DWARF Is a Free Solo Hex Crawl About Walking Home
Tavern Lore just put out DWARF, a complete solo hex crawl RPG on a name-your-own-price basis. You play one dwarf making the long trip back to the Mountains.
DWARF by Tavern Lore is up on itch.io, name your own price, and the premise is about as clean as a solo game gets. You play a lone dwarf who has to make the long journey home to the Mountains. That’s the game. The walk is the game.
It’s a hex crawl, and it’s a full system rather than a supplement for something else, so there’s nothing else you need to buy to run it. What’s in there:
- Hex generation with terrain and weather
- 100 points of interest and 120 encounters
- Dungeon generation
- A bestiary of 30 monsters
- Hunting and fishing
- NPC generation, plus tables for treasure, magic items, and camp encounters
- A name generator and a custom character sheet
The setting is high fantasy in the pleasant sense. Green hills, blue skies, lush forests, with the emphasis on travel and camping rather than one dungeon after another. Though the tone description on the page takes a hard left turn about three lines in, so go read that yourself. It is not a solemn game about a solemn walk.
The fishing is what got me at a glance. Most solo hex crawls treat travel as the boring bit between the interesting bits, and the pitch here is that the travel is the interesting bit. Camping, weather, working out what you’re going to eat. That’s a different kind of session, and it’s the kind I’ve been reaching for lately.
I’m going to play through it myself this week, so I’ll be back with a proper write-up once I’ve actually walked it.
It comes as two PDF layouts, A5 and 8.5x11, with the character sheet as a separate download.