(20/41: 2016) David Black
The Strange Little Black Book
In 2016, a pamphlet appeared in the OSR community that didn’t quite make sense. Twenty pages. A5 format. A complete fantasy role-playing game inside it. David Black’s The Black Hack stripped the original edition of Dungeons & Dragons down to its load-bearing walls and threw away everything else. Character creation took minutes. The rules fit in your hand. And somehow, impossibly, it worked.
The design wasn’t just minimal — it was defiant. Where other OSR retroclones lovingly preserved the quirks and complexities of 1970s D&D, Black asked a different question: what if you kept only the parts that actually mattered at the table? Player-facing rolls meant the GM never touched dice. Usage dice turned inventory management into a single elegant abstraction. Armor reduced damage instead of making you harder to hit. Every choice was a simplification that somehow made the game feel more immediate, not less complete.
The Hack That Became a Format
What happened next is the rarest thing in game design: a single game became a template. Black released The Black Hack’s core rules as open game content — freely available for anyone to hack, translate, and redistribute. The community responded by building on it. The Cthulhu Hack. The Mecha Hack. The Space Hack. Dozens of derivatives appeared, each taking Black’s structural framework and applying it to a different genre or setting. “The ___ Hack” became a recognized design format, a shorthand for radical simplification built on Black’s mechanical foundation.
The second edition arrived in 2018 as an expanded boxed set — still lean, still elegant, but with more content and refined mechanics. An Italian translation in 2023 grew to 220 pages with a full campaign setting. The core rules are now available in nine languages. The game that started as a pamphlet became an ecosystem, and every branch grew from twenty pages of structural clarity.
The Honest Assessment
The Black Hack is a singular achievement, but it is singular. Black’s design portfolio begins and ends with one game system across two editions. The craft is extraordinary — RPG historian Stu Horvath called the second edition “one of the purest refinements of a D&D hack ever to see print,” noting that the rules were “so polished they’re nearly slippery.” But there’s no body of work to evaluate across multiple projects, no evidence of how Black’s design thinking evolves when applied to fundamentally different problems.
The propagation, though, is undeniable. Every minimalist d20 game that trims the fat, every dungeon crawler that lets players roll all the dice, owes something to The Black Hack. The decision to make the rules open content wasn’t just generous — it was structural. Black built a platform, not just a product. That’s a different kind of design achievement, and it deserves recognition even if the output is technically one game.
The Scoring Case
Invention (6): “Significant Innovation”
The Black Hack’s radical minimalism was genuinely novel in the OSR space. Player-facing rolls and usage dice existed in other contexts, but the specific combination — and the defiant commitment to fitting a complete RPG into twenty pages — created something new. The game became a format: “___ Hack” is now a recognized design template other creators build on. That’s invention that transcends a single product. 6.
Architecture (6): “Strong Construction”
Extraordinarily tight design. Twenty pages for a complete, functional RPG that handles character creation, combat, magic, monsters, and dungeon exploration. The player-facing mechanic elegantly eliminates half the dice rolls at the table. Usage dice solve inventory tracking with one abstraction. Armor-as-damage-reduction simplifies combat without losing tactical weight. The second edition expanded without losing the essential economy. Near-perfect structural efficiency. 6.
Mastery (5): “Notable Craft”
Two editions of one game system, refined from pamphlet to boxed set. The craft is deep but narrow — essentially one design explored to its fullest expression. The polish is remarkable, the refinement between editions shows real growth, and the structural clarity suggests a designer who understands exactly what to cut. But the output is a single system rather than a body of work across multiple projects. 5.
Adjustments (+3):
- ■ Longevity 10+ years: +0 — Published designs from 2016 to present, under a decade of active design output.
- ■ Longevity 20+ years: +0 — Not applicable.
- ■ Full-time career: +0 — No evidence of game design as primary profession.
- ■ Awards: +0 — Critical acclaim from RPG historians and the OSR community, but no documented Origins, ENnie Gold, Spiel des Jahres, or Diana Jones Award.
- ■ Branded name: +0 — The Black Hack is well-known within the OSR community but does not pass the grandmother test.
- ■ Cross-genre success: +0 — Single format (RPG). Derivative “Hack” games were created by other designers, not Black himself.
- ■ Commercial success: +0 — Indie publication; Kickstarter raised £5,525. Successful within the OSR niche but not at the $10M threshold.
- ■ Design propagation: +2 — The “___ Hack” format was explicitly adopted by dozens of designers. The Cthulhu Hack, The Mecha Hack, The Space Hack, and many more built directly on Black’s open mechanical framework. One of the clearest cases of documentable design propagation in modern tabletop gaming.
- ■ Field stewardship: +1 — Made the entire core rules open game content, freely available for anyone to hack, translate, and redistribute. The rules are now available in nine languages. This was deliberate community infrastructure — building a platform for other designers to create on.
Total: 20 points. Year: 2016.
The Hidden Pattern
The Black Hack is an argument about what games actually are. Most RPG design is additive — each edition adds rules, options, subsystems, splat books. Black went the other direction. He treated D&D like a sculptor treats marble: the game was already inside the stone, and the job was to remove everything that wasn’t the game.
The deeper pattern is trust. Player-facing rolls trust the GM to narrate without mechanical scaffolding. Usage dice trust players to accept abstraction over granularity. Twenty pages trust the table to fill in the gaps. Every design choice in The Black Hack is an act of faith in the people sitting around the table — a bet that less structure creates more play.
What Remains
David Black wrote one game. That game changed how an entire community thinks about design. The Black Hack proved that a complete RPG could fit in a pamphlet, that radical simplification could feel like expansion rather than loss, and that giving your work away could be the most powerful design decision of all.
The derivatives continue to multiply. The format continues to spread. The original twenty pages remain as clean and functional as the day they were written — a proof of concept that needed no revision, only expansion. In a hobby that often equates complexity with quality, Black made the case for the opposite. The case held.
20 points. 2016. Twenty pages that rewrote the rules.
The hardest thing in design isn’t adding what’s missing. It’s knowing what was never needed in the first place.