Source:
https://www.polygon.com/24098495/zweihander-rpg-kickstarter-campaign-announcement

Award-winning Zweihander RPG is back from the dead with a new edition on
Kickstarter

What is dead may never die
By Charlie Hall Mar 12, 2024, 12:29pm EDT

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.