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ZWEIHANDER Grim & Perilous RPG: Revised Core Rulebook
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WELCOME TO GRIM & PERILOUS GAMING
Featured on Forbes.com, ranked one of the best-selling fantasy tabletop role-playing games at DriveThruRPG, and having sold over 90,000 copies worldwide, ZWEIHÄNDER Grim & Perilous RPG is a bloodier, grimmer, and grittier version of classical tabletop role-playing games. This revised edition is published in celebration with Andrews McMeel Publishing and features a refreshed layout, new artwork, rules clarifications, color plates by Dejan Mandic, and errata.
ZWEIHÄNDER Grim & Perilous RPG is a game where your characters Using the Powered By ZWEIHÄNDER d100 game engine, you will create grim characters, write perilous adventures, and build your own low fantasy & dark fantasy campaigns. These rules are a perfect fit for Renaissance and medieval-styled adventures, too. You can also use this book to create your own home-brewed worlds, whether inspired by the works of Andrzej Sapkowski’s The Witcher, George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, Glen Cook’s Black Company, Myke Cole’s The Armored Saint, Robert E. Howard’s Solomon Kane, Scott Lynch’s Gentlemen Bastard series, or other "grimdark"-inspired media.
This all-in-one game includes most of what you need to a character creation guide, game mastery rules, and a bestiary brimming with creatures both fair & foul. All that’s left are a few friends, pencils, and a handful of dice.
ZWEIHÄNDER Grim & Perilous RPG awaits, and the fate of your grim & perilous tale hangs in the balance!
WELCOME TO GRIM & PERILOUS GAMING
Featured on Forbes.com, ranked one of the best-selling fantasy tabletop role-playing games at DriveThruRPG, and having sold over 90,000 copies worldwide, ZWEIHÄNDER Grim & Perilous RPG is a bloodier, grimmer, and grittier version of classical tabletop role-playing games. This revised edition is published in celebration with Andrews McMeel Publishing and features a refreshed layout, new artwork, rules clarifications, color plates by Dejan Mandic, and errata.
ZWEIHÄNDER Grim & Perilous RPG is a game where your characters Using the Powered By ZWEIHÄNDER d100 game engine, you will create grim characters, write perilous adventures, and build your own low fantasy & dark fantasy campaigns. These rules are a perfect fit for Renaissance and medieval-styled adventures, too. You can also use this book to create your own home-brewed worlds, whether inspired by the works of Andrzej Sapkowski’s The Witcher, George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones, Glen Cook’s Black Company, Myke Cole’s The Armored Saint, Robert E. Howard’s Solomon Kane, Scott Lynch’s Gentlemen Bastard series, or other "grimdark"-inspired media.
This all-in-one game includes most of what you need to a character creation guide, game mastery rules, and a bestiary brimming with creatures both fair & foul. All that’s left are a few friends, pencils, and a handful of dice.
ZWEIHÄNDER Grim & Perilous RPG awaits, and the fate of your grim & perilous tale hangs in the balance!
Kindle Edition
Published June 11, 2019
52 people are currently reading
28 people want to read
About the author
Daniel D. Fox
14 books9 followersDaniel D. Fox is the executive creative director of games at Andrews McMeel Publishing. He won two gold ENNIE Awards at Gen Con for Best Game and Product of the Year with his fantasy horror game ZWEIHANDER RPG. When Daniel isn't designing tabletop role-playing games or board games, he's enjoying his other favorite hobby: cafe racer motorcycles. He lives in the City of Fountains with his wife Ali and their two young kobolds.
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
July 22, 2021
This is a brick, but it does come with what you need to play the game and then some. Zweihander is grim and perilous setting that uses a lightly modified D100 system similar to and based on the 2nd edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay. The setting is grimdark but it is also, frankly, slightly genetic. This is for good and ill--elements of many darker sword and sorcery settings are incorporated. The genetic setting is clearly aimed at providing a dark medieval or early Renaissance style setting that allows for maximum G.M. flexibility. Deities seem to pull from both Warhammer and Game of Thrones for inspiration, and magic is perilous to us. The basic game mechanics are not complex, although there are rules for things that one may use in such a setting. The professions give on tons of character builds. While not a perfect system, it does give one a feel for old-school Warhammer Fantasy as a mechanic with a very flexible baseline setting.
April 25, 2020
Plays like a slimmed down WHFRP 1st ed but with some neat quirks and a bit more evolved. The class traits make profession choices more critical early as they carry over and synergies with later abilities. The lowly commoners have a purpose as early stage adventurers instead of as re-rolls like the lowly charcoal burner or camp follower.
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August 12, 2021The short version of the difference between American RPGs and European games is: when designing a fantasy system for Americans, Gygax and company came up with a power fantasy where the characters go from rags to riches by wandering around, killing things, and taking their stuff (and maybe incidentally doing heroic things like helping the helpless) -- this is the core of D&D. When designing a fantasy system for Europeans, Games Workshop took the grinding horror of the Thirty Years War, when chaos was loosed on the land and roving bands of soldiers-turned-murderers might invade your town at any time. This was Warhammer.
Zweihander started as a Warhammer homebrew revision -- the working title for a while was "Corehammer." Now, I aggressively avoided this rpg, even when it was winning awards, based on the title: between "zweihander" -- a two-handed sword -- and "grim and perilous", I thought this was a gritty and maybe edgy bit of 90s revanchist nonsense. But after hearing lead designer Daniel Fox talk about the process on the Vintage RPG podcast, I picked it up at the library. (It particularly helped that he expressed love for all sorts of games and gamers -- he not claiming that there was one right way to play or one right type of player.)
Now I am not fully qualified to discuss this work from any historical perspective, since I am not particularly conversant in the history of Warhammer or even much drawn to the core experience here, which I might describe as "confronted with a dilemma without any good solutions." And even from a cursory skim of the main two books -- which, my god, are big, which is another thing that turned me off, but which I understand both as a selling point and as a reasonable decision: these 10 pounds are all you need to play -- I have some questions, like: the rulebook is said to be setting-neutral, and even includes notes for a classic fantasy world or even playing in a fantasized version of the Thirty Years War, and yet, there are specific gods and magical schools (which is pretty standard -- D&D does much the same, presenting an ostensibly setting-neutral system and then adding bits of setting). Still, I think would have preferred going all in on some setting or some more abstract view with instructions on, say, designing your own grim-and-perilous pantheon,
That said, once you hit the "Slain!" tables, you know something of what you're in for here: a series of tables that lists the random descriptions that the GM can say when a character is slain by a piercing, bludgeoning, or slicing weapon. Now whether this is played for pure enjoyment of watching someone else get sliced and diced (i.e., the gritty 90s, which thank you but no, I already lived through once), or played with some terror at your own mortality (since wounds can do the worst thing of all for roleplayers: lower your stats), I guess is up to the roleplaying group.
Now, the thing that really almost sold me on this game is the introductory adventure, which does the necessary thing for introductory adventures: give the players a taste of the main rules and also, give the players a taste of the tone. The adventure has some material which could be edgy in the worst way possible (that is, violence against women and children), but has some interesting problems, and a very nice designer's note about how the focus here is on the revenge of one of those abandoned women, and how the tension in the scenario is all about how some men see women as property rather than as people. Now, again, this could be played with nuance and delicacy or.... not, depending on the gaming group. And again, whether that's what you want in your RPG is going to be up to you.
Zweihander started as a Warhammer homebrew revision -- the working title for a while was "Corehammer." Now, I aggressively avoided this rpg, even when it was winning awards, based on the title: between "zweihander" -- a two-handed sword -- and "grim and perilous", I thought this was a gritty and maybe edgy bit of 90s revanchist nonsense. But after hearing lead designer Daniel Fox talk about the process on the Vintage RPG podcast, I picked it up at the library. (It particularly helped that he expressed love for all sorts of games and gamers -- he not claiming that there was one right way to play or one right type of player.)
Now I am not fully qualified to discuss this work from any historical perspective, since I am not particularly conversant in the history of Warhammer or even much drawn to the core experience here, which I might describe as "confronted with a dilemma without any good solutions." And even from a cursory skim of the main two books -- which, my god, are big, which is another thing that turned me off, but which I understand both as a selling point and as a reasonable decision: these 10 pounds are all you need to play -- I have some questions, like: the rulebook is said to be setting-neutral, and even includes notes for a classic fantasy world or even playing in a fantasized version of the Thirty Years War, and yet, there are specific gods and magical schools (which is pretty standard -- D&D does much the same, presenting an ostensibly setting-neutral system and then adding bits of setting). Still, I think would have preferred going all in on some setting or some more abstract view with instructions on, say, designing your own grim-and-perilous pantheon,
That said, once you hit the "Slain!" tables, you know something of what you're in for here: a series of tables that lists the random descriptions that the GM can say when a character is slain by a piercing, bludgeoning, or slicing weapon. Now whether this is played for pure enjoyment of watching someone else get sliced and diced (i.e., the gritty 90s, which thank you but no, I already lived through once), or played with some terror at your own mortality (since wounds can do the worst thing of all for roleplayers: lower your stats), I guess is up to the roleplaying group.
Now, the thing that really almost sold me on this game is the introductory adventure, which does the necessary thing for introductory adventures: give the players a taste of the main rules and also, give the players a taste of the tone. The adventure has some material which could be edgy in the worst way possible (that is, violence against women and children), but has some interesting problems, and a very nice designer's note about how the focus here is on the revenge of one of those abandoned women, and how the tension in the scenario is all about how some men see women as property rather than as people. Now, again, this could be played with nuance and delicacy or.... not, depending on the gaming group. And again, whether that's what you want in your RPG is going to be up to you.
February 17, 2021
Haven't had a chance to play yet but was a great read. I cannot wait to play a Grim and Perilous game.
July 9, 2019
An excellent spin on the mechanics from the first two editions of WFRP, in a huge tome in which the rules are presented clearly and with plenty of examples. It’s a system I’d consider using for a dark Medieval fantasy campaign at some point, and I like that it focuses entirely on rules and concern for the prospective GM and not on some proprietary setting. Does for those early Warhammer RPGs what Pathfinder did for 3.5 D&D
March 9, 2021
Despite the huge size, this isn't as complex of a game as some might imagine (a good portion of the page count is actually class lists, equipment, a bestiary, etc.). This game is a good alternative for people wanting a slightly different Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay ruleset.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews