HAGHEX

A minimalist, rules-light RPG for playing old-school fantasy stories, in the spirit of the game originally devised by Dave Arneson and Gary Gygax in the 70s. Another fantasy RPG among hundreds of already existing ones? Certainly. But everything you need to know — including rules for fleshing out any player character you have in mind, combat mechanics, a table of items and other adventuring resources, a magic/mystic power system, and a GM’s guide — fits into two pages, which can be printed on a single paper sheet and folded into a leaflet. Did I say it is free?

HAGHEX uses only six-sided dice. You roll a handful of them and see the three highest rolls, overlooking the rest. If two out of three results are greater than 3, it’s a success! Wanna have a more difficult check? Make it 4! Simple, no math! The number of dice you roll depends on how skilful your character is in the tested ability. This game is classless, orbiting around a three-level skill progression system to determine the various abilities a character can have, which may include culture- and race-related abilities. As an example for you to create your own characters, HAGHEX comes with the statistics of Delárinn, a half-elf rogue that knows a little bit of magic! Interested? Download now HAGHEX, because there is much more on it than I have written here! 

This game draws inspiration, both mechanical and conceptual, from great TTRPGs: The Elephant and Macaw Banner, EZD6, Grok?!, Index Card RPG, Knave, Dungeon Crawl Classics and Deathbringer. The core idea behind HAGHEX was to strip down the boring and time-consuming stuff, like adding bonuses to rolls and tracking individual items, to get a portable rule set that can be played by anyone, whenever they want and wherever they are. People don’t need sets of fancy dice and read tons of rulebooks to play a fantasy RPG. Ingenuity is the key element to play, and once it is there, the rest will follow! HAGHEX is just a guide to that.

If you feel particularly generous after playing and enjoying HAGHEX, buy me a coffee! :)

NEW, HUMAN-DRAWN cover image by Rafael Delgado.

Cover image generated on Dream by Wombo, using the Buliojourney v2 art style and the following text input: "Alligator in witch clothes drawn in the black-and-white style of old-school role-playing games like Advanced Dungeons & Dragons" (this was the cover image before 2024-01-30).