Zweihander

This page is in need of cleanup. Srsly. It's a fucking mess.

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This article is about something that is considered by the overpowering majority of /tg/ to be fail. Expect huge amounts of derp and rage, punctuated by /tg/ extracting humor from it.

Zweihander Grim & Perilous RPG
RPG published by Andrews McMeel Universal
Authors	Daniel D. Fox
First Publication	2017 (Original) 2019 (Revised)

"The first lesson you have to know is this: you can’t earn anything in this world... Lesson two: a man will do anything he can to survive... the third and most important lesson: life is pain and death."

– Danziger Eckhart, Soldier and Ex-Convict

Around the time Games Workshop decided to piss off everyone but wargamers create Age of Sigmar, Fantasy Flight Games lost the rights to all their Warhammer properties, resulting in them liquidating all of the copies of the Warhammer Fantasy and 40k RPGs, cardgames, and board games and then removed them from sale. This annoyed several people beyond belief, especially people who liked the Warhammer Fantasy RPG and had yet to learn of Cubicle 7's Fourth Edition. Some of them decided that this was bullshit, so they grabbed a copy of WFRPG Second Edition, filed off all the serial numbers and copyrighted names, and had a Kickstarter to publish it. The result was Zweihander by Grim and Perilous Studios.

Released by Grim and Perilous Studios in 2017, this WFRPG retroclone is the love-child of one Daniel D. Fox. Starting as a Project COREHammer on the strike to stun forum, it has evolved into a full-fledged dead-tree codex which has apparently won some prestigious award no one cares about.

A revised edition featuring better formatting, art, and errata was released as a pdf in January 2019. In addition to the typical accouterment of spell cards, GM screens and the like, Zweihander has two major supplements.

• Dark Astral lets you play in a 40k expy instead of a Warhammer Fantasy Ripoff.
• Main Gauche is focused on adding CHAOS! to the game.

The name Zweihander is both based on the common name for a fuck-off huge two-handed sword and a reference to how you can use the massive 600+ page Core book as a two-handed weapon to beat your players with.

While it does pull from WFRP 2e for some mechanics, it is far more focused on achieving the gritty, dirty terribleness of WFRPG 1e. The world is violent, dirty, uncaring, and you will probably be eaten by something horrible. While there is no official setting, the Weapon/Core Book offers some options for using the thirty years war (1630's Germany), The Lost Colony of Roanoke (1610 Colonial America), Goth Moran (WF Empire Tactics Ogre), and Kahabaro. (Fantasy London?)

The Mechanics

Zweihander uses a percentile dice + skill based system to resolve tasks. The players share a small pool of Fortune Tokens which can be used to improve their odds to succeed. This pool refreshes each session.

Characters have 7 primary attributes, an ancestral trait, an archetype and profession, a background which includes a "Dooming Prophesy" based on the characters season of birth and a whole lot of other less important/cool things. All of this is randomly rolled, like FATAL but competently designed. You wanna play as an elven wizard? Tough luck, you're a dwarven flagellant. Know your place!

The Weapon/Core Book has rules for all sorts of things that sometimes come up and are usually pretty fiddly to use. There's a crafting system, Magic uses reagents that you actually have to buy/find are used up in casting, and specific detailed rules for every type of physical and mental ailment. There's a reason the book is as huge as it is.

Numbers Filed Off

Certain things are clearly Warhammer rip-offs. This is to be expected, as it is a retroclone, but it's a little blatant in places.

• Wytchstone
• Aetheric Winds
• Aztlan
• Skrrzak
• Orx
• Princes of Chaos
• The Abyss

The Shill Among Us

In 2017 it was rumored (and later confirmed by Daniel himself) that Fox was frequenting /tg/ under various aliases to push his game, with threads popping up talking in-depth about its amazing features, how it was better than Warhammer, and how people should go buy it. Weak retorts to criticism and Fox's similar habit of advertising his game across the interwebs, including interjecting it into discussions about other games, made it suspect that he was in fact the sockpuppeteer behind the shilling. He's pretty open about advertising Zweihander and defends the practice as just that, regular advertisement, but even on other websites some people seem to have grown tired of his Robotnik self-promotions.

This paired with him doxing people he doesn't like, being fanatically active in shutting down piracy of the system (while his own setting being a shameless rip off), and openly spending donated funds to try to shut down some dumb D&D Twitter thing no one cares about because it was "bigoted" (and coincidentally being used by people who criticized Zweihander) has left him with a fairly controversial reputation across the board, hell this page has been blanked and reverted a dozen times at this point, drawing up arguments on if and when one oversteps the bounds of simply promoting a product.

External Links

Link to the official website