Played It: The Black Sword Hack
Spoilers: It's AWESOME!!
Played It: The Black Sword Hack
For six sessions, I ran two different groups through the fantastic, sorcery-drenched world of The Black Sword Hack, and now that both games have wrapped, it's time to look back and see what sang, what broke, and what I'd do differently.
The Pitch
The Black Sword Hack, published by The Merry Mushmen, is a dark, doomed take on sword-and-sorcery powered by the lean, roll-under Black Hack mechanics. It’s drenched in the aesthetics of Moorcock’s Eternal Champion stories, where characters walk the fine line between Law and Chaos, where gods manipulate mortals and where magic is as dangerous as it is powerful.
I knew I wanted this to be short-form campaign play—6-8 sessions, built around character-driven emergent storytelling in a grim world of mercenaries, cults, scheming warlocks, and cosmic horror. I got extremely lucky by having enough interest to create two groups, two different campaigns:
Sunday Group: The Cycles of Errazu
A story of reincarnated kings, false messiahs, and ruthless warlords.Monday Group: The Fall of Malpha
A mythic tragedy of betrayal, war, and an apocalyptic artifact.
Both groups ran on parallel tracks, each exploring different aspects of the Black Sword Hack’s mechanics.
What Worked
🎲 Lean, Familiar Mechanics
BSH’s roll-under system is easy to grok and fast to resolve, and I love how it avoids the paralysis of "modifier math." A Range-band-based combat system (instead of tactical grid movement) let us lean into theater-of-the-mind fights while keeping positioning meaningful. But most of all? The DOOM mechanic—chef’s kiss. It’s a countdown to ruin, a personal fate-clock that feels thematically perfect for a doomed sword-and-sorcery world.
🎲 Emergent World-Building
From the Blue Smoke Cultists to VanderJack’s tragic downfall, almost everything in these campaigns was born from play, not pre-written plotlines. I had a framework—major factions, power struggles, a loose sense of geography—but the players decided where to push, and the world pushed back. BSH isn’t explicitly a "story game," but it facilitates emergent storytelling incredibly well. Not fully in the OSR bucket, but it's close enough.
🎲 Sorcery Is Dangerous
The magic system in BSH is meant to be wild, unpredictable, and sometimes costly, and I loved it. Vanderjack's tragic end was due to magic gone awry. But Wulf's use of sorcery produced some amazing wins. The best was getting an enemy half-giant to help protect him.
🎲 Flexible Prep Pays Off
The best example? Gideon’s Bounty. He started as a random table result of a player deciding not to pay the cost of living tax. But, through the Order of Truth’s machinations, the Northland Raiders, and the cycles of reincarnation, he became the fulcrum of the Sunday game’s final arc. I love it when prep can bend without breaking.
🎲 Short Form Play Feels Right
With six-session pacing, there was always forward momentum. Every adventure mattered. I never had to worry about filler sessions or pacing drag. Some RPGs feel like they need longer, open-ended play to breathe—BSH handled this tight 2-hour format easily.
🎲 Online Friendly!
We used Lets-role VTT out of the UK (IIRC) with no real problems outside of learning new software. Let's-Role is about as simple as you can get IMHO for VTTs. There are some UI quirks, but I'll call it British folk being British.😝 I'd use it again.
GM Lift Required
💪🏾 Combat Can Get Swingy
Brutal, fast combat is a feature, and some fights ended before they felt like fights. And barbarians —two of them will make quick work of many things! I love a good high-lethality system. Sometimes however, like we know about D20 combat, whiffs suck... This is a solved problem with many options found across the internets. From Into the Odds just roll damage, to a more PBTA solution.
💪🏾 Social Mechanics Were Lacking
For a game full of scheming cultists, backstabbing nobles, and cosmic warlocks, I felt that social interactions lacked mechanical teeth. I ended up hacking in The One Ring’s Audience system to make negotiation and manipulation a structured, high-stakes process. It worked well! But I wish the game had something baked in for handling these power-dynamics-heavy interactions instead of a standard stat check.
What I'd Do Differently Next Time
📌 A Stronger Hook for the First Session
Black Sword Hack has an amazing setting creation process that includes defining the main Antagonist. I love dropping players into a living world and letting them pull the threads, but I think both games could have benefited from a more immediate, high-stakes first scene. I loved how the first fights in both campaigns set the tone, but the first 20-30 minutes could have been tighter on my part.
Would I Run It Again?
No Doubt.
The Black Sword Hack hits so many of my sweet spots:
✅ Fast, brutal combat
✅ Player-driven worldbuilding
✅ Simple, familiar mechanics that you can build upon
✅ Short-form play that feels satisfying
This is it if you want a low-crunch, high-impact sword-and-sorcery game that delivers hard choices, violent action, and doomed antiheroes.
I’m already thinking about my next run—maybe a single group longer campaign, maybe an open-table sandbox—but whatever form it takes, The Black Sword Hack has earned a place in my rotation.
Mad Love to Betany, Wulf, Anton/VanderJack, Rikvengar, Iride, Letulei and Peto.
May Doom Forget Their Names.