For some Friday night fun I thought I would test out The Black Hack as "by the book" as possible. I'm considering using it for a one-shot this weekend, so to familiarise myself with the rules I rolled up four characters (one of each class) and ran a solo encounter against a "carrion creeper" and a "grizzly bear".
Rolling up the characters...
As The Black Hack claims to take inspiration from the "Original 1970s [...] game", which I assumed to be OD&D, I was interested to see how it fared by way of character creation. I got out my 3d6 and began rolling. Character generation is amazingly close to the 3 little brown booklet process in both flavour and experience. It is certainly as quick, if not quicker, than the original game. I intended to test drive the four core classes: warrior, cleric, thief, conjurer.
The first character I rolled, a conjurer, had no stats above 15 and it ended up being a straight down the line character. As both intelligence and charisma were high, I thought the scores were appropriate for an enigmatic conjurer. It was 3d6 down the line for the cleric too. The warrior, however, had 16 in one attribute, while the thief was so shitty that I had to swap a few scores around – by the rules you can swap up to two – to make it a feasible character. I have seen some people whinging online about the mandatory 2d6+2 roll if the previous score is 15+. Honestly, it makes sense from a mechanical perspective and I didn't feel like it crippled the character particularly. Plus, here's a little secret: you don't have to play by the rules as written.
Anyway, the whole process was super easy. I had read through the booklet once or twice before today, so I was fairly familiar with the rules. Nevertheless, creating four characters can't have taken longer than thirty minutes. I do have a quibble with the "incomplete" nature of the equipment list. Certain items are listed very granularly, like armour, shields, and even herbs, but no weapons are given prices (besides arrows and two-handed weapons). This is kind of annoying and the referee is left to devise their own prices for weapons. Unlike OD&D, armour is especially expensive in The Black Hack, so one assumes that weapons would be too. I went with a quick and dirty house rule that all one-handed weapons are 25 gp if a two-handed weapon is 50 gp. The nature of thieves tools appear to be pretty vague too. I made the assumption that thieves require them to do any of their general thieveries. That quibble aside, making characters was fun. I even rolled all the beginning spells randomly using 1d5 and 1d6 to determine which spells the conjurer and cleric received. I immediately noticed that characters tend to be tougher than a white box game would usually permit. All characters have a higher hit point range and the conjurer and cleric have a high chance to be able to recast memorised spells if their intelligence/wisdom is respectively high. There is a larger range of known beginning spells too. Let me introduce the party:
Conjurer:
Hit Points: 8
Strength: 5
Dexterity: 10
Con: 6
Intelligence: 13
Wisdom: 12
Charisma: 13
Items:
Sword (1d4 damage), backpack, oil x2, lantern, torches x6, rations, flint & steel, wineskin, 1 gp.
Spells:
1st – Sleep, magic missile, charm, detect magic
2nd – Darkness, levitate
Warrior:
Hit Points: 13
Strength: 16
Dexterity: 12
Con: 9
Intelligence: 10
Wisdom: 9
Charisma: 11
Items:
Gambeson (2 AP), sword (1d8 damage), bow, arrows x10.
Cleric:
Hit Points: 9
Strength: 14
Dexterity: 12
Con: 9
Intelligence: 10
Wisdom: 15
Charisma: 7
Items:
Gambeson (2 AP), small shield (2 AP), club (1d6 damage), 45 gp.
Spells:
1st – Light, detect evil
2nd – Speak with animals
Thief:
Hit Points: 9
Strength: 12
Dexterity: 12
Con: 6
Intelligence: 11
Wisdom: 6
Charisma: 11
Items:
Gambeson (2 AP), bow (1d6 damage), arrows x10, thieves tools.
Three encounters...
To create a fair evaluation of the system I decided I would run at least three encounters. The first was the party against a 1 HD "carrion creeper" (smaller cousin to the carrion crawler?). It took a few skims of the book to work out how initiative and combat actually worked during play, but once I got the hang of things it was pretty intuitive. I immediately liked the initiative system. It was easy and seemed to flow. It's a bit different from how I normally do initiative – I basically use B/X – but it worked well. It appears that there is a single initiative roll per character, per encounter, rather than the round-by-round initiative system of earlier games. The pregen characters absolutely annihilated the carrion creeper. Surprisingly all the characters succeeded in their dexterity checks and gained the initiative before the crawler could act. The thief backstabbed it and the warrior chopped it to bits in a single round, before the cleric or conjurer could even get to it. I decided to pit them against something a bit stronger. I looked at the ogre and even fleetingly thought it would be funny to throw them at the mercy of a demon, until I saw the grizzly bear. On paper it seemed like a good challenge but doable for four 1st level characters.
In the first run through, the thief won initiative, but everyone else failed their checks. The thief attempted to backstab but missed (the sneak check succeeded but not the attack roll). The grizzly bear retaliated and got the thief pretty good. I forgot that the thief was using a bow, and wouldn't necessarily have been in melee range; I guess that the thief can "backstab" with a bow? The warriors and the cleric both took hacks at the bear but missed, while the conjurer cast a sleep spell. The spell would have sent the bear to dreamland, though I did forget to offer the bear a saving throw; or rather, I forgot to offer the conjurer an intelligence check to determine the spell's efficacy. I did remember to test whether the spell had expended a slot and rolled an intelligence check for the conjurer, who passed, meaning the conjurer could cast sleep again that day. I assumed at this point that the characters would have made mincemeat of the bear once it was asleep.
I ran the same encounter a second time but decided that for whatever reason the conjurer wouldn't use sleep. The bear, as a "powerful opponent", easily bypassed character defences, while the characters made some unfortunately high rolls during their attacks (remember low is better). The cleric, for instance, missed all but one of his attacks! Finally, the encounter was over with the thief crippled (-2 strength) and the fighter disfigured (charisma reduced to 4). Both had been forced "out of action" – or effectively killed – by the bear. That was one tough ursine!
Well, that was fun..
Overall I thought the system was very streamlined and efficient. On paper I wondered how the game would flow, but it was very intuitive once I had clarified the quirks of the game. The "powerful opponents" rule made a HUGE difference. Without this rule I think the system would be pretty skewed. Obviously I cannot comment on how higher levels play out, particularly once some magic items are discovered, but I would definitely play The Black Hack again. The rules are perfectly short. All the essential elements that I like from OD&D are there. It left me excited because the rules lite nature allows prep time to be maximised, allowing focus on campaign details rather than stat blocks.
