Review: A Home Reforged

tl:dr; a game of dwarves delving the dark to restablish outposts; tight old-school style with some nice mechanical twists.

Where did this come from? Zinequest 2024. I had it on my shelf but recently managed to get bits to table thus a review.

Art by Michail Papanchuk

Nice little book, focuses on a theme and while first impression might be 'oh, dwarves, have we not done this' - this is actually a neat compilation of all the things you would need for a dwarven delving campaign that are often scattered across lots of books and need legwork from the DM. Here we have everything you need in a single package.

The book itself is a fat zine or a small book - 92 pages - with about ~ 1/4 of the book made up of 'ready made scenarios' that make this ready to go out of the box. I am more of a fan of the 'adventure that showcases the system' as time goes on and these are good examples of that.

The book itself does not have clear sections but I would batch it roughly as:
5 page essay on dwarvishness
7 pages of general rules
18 pages of character mechanics
16 pages of game running mechanics
16 pages of a bestiary
22 pages of keyed dungeons

Opening with a multipage essay on dwarvishness is the 'nail your colours to the mast' moment that tells you what you are in for here. This is dwarf country, we're talking dwarves and their environment.

The general rules are at d20-roll-under system, target your stat plus modifiers, with advantage/disadvantage as applicable. Most of the rest would be familiar to most players of D&D with a few wrinkles. First; usage die are the mechanic for depletable resources during your delving. Secondly, in combat players roll all the dice - attack roles for when they attack, defense rolls for when monsters attack them. Armour can be sacrificed to block damage. I would be interested to fully road test this, it makes it seem like combat survivability and effectiveness would snowball since you are testing the same stat, Strength, for attack and defense - there are no glass hammers here, only effective or not in combat.

The character mechanics comprises 'molding your dwarf', 'character creation', 'creating your clan', a 'sample character' and 'classes'. The dwarf creation flow starts with 4d6-drop-highest for attribute rolling and picking a class. The options available are alchemist, deepscribe (scouts), defenders, forgemasters (cleric-y), runemasons (spellcarvers) and tinkerers (artificer-ish). Once you note your qualities from the class then making your dwarf unique (there is a table) and giving it a name (on you). We get twenty spells at the end of the section, four for each of five levels.

Next the game running mechanics - 'traversing the deeps', 'travel', 'resting', 'adventuring in the deeps' and 'the deeps' - covers all the elements of how a session runs. We get rules for travel, exhaustion, rest, reactions and morale, landmark tables, encounter tables for the camp, upper and lower deeps and improvements for your base camp - since the theme of the whole piece is 'Home, Reforged' we are of course establishing outposts underground. These are combined with levelling through 'mighty deeds' requiring the achieving of great things and then, critically, the spending of treasures and telling of the tale of it, to level up.

The bestiary is significantly simplified because of the 'players roll defense' approach; a monster gets only a damage die, a level (~ Hit Die) and a morale score for mechanics - plus flavour and any special effects they have. This is refreshingly simple, I like it a lot and helps pack sixteen monsters into the sixteen pages along with nice artwork for most.

The two keyed dungeons at the back are great; useful for any table - and from the kickstarter I also got some A4 versions. The book has "In the ruins of Nur Burim" and "Into the Doom Vault" and the A4 maps I got added an Abandoned Quarry/Derelict Mine. These are all good, gameable locations - I managed to get the Abandoned Quarry/Derelict Mine to table - run with 5e but nonetheless - and it was good to provide a whole sessions gaming including a glorious last stand for a dwarf.

To wrap up - what we get in here is a nice, focussed game for dwarven delving the deeps, finding lost sites and restablishing outposts with treasures just as the means to buy drinks while telling of your mighty deeds. The tight focus serves it well, by not having to be a universal wrench we keep a tight set of mechanics and with the players rolling everything this will feel different to most of what is out there.

What I have managed to bring to table of this has stood me well, probably worth it for the under-ground adventure rules and the dungeons for dropping into any game, even if you never get to run a proper dwarf campaign.