When lockdown began in early 2020 I quickly realised we’d need something to keep us from going insane, so in March I announced a game of D&D. I was fascinated by the OSR books I’d been reading, like Ultraviolet Grasslands & the Black City and Neverland, and didn’t want to run anything as complicated as 5e or 2e, so I settled on The Black Hack.
I initially invited 30 players and announced that I’d run a game for a rotating cast any time 4 or more were available at one time, but this quickly shook out into five devoted players and a regular Sunday slot at 6PM.
For the adventure I chose Through Ultan’s Door I: Ruins of the Inquisitors Theatre and dropped the players into its eerie, foetid dreamland. When I ran out of Ultan’s Door zines I started piecing things together from the author’s blog, taking the players to my versions of the White Jungle and the Wreck of the Parapraxis, the Festival of the Sybarites, the Alkaline Wastes (conjured from the art of Pascal Blanche), the Sunken Spire of Sarpedon the Shaper, and the terrible Sightless Labyrinth.
Ben Laurence, whose influence on the campaign can hardly be overstated, also had a wonderful approach of taking rudimentary locations off the ancient Wilderlands maps that formed the foundation the campaign was built upon and fleshing them out, and I did the same to conjure places from the PCs backstories - Underleaf, Owlshadow Forest, the blighted Lands of Ibis, the Shattered Isles, Romillion and the Boiling Sea.
And I took content from other authors wherever I could fit it in - from James West’s Black Pudding, from Mothership.
As we played the system developed, first by re-introducing Armour Class and incorporating more elements of OSE, before evolving into its own thing. When the campaign ended after three years, two of the players went on to run campaigns with the system and in the same setting.