Giving The Black Hack 2e a Test-Drive

About a week ago, I ran The Black Hack 2e for the first time.

I never read/played the original edition of The Black Hack (TBH)–but I'd read mostly good things and I'm a bit of a system whore, so I decided to take the leap when they had a Kickstarter for this second edition.

As far as the book itself–I can't speak to whether someone should move from 1e to 2e, but I CAN say that I find the 2e book to be pretty sweet. The actual rules of the game are summed up succinctly and it doesn't take much to understand how the game works. It's a roll-under system, which I'm coming to enjoy as a mechanic, and it introduces things like the Usage Die–An abstraction to avoid the tedium of counting things like the amount of rounds remaining for a torch. The rest of the book is DM advice, drop-tables, and tools for generating dungeons, towns, and hexcrawls. I'm not sure I would actually use these tools as suggested–but browsing them and making stuff out of the ideas generated is also a great use and they work well for that.

Since I was going to run a one-shot with rules I'd never run before, I decided to find a traditionally-styled one-page dungeon (I own PDFs of all of them) that would take very little overhead on my part to put together and run. I settled on The Burial Mound of Gilliard Wolfclan by Josh Burnett, over at Bernie the Flumph–And I'm so glad I did! A simple story hook (go get that magic sword) sends the party to a burial mound that is currently inhabited by some goblins and their leader, Skazic the elf. The goblins don't know that there's actually an undead uprising beginning down deeper in the dungeon!

This really was a great setup because it involved multiple things I enjoy but don't do as much of since I've been running Crawljammer–a traditional dungeon with traps, both basic and magical, traditional monsters, and factions! The module suggests that the biggest, baddest goblin is actually unhappy that the elf is in charge–I took that and ran with it, suggesting that he actually used to BE the leader, but was usurped by goblin democracy (sure, why not?) because the elf is literate and can do math–something none of the goblins can do.

The game went really well–we had three players (two newbies and one experienced), I made them all level two, the experienced player made two characters, and we dived in.

I found that the game was quite smooth to run. In TBH, the DM doesn't roll for a monster attacking a character–they tell the player to roll for the character to block/avoid the attack. It was very weird to not roll for those things–but I got used to it, and I came to enjoy that I could keep my mind on what the monsters were actually doing instead of looking at sheets and dice to determine things. I still rolled damage when the monsters hit, but it might be interesting to not do that either.

Another thing I enjoyed was that the duration of most spell effects are based around the Usage Die–So when the wizard cast Web, we kept checking to see if the web was holding by rolling a d6–if it landed on a 1 or 2, the die was demoted to a d4–and when THAT landed on a 1 or 2, the spell ended. This adds a really interesting tension to the game and creates, I think, a weirdly more truthful representation of magic. It is powerful, but uncertain. I dig it.

TBH uses the same concept for things like arrows, oil, potions, and light sources. I've gotta admit, I go back and forth on arrows. I can understand from some perspective why that makes sense–if your 'vision' is that, in combat, we're really just rolling to see what the result of a series of attacks is, then you didn't really fire a single arrow in combat, you might have fired one and you might have fired several. The Usage Die abstracts that idea. As far as torches, the Usage Die was perfect–because it added tension constantly during dungeoneering that otherwise could have been boring because I wasn't using random monster rolls for this game.

So, I would say that this run of TBH2e was a success and that I, and the players, really enjoyed ourselves. Josh's dungeon was a pleasure to run and the system did exactly what I think a good system should do–get out of the way and let the fun happen.