I jumped on the Blackbird hype train early on and I do think, that the system as well as the world featured in blackbirds are well defined. Me and my friends played two oneshots of Blackbirds and it was fun. All of us had a great time but we prefer ZH afterall. However, this is not just a rating for the mechanics and the books content but also it's presentation in general.

I must admit, when I got the book and scrolled through the pages, I was a bit disappointed by the Layout and overall structure. The art itself looks amazing really. The composition on the other hand, feels a bit off. The pages do not feature decorated side borders and are kept clean and simple. The highly detailed artwork does not blend into that so well especially without blending out edges or anything. While the book features amazing pages where art is actually interacting with the text, enhancing reading the experience, some parts of it do seem like a MS office project anyone could do which I am not a huge fan of in a fantasy setting.

Individually the art of Blackbirds is great, but artstyles differ within chapters which I'm also not a huge fan of. Compared to Zweihänder where every piece of art was kept in the same style, blackbirds features a kind of oil painting artstyle (which I love) next so cartoonish art and then some of the pages actually do have borders with a great design but only for one chapter and some text boxes and pictures (pages 260-264) just overlap this border which makes me think why put it in if it overlaps anyway.

In conclusion, Blackbirds is a great pen and paper game while the book has it's flaws. It all comes down to personal preference and I do think, that all of the artworks look amazinh. They just don't always look great on the page they are presented on.

The cards arrived today in a 13x13x10 cm box. Order to delivery (germany) took 15 days including the 5 days the package was held in customs in Frankfurt. The box had a big "Fragile" sticker attached to it and by the looks of it it was handled with care. No extra customs fee so that was the first big surprise!

The printed cards feel really nice and I didn't notice a weird smell or centering issues. A single layer of magnetic paint is enough to hold them with a magnet. Therefore, the cards are easily attached to my GM Screen and will most likely be used frequently during our upcomming sessions. Can't wait to use them!

I coundln't find any useful tarot sleeves yet so I'll kep them in the box untill I found a solid way to protect the surface.

first off: I love the NPC Builder. You really want to purchase this, if you are going to create a bunch of Characters for your campaign. The excel file is easy to use and comes with a few more options built in than the monster Builder. What I'd love to see in the future: Options to build the other ancestries (Aztlan, Orx, Skrzzak, Grendel and Golems)and an Option to create an elite NPC (Highest attribute Value is 50% at the moment). This is a really good investment considering how much time is saved in the long run

keeping in mind that thie monster builder is still work in Progress it is definitely a 5/5. Creating a new monster is pretty easy with only basic excel knowledge.

However, compared to the NPC builder there are some handy features missing. The Monster builder does not include a risk factor overview to keep track of advances for example. If you are going to populate your own Zweihänder world there is no way around buying this

I was really hyped.

Now, that me and my friends finished our first 4e campaign, I must say: I think this project was rushed. Some rules are just vague or not included at all which leads to annoying but necessary discussions while playing which is unfortunate. Also the golden rule "change or ignore elements if you don't like it" is... Well you can't do it in terms of combat. Combat is some kind of gear mechanism and if you remove one thing (ADVANTAGE), the whole system is unplayable. In the end, we spent hours to homebrew a combat system we could enjoy (a bit) but this new "critical wounds" and insanely high critical hit rate with criticals even when defending and stuff is just overkill. While combat takes an eternity, you still have limited options what you can do during combat. Our experience was: you either Attack (opponent tries to dodge or parry) or you go defensive stance. That's about it. Sometimes you are able to do a charge attack and in really rare cases you can activate frenzy or something but... Yeah.

Tldr: This new combat approach feels very complicated. While it sounds great on paper, it feels like a burden while playing.

The overall quality is really good though. The art is nice but a little bit too repetetive. Even though this review sounds really negative so far, there are still many elements that I love about the 4th edition. Those are:

• Dark deals (A really interesting and sometimes game changing mechanic)
• the career system (it is easy to create homebrews and add missing stuff)
• magic and everything that comes with magic (the lore specific effects are a great idea and work really well. There is a Lack of chaos magic though which is unfortunate)
• height and it's effect on combat

Conclusion:

If you are a hardcore fan of the 2nd edition, you might hate this system. While all of the mechanics SOUND great, they didn't really convice me in the end. Me and my group played this version for about 6 months, had a blast but we can't wait to go back to our favorite edition of WFRP. All the best to Cubicle 7. Love you guys and I really want to love the 4th edition but I can't :(