[Review] Black Sword Hack – Ultimate Chaos Edition

BLACK SWORD HACK – Ultimate Chaos Edition
An Old School Renaissance (OSR) Fantasy Game
Written by Alexandre ‘Kobayashi’ Jeannette, with art by Goran Gligovic
and released by The Merry Mushmen.

It isn’t often that I look to review books outside of the vast library of Stormbringer (and Elric!) RPG supplements that I’m yet to critique, but given the recent positive murmurings about Black Sword Hack – and its potential to replicate the old-school gaming style of Eternal Champion roleplaying – I thought why not take some time out of my busy schedule and take a look at it.

Initial observations

I should start by saying that I purchased this book as a PDF via the publisher’s website having missed the very successful Kickstarter in late 2022. As an aside, while this is my first interaction with the French-based Merry Mushmen, they seem to be a publisher of the most wonderful boutique games and roleplaying supplements, although there was little on their website to tell me much about them, beyond the generally gorgeous quality of the material they produce, of course.

I should also mention, that as they are a small publisher this does unfortunately reflect on the price of their products – with the BLACK SWORD HACK – Ultimate Chaos Edition PDF being €16 Euro and the Print/PDF option €29 Euro before any shipping is added. Just to put that in context for someone like myself, based here in New Zealand, the PDF works out to be $28 NZD, while the physical edition comes in at just over $70 NZD! Ouch!

But while these costs might make me cringe, the art and design of BLACK SWORD HACK – Ultimate Chaos Edition pretty much makes up for it, being packed full of Goran Gligovic’s – the book’s lone artist – beautiful work. Better still the PDFs come in many different layout versions, including one that provides a two-page spread view, allowing the reader to fully appreciate all the art in the glorious format it was obviously created in. It is these sorts of design decisions that demonstrate the flexibility and thinking available to smaller publishers like Merry Mushmen and does a lot to ensure they stand out from the crowd in terms of their quality.

Onto the book itself, it is a 112-page PDF, that has a fairly short Table of Contents and surprisingly no index at all (although given the length of the actual rules and the nature of this style of game I wonder if an index is really all that necessary). The text opens with a pleasant surprise; a foreword from Bill King, the well-respected fantasy author (and creator of the Gotrek & Felix characters for the Games Workshop Warhammer Fantasy setting). This brief introduction discusses Bill’s own relationship with roleplaying and his love of the previous edition of Black Sword Hack.

So what is Black Sword Hack and can you play Stormbringer with it?

To spare you the effort of reading the rest of this review… yes… yes you can…

…

Oh, you’re still here? Okay, ummmm…

Yes, you can very easily replicate Stormbringer using Black Sword Hack, but like many games that have recently declared their ability to fill this niche, your personal opinion of the ruleset is really going to come down to the Game Master’s (and their players’) ability to adapt the mechanics on the fly.

Now why do I say that? The short answer is that you only ever get the basics in every category that makes up the structure of a roleplaying of this type, and everything else is left for you – the players – to do.

I should explain, in Black Sword Hack, the game’s claim to being a game focused on “dark fantasy roleplaying … inspired by (but not limited to) the works of R.E. Howard, Michael Moorcock, Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane series, Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar and Jack Vance’s Dying Earth books” is based on the descriptive material appearing in the endless series of lists scattered throughout the book. From character backgrounds, through the rules to create your unique setting, and even the sample scenarios themselves everything in this ruleset is about providing options but not details (and in that regard, you don’t even get that many, a dozen or so options in each list – at most – just enough to ensure that you hopefully keep the scope of the game on its purported dark fantasy styling). I’m going to be critical here and say that lists don’t make a game, and this is a trap that I think too many games such as Black Sword Hack fall into. They note the tropes of a genre and then use these descriptions to focus, and many ways limit, the gameplay to that singular style. I would contend that while the heart of a setting such as the Young Kingdoms of Elric’s world does consist of some very obvious tropes and defined aspects, the fun derived from playing in this game actually comes from challenging these expectations rather than simply conforming to them.

Black Sword Hack can be pretty bad at stolidly attempting to stick to the obvious dark fantasy trappings, but beyond these and some specific example options – such as the lists of Faerie Ties, Twisted Science and Runic Weapons, etc. – the rest of the game is actually pretty much just generic fantasy, using – dare I say it – a system that is just adequate for the job.

Is it too horrible for me to say all that?

I suppose, after those comments, you are going to think I don’t like the game, but you’d be wrong. I very much appreciate it for what it is – a simple set of game mechanics (that attempt to replicate the gaming aesthetic of the late 70s and early 80s) and plenty of suggestions and guides that identify what aspects once defined old-school dark fantasy. However, beyond the atmospheric art and design, and various examples ‘borrowing’ straight from the words of the fantasy authors themselves, there is nothing that compels me to believe that Black Sword Hack does anything other RPG couldn’t.

In summary

I like BLACK SWORD HACK – Ultimate Chaos Edition, but in my (likely unwanted) opinion – it doesn’t go far enough to actually bring the conflicts of Elric, Corum or Hawkmoon to life…