Ogrebattle wrote:How much of the book is there left to review?
Not much. This post, and one more about a “Secrets” chapter.
Frank wrote:This is kind of emblematic of how ACKS is better researched than most games of this genre and also nowhere near as well researched as it thinks it is. I mean, if you look up the "wiki-fact" of "how many active geysers are there?" you get the number 1000. Now first of all that one thousand isn't four significant figures of a one followed by three zeroes. If you look at an actual list it comes out to like 1,041. Which would be an irrelevant nitpick except that they are legit adding the number of geysers to the number of natural eternal flames (that they number at 11), but their rounding error is already higher than the number in the second term, so what the fuck?
But there's another point that I want to get to, which is that over five hundred of the active geysers on the planet are in Yellowstone. Talking about what the average square mileage per geyser is gibberish because almost half of them are in a single 3,468 square mile national park, and the other half are in the rest of the world.
These are good points. It’s not even like the rounding-error number of eternal flames characterizes the rarity of “greater places of elemental fire”, while volcanoes are “medium places of elemental fire”, and geysers are “lesser places of elemental fire”. The book’s actual distributions of size are:
ACKS wrote:The size of places of elemental power can vary widely. To determine randomly, roll 1d6: 1-3, Small, 3d6 x 500 square feet; 4-5 Large, 3d6 x 50,000 square feet; 6 Huge, 3d6 x 5,000,000 square feet.
Switching topics:
Frank wrote:I hadn't heard of Echo Resounding. Looks interesting. Certainly it's asking the right questions and promising the right things. Definitely something to look at.
The main red flag for me is that it's written up for Labyrinth Lord. That's just a weird thing to do.
I’ve also heard positive things about AER, as well as Crawford’s other games, although I’ve never read them. I don’t think anyone actually plays Labyrinth Lord, though. It’s just an easily-modified rules-skeleton, so you use LL supplements while actually running DCC or Black Hack or your own house rules. Even if you say that you play LL, you mean that you play Basic D&D
as you remember it. Also, it’s useful to remember that ACKS, unlike what I understand of AER, is more than just a set of domain-rulership systems: it’s also one of the tighter dungeon-crawling hacks I’ve seen.
Chapter Six: Heroic Monsters
This is a bestiary chapter. D&D is pretty good at them. Occasionally, with bestiaries, you get something weird like
Fire on the Velvet Horizon that is as much a set of experimental short fictions as it is a monster manual, but mostly you get entries of things to stab in the face.
Many of the entries here are from Tolkien. You get balrogs, watchers-in-the-water, stone trolls, and ringwraiths. (Of course, the Tolkien kraken is distinct (and much weaker) than the core ACKS kraken, and the Tolkien stone trolls are totally different from the ACKS core regenerating trolls, but that’s kitchen sink fantasy.) Wrt Conan inspirations, you get giant slugs and giant snakes. Then there’s the stymphalian birds from the myth of Hercules, a dragon-rewrite that uses eldritch spells, and a variety of demons. This chapter’s exclusions are more surprising than its inclusions. There’s nothing from Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, or Fritz Leiber, all of which one might reasonably have expected.
A surprisingly low frequency of dragons in ACKS can speak: a dragon has to get up to Old (14 HD, been around at least a century) before they have even a 50% chance to be able to talk at all. This is an implicit setting decision (of ACKS and other older versions of D&D) that I’ve always found pretty dissatisfying. It’s obviously something you can change super easily, and I bet a lot of people change it without realizing it, but I feel like bestial dragons and conniving dragons are sufficiently distinct that they merit separate stat blocks.
Chapter Seven: Heroic Treasure
Treasure tables for everyone
Mister Caverns who run ACKS are supposed to rely heavily on random treasure generation for loot. Monsters have different treasure categories (“Incidental” for beasts, “Raider” for evil humanoids, and “Hoarder” for things that like the shiny) and subtypes that determine treasure distributions. This book revamps the core treasure tables with the stated goal of making treasure take up more mass and volume. It’s accomplished both by shifting treasure amounts into low-value coins like copper and silver, as well as by incorporating more non-monetary treasure like paintings and livestock into hoards.
(Remember that ACKS’ encumbrance system is in terms of stones (abstracted to 7-14 pounds) rather than actual pounds. The underlying numbers are small enough that using encumbrance doesn’t slow actual play to a halt: the idea is that, even once you’ve scored it big, moving your ill-gotten loot back to town could be an adventure in and of itself. This is another aspect of ACKS that I really enjoy.)
In ACKS core, the treasure hoard of an old dragon (14 HD) used to only weigh 7.5 stone, but, in the HFH, the coin portion alone of that dragon is now 46 stone. I would argue that this is
better, but, ultimately, still pretty sad. For reference, PC classes have a maximum level of 14, and leveling up takes a lot of real-time. So getting to the point where you’re capable of beating a 14-HD dragon could easily be a years-long campaign. The players might eagerly envision streams of wagons being needed to cart away this dragon’s treasure. But they’ll be in for a rude awakening when they notice that all of this 46 stone of coin can easily be loaded onto a single ox (medium load 45 stone) or a single mule cart (medium load 35 stone), and it can almost be loaded onto a pony (maximum load 40 stone). Even the hoard of a Venerable (20 HD) dragon is only 70 stone, right what you can put on that single mule cart.
The values of these hoards are also surprisingly low, relative to the sorts of purchases high-level characters will be wanting to make. That 14-HD dragon’s hoard will come out to around 25,000 gp total. A party that kills it will probably be King-tier, meaning that they will have their own domains and cities and armies shit. So that 25,000 dragon hoard might seem like a nice bump for their treasuries, but then you notice what upkeep costs look like in this game. For example, a unit of 40 heavy cavalry costs 2,400 gold pieces
a month in upkeep. And it’s not like 40 heavy cavalry is a real force to be reckoned with: in the ACKS wilderness, it’s totally possible to casually run into orc villages with hundreds of combatants. For reference, some of the magic items later in the chapter have values in the hundreds of thousands of gold pieces.
I don’t know what the takeaway message for this portion of the chapter should be. On one hand, I assume that Macris has put more thought into costs and treasure amounts for ACKS than I have. But on the other hand, even this book’s enhanced treasure volumes are just sad. People have discussed paltry treasure volume in D&D since
2006 at least, so it’s not like I’m raising novel objections. We have to remember that ACKS runs off of a gold-for-XP model, so you can’t just adopt the Dungeonomicon solution of “past a certain point, gold doesn’t matter”. It’s possible that allowing monsters to have fun amounts of treasure would cause XP tables to blow up to an infeasible degree.
Loot
This chapter also has new loot entries, both mundane and magical. Some of the mundane table entries are fun ways to spice up a monster den.
- platinum reliquaries with crystal panes
- uncommon animal antlers, horns, and tusks
- bags of loose tea or coffee
- a captured equerry or lady-in-waiting
- opal cameo portraits of historical figures and aristocrats
Another minor-but-fun addition is weapon and armor frequency tables for different types of settings. By the book, you’ll only ever get that goofy chainmail bikini if you’re in a “sword & sorcery” setting, where you’re also likely to find more of the weird D&D weapons like whips, nets, and bolas. Plate and mail armor are common in “chivalric romance” settings and are less common in “ancient myth” settings. It’s the sort of “describe a setting by some random tables” design that the OSR does pretty well.
The new magic items are fun – they generally do more than just give you a numerical bonus or cast a spell on you – but they’re also the sort of thing you can find in dozens of other D&D books. Skimming through the lists, I don’t notice as many references to other fiction as I did in the classes and monsters. In particular, there are no “rings of power” or anything. This one is neat:
Iron Crown of the Sorcerer-Kings: This legendary regalia was created by Uragasi, first sorcerer-king of Zahar, conqueror of the Thrassians. It was worn by every reigning sorcerer-king thereafter until it was lost to history during the fall of Zahar. While the iron crown is worn, the wearer regenerates 3 hit points each round… Any limbs or body parts lost to mortal wounds will attempt to crawl or squirm back to the main portion of the body to reattach, and can be reattached instantly simply by being held to the stump.
That’s equipment and monsters. There’s one more chapter that has more DM-facing material.
Out beyond the hull, mucoid strings of non-baryonic matter streamed past like Christ's blood in the firmament.