HackMaster

HackMaster is a fantasy tabletop role-playing game published by Kenzer and Company that began life as a joke rather than a real product. It started as a fictional game parodying Dungeons and Dragons, played by the characters in Jolly R. Blackburn's comic strip Knights of the Dinner Table, whose cast were shown playing a made-up HackMaster Third Edition. Kenzer and Company later turned the joke into an actual published game, releasing it in 2001 as a heavily revised Fourth Edition, and reports suggest the name itself had originally been changed for copyright reasons tied to its Dungeons and Dragons parody roots. The current Fifth Edition has moved away from most of that parody framing, with game mechanics rewritten from scratch specifically to avoid intellectual property conflicts with the games it once satirized.