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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.
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