Blunderbuss RPG - Starter guide
What is Blunderbuss?
Blunderbuss is a grimdark fantasy roleplaying game set in a twisted sixteenth-century Europe. The heart of it is Danswijk, a free city at the mouth of the Visula river: a corrupt trade hub of crime, cults, sin-worshipping conspiracies and opportunity, modelled on the historical merchant cities of the Baltic. The year is 1597 of the Era of Sin, dark powers walk the world, and your characters are the morally flexible souls trying to make a living in it.
The tone is blood, coin and black powder, with a streak of dark humour running through everything. It openly draws on the grimdark fantasy games of the eighties and nineties, a lineage we traced in our history chapter From career to grave: low characters, high stakes, and the constant suspicion that the next job will be the one that kills you.
Blunderbuss was designed by Polish game designer Maciej Hetmanczyk and published by Archmage Arispen. It was crowdfunded on Gamefound in 2025 and reached backers in 2026 as a hardcover rulebook.
How does the system work?
The engine is a streamlined percentile system: roll d100 under your chance, and one roll resolves the whole exchange. Every roll is player-facing, so the game master never touches the dice; the table's fate stays literally in the players' hands. Characters are built on just two attributes, Skill and Luck, sharpened by specialisations, and on a career: the book offers more than a hundred professions to claw your way up from.
Three rules define the feel. Doubles on the dice are great successes or great failures, moments where the story lurches. Wounds are dynamic and permanent: you can lose limbs, gain scars, or meet a spectacular end. And magic bites back; spellcasting is exhausting, mutagenic and occasionally cataclysmic, so every spell is a bet.
Between adventures, an earnings and base-building system lets the party invest its loot in a hideout, growing it from a damp cellar into a tavern, shrine or forge. Coin matters in Danswijk, and the game gives it teeth.
What do you need to start?
One hardcover rulebook covers the whole game: rules, setting and the tools to run it. Beyond that you need a pair of ten-sided dice per player for percentile rolls, something to write with, a game master and two to five willing sinners.
The book is in English.
Who is this game for?
Play Blunderbuss if you like your fantasy strange, savage and darkly funny: grim streets, desperate schemes, and characters who are one bad roll from the gutter. If you grew up on the old-school grimdark games, or wish you had, this is squarely aimed at you. It also suits tables that enjoy long-term projects; the base-building system gives a campaign a home to fight for.
Skip it if you want heroic power fantasy. Characters in Blunderbuss get hurt, mutate and die, and the game treats that as content rather than failure. Players who need their characters safe will not be happy here.
How does it compare to other systems?
Compared to Dungeons & Dragons 5e, Blunderbuss flips the fantasy on its head: instead of heroes accumulating power, you play survivors accumulating scars. Mechanically it is leaner, with one roll where 5e has many, and the player-facing dice change the rhythm at the table; the game master narrates and the players sweat.
Compared to MÖRK BORG, its closest neighbour on our shelves, Blunderbuss shares the doom but not the format. MÖRK BORG is a rules-light apocalyptic flash of a game, perfect for short brutal bursts; Blunderbuss is built for campaigns, with careers, earnings and a hideout that grows between sessions. If MÖRK BORG is the scream, Blunderbuss is the long grim march.
Where do you start?
Start with a session zero. Agree on the tone: how dark, how funny, how cruel. Then build characters around their careers rather than their stats; a gravedigger, a defrocked priest and a smuggler tell you more about a party than any number does. Set your first job in Danswijk itself, keep the stakes low and the pay lower, and let the city's factions do the rest. The wound system will teach caution faster than any warning can.
Recommended products at Netherbook
The Blunderbuss rulebook is all you need; one book, whole game.
If the grimdark register is what hooks you, MÖRK BORG delivers it in its most concentrated form, and our Fantasy collection gathers the rest of the dark corners of the genre. For a table deciding between the two tones, our Mörk Borg starter guide is a good next read.