The One-Person Studio in Utrecht

Somewhere in the Netherlands, a former 3D artist sat down and wrote a twelve-page roleplaying game. He illustrated it himself. He laid out every page. He released it for free under a Creative Commons license, uploaded it to itch.io, and waited to see if anyone cared.

Within four years, over a hundred people had built things on top of it. Translators carried it into fourteen languages. Crowdfunding campaigns crossed six figures in euros. A convention in Toronto invited him as a guest of honor. The twelve pages had become a platform.

Emiel Boven did not invent anything new. He built a launchpad.

The Current He Swam In

To understand what Boven built, you have to understand what was already in the water. By 2020, the indie RPG scene had been moving in a clear direction for half a decade. Chris McDowall had stripped dungeon-crawling to its chassis with Into the Odd in 2014. Ben Milton had made equipment the soul of character identity in Knave in 2018. The NSR—New School Revolution—had given the movement a name and a set of shared convictions: minimal rules, maximum table speed, zine-format publishing, Creative Commons licensing, itch.io distribution.

Boven arrived in 2021 and swam with this current, not against it. DURF uses a d20 roll-under system descended directly from Knave. Characters are defined by their inventory, not their class. Combat is fast and lethal, following the OSR principle that fighting should be a last resort, not a tactical minigame. The core rules fit on a few pages.

None of these ideas were his. What was his was the particular way he assembled them—and the decision to make that assembly as open as possible.

The Inventory Slot as Universal Metric

The cleverest thing in DURF is a small idea executed with precision. When your character pushes beyond their limits—rolling an extra die, straining for an edge—they take a point of Stress. That Stress does not go on a separate track. It occupies an inventory slot. The same slot that could hold a torch, a sword, a coil of rope.

This means the cost of pushing yourself is measured in the same currency as the cost of carrying gear. Mental fatigue competes with physical utility for the same finite space on your character sheet. The choice is tactile and immediate: do you keep the healing potion, or do you absorb one more hit of stress?

Boven did not invent stress-as-resource. Blades in the Dark and Mothership had both used stress as a trackable currency. Mausritter had already placed conditions into inventory slots in 2019. But Boven unified these threads into a single interface where encumbrance, stress, magical potential, and status effects all compete for the same limited real estate. It is synthesis, not origination—but the synthesis is clean enough that other designers found it worth building on.

The Ink Economy

The Electrum Archive, co-created with Ava Islam beginning in 2022, shows Boven reaching for something more distinctive. Set in Orn—a dying science-fantasy world drawn in Moebius-influenced line work—TEA runs on a d10 system rather than DURF’s d20, signaling a deliberate move away from his own earlier framework.

Its central innovation is Elder Ink: a resource that functions simultaneously as currency, fuel for ancient technology, and the catalyst for magic. Warlocks inhale ink to power spells. Spending money literally diminishes your ability to cast. This creates a triangular tension where every drop of ink is contested between three demands, and the party’s economic decisions are inseparable from their magical ones.

Reviewers have called this a standout feature. It solves a real design problem—the disconnect between a game’s economy and its magic system that plagues many OSR designs—by making them the same system. Whether it rises to the level of genuine mechanical invention or remains an elegant recombination of existing ideas depends on how strictly you draw the line between the two. The methodology draws it strictly.

The Open-Source Gambit

The decision that defines Boven’s career is not mechanical. It is legal. DURF was released under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license—the same license used by Wikipedia. Anyone can copy it, modify it, sell derivative works, translate it into any language, hack it into any genre. The only requirement is credit.

This was not a casual choice. It was architectural. By making DURF maximally hackable, Boven turned a twelve-page RPG into a community platform. The annual DURF Jams—five so far, running from 2021 through 2025—have generated over 108 third-party creations. Star DURF took it into space. The Walking DURF added zombies. Gamma DURF went post-apocalyptic. DURF Souls brought dark fantasy. ZURF, SERF, TURF—the naming convention became a genre marker in itself.

Fourteen language translations followed: Japanese, Italian, French, Spanish, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Russian, Czech, Chinese, Portuguese, Finnish, Esperanto, Ukrainian. For an indie RPG by a designer with no prior reputation, this is extraordinary reach. Not because the game itself is extraordinary, but because the licensing made participation frictionless.

The Trajectory

Boven’s career falls into three clear phases. The pamphlet era of 2021: free itch.io releases, minimal page counts, black-and-white line art, the hacker’s impulse to strip a thing to its smallest functional form. The zine era of 2022–2024: The Electrum Archive, collaboration with Ava Islam, itchfunding that hit its goals in twelve hours, then a Kickstarter for TEA Issue #02 that brought in over 48,000 euros from 1,327 backers. And now the expanded era: DURF Expanded, a 200-page hardcover currently in production, backed at nearly 79,000 euros, scheduled to ship in 2027.

The progression is steep. From free PDFs to five-figure crowdfunding in four years. From solo pamphlets to professional editing partnerships. From a d20 system borrowed wholesale from Knave to a d10 system that attempts its own mathematical identity. Each phase shows visible growth.

But the career is five years old. The most ambitious project has not shipped. The body of work, while professional, remains modest in scope: one rules-light core system, a handful of adventure modules, a co-designed zine series still in progress. The mastery question—did this designer develop genuine command of the craft over time?—cannot yet be answered with confidence. The arc points upward. Whether it reaches its ceiling is a question for the next decade.

The Heartbreaker Question

Every designer working in a recognized tradition faces the same challenge: how close is too close to the source? At least one reviewer dismissed DURF as a heartbreaker—a game that borrows so heavily from its predecessors that it fails to justify its own existence. The Knave DNA is obvious. The Into the Odd influence is structural. The OSR combat philosophy is inherited, not reimagined.

This criticism has weight. DURF does not create a new format within RPGs. It does not introduce a mechanic that other designers have adopted independently of the DURF ecosystem. The stress-as-inventory idea is elegant but not unprecedented. The 108 jam entries are people building content for his system, not people taking his innovations and incorporating them into unrelated games. There is a meaningful difference between platform adoption and design propagation, and the methodology cares about the latter.

The counterargument is that Boven was not trying to invent. He was trying to distill. The goal was maximum accessibility and maximum hackability—the lowest possible barrier between having an idea for a dungeon-crawl and actually playing one. Measured against that goal, DURF succeeds completely. Measured against the invention pillar of this methodology, it scores as a solid implementation of circulating ideas. Both assessments can be true simultaneously.

Total: 16 points. Year: 2021.

Emiel Boven scores 16 out of 40. That is the score of a designer at the beginning of a trajectory, not the end of one. He did not invent new mechanics. He did not build systems that support decades of play. He has not yet demonstrated mastery across a deep body of work. What he did was take a set of circulating ideas, assemble them with unusual clarity, and open the door wide enough that a hundred strangers walked through it. The launchpad works. The question is what gets launched from here.