If there's one thing that really impresses me with how far RPG releases have come, it's the resurgence of fantastic starter set boxes absolutely packed to the gills with content -- and this is no exception. It may, in fact, be the cream of the crop. I'll go through the box, skipping the dice because you don't get those if you order the PDF (they're fine, functional, black).

The Player's Guide starts with an introduction that lays out the themes up front without tying them down to a specific world. Essentially, as long as the world you want to play in has these themes -- in other words, as long as it's dark fantasy -- the game will work for you. This is followed by the usual explanations of terms like player, gamemaster, session, and so on, and provides a rolling example of play. Interestingly, the example of play is also the first scene of the included adventure, meaning that if you run that adventure the players will be responding to the same situation as the example of play describes. I'm not sure whether this is a good thing or a bad thing; I'd think that new players would enjoy the familiarity of a situation they've already visualized while veteran RPG players would be confused.

The next section goes into detail on the dice system. Since Zweihander is essentially an OSR version of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, the system will be familiar, but it's been streamlined and brought to heel. It's a fairly standard percentiles system for the most part, where you add your attribute and skill and try to roll under. Rolling doubles makes the roll a critical, either critical success or critical failure depending on the number showing. The Flip to Succeed and Flip to Fail rules are a much more exaggerated form of advantage and disadvantage from later editions of D&D (and an increasing number of other games), making very dramatic shifts and exaggerating the system's lethality. There's also a metacurrency called Fortune/Misfortune, with the usual setup where players spend tokens to benefit PCs and pass them to the GM, who spends tokens to benefit NPCS and passes them to the players.

Character generation is pretty simple, and as presented here it is entirely random. Your Profession, essentially a bare-bones character class, is rolled randomly; you then roll your attributes randomly in order, regardless of how well they fit the Profession; you roll your starting social class; you calculate various values based on that; and you either pick Human or roll an ancestry at random, and then your character's physical appearance and personality are rolled randomly (!) You don't have a lot of control here, and there's no guarantee you'll get anything you're remotely interested in playing; even if you do, the player characters won't fit any kind of theme or have any obvious reason to associate with each other. Hopefully there's a non-random system provided in the Revised Core Rulebook, because random gen fell out of fashion for a reason.

Taking a moment to note that character gender is open and fluid, and the accompanying artwork shows what appears to be a trans man being fitted for a binder. Frankly that's amazing. The past was a lot less black and white about gender than uneducated people insist, and given this game isn't historical it can have any sociological constructs the author wishes. But backing it up with art? That shows a commitment to inclusiveness I don't think I've ever seen in an RPG before.

Finally, you actually get to choose something: your character's name and one each of the talents, attribute bonuses, and (for spellcasters) a spell. You also get to buy your equipment; a bewildering array of mechanically different weapons are available, as well as the usual armor, village services, and basic gear.

Most of the rest of the book is devoted to combat. It's crunchy, but only moderately so, and fairly intuitive; I wasn't surprised by anything I read. There's an Action Point system, which lends itself to tactical planning and heavy use of teamwork in fights. You can attack, move around, attempt various special moves, or use "words as weapons" to pass status conditions around to friends and foes alike. The book finishes with a brief section on magic.

The Gamemaster's Secrets book is a lot like the Dungeon Master's book in the old Basic Set. There's a section at the front with the social interaction and Corruption rules that the players are expected to learn through rough experience, followed by a long and detailed adventure. The adventure is a mystery, where the player characters are recruited by a friend to solve a rash of disappearances. It's a pretty good adventure, a little on the difficult side, and does require the players to be in a dark fantasy morally-gray mindset. The book finishes with a VERY small bestiary, essentially just the creatures and characters you need to run that specific adventure, and the tables to roll on when characters sustain injuries.

The next item is a sheaf of character profiles (i.e., character sheets). The design in the printed edition is a four-page booklet, with Profession information on the front, the character sheet to be filled in on the two facing pages, and a summary of combat actions on the back. This is a very nice and functional design with the printed version, using 11x17 paper folded down the center ... though it would be very difficult to print this out from the PDFs, which present them as four-page documents. I guess the best solution is to print double-sided and recreate the booklets by placing two pages next to each other. Whichever way you go, the Gamemaster needs to be prepared for character sheets to take up fully twice as much table space as usual. The information on the professions is also located nowhere else in the box, meaning that giving the sheets out to the players will permanently remove the profession information from the kit. The advantage to the PDF is to be able to give players a printout to keep while not losing your only copy of that information.

Next we have an absolute hoard of cards and other tools.

There's an entire deck of injury cards, duplicating the entries on the table in the Gamemaster's Secrets book; they're on thin cardstock but functional. This is followed by a deck of spell cards (a product that other companies make you pay through the nose for) covering all of the Generalist spells. There's a giant poster of the cover art from the boxed set, which is actually pretty damned good.

The last of the general tools provided is a gamemaster screen. It's landscape-oriented, which isn't my personal preference, and a little flimsier than I like. The front, player-facing side has nothing but art, which is the style at the time, and the art is mostly just an array of characters staring at the players. I suspect this is just art from the full core rulebook photoshopped together; I'd much rather have had a nice panorama of a dark fantasy town or evocative adventure site. The back of the screen is mostly an expanded version of the combat actions table -- even with the injury card deck included, the injury charts REALLY needed to be summarized on here, and they aren't.

The rest of the box is devoted to handouts and resources for the introductory adventure in the Gamemaster Secrets book. A poster-sized map of the town, one side of which is annotated for the GM and the other of which is unlabeled for the players. A THIRD card deck, this one containing two copies each of the important clues to solving the mystery. (One worry: the players may dismiss anything they learn without an accompanying card.) And cardstock maps of every location, again with the player map on the front and the gamemaster's annotated map on the back. The best way to use this is probably to clip it to the top of the gamemaster screen for easy reference, though I'm not sure how I'd do that in practice.

Now, I've described all of these things as being made of "cardstock," and of course that's going to be up to you to provide when you print them out. Most cardstock that works with an inkjet should work for the adventure materials. For things you're going to be using for a long time, though, like the injury deck and spell cards, I suggest getting some blank tarot-sized cards from The Game Crafter or somewhere, printing the material on sticker paper, and then sliding them into some tarot-sized sleeves (ask at your game store). That'll give you something nice, sturdy, and permanent that you can keep using indefinitely.

Overall, while I do have some specific gripes here and there, this is a terrific package in both retail and PDF form. The game system gives you the flexibility that tactical gamers crave, and there's a wealth of character options (when you're not rolling randomly, at least). This is a system with some real meat to it, and the Starter Kit will give you enough material to decide if it's right for you at a sinister bargain price.

I've heard people say that Zweihander is just WFRP without the sense of humor. First, saying it's "just WFRP" as though that means it has no reason to exist kind of invalidates the entire OSR movement. Why bother creating an OSR game when you can just buy older editions of D&D? Besides, given WFRP's particular sense of "humor," I see that as a glowing review.

I'm just about positive there's a terrific game buried in here under all the ... stuff ... but I'm not used to having to put this much effort into finding it. Every part of this game is a confused mess.

I've been gaming for decades and at this point I can pick up a new action resolution system in a couple of minutes. Not this time. I kept finding myself having to flip back and forth across the same handful of pages, mentally juggling the game's different metacurrencies, constantly running into terms that were crucial to understanding what I was reading but which wouldn't be discussed at all until pages later. I had to search around to find tutorials, and then COMPARE those tutorials to each other, just to get a grasp of the basic system.

It's probably very easy to learn if someone teaches it to you instead of you having to learn it for yourself. The system doesn't actually seem that complicated! The problem here starts and ends with BAD WRITING: a jumble of concepts presented in the wrong order. I felt like I wasn't reading a published game system, but the scattered notes and post-its of a gamemaster's homebrew system, typed up in random order. Where was the editor!?

This isn't even getting into how much fluff there is. Now, under most circumstances fluff is a good thing, particularly when a game is designed for narrative play (which a competent Star Trek game would need to be). In-universe quotes and documents are also a good thing, and make fantastic sidebars. But the book goes way overboard here; entire chapters are devoted to nothing but those sidebars! No actual text! Even the chapter on the UFP is written from an in-universe perspective, and assumes that you're already familiar enough with the setting that you only need an orientation on where in the established timeline the game is set.

If you could actually learn about the Star Trek universe from these sidebars, then maybe it could be salvageable. Paranoia XP pulled it off. But I read these things, and they're largely incomprehensible unless you not only know Star Trek but recognize the specific episodes they're referring to. This is not a world background chapter. This is trivia night. If you're not already familiar with the universe -- and yes, that's entirely possible, I know a few people who'd be happy to play an RPG of interstellar diplomacy and scientific discovery but who've never seen a single hour of Star Trek -- it's absolutely no help.

On top of everything else, the only way to get an actually readable copy of this book is to buy it on DriveThruRPG as a print-on-demand. The generally available book is printed in white text on black because that "looks more like an LCARS screen." Puts me in mind of an RPG called ... was it Secrets of Zir'an? ... where the game was perfectly fine but they chose to use a page background of glyphic text. Printing text on top of text. It was flavorful, sure, but it made the book unreadable and the game unplayable. The retail Star Trek Adventures books aren't that bad, but there have been so many reports of eyestrain that it's very clear the publisher put form over function.

Finally, there's the elephant in the room. I don't care about the drama. What I care about is that the fandom insisted that a certain person not be involved in the book, and Modiphius not only still got that person involved but actively lied to its fans, listing that person under a pseudonym, and the person responsible showed absolutely no remorse. That's a level of contempt for your customers that's pretty much unforgivable, especially these days when there are people way worse than that guy still getting plenty of work in the RPG industry.

For all of these readability and usability issues, I'm awarding this book two stars. I want to be clear I'm not writing a negative review of the GAME SYSTEM. If you can find someone to teach it to you, so you only need to use the book for reference and browsing, you'll probably have a ball with it. But this book needs a new edition, pronto, with a new graphic designer, a new writer, and a new editor.

Ugh, this is ... there is no point in downloading this. If you know what the term "Calvinball" means, and you've read the product description, you've already read the game. I was hoping for some kind of structure or base to work from, some kind of universal rule that players would come up with a thousand exceptions to -- like the way Yu-Gi-Oh is played in the anime, where you can use a monster with "catapult" in its name to hurl your opponent's monsters at each other, or where a fight between a fantasy giant and barbarian can be interrupted by the arrival of a Klingon warship.

This book basically just says "play cards from a random assortment of CCG cards and then describe how it works to your advantage." There is one example. And that's it. This PDF is about half a page long plus whitespace and cover.

This would be appropriate as a sidebar. As its own PDF it's kind of ridiculous; all of the content in the book is implicit in its title.

I'm kind of torn about how to review this.

First, I should say that based on what's already here, this is one of the best kid's RPGs I've ever seen, and even as an adult I'm finding this a lot friendlier and more casual than a lot of games on the market. The same kind of rules set that works great for teaching kids works equally well for low-stress games between friends who aren't looking for a tactical challenge but just want to have the fun of an old-school dungeon crawl without all the math. With a group of adults you can be playing a satisfying game inside two minutes of starting time.

So why only four stars instead of five?

Like I said, what's here is fantastic ... and it's worth it at the price point (even keeping in mind that you NEED one of the accompanying books of monsters). But it feels like there should be more. Not in the sense of more complexity -- the amount that any one player has to think about it just about exactly right.

But there need to be more characters to choose from, a longer list of monsters, a longer list of treasures, an extended example of play, more information on dungeon creation, and ... well, just more of everything in general. This could be handled with supplements, but I'd kind of rather see more of a "boxed set" approach with a player book, a monster book, and individual character sheets.

I can also note that the game does seem to assume that an adult will be running the game. That's not necessarily true (and I say that as someone who DM'd her first red box D&D game at around Dungeonteller's target age). But, again, this falls into the same category of "I want more."

Finally, the usual small comments. Individual PDFs for the characters from the same book would be a good addition. The monster counters are a good idea ... but using an isometric view instead of overhead makes it harder to make them work visually when used alongside actual miniatures. The version of the pixie included in the bundle seems to be incomplete; you can get the full pixie by downloading the pixie add-on separately. Also, using pixel or "cartoony" paper miniatures (Octopus Apocalypse, Battle Studios, Darkfast, etc.) gives a REALLY nice friendly visual to go with the friendly rules.

The only reason this isn't a five-star review is that eight is a very low number of distinct figures for the price point (the quoted number 18 includes duplicates of the same figures).

While the Sisk Hoplites are kind of generically menacing-looking and Greek-looking, the art is absolutely excellent, and the remainder of the set is exceptional (Riftblade, specifically, may be one of my favorite pieces of fantasy art).

This is a really spectacular set of standups; while technically it's specific to the Torn Worlds universe, the majority of these characters could pretty much be used for any fantasy or fantasy-styled steampunk (I'm especially thinking of Victoriana here, which has a similar mixture of sapient species). They're evocative, the sort of standups that can produce instant character ideas (which is also good for Ganesha Games' Tales of Blades and Heroes, which uses a "start with the miniature" character generation system).

The only "bad" thing is that some of these illustrations are good enough that I want physical miniatures instead, and I know those won't be out for months (possibly longer, for those of us who missed the Kickstarter for them).

This is an absolutely gorgeous map. As soon as I picked it up I went to try to have a copy printed out -- but the software I was using stated that the image was too small and at the stated 20x30 would print heavily pixelized. I tried another piece of software and the same thing happened.

I finally worked out what was wrong using GNU Image Manipulation Program. The image is indeed 2000x3000 pixels, and at the expected 100ppi that would work out to a 20x30 map. (Which is a little low, I'd expected about 140ppi, but it's certainly good enough). However, for some reason the image was set at 500 ppi.

I was able to get the original intended size by resetting it to 100 ppi (which is actually a little low for an image with this much detail). The actual image is perfect, but I am docking one star for the serious technical fault. A computer noob would have had NO clue what was wrong or been able to fix it.

As with the previous entries in this set, these adventurers are drawn in a very kinetic style, perfect for lighthearted fantasy gaming, beer & pretzels play, kids' games, and so forth. The style is deceptively simple and very attractive on the table, but they don't mix well with other companies' artwork so I hope more sets (such as monsters) are released soon so a consistent table look can be achieved.

On the one hand, these miniatures give a friendly, jaunty feeling to the table, perfect when running a game for kids or a game that doesn't quite take itself seriously. They really convey a feeling of fun.

On the other, this style of miniature doesn't mesh that well with more realistic-looking paper adventurers. I hope they come out with more sets, especially sets of monsters and monster humanoids like orcs, so you can maintain a consistent look on the table.

I was expecting much more of certain things here -- and much less of others.

I was only a handful of pages in when I first ran across the word "yiff," a sexual term in the furry fetish that doesn't belong in this book. There are other ... comments ... laced throughout, as well as certain disadvantages and one of the templates, that are common things in the furry fetish but will be totally unexpected to Pathfinder players.

As to what's missing ... no turtles? No otters or weasels? The book claims that weasels and otters have the same statistics as rats, and that turtles have the same statistics as dolphins. I looked over the stat blocks and I have grave misgivings about that, and these aren't uncommon or obscure species they're skipping. Meanwhile we have entries for dragonmorphs (useful, but not really relevant) and shoggothmorphs (WHAT?)

The 660 million possible races figure seems to be arrived at by simply figuring out how many possible combinations can be thrown together without any rhyme or reason. It's like claiming that Dungeons and Dragons has hundreds of possible character classes because it contains feats. Not to mention, this also includes a LARGE number of "racial abilities" that are nothing of the kind -- social disadvantages, telling magic riddles, berserker rages, the flippin' Ranma 1/2 curse ... it's not a racial ability if a member of any race could have it or acquire it!

Also: rules for playing video game sprites, cartoon characters, Earth humans turned into furries, and Neanderthals DO NOT BELONG IN THIS BOOK.

I bought this book hoping to be able to use it to add normal furry races to my campaign world -- the sort found in Spellsinger, Ironclaw, World Tree, Usagi Yojimbo, etc. I'm finding myself having to do a lot of "well, I can use THIS to mean THIS, and I can substitute THIS for THAT" just to create major characters from those properties, at which point I'm thinking I could just do it myself from scratch and that I wasted ten dollars.

As is, for all these reasons I wouldn't be comfortable handing this book to a player and saying "make a race," and that's the whole ball game right there.

I'd recommend: Pull ALL even remotely sexual or fetishistic material (including the Half-Willing Prey template, which is playing to a fetish I don't even like thinking about), maybe for another book. Abandon scientific classifications and find a better way to group animal types; multiple entries for subcategories of canines and separate entries for whales and dolphins don't help, and disparate animals like those mentioned above shouldn't be lumped into categories together. Overhaul the racial advantages/disadvantages list to restrict it to things that are inherent to racial PHYSICAL traits like flight and water-breathing, making sure nothing that could be acquired is listed as inherent. And remove the silly templates.

I'm not sure what the point is of a free preview that doesn't include enough information to play it. Without the full Hot Chicks RPG you only have a few characters, an alien race that isn't much more than a source of squick and serve as pop-up targets, and some comic pages and art from deep, deep inside the Uncanny Valley.

And if you already own or want to buy the Hot Chicks RPG, why would you bother with a free preview?

Great for unnerving your players when placed at the bottom of dungeons or in forbidden caverns.

Much more useful, though, as a small side object for modern and futuristic games, not to mention as a replacement for the impossible-to-find vending machine 3-D object for Heroclix.

There's practically nothing here.

One page of rules, which come down to a lot of dice rolling -- there's about as much strategy as Candyland. Roll 1d6 and move, roll 1d6 to see if you have to make another roll or (ludicrously) go back to start.

There are different characters to choose from but no balance between them.

The statement that the game is "revealing" comes down to players being told to tell a story about themselves or the character they're playing at the end of each turn. It has nothing to do with the rest of the game; you could throw a similar rule into anything.

The gameboard looks like it was thrown together in Photoshop in five minutes. It's just an ugly neon-green grid with a single linear path; all spaces are the same.

It doesn't look like any effort whatsoever was put into this game. There's a lot of promise in the concept but this doesn't even touch on it. Even at $1.00 this game is a total ripoff.