I'm not too fond of The Black Hack, and the last game using this system I played was rather disappointing. Why, then, did I buy Black Sword Hack: Ultimate Chaos Edition? My understanding was that the game was going to be published under the Creative Commons Attribution licence, and I wanted to support the initiative. Alas, that was not to be, only the rules were released under a free licence, not the rest of the game :-(.
Once again, I'm translating a character sheet hoping that I'll never be asked for compensation by a copyright holder down the line because I reused layout and illustrations to make the game accessible to more players. I'm sure there would be plenty of interesting stuff to be done had the game been completely freed: write pregens illustrated with the book's characters, publish follow-ups to the included modules, make supplements using the same layout…
The same is true of CRACK by the same editor (whom I otherwise greatly appreciate). "CC BY 4.0" is displayed proudly on the cover, but the credits only apply the licence to the text.
But let's not look a gift horse in the mouth, it's a step in the right direction. I merely hope that one day we might be able to reuse game illustrations and layout as easily as we now can reuse text.
Back to the character sheet, I only translated a single format (A5, full colour) because that's enough for my one-shot this week. The game's author being francophone, the full range of formats will most likely get and official tanslation soon anyway.
- Character sheet in French (PDF, A5)
- Backgrounds in French (PDF, A5)
