Episode 70.5: Dave Kenzer & Hackmaster 25th Anniversary Edition

Well, it turns out a couple of us have played Hackmaster.

I've only played it once, but you were my GM at CarryCon, so I had lots of fun and didn't die.

I guess maybe just cover some of the basics about Hackmaster to start with, because I know when I bought the original version of the game around 2001...

It was brand new, but it was called Fourth Edition.

Well, I mean, I don't want to give you a full history lesson because that would take all of our time.

But very briefly, we built the Hackmaster game.

We did call it Fourth Edition, the first game that we made because it was, as you pointed out, was originally referred to by Knights of the Dinner Table.

And in that comic, they played what was called Hackmaster 3rd Edition.

By the way, the only reason there was a name Hackmaster for the game that the Knights of the Dinner Table played was because when it was running in Dragon Magazine, the comic strip Knights of the Dinner Table, and it had been running in Dragon Magazine for many, many months, maybe even more than a year, when the editor realized that the name on the Game Master shield of B.A. Felton, the Dungeon Master in Knights of the Dinner Table in Dragon Magazine, the game was called Dung and Dragons, D-U-N-G, Dung and Dragons.

So it was kind of making fun of Dungeons and Dragons.

When they realized that, they lost their minds and said, you got to take that off.

So just spur of the moment, Jolly needed to come up with a new name.

And he named it after one of the characters magic items, which is a hack master plus 12 sort.

So the name hack master was born.

A few years later, due to popular demand, we decided we were going to make our own real actual playable game called hack master.

And to do that, we use the Daughters and Dragons rules.

And so that was how Hackmaster was born in 2001 and why we called it fourth edition, because in the comic, they were playing the third edition.

So we call it Hackmaster 4E.

And that game was...

I'd say 25% first edition AD&D, 25% second edition AD&D plus original D&D and basic D&D mixed in, 25% new rules entirely, and 25% attitude.

So that's kind of the mix that we used for that game.

We had a lot of rules around our design elements, and some of them, I'll be honest, they were We're also making at the same time official third edition D&D products for carrying the D&D logo in our Kingdoms of Calamar line.

We're making adventures and rule books and stuff for the D&D 3.0, which is now Pathfinder, really.

We weren't D20 like a lot of our competitors who were making official D&D products.

So we were under the guidelines of Wizards of the Coast and they had a lot of rules about what you had to do to make D&D.