The Old School Renaissance is a microcosm within the RPG world. Although many (including myself) refer to the OSR as a whole, cohesive thing, the reality is that the movement is more the result of at least half a dozen origins that random-walked into game preferences which, to an outsider, look similar. The broad preference towards the genre establishment of Dungeons and Dragons (or at least Appendix N, if not the system itself) bounds the definitions we work with; other retroclones and revivals like Cepheus and RuneQuest aren’t included, even if they too are ‘old school’. No, the main thing that all vectors of the OSR have in common is that they are trying to recreate the time when the roleplaying game was new. And when RPGs were new, either literally or in the eyes of the designer, the new thing that they first touched was (almost always) D&D.

All OSR games are aiming for either D&D as it was, D&D as it could be, or D&D as it was supposed to be. D&D as it was is simple; Old School Essentials is a straight-up retroclone and proves that ‘Basic D&D without shitty layout and shitty editing’ is a winning recipe. It’s the best known and best selling retroclone, but the retroclone camp of the OSR is arguably the oldest (to the degree that OSR is a label we can trace it back to OSRIC). D&D as it could be is where we start getting a lot of the distillations; the rules in early editions were such a mess you barely used any of them, so clearly one could write a game only using those few rules we could actually make work. This is where Into the Odd comes in, this is arguably where The Black Hack comes in, and, if rules were in any way supposed to be primary in the game, this might be where Mork Borg would come in. This example shows setting and tone are a different topic here than ‘game’. D&D as it was supposed to be is a tough one, and there aren’t many games that really aim for this mark. Whitehack is the one that comes to mind for me, taking the length and complexity of the original booklets and turning that into something much more flexible and consistent.

Black Sword Hack is also, in a manner of speaking, attempting to be ‘D&D as it was supposed to be’. The ‘supposed to be’, though, is more about set and setting (and setting assumptions) than mechanics. Built on The Black Hack, Black Sword Hack is a game built with full awareness of the original inspirations of D&D. The original concepts of Law and Chaos, courtesy of Michael Moorcock, drive the world-spanning conflicts. Robert E. Howard and Fritz Leiber are core and obvious inspirations for the flavor contained within. And, interestingly, references to Tolkien are minimal to nonexistent. There are no elves or hobbits here, only humans, ready to be corrupted by numerous forces beyond their understanding. And, thanks to its basis on The Black Hack and some smart writing, all of this straight-up swords and sorcery goodness takes place in a player-created setting, emphasizes reactive play, and, to put it bluntly, shows a solid understanding of all the game design innovations that have happened to RPGs in the last fifty years. Black Sword Hack is tight (and short), and it would be hard to pad out a review of the game into a full article. That said, when you sit it next to other major titles in the OSR universe, old-school and old-school adjacent games like Mork Borg and Worlds Without Number, you notice some interesting things about design choices and design intent which are driving the most successful titles in the subgenre today.

Black Sword Hack comes in at a svelte hundred (or so) pages, and the mechanics pick up from The Black Hack with few modifications; as The Black Hack itself is a distillation of D&D with a few nuggets, there isn’t much to talk about here. Everything is based on a d20, players roll almost all the dice (in combat, players roll their attacks and then roll defense for attacks coming at them). Character generation is based on a random line roll…But here is where the game starts actually getting unique. The 2d6 line-roll in Black Sword Hack is significantly flatter than a 3d6 or even 4d6 drop lowest line roll; the results from 2 to 12 map to base stat values that range from 8 to 13. This means that getting a notably good (or bad) stat roll is rare, and most results will be in that 10-11 ‘average’ range. Where this gets a bit more interesting is with Backgrounds. Each player picks three Backgrounds for their character, limited by their choice of Origin. Each Background gives one stat bump, as well as a special ability; this gives the player the ability to focus in on their strengths and make the stat spread more interesting than just random assignments from 8 to 13 on a bell curve. Let’s talk about what these Origins and Backgrounds actually are, though, because here we start to get into both emulation of the source material and a pretty high flavor:rules ratio. Origins are divided into three categories: Barbarian, Civilized, and Decadent. This looks to be a pretty archaic worldview and it is, because it’s based on the settings of all the swords and sorcery stories I referenced above (with Robert E. Howard and Conan being both a significant influence but also the easiest one for a casual S&S reader to immediately see). One may bristle at the wording given what it used to connote (no one’s going to claim that Robert E. Howard wasn’t racist, after all), but the game does a good job of both treating the three Origin types evenly and also unmooring them from reality in a delightful way. I personally think giving Swords and Sorcery the Lovecraft treatment here isn’t a bad thing, and the author is clear about where the terminology comes from; in some ways, acknowledging the racist history of swords and sorcery and then moving on is better than the mealy-mouthed attempts of WotC to justify their continued use of similar concepts in newer editions of D&D. But I digress.

The Backgrounds provide singular abilities that are both narrower and significantly more interesting than most D&D classes, and that’s not only because access to the supernatural power sets (sorcery, demon pacts, spirit alliances, faerie ties, twisted science) are permissioned by Backgrounds. Every single one of the Background abilities is useful in some way, and mixing and matching is going to yield a character that feels unique and has something potent they can do. There’s also a solid number of non-combat abilities, though being that this is an OSR throughline from D&D they’re in the minority (and no one’s expecting otherwise).

The Backgrounds are the first element of the game that makes up its biggest strength, namely feeling like a pulp fantasy novel. I love the way magic (and magitech in a manner of speaking) is treated here: Everything feels potent, dangerous, and at least a little bit out of your control. This continues on into the worldbuilding; all of the tools given to create the overarching world set it within a grand struggle between Law and Chaos, in the Moorcockian tradition that was first used to good effect in Chainmail (and then later bastardized by the nine box alignment system that works better in memes than it does in D&D). One sick little detail that I love is in the advancement system. Each level (there are ten) comes with some form of benefit, and for four of those levels the benefit is a Gift, some form of character ability of similar scope to this picked at character creation with the Backgrounds. Each Gift is categorized under Law, Chaos, or Balance. The endgame described in the book is the final battle between Law and Chaos, and whichever side you take, your character loses all the Gifts associated with the opposite side. This is also the point where all characters are told to choose on their own, even if it means that the party is split into two camps for the final encounter.

Black Sword Hack is going against the grain of the archetypal OSR game by going big. One of the first direct references to a mechanic from The Black Hack, the usage die, insists against using the usage die in the way it’s typically used in The Black Hack, namely to track arrows and rations and torches, adventuring consumables as it were. When I first read this I mistakenly interpreted the game as stating that counting those resources would be better (it’s not), but after absorbing the game more fully I better understand the intent. Black Sword Hack wants the characters to be big damn heroes, and wants larger than life conflicts. You don’t count arrows for the same reason you don’t count arrows in Fifth Edition D&D: it doesn’t matter.

It’s important to talk about power level a bit because the OSR is often conflated with lower level, grittier games. Some of this gets back to the framing I noted before, about using the rules that worked and abandoning the ones that didn’t. D&D was nearly always a game about ascending to godhood, it’s just that by the time you reached the ‘I’ of BECMI, everything was a disastrous mess mechanically. At the same time, D&D was always structured in a way to make you feel like you were earning your way to a higher power level. That’s arguably the intent of many newer OSR-adjacent games like Dungeon Crawl Classics and Worlds Without Number; neither of these games put much of a dent in the D&D power curve at higher levels, they just emphasize the low level slog to get there. Kevin Crawford states this bluntly in Worlds Without Number; character advancement feels better when it’s earned, when it’s difficult.

I don’t mean to imply that Black Sword Hack doesn’t start at a low power level; PCs in this game are just as feeble as they are in many OSR titles. At the same time, the power does come early. If you pick a background that gives you access to sorcery, you just roll spells at random; there’s no tiered list. If you have spirits or demons who listen to you, that’s available at character creation as well. Even if the game is grittier and ‘more difficult’ than modern D&D, the power curve is arguably flatter; you can begin mucking with forces beyond your comprehension at game start and that’s damn cool. It also, in a way, is a compelling interpretation of ‘level 1’ compared to many other games: You may start out relatively weak but you also start out as a protagonist, with all the extraplanar baggage that entails.

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Black Sword Hack is a different take on the OSR formula, but I believe it still hews to the underlying thesis of the OSR. Whether they say it outright or not, most OSR designers are trying to recapture the feeling of playing D&D for the first time. Whether they were college students enchanted by a new idea or kids puzzling through a rulebook that made little sense (and didn’t seem to care to either), first-time players of D&D often see the game as a window to new worlds and new experiences. Like many firsts, it isn’t going to hit that way again. Still, there is something potent that can be unlocked by chasing what made that first time so special. What Black Sword Hack is doing differently is trying to unlock a slightly different, slightly older first time experience. D&D was designed around swords and sorcery novels because those were the window into fantasy that so enchanted early gamers like Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. By going back to that source material, Black Sword Hack becomes a game that, instead of trying to recreate the first time playing D&D, is trying to recreate the magic that inspired D&D to be designed for the first time.

In many ways, Black Sword Hack isn’t much of a departure from the OSR formula, not in the way something like Electric Bastionland or Ultraviolet Grasslands could be considered a departure. At the same time, that relatively central core conceit makes it ideal to examine how the OSR has evolved in the last six or seven (or twenty or twenty four) years. Black Sword Hack is still a D&D derivative, though by directly working from The Black Hack it manages to place a bit of mechanical distance from the common ancestor. It is still obviously designed as a player facing game, but using both its character abilities as well as the Doom die for overarching player advantage, it’s still leaning in to using the mechanics which it provides. And, while Black Sword Hack is arguably as adaptable and hackable as any game in the OSR library, it’s also intended to be used for the inbuilt campaign, a cosmic struggle between Law and Chaos which permeates into the characters and progression mechanics, bestiary, and worldbuilding rules. It is, to some degree at least, a step change to the sorts of OSR titles that came about around the time 5e was released, like Whitehack, Maze Rats, and Into the Odd. At the same time, we should expect this sort of evolution from the incumbents; Black Sword Hack is built off the second edition of The Black Hack. Into the Odd was followed by Electric Bastionland and Maze Rats by Knave, and Knave has a second edition as well. Whitehack is on its fourth edition. The core of the OSR is now iterating in the same way that D&D did (the sorts of iterations that eventually drove people off to start making OSR games in the first place), and new designers are bringing in new ideas and new approaches, giving us other, more different things like Mork Borg. As a hack of a hack, Black Sword Hack neither represents the old guard of the OSR nor the Stockholm Kartell/NSR/whatever it’s being called now. It’s simply another designer’s attempt at what has arguably been the core thesis around all of these games the whole time: I want to recapture what made me excited about fantasy roleplaying in the first place.

Header art from Black Sword Hack. Black Sword Hack Ultimate Chaos Edition (the newest version) is available direct from The Merry Mushmen; the original version is available at DriveThruRPG.

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