A Grim Hack (From Monster at my Desk)
Resource Page here on itch.io
$12 from Exalted Funeral or PWYW on itch.io
I snagged A Grim Hack on a lark, during one of several random "that looks interesting" expeditions in to Exalted Funeral's amazing webstore. Honestly, after reading it the first time I more or less forgot about it and stuck it on a shelf until recently when I got a free code for the book and resources over at playrole.com, which prompted me to dig it out again and explore it a bit more. Here's what I discovered.
What it is: A Grim Hack is nakedly straight up in its goal: to provide a slim alternative rulebook the Zweihander Grim & Perilous Adventures, which is in turn an unabashed retroclone of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (1st or 2nd edition, I am not sure which). So in theory the goal of A Grim Hack is to provide an easy ruleset that I suppose could work as a substitution for sourcebooks and material from either of its related systems.
The Rules: A Grim Hack is an incredibly dense summary of the core conceits of the Zweihander/Warhammer mechanical expressions. You have eight stats, a percentile resolution mechanic, skills, professions, ancestries (which are basically personality traits), lots of combat rules, and a dense but useful magic system. It hints at other ways to use the rulebook.
A Grim Hack is also an unabashed "basic rules only" overview. You will need to go to the itch.io page linked above if you want the stuff a GM will need to actually run the game (monsters, NPC rules, a scenario). You could probably use the other books it is a condensed clone of as resources, but the GM PDF supplements really do help. I rather wish that A Grim Hack had published a second volume with these rules in print, but it looks like for now they are on PDF only through itch.io.
The Setting: not a single whiff of setting detail, outside of what you make of it, with some hinting that A Grim Hack would make for a fine medieval life simulator (and I think it would). It talks a bit about games without magic, or games with rare magic, and that's about it.
The game has some decent black and white art, ranging from "zine quality-okay" to decently evocative, such as the cover. A couple illustrations fall in to the "back of the high school notebook" category, but it has no impact on the product's presentation, which is emphatically about cataloging a set of extremely condensed rules.
Support: exclusively on itch.io, where several pay-what-you-want PDFs can be found with some mundane and fantastical monsters, NPC design rules and a scenario.
In the end, A Grim Hack stands out as being distinctly unlike a lot of other digest size zine RPGs in that its mechanically complex and dense, surprisingly so for the size of the rules at 40 pages. But, as the developer freely admits, his goal was to have a ruleset that he could pull out which did not scare players away with 400-500 page rulebooks.
Unfortunately I am not well versed in any of the base systems A Grim Hack riffs from, so I do not know if its works well as a substitution rulebook or not. It definitely seems like it can stand on its own two feet, if you download the free resources to provide GM content.
Who Should Get This? I suggest that if you are in the same boat as the author, and like the mechanical style of Warhammer/Zweihander but would rather have a 40 pages rulebook than a 400 page rulebook then you might like this. Alternatively, if you want a gritty, surprisingly deep (for 40 pages) character and combat system, and want to run your own weird medieval campaign then this may be up your alley.
Up Next: Sharp Swords & Sinister Spells
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