From darkened room to game box - Queeste and the first Dutch roleplaying game

Nijmegen, the Netherlands, late 1970s. A handful of friends are lying on the floor of a darkened room. Nobody has a character sheet, nobody has a die. One voice begins: I see meadows, and a path separating the woods from the fields. A second voice adds that it is a misty morning and the grass is wet with dew. Someone hears a bird. Someone else sees it: a blackbird, taking off and diving deeper into the woods. Let's follow it.

That is how the first roleplaying game made in the Netherlands began, without anyone in that room ever having heard of Dungeons & Dragons.

Guided fantasy

The man who usually got the game going was Joop Oele, a graphic artist. He and his friends called what they were doing guided fantasy. In those years, roleplay was mostly a word from therapy; they turned it into a journey. There were no rules and no props, only a landscape described by several voices at once. Oele later compared it to the glass at a seance: many hands move it, and nobody knows where it will go. From mask to character sheet tells how people played roles long before there were roleplaying games. In that room in Nijmegen it happened again, unplanned and without a model.

Oele tinkered with other games too. Under the name Hertogenspel he designed wargames on a large board, with wooden blocks and colored pins for the traits of a unit. In 1978 he came up with a labyrinth game: forty-nine rooms in a seven-by-seven grid, with a rose at the center. Every room asked you a question, and the right answer opened the door that led closest to the rose. Later he added a sphinx that posed riddles and wandering monsters controlled by your fellow players. Put the darkened room, the board, and the labyrinth side by side and you can watch a roleplaying game take shape, from parts that already existed elsewhere but were reinvented here, cut off from the rest of the world.

A game with a face of its own

Because Queeste grew in isolation, it looked like nothing else. In America the hobby had rolled out of wargaming, with the twenty-sided die as its trademark (From army to hero and From classroom to dungeon tell how). Oele had no d20. He had ordinary six-sided dice and a handful of tokens. If you wanted to attempt something, you threw as many tokens as your trait had points, plus a d6. A fistful of discs flung onto the table: you felt the game in your hands.

The artist in him also wanted every location to have a drawing. Loose cards of seven by seven centimeters, drawn so you could lay them side by side into a map of the whole area. Anyone who played the first adventures knew exactly where they stood.

And there were guilds: Templar Knights, Sun Riders, Wolf Women, Druids. The magic system for the Mages came from Rob Meijer, who based it loosely on Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea: you wove your own spells from words of a magical language. The game master was called a Quaestor. What other games called levels were called initiations here. Even the words were homegrown.

The box from Knossos

In 1979 Oele founded his own publishing house, Knossos, and released Queeste in a box: the rules, the illustrated cards, simple wooden tokens, a die, and the first adventure, Tocht naar de Onderwereld (Journey to the Underworld). The box sold across the Netherlands, but mostly around Nijmegen. Then came Grint, a booklet in A5, and Tigris in A4, the format in which Oele also started a magazine of his own, with adventures such as Oosterterpe, Sardon, and Slotmar, and a special issue listing all the guilds.

To put that in perspective: Dungeons & Dragons was five years old and had barely gained a foothold in the Netherlands. Het Oog des Meesters, the Dutch edition of Das Schwarze Auge and a whole generation's first encounter with the genre, would not reach the shops until 1985. Queeste was there six years earlier, in a language where nothing else yet existed.

Faster than its maker

The ambition did not last long. All those drawings took time, and most groups switched to a more verbal style after a few adventures. Throwing all those tokens proved unwieldy; a helper program was even written for the Sinclair ZX Spectrum to handle the arithmetic. And every group played faster than Oele could ever publish. Anyone who had bought the box without a line to Nijmegen had to invent their own adventures to keep going.

Commercially it was never a success. The last properly published adventure was Whandal, co-written with Thom Oostendorp, the druid of the original group. After 1984 things went quiet. Oele had a family and a job, and so did others at his table. A complete saga stayed in the drawer as typed drafts and loose sketches.

Here is the honest part of this story. Queeste was not a lost masterpiece ignored by the market. It was a game made for its own table, and it could hardly function anywhere else without that table. That is exactly what makes it so typical of what a roleplaying game is at its core, long before anyone used the word indie (From contract to kitchen table).

What remained

The story could have ended there, had not one player from the original group started a new group of his own around 1985 and carefully preserved all the material. In 1992 a group of volunteers began the Queeste renovation, with Oele's blessing. A year later the rules and Tocht naar de Onderwereld appeared again, and in the years that followed nearly everything in the drawer finally came out, along with new stories: more than fifty publications in total. To this day the material is free to download for personal use.

If you want the whole story, from Queeste through Het Oog des Meesters and the quiet years to the makers of today, you will find it in The complete guide to Dutch-language TTRPGs. If you would rather play right away: Netherbook carries Creations in Dutch, from De Verhalenvlam for families to MythWatch: Age of Redbad, with Frisian legends in Dutch.

And that darkened room? It never went away. Every game master addressing a table tonight is doing what Joop Oele did in 1979: describing a landscape and waiting for someone else to see the blackbird. One concrete detail, and the desire to go after it. Everything that came later, the box, the rules, the dice, was a way of keeping that moment.