Kal-Arath Review

 

Hi everyone and welcome to my blog! I’ve played a lot of solo games, and I’ve certainly gravitated towards some more than others. One of my favorite RPGs that I’ve ever played is Kal-Arath by Castle Grief, and I wanted to honor it in some way by writing a review of it, a sort of thank you of sorts for all the fun I’ve had with it.

Kal-Arath is set in a sword and sorcery world. Think Conan the Barbarian, though if I’m honest, I like Kal-Arath’s setting just a little better. While in the subsequent years since releasing Kal-Arath Castle Grief has published zines to expand Kal-Arath’s world, the details of the world of Kal-Arath are largely up to you. Overland travel is accomplished by designing a hex map. If you know me, I love hex maps. Creating the setting of a game is half the fun of playing the actual game for me.

Hex map travel is very detailed. You roll for the weather, which is affected by the season you are in, you roll to see if you Get Lost, you roll to forage, and you roll for Points Of Interests and encounters with both hostile and non-hostile NPCs.

I love that I never know what I’ll encounter each day of travel in Kal-Arath. It’s been an inspiration to my own TTRPG games I’ve published that make use of hex maps.

Dungeons are just as fun to generate. You create a pool of d6’s (d6’s are the primary die size for this game, making all rolls super convenient) and each d6 represents an area of the dungeon you will enter. For a large area, Castle Grief recommends 7d6. That seems like a lot, though you could just roll your d6 seven times instead of using seven d6’s at once.

Anyway, you roll the d6’s onto a piece of paper, letting them fall where they may, with the position of the dice to each other representing the layout of the dungeon areas. Whatever value you rolled for your dice determines what you will encounter in that area. It could be empty, a trap, an enemy, an NPC, treasure, or a special room/Boss.

Dungeons are just so enjoyable to generate this way. In my limited experience when I first started playing Kal-Arath, I had never seen a dungeon generation system like this before, and it just seemed so brilliant and quick.

And of course Kal-Arath provides tables to specify what kind of traps or foes or treasures you encounter in the dungeon.

While the Bestiary isn’t the biggest collection of foes I’ve ever seen, it’s certainly big enough for solo games and the enemies in this game are no joke. I kind of made it easy on myself as I chose to go the Four Against Darkness route and make four characters to roleplay as in Kal-Arath rather than just one. Even so, I encountered some foes that nearly wiped out my party.

Fortunately, character generation is quick and easy if your character happens to, you know, die a gory and violent death by a pack of Raptor Lizards. You start by putting four points into five stats that represent Strength, Toughness, Agility, Intelligence, and Presence. All of these stats are really useful when playing solo, so deciding what to focus on and what to neglect is deeply strategic and allows you to create a truly unique character each time.

There are Skills you can learn and lots of magic, though magic is always a risk in the world of Kal-Arath. You make pacts with demons to utilize magic, and this can cause significant harm to your character if the spell you cast ends up failing.

Combat is simple. Attacking and defending is done in a player-facing way, using 2d6+Strength vs 8 to succeed with a melee attack. You use Agility instead for missile attacks, and Intelligence instead for spellcasting.

On the opponent’s turn in combat, you roll 2d6+Agility to dodge.

There’s a little more to combat than that, but I don’t want to give too much away. Just let me say combat is fun, risky, and exciting.

There are tons of tables to roll on which is always a good thing if you’re playing solo. I love the tables in Kal-Arath and have used them to play with in other games.

If you’re interested in Kal-Arath by Castle Grief, you can find it on itchio here and on drivethrurpg here. I also highly recommend getting any supplements you can find for it. It’s already a great game with just this one book, but the supplements and zines for it just make an amazing game even better with more tables and enemies and city generation.

I hope you enjoyed this review! Don’t forget to subscribe to my Substack @sarahsoloadventures for the weekly newsletter that is released every Wednesday!