Zweihander: Grim and Perilous RPG, the unique tabletop system on the core of groundbreaking titles like Flames of Freedom and Blackbirds, is again available on the market. A brand new crowdfunding marketing campaign for the sport’s second iteration, dubbed Zweihander Reforged Version, launches as we speak. Polygon sat down with creator Daniel D. Fox to be taught extra — together with how issues nearly went utterly off the rails again in 2022.
It’s not usually {that a} new tabletop role-playing recreation can muscle previous the Dungeons & Dragons of the world, however that’s simply what occurred for Zweihander. After taking dwelling the gold Ennie award for finest recreation in 2018, the Kansas Metropolis writer and designer parlayed his win into a task at Andrews McMeel Common because the director of the corporate’s fledgling video games division. Then, only a few years later, all the pieces — together with his function with the corporate — fell aside. The rationale? Fox tells Polygon it had lots to do with the value of paper on the time.
“Despite the fact that we have been exceeding our projections on revenues,” Fox stated, “it is a 30-person firm with a brand new [line of] enterprise. They’re nice at what they do. They’re not nice at new enterprise. So I had an extended dialogue with the president of publishing, and he [decided we should] wind this down.”
The information got here at an inopportune time on the tail finish of the pandemic, simply as curiosity in non-D&D tabletop RPGs started to speed up. It additionally torpedoed, for a time, the manufacturing of one other high-profile crowdfunding success, Into the Mom Lands. And whereas that undertaking rapidly discovered a brand new dwelling with Inexperienced Ronin, Zweihander itself continued to hover on the brink. That’s, till Fox met up with the crew at World of Sport Design.
“Zweihander falls beneath the World of Sport design umbrella,” Fox stated, “so they’re the proprietor and the writer.”
Fox nonetheless has loads of inventive management, nevertheless. Along with collaborators Kate Bullock and Anna Goldberg, Fox is within the technique of placing the ending touches on the revised recreation — work that he’s been pressured to sideline for much too lengthy.
“We had all this group suggestions, from all of those playtesters,” Fox stated. “We form of collected all this data over the past six, seven years, from individuals who had been enjoying Zweihander, and there are loads of issues that we needed to vary, too.”
Along with revised and extra colourful artwork, Fox stated that a lot of the sport’s taste textual content can be being rewritten for contemporary audiences. The sport additionally takes an much more aggressive stance on character dying.
“What’s fascinating about Zweihander is most RPGs actually concentrate on the form of zero-to-hero momentum,” Fox stated. “So D&D, Pathfinder, these are nice video games. I play them. I like them. However […] what if it wasn’t zero-to-hero and zero-to-one? What when you performed flawed, tragic characters who weren’t attempting to vary the world, however the world was attempting to vary them? After which what would that journey appear to be for that character — or on this case, we name them survivors. What would that journey appear to be for the survivor in the event that they have been form of preventing towards these evils and this stuff which might be attempting to show them nearly into the monsters they have been preventing themselves?”
You possibly can be taught extra about Zweihander Reforged Version on the marketing campaign web page, which features a hyperlink to a free “session zero” quickstart doc. The marketing campaign runs now by means of April 7, with supply anticipated by Feb. 2025.