In the balance
BLACK SWORD HACK
Designer: Alexandre ‘Kobayashi’ Jeannette | Publisher: The Merry Mushmen
Black Sword Hack is the game I wish I had been handed by someone when I was ten. A fantasy world where Law and Chaos battle it out, and there’s not too much mucking about with different flavours of elves or 4000 pages of lore (more like snore, right?) or other directly Tolkien-derivative stuff. If the mistake of fantasy is thinking the cool part is that the books are very long, history complex, and that every sword has a name – Black Sword Hack cuts a different path. (You can still name your sword if you want though).
This Ultimate Chaos Edition is, in our opinion, the final boss version of this popular Black Hack system. Like its ancestor, the main feature is a D20 rollunder system and sexy and exciting (as much as dice mechanics can be) ‘usage dice’. The usage dice are a way of tracking larger elements of the world and campaign, they might start with a D20, and for every 1-2 rolled the dice is downgraded. Eventually, when the dice disappears something happens, for example – bad stuff in the case of players pushing their characters and rolling their ‘doom’ dice a lot, or simple things like a debt has been repaid to an NPC. It’s an elegant and slightly boardgamey system that uploads a lot of ‘background thinking’ from the GM.
You’ll create interesting characters with strange origins (barbarian, civilised, decadent) and backgrounds. These are all mechanically supported, but mostly designed to give you a small circumstantial advantage and a couple of litres of boiling hot flavour. Dark pacts can be created to produce spicier characters with demonic powers and buddies, magic, or other wild and just-a-little-bitmetal. There’s something about the artwork from Goran Gligovic too, that flattened 70s style, that really makes me feel like this was always meant to have existed.
And this all makes sense, this is a book published by the creators of Knock! an RPG magazine created because “those old web pages are getting dusty”. This is an answer to a lot of thinking about what should have already existed. As such, it’s brilliantly pitched. I’ve always been looking for a ‘traditional’ fantasy game like this, one where the nerds can’t take it away to be boring about it. This might well be it.
The book also contains three full adventures – these range for very quick sessions where you’ll sketch a map as you go, if one at all, to much larger campaign settings. If you want to take it further there’s adventure and quest seeds included. The included dungeons will keep your groups busy for some time, but if you want to supplement it the excellent The Chaos Crier is worth picking up too. This is a tiny 28 page magazine of adventures and setting that are totally ready to run.
For those who want to keep the swords, sorcery and all that without the crushing weight of Big Fantasy™ looming, then this might just be your best bet.
CHRISTOPHER JOHN EGGETT
WE SAY
A nearly perfect system dropped into a world that holds all of the draw of classic fantasy, but in a refreshingly original package.
TRY THIS IF YOU LIKED INTO THE ODD…
Or Electric Bastionland. A vast world already exists here, you just need to discover it.