Generic RPGs are designed to accomplish a goal that many say they want. The ability to write anything, make any genre fit together, and theoretically never have to learn another system again all sound great. The reality usually ends up being something different, though. The entire reasoning behind generic RPGs even being possible has forever been couched in very narrow assumptions about what an RPG actually is. Once you expand those assumptions a little bit, a generic game starts to look impossible.

QuestWorlds, originally called Hero Wars (and HeroQuest in between those two), is a game that came out of a post-TSR, pre-Forge era of the early 2000s much like the first edition of Fate. Both of these games have the same essential objective: build out a set of mechanics that can take any character on one side, any challenge on the other, and adjudicate that character standing up to that challenge regardless of the specifics. Add in some balancing rules for character creation and advancement, and you’ve got a game that’s ready for anything. Kind of. Both QuestWorlds and Fate make very similar disclaimers about only working with genres with capable and proactive heroes prevailing over larger-than-life challenges. The disempowerment of horror doesn’t really work, nor do the continuous drags of hunger, thirst, or wound management found in survival games. These generic games, and many generic games, quickly reveal themselves to be “roughly the way we think people play RPGs” games.

As in many of these discussions, I don’t actually find much fault in QuestWorlds. The game has you create characters with abilities numbered from 1 to 20. As they go through the world, they use their abilities to overcome challenges. In order to do this, a player must roll under their ability while the GM must roll under the rating of the Resistance, or magnitude of the obstacle being faced. If the player wins the roll and the GM doesn’t, the character succeeds. If the GM wins and the player doesn’t, the character fails. If both GM and player succeeds, then the highest roll wins (i.e. Blackjack rules). There is more to the game, but that’s really the basics of it. Everything else boils down to how finely you can slice and dice these abilities, and a few narrative elements like Hindrances (character flaws) and Story Points (a metacurrency to turn the tide in the PCs’ favor). While there really isn’t anything particularly narrative about this game, it does separate the rules from any sort of simulation, allowing the Resistance and Ability numbers to represent whatever is relevant to the story you want to tell.

What makes QuestWorlds different from, say, Fate is that QuestWorlds is structured in a way that the rules provided in the book are comprehensive and complete. There is a sidebar in the GM’s section of QuestWorlds literally titled ‘No New Mechanics’, admonishing GMs not to create additional rules to help model things like superpowers, instead using ‘narrative description’ to differentiate larger-than-life powers.

What makes a generic game?

I went back over all of Chaosium’s marketing copy to make sure that the word ‘narrative’ wasn’t used and indeed it wasn’t. Many reviews of the game use it though, and they’re flat-out wrong. While a number of narrative games are named in the preface, this ruleset is simply about adjudicating challenges to characters. It is game mechanics through and through, and all of the narrative content comes in the form of soft advice sections. “Failing forward” is mentioned in the GM’s section; there are no mechanics enforcing it (unlike in, say, Torchbearer). The GM’s section talks about ‘The Fiction’ and how fictional positioning works in a game but, once again, there are absolutely no mechanics which directly engage with fictional positioning (unlike in, say, Blades in the Dark).

The reason QuestWorlds is ostensibly narrative is borne out of absence, not presence. QuestWorlds has no rules directly engaging narrative or storyline in any appreciable way. It also has no rules grounding the game to any one specific implied physics, be that a physics like the world as we know it, a physics full of high-powered magic, or a physics where the main characters are all engrams with the ability to instantiate whatever digital avatar they wish. And by being so unmoored QuestWorlds (like Fate, or Risus, or many other generic games) can be used to play a game in any of those settings. And similarly, while elements like fictional positioning and failing forward aren’t mechanically locked into the game, they’re available for a GM to use whenever the situation warrants it. So with all this flexibility, what’s the problem?

All generic games have two fundamental issues, one when it comes to marketing and one when it comes to providing a game experience. On the marketing side, none of the things that usually exist to draw in players exist in a generic game. Perennially bestselling RPGs, be that D&D, Pathfinder, Call of Cthulhu, or Cyberpunk, all present a specific setting and a specific gameplay experience that are used to draw players in. The importance of that marketing can’t be overstated: Lovecraft and Cyberpunk 2077 drove players to the connected experiences that came out of their associated games, while D&D had a number of inspirations and incidents connected with being the first RPG. What none of these games were, though, was just a set of mechanics adjudicating something as nebulous as ‘conflict’.

This leads into the other fundamental issue inherent in all generic games: Beyond marketing, the games are, definitionally, not playable out of the box. Some games address this with an underlying worked example; Fate gives a starting skill list and associated stunts in Fate Core, as well as an approaches list in Fate Condensed. QuestWorlds, like generic games Cortex Prime, Genesys, and GURPS, has no complete worked example within the core rules. In order to play the game you must, in effect, finish the game. This is an unavoidable issue with generic games; if they came with a game baked in they would necessarily not be generic. That said, the reason GURPS and Fate are the two generic games which have sold the best is that they’re the closest to playable out of the box. Fate is set up to be played in the book, while GURPS is a library of options that have been modeled for you, seducing a GM into believing they just need to pick and choose.

What you really need for a generic game to be your best choice is something you want to write. All the details of how the setting and conflict in your head operate will provide the details that the system doesn’t: The core abilities, challenges, and premises that come together and connect your setting with the setting-less game you’ve chosen. That of course implies the next question. If you want to write your wholly original (or at least heretofore unconverted) setting into an RPG campaign, when is QuestWorlds going to be the best choice?

When is QuestWorlds the best choice?

I’ve spent very little time talking about chained sequences or masteries or any of the other specific details of the QuestWorlds rules, but that’s in part because I don’t think they’re that important. The mechanics of Hero Wars were mathematically sound in 2000, and QuestWorlds is similarly mathematically sound today. The question at the heart of considering the game doesn’t rest on its math (this isn’t Shadowrun, luckily), it rests simply on when it would be the best choice for the one task a generic RPG can do: providing a scaffold for your custom game.

On one hand, QuestWorlds being fairly constrained rules-wise means that it is easy for a GM to incorporate breadth into their design. Once you understand what the rules can do and how to adjudicate that, everything the system can do is at your fingertips with minimal faff. I’d say Fate Core and QuestWorlds are at a similar level of complexity, and both have the same advantage of being able to model essentially anything you can name. QuestWorlds keeps it traditional, though, not adding in any narrative economy or other mechanics that demand engaging in a specific gameplay loop beyond what is going on in the fiction. A lot of players, especially those turned off by Fate, will appreciate that.

On the other hand, I just don’t see QuestWorlds as being able to actually do all that much. At its core, QuestWorlds is taking the scaffold of BRP, dividing everything by 5, and squishing all test difficulties together under resistances. The strength is that a GM need not write anything besides a difficulty number, but the weakness is that a GM can’t write anything besides a difficulty number. QuestWorlds ends up being a sort of ‘minimum viable RPG’, and some of the inline references to Call of Cthulhu and RuneQuest make me believe that even Chaosium thinks this to a degree. There is power in having a portable ruleset for when you want to tell stories and roll dice, but QuestWorlds throws the promise of a generic RPG into relief against its execution.

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My personal views on generic RPGs have evolved over the years. I ran GURPS almost to the exclusion of everything else for a decade, and was enchanted by other games like Cortex Prime and Fate. The fact that I never got Fate or Cortex Prime to the table for more than a short stint speaks to what’s happened to gaming in the decade since my GURPS tenure ended. From where I sit now, on the far end of The Forge and the indie explosion that happened in the late 2010s thanks to Google Plus and Twitter, I can’t help but think that the generic RPG as it exists is a product of a different time (besides GURPS, which is definitely a product of the 80s). Hero Wars came out in 2000, Fate was originally released in 2003, and Cortex was originally released in 2005. Fate and Cortex arguably got more sophisticated as time went on; tracing a line from the originals through Fate Core in 2013 and then Cortex Prime in 2020 shows a continuing evolution in narrative gameplay mechanics and tools available to ambitious GMs and aspiring worldbuilders. QuestWorlds does not show the same increase in sophistication, and while that may have been deliberate I also think it was a mistake. As much as I don’t think any of the games really provide a compelling proposition for all but a small niche of GMs, QuestWorlds seems more stuck in the past than a fun throwback.

I don’t exactly know what it would take to write a new and popular generic RPG in 2025. GURPS has retained some degree of popularity because it is literally a library of concepts translated into RPG mechanics; thanks to economics a game with the breadth of GURPS 4e or 3e literally could not be designed today without an angel investor of some sort. Fate and Cortex Prime are extremely powerful but do little out of the box; QuestWorlds is easier to set up than either of those two but significantly more limited than them as well. There is something to be said about Genesys, the new edition of BRP and other upcoming systems like Storypath Ultra and D6 System 2e literally letting GMs play game designer, but arguably these all are more equivalent to stripping a GM’s favorite game to the studs so they can renovate it as they see fit.

Generic systems have never really stuck the landing on going from ‘role-playing system’ to ‘role-playing game’, and I think that’s what really popped out to me as I read QuestWorlds. The mechanics of QuestWorlds are built around defining a character, defining how that character addresses challenges, and to a small degree how that character changes. Because the setting and conflicts are provided by the GM (and because said setting and conflicts don’t really engage with the mechanics beyond making them more specific), any mechanics around how the setting, story, or characters are evolving are absent, beyond an advancement system that’s basically adapted from BRP and is as light-touch as possible. When you look at more genre-defined games, their gameplay mechanics are grounded to said genre. Cyberpunk 2020 and D&D could not easily use each other’s combat systems without significant impact, and other elements like hacking mechanics are even more specific. When you do what QuestWorlds does and genericize every conflict into a ‘contest’, you end up taking out most of the mechanical reasons people play RPGs in the first place. Even games without delineated combat systems like Apocalypse World utterly depend on having distinct and separable mechanics for each character archetype; without those playbooks PbtA wouldn’t have nearly the popularity it does now.

Without any distinct mechanics, QuestWorlds is aiming at one very specific audience: GMs who already have a world and concept in mind and just need a consistent way to adjudicate conflicts when they come up. It is ‘minimum viable RPG’ in every way, and yet that will appeal to some because there aren’t many other games like it on the market. If you look at a game in terms of not doing anything extra, QuestWorlds works and works well; there is decent depth when a conflict comes up but no need to worry about specifics outside of that. What QuestWorlds isn’t, really, is a game. This is true of many generic RPGs, of course; without a setting defined or even a specific type of story or conflict, how could they be? But as much as most generic RPGs aren’t games, they also don’t live up to the promise of assisting or enabling a GM to actualize a story or setting as an RPG. There is something missing in generic RPGs, some element that can bridge the gap between a large collection of mechanics and a game as the GM envisions it. QuestWorlds is easier to use than many of these other systems for the simple reason that it can do less, making the same tradeoffs as any other rules-light game. When Hero Wars/QuestWorlds first came out, it was the only game in town besides FUDGE for a generic game that still had a bit of weight. Now? The RPG world has changed, and what players are demanding has changed. QuestWorlds will still work well for GMs who have a full world in their head, or for existing HeroQuest fans willing to shell out for genre packs. For everyone else, though, blank page syndrome and a lack of mechanical distinction is likely to send you looking for either a more complex toolkit or a game that’s playable out of the box.

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