Be an Adventurer! 3Hex Issue 1, a quick look at a little game.

I love me a good ole' Old School hexcrawl.

This frequently throws people. I have made it fairly clear that Basic RolePlaying is my preferred rules system, a deeply simulationist game. By that, I mean that BRP attempts to model in math the genres it is applied to. Call of Cthulhu recreates the cosmic horror of Lovecraft, with a sanity system that models how people go nuts in his fiction, not in real life. RuneQuest Roleplaying in Glorantha models the bronze age world of, no surprises here, Glorantha. It does not seek to accurately recreate the economics, sociopolitics, or brutality of the terrestrial bronze age. Pendragon is, frankly, Sir Thomas Malory summoned back from Avalon with dice. It has nothing to do with the middle ages. And Basic RolePlaying is a tool kit to model whatever genre you want. These are not games that depend on randomness. Randomness is an element, and has to be in any game reliant on dice, but they are very structured, intentional systems meant to control the type of play that emerges.

On top of that, I am known for story-oriented scenarios. The three Six Seasons books chronicle the fall of a clan, its time as a warband, and its return home. The Final Riddle is a one-way trip into madness. Again, randomness is present. Characters can fail. They can die. But there is a narrative in place. 

Old School gaming has no interest in simulation or stories. Crom LAUGHS at your narrative arcs! At Old School's core is emergent play. Roll the dice, see what happens. The results of the dice rolls, and the decisions you make, are the story. In the stricter Old School games, you don't know what character you will play until you roll stats for it. Adventures, locations, and encounters can all be determined randomly. Gygax had tons of random tables in the original Dungeon Master's Guide, and modern descendants like Old School Essentials or ShadowDark have followed suit. You can literally build the campaign, and the world, as you go. And unlike the more simulationist games mentioned above, the lighter dice systems of Old School games are little more than pass/fail mechanics. There are fewer skills (if any) to sculpt the expectations of the setting. Worlds are implied in the rules, but not explicitly modeled. You jump in, you play, and the game emerges.

Be an Adventurer! 3Hex Issue 1 (man that is a mouthful, let's call it 3Hex from here on) is a little solo-play game with decidedly Old School leanings. Author Mark Quire LAUGHS in the face of your simulations and narratives, by Crom! Yes, I promise to stop doing that. Weighing in at all of five pages, this PDF is essentially a three hex dungeon/wilderness crawl (which might have something to do with the name). One hex is The City, one is The Reach, and one is The Badlands. Each has its own random encounters generated when you enter the hex. The tongue-in-cheek conceit of the game is right there on the first page:

Be an Adventurer! THEY SAID. It’ll be fun and make You RICH! THEY SAID.

It’s not.

None of this is fun, none of this has made me rich. I’ve been stuck in this swamp for four days. There is something growing between my toes that I SWEAR occasionally giggles, I’m super hungry, AND I AM REALLY NOT HAPPY. NOT. HAPPY. AT ALL.

Your naive would-be Adventurer begins in The City, and sets out to win treasure and fame in this and other hexes (but is more likely to starve or die a hideous death). Each day of play, called a "loop," you either roll for an encounter in the hex you are in or more to the adjacent hex. At the end of each day, you gain a point of Hunger (Hunger also acts as damage in this game). At 6 points of Hunger, you are dead. But Hunger can be combatted with one of your three other stats. Groats are the coins in the game, and you start with D6. Vittles are rations, and you can spend one each day to prevent Hunger. Finally there are Upgrades, which are weapons, armor, magic items, and experience, making your little bugger (sorry, your brave hero) tougher and more resilient. Like Hunger, Vittles and Upgrades start at zero and are gained in play.

The core mechanic for tests in the game is to roll 2D6 + your total Upgrades and - your current Hunger. You will want to roll higher than your opponent's combat scores or the difficulty of whatever test you are facing.

Aside from the randomness of the game, what makes it Old School adjacent is the entire core concept. Old School games are notoriously brutal. They were survival horror games, not heroic fantasy. 3Hex leans hard into that spirit. Like Knave! or MÖRK BORG, there are no character classes here, however. You are defined by your gear. Presumably further issues will add more hexes to explore, and perhaps more complexity, but as is 3Hex is a lightning fast solo play with a sense of humor about itself. Like MÖRK BORG the fun is in your inevitable, horrible doom.

Or maybe you could get lucky?