Zweihander: Grim and Perilous RPG, the original tabletop system at the core of groundbreaking titles like Flames of Freedom and Blackbirds, is back on the market. A new crowdfunding campaign for the game’s second iteration, dubbed Zweihander Reforged Edition, launches today. Polygon sat down with creator Daniel D. Fox to learn more — including how things almost went completely off the rails back in 2022.
It’s not often that a new tabletop role-playing game can muscle past the Dungeons & Dragons of the world, but that’s just what happened for Zweihander. After taking home the gold Ennie award for best game in 2018, the Kansas City author and designer parlayed his win into a role at Andrews McMeel Universal as the director of the company’s fledgling games division. Then, just a few years later, everything — including his role with the company — fell apart. The reason? Fox tells Polygon it had a lot to do with the price of paper at the time.
“Even though we were exceeding our projections on revenues,” Fox said, “this is a 30-person company with a new [line of] business. They’re great at what they do. They’re not great at new business. So I had a long discussion with the president of publishing, and he [decided we should] wind this down.”
The news came at an inopportune time on the tail end of the pandemic, just as interest in non-D&D tabletop RPGs began to accelerate. It also torpedoed, for a time, the production of another high-profile crowdfunding success, Into the Mother Lands. And while that project quickly found a new home with Green Ronin, Zweihander itself continued to hover on the brink. That is, until Fox met up with the team at World of Game Design.
“Zweihander falls beneath the World of Game design umbrella,” Fox said, “so they are the owner and the publisher.”
Fox still has plenty of creative control, however. Together with collaborators Kate Bullock and Anna Goldberg, Fox is in the process of putting the finishing touches on the revised game — work that he’s been forced to sideline for far too long.
“We had all this community feedback, from all of these playtesters,” Fox said. “We kind of collected all this information over the last six, seven years, from people who had been playing Zweihander, and there are a lot of things that we wanted to change, too.”
In addition to revised and more colorful art, Fox said that much of the game’s flavor text is also being rewritten for modern audiences. The game also takes an even more aggressive stance on character death.
“What’s interesting about Zweihander is most RPGs really focus on the kind of zero-to-hero momentum,” Fox said. “So D&D, Pathfinder, those are great games. I play them. I love them. But […] what if it wasn’t zero-to-hero and zero-to-one? What if you played flawed, tragic characters who weren’t trying to change the world, but the world was trying to change them? And then what would that journey look like for that character — or in this case, we call them survivors. What would that journey look like for the survivor if they were kind of fighting against these evils and these things that are trying to turn them almost into the monsters they were fighting themselves?”
You can learn more about Zweihander Reforged Edition at the campaign page, which includes a link to a free “session zero” quickstart document. The campaign runs now through April 7, with delivery expected by Feb. 2025.
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