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