Zweihander: Grim and Perilous RPG, the unique tabletop system on the core of groundbreaking titles like Flames of Freedom and Blackbirds, is again in the marketplace. A brand new crowdfunding marketing campaign for the sport’s second iteration, dubbed Zweihander Reforged Version, launches in the present day. Polygon sat down with creator Daniel D. Fox to be taught extra — together with how issues virtually 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 residence the gold Ennie award for greatest recreation in 2018, the Kansas Metropolis writer and designer parlayed his win into a job at Andrews McMeel Common because the director of the corporate’s fledgling video games division. Then, just some years later, every thing — together with his function with the corporate — fell aside. The rationale? Fox tells Polygon it had so much to do with the worth of paper on the time.
“Regardless that we have been exceeding our projections on revenues,” Fox mentioned, “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 mission rapidly discovered a brand new residence 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 mentioned, “so they’re the proprietor and the writer.”
Fox nonetheless has loads of artistic management, nevertheless. Along with collaborators Kate Bullock and Anna Goldberg, Fox is within the means of placing the ending touches on the revised recreation — work that he’s been compelled to sideline for a lot too lengthy.
“We had all this neighborhood suggestions, from all of those playtesters,” Fox mentioned. “We sort of collected all this data during the last six, seven years, from individuals who had been taking part in Zweihander, and there are a whole lot of issues that we wished to alter, too.”
Along with revised and extra colourful artwork, Fox mentioned 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 deal with the sort of zero-to-hero momentum,” Fox mentioned. “So D&D, Pathfinder, these are nice video games. I play them. I really like them. However […] what if it wasn’t zero-to-hero and zero-to-one? What for those who performed flawed, tragic characters who weren’t making an attempt to alter the world, however the world was making an attempt to alter them? After which what would that journey seem like for that character — or on this case, we name them survivors. What would that journey seem like for the survivor in the event that they have been sort of preventing towards these evils and this stuff which are making an attempt to show them virtually 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 way of April 7, with supply anticipated by Feb. 2025.