OSSR: Adventurer Conquerer King

[Blicero]

OSSR: Adventurer Conquerer King

Hi there, I’m Blicero. I don’t post much, but I thought I would try my hand at an OSSR. Today I’ll be looking at the Adventurer Conqueror King System, which is a retroclone of B/X D&D. (If this review is terrible, tell me.)

There will be shitty old-school design in this review. That’s why I’ll need this:

If you like spicy-ish beer, it’s pretty choice.

Brief historical background for anyone who cares: In the 80s, there were a couple of different D&D rulesets released along AD&D. First, a “Basic” edition was released, which covered levels 1-3. Then “eXpert” rules came out, for levels 4-6. This was followed by Companion, Master, and Immortals rules, which took you up to level 36. The first two sets are often grouped together as B/X. To be a bit more precise, there were at least two different Basic sets released, with slightly different rules and editing because lol consistency. Today, grognards wage ideological wars over whether OD&D, AD&D, B/X D&D, or something else represents the true vision Lord Gygax espoused. Despite this, AD&D and its contemporaries are about as similar as 3.0 and 3.5, from what I can tell. Making the argument kind of pointless.

Now, I don’t really care about any of that information, and you probably don’t either. But it’s kind of important to know, because a lot of ACKS’s major design decisions stem from the fact that it grew out of a set of houserules for the writer’s B/X game. Without this background, the design decisions seem completely inexplicable. With this background, they’re just stupid and outdated.

I’m going to be upfront and say that a lot of ACKS is really cool and well-designed. I enjoy making fun of grognards as much as the next guy, but this time they did a decent job at times. In particular, the high-level game is pretty interesting. For example, wizards have rules for breeding and crossbreeding their own minions. High-level clerics get increased spell power if they have a lot of worshippers in their domain. Fighters get to raise and lead armies.

ACKS also has a tightly-designed economy that players are encouraged to interact with. It tells you how to generate trade routes and basic supply and demand systems for the setting. The equipment and hireling prices actually make sense. If you’re into that level of detail, it’s pretty neat.

For what it’s worth, I also really like the art in the book. It’s all slightly stylized black and white, and most of it is pretty evocative of sword & sorcery-type adventures.

This is their example fighter illustration. I totally dig it.

But in order to use these interesting ideas, you have to suffer through too many shitty old-school rules. As we shall shortly see.

Oh, also: The lead designer of ACKS is Alexander Macris. He apparently wrote a WWII wargame a while back and is one of the founders of the Escapist.

Ch 1: Introduction

As usual, ACKS begins with a fiction piece. Like most introductory fiction pieces, it’s kind of pointless. There are a lot of proper nouns thrown at you in the first few paragraphs, which makes it difficult to follow. The basic gist is that it’s about the party convincing a bunch of lords to break away from pseudo-Rome and form their own country. Which is kind of cool, I guess. Then there’s a brief fight with ogres at the end that the characters handily win. The story takes place in Macris’s homebrew world, the Auran Empire, which is basically fantasy Rome. ACKS itself is not a setting-specific game, though. For the most part.

After the fiction, we get the standard “wut is roleplaying” spiel. None of it is new information, so let’s move on.

Ch 2: Characters

This chapter is not particularly interesting, as it contains many of ACKS’s legacy rules choices. Let’s skim through them.

Character ability scores are 3d6 in order. The game is expected to be lethal at low levels, so you’ll probably end up with a decent character by the time the gauntlet ends. Having decent ability scores is not especially useful, though. For example, Wisdom is the only ability that affects your saving throws. Besides the saving throws, Str, Dex, and Con all correspond roughly to their 3e benefits. Int affects your languages, and Cha makes you better with henchmen.

ACKS does have the old Prime Requisite rules. That is, each class has an ability listed as its Prime Requisite (Str for fighters, Dex for thieves, etc). Having a high Prime Requisite increases your XP gain by 5% or 10%.

[It is appropriate to take a drink here. Or cry. We all know that rules that increase or decrease an XP gain rate are bad. ACKS apparently does not.]

Besides the XP boost, fighters have a game mechanical need for high Str. But thieves have no special need for Dex, and clerics don’t really care about Wis. Wizards only care about Int because it increases the number of spells they know. So ability scores are not super important in ACKS.

Basic Action Resolution

Before we begin with classes, it’s probably worth noting how ACKS does AC, BAB, and saves. (Hint: It does them poorly.)

ACKS uses a weird, unholy hybrid of THAC0 and BAB. The good news is that having a higher AC is better than having a lower AC. The bad news is everything else.

Unlike any other D&D derivative that I know of, ACKS gives unarmored opponents an Armor Class of 0. Why? No one knows. Classes are then characterized by their “Attack Throw” progression, which is the number you need to roll to hit an AC of 0. This value is given in the form “10+”, indicating you need to roll at least a 10 to hit an unarmored dude, assuming you have no other relevant modifiers to your attack throw.

Is this a good system?

NO.

NO.

NO.

[I have finished my first bottle.]

It’s not as bad as THAC0, but it’s still really fucking terrible. And it’s terrible for the same reason: Sometimes lower numbers are better, and sometimes higher numbers are better. Whoever designed it should feel bad, I’ll punch them in the dick through the internet, etc. etc. etc.

For example, suppose you have a 13 Strength, which gives you a +1 modifier, and a base attack throw of 5+. Then either you take your positive Strength modifier and apply it to your attack throw, resulting in the lower value of 4+. Or, each time you make an attack roll, you add 1 to your dice result and then compare it to your attack throw. Unsurprisingly, both of those are terrible options. And because this is a D&D clone, you’ll be applying modifiers to your attack rolls all the god damn time, and you’ll need to deal with this issue each single fucking time. You also need to subtract your opponent’s armor class from your result or something and fuck I just can’t. Time to start the next bottle.

Now that that’s done with, we can move onto saves. ACKS has (I think) the same saves as AD&D:

1. Petrification & Paralysis
2. Poison & Death
3. Blast & Breath
4. Staffs & Wands
5. Spells

They’re bad for the same reason that AD&D’s saves are bad. Your saving throw value is also given in the form “n+”, meaning that you need to roll at least an n to succeed. This is still a bad decision, but it’s not quite horrific, because modifiers to saving throw values are pretty infrequent.

Classes

ACKS ships with 12 classes. Four of them are labeled as “Core Classes”, four are labeled as “Campaign Classes”, and four are “Demihuman Classes”. Yes, ACKS has different classes for humans and non-humans. We drink some more here. Human classes go up to level 14. Demihuman classes have maximum levels lower than that, because level limits were everyone’s favorite part of old-school D&D, and they were universally used. [/sarcasm]

For the spellcasters, 7th, 8th, and 9th level spells show up as rituals. Which I guess I’ll talk about later.

The book never actually says what the difference between a Core class and a Campaign class is. One of the Campaign classes is lore-specific to the Auran Empire, but the others are not. So who knows.

You may have hoped that, despite the AC shittiness, ACKS is at least smart enough to give its classes a universal XP progression track. If you did, you are completely wrong. Each class gets its own XP track. So take a drink with me. I don’t think that the XP numbers are the ones used in AD&D, but I don’t care enough to check. Thieves are the fastest to progress, hitting level 14 at 680,000 XP, and mages are the slowest, hitting level 14 at 1,060,000 XP.

The Core classes are just the basic Fighter, Mage, Cleric, Thief. (They’re presented in this order because lol alphabetization. I drank here.) Because this is a retro-clone, none of them are especially complex. Each class does get to build a stronghold and start accumulating followers at level 9.

1. The fighter just gets full weapon and armor proficiency, a scaling bonus to damage, and a bonus to the morale of his henchmen at 5th level. Fighters only get a hit die of 1d8, and their attack progression goes as 2/3 of their level.
2. Mages get spells. At 5th, they can research their own spells, scribe scrolls, and brew potions. At 9th, they can make magic weapons and armor. At 11th, they can start using rituals, crafting magical constructs, and creating magical cross-breeds. All of which are fly.
3. Clerics can turn undead (which is actually useful, unlike in 3.5). Like mages, they get magic item and construct creation. They don't get spellcasting until level 2, which is kind of interesting.
4. Thieves get the standard slew of thief skills: backstab, open locks, find/remove traps, pick pockets, move silently, climb walls, hide in shadows, hear noise. Your chances of succeeding at these actions go up as you level. Initially, they can be summarized as “You fail”; by level 14, they’ve become “You succeed”. They can also read languages, but not magical writings, because fuck you. Their stealth and backstab abilities are written as vaguely as you would expect.

Some further notes on Core Classes:

1. Alex Macris has said online that he didn’t give the fighter any interesting abilities because it’s the most common class in the game world. And it doesn’t make sense for everyone to have special abilities. So Fighter is basically an NPC class. I took another drink at this point.
2. ACKS only has spontaneous spellcasting. Clerics have access to every spell on their list, and wizards are limited to those spells in their spellbook, the maximum size of which is controlled by their level and Intelligence.
3. At level 6, clerics gain access to both 3rd and 4th level spells. This made no sense to me the first time I saw it. As far as I can tell, this was a typo in one of the early “Basic D&D” games that somehow propagated all the way to ACKS because lol retroclones.
4. ACKS is too old-school for standardized ability names. When introducing a class ability, it will bold some piece of the text. But that piece is not actually the ability’s name, which can make things difficult to follow. For example, the paragraph that describes mage spellcasting has as bolded text “learn and cast many powerful arcane spells”.
5. Mages eventually get apprentices. This passage is kind of fun:

   He will then then attract 1d6 apprentices of 1st-3rd level plus 2d6 normal men seeking to become mages. Their intelligence scores will be above average, but many will become discouraged from the rigorous mental training and quit after 1d6 months.

6. As mentioned before, a thief’s Dexterity has no bearing on their ability to use thief skills.

Then we get to the mysteriously named Campaign classes, which I’ll skim over because beer. There’s an Assassin, a Bard, a setting-specific cleric variant called the Bladedancer, and an Explorer. Assassins are roughly fighter/thieves, and Bards are what you'd expect (although no spellcasting). Bladedancers are basically Clerics, except they use bladed weapons instead of blunt weapons, they only wear light armor, and their spell lists are slightly different. No, I don’t know why they’re a separate class either. Explorers are rangers, except they’re not especially good at fighting.

Finally, there are the demihumans, all of which have “noun-noun” type names that make them sound like WoW classes. There’s a Dwarven Vaultguard, which is just a fighter, a Dwarven Craftpriest, which is just a cleric, an Elven Spellsword, which is a fighter-mage, and an Elven Nightblade, which is a thief-mage. All of the demi-human classes are more or less identical to their human versions, save that you get some racial bonuses at level 1. If that makes you ask, “wow, why are there racial specific classes at all, then?”, I don’t know either.

The Vaultguard has a maximum level of 13, which it achieves at 790,000 XP.
The Craftpriest has a maximum level of 10, which it achieves at 430,000 XP.
The Spellsword has a maximum level of 10, which it achieves at 600,000 XP.
The Nightblade has a maximum level of 11, which it achieves at 630,000 XP.

If you’re smarter than me, you might see a pattern to those numbers. I do not.

The chapter ends with a brief discussion of alignment. There are only three: Lawful, Chaotic, and Neutral. Law thinks that civilization is good, Chaos thinks that civilization is bad, Neutral doesn’t care. Lawful and Chaotic people might both act in heroic or villainous manners, but Chaotic societies tend to be capital E Evil.

As far as alignment systems go, it’s not terrible.

This is probably the least interesting chapter in the book, since few of ACKS's innovations directly apply to character classes. Beginning with such a dinosaur of a chapter would probably make ACKS a much tougher sell to people who did not grow up with B/X or AD&D. But that was probably not a market the writers were really trying to reach.

Next up: Intro to ACKSconomics

[Red_Rob]

I always appreciated the simplicity and lack of complicated rules in older versions of D&D when it comes to younger or first time players, but the 80's design aesthetic really grates (curse you THACOOOOO!). I was hoping that Legends & Labyrinths would finally be the simplified 3e I'd been hoping for, but now that's died a death I was interested in ACKS.

I guess that hope flew the coop, but I'm still enjoying the review. Good job!

[OgreBattle]

Yeah, I reaaaaaaally dig the artwork.

The artist is http://www.ryanbrowning.com/ Here's some of his artwork:

I've played a bit of ACKS and enjoyed it, though it does seem unccesarily cluttered by legacy features as you just described, but it was a kickstarter project and "Oldschool flavor" was their selling point.

[ubernoob]

I always appreciated the simplicity and lack of complicated rules in older versions of D&D when it comes to younger or first time players, but the 80's design aesthetic really grates (curse you THACOOOOO!). I was hoping that Legends & Labyrinths would finally be the simplified 3e I'd been hoping for, but now that's died a death I was interested in ACKS.

I guess that hope flew the coop, but I'm still enjoying the review. Good job!

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/699/heroquest

Literally the first RPG I ever played. Simple enough for a 9 year old.

[codeGlaze]

Loving the review so far, keep it coming.

[JigokuBosatsu]

This is a good review. I do like the art- it's a weird half-step between John Cobb's spastic scribbles and Dave Trampier's precise, deep linework.

[Blicero]

I was hoping that Legends & Labyrinths would finally be the simplified 3e I'd been hoping for, but now that's died a death I was interested in ACKS.

I guess that hope flew the coop, but I'm still enjoying the review. Good job!

For what it's worth, ACKS is probably the best retroclone I've looked at. (I have a weird thing for reading through retroclones, even I don't want to play them.) Some of the others might adopt slightly more modern sensibilities, but they're not as interesting. That being said, I would not want to play it again without hugely extensive rewrites.

And thanks for the additional art, Ogre. That efreet picture is totally baller.

[echoVanguard]

For a first-time OSSR, this is quite good. Top marks.

echo

[tussock]

Minor note, hidden class features exist. Fighters also get the best cleave progression, for instance (and up to one cleave per HD, with a 5' step per cleave, capped at 2-4 for different missile weapons but uncapped in melee, other classes only ever get 1), and the bonuses from two-weapon fighting, and do eventually get the best saves.

[Blicero]

@Tussock: Cleaving is never mentioned in Ch 2, so I didn't mention it in my review of Ch 2. And my version of the rules says that classes that fight as clerics or thieves get a number of cleaves equal to half their level, which is usually greater than 1. I didn't talk about saves much because I figured I'd blathered on about mechanics for longer than was particularly pertinent.

Relatively speaking, ACKS fighters are probably better off than their 3e brethren. Assuming they have a decent-ish magical weapon, they can kill most things before they get killed, because number inflation is kept to a minimum. But they still have the least interesting endgame content. Compared to the combat classes from the expansion book, they look even more like an NPC class.

Anyway:

Ch 3: Equipment

There will be less drinking in this chapter, because most of the content is surprisingly decent. Sorry guys.

ACKS actually has the best Equipment chapter I’ve ever seen in a D&D-clone. That might be kind of faint praise, but it’s still praise. So why do I like it so much? Let’s see:

First, there’s a very firm sense of context. The rules go on about setting details like “This is how much money a peasant needs to survive on a monthly basis. This is how much a baron or mid-level adventurer needs. This is how much a prince or high-level adventurer needs.” What’s more, most of the numbers are adapted from actual historical data. If you’re trying to create a fantasy setting that has good verisimilitude, it’s quite helpful.

Of course, the downside is that the range of settings you can create with these numbers is kind of limited to “Pseudo-historical Europe between 1000 BCE and 1000 CE”. Magic and other fantastical elements do not play a huge part in ACKS’s macroeconomies as written. Which is fine, although I kind of wish the rules had been designed to create weirder economies. It would have been difficult to do that and maintain the consistency, though.

One thing I really like about ACKS is that it has some nice equipment availability rules. Settlements are grouped into sizes (Class VI: 0 - 1250 people, Class V: 1250 - 3000 people, Class IV: 3000 - 8750 people, Class III: 8750 - 25,000 people, Class II: 25,000 - 100,000 people, and Class I: 100,000+ people). For each class of city, there’s a table that tells you how many items of a given price range are available for a given month. It’s pretty neat.

So suppose you’re in a Class IV city. If you’re buying a bunch of 10’ poles for some nefarious end, you’re in luck. Since poles are cheap (1 gp each), you can find up to 65 of them in the city. A shortsword (7 gp) is a bit more expensive though, so there are only 5 buyable shortswords in the city for that month. If you’re also going into siege warfare and want to buy a heavy catapult (200 gp), then you have only a 25% chance of finding one for sale. You’d have better luck in the nearby Class III city.

You can also commission equipment to be made for you. You’re more likely to be able to commission something than you are to find it for sale. You’re guaranteed to be able to commission a heavy catapult in a Class IV city. And normally, there would be no chance finding a war galley for sale in your Class IV city. But there’s a 10% chance you’ll be able to commission one.

I find this sort of thing incredibly slick and far more interesting than, say, the gp limits in 3.5. It’s not particularly sexy, but it’s very functional. And since these rules are not hidden away in the DMG, they have a decent chance of actually coming up in play. The party will be all “Hey, we’re outfitting an expedition to this nasty dungeon. We better head for the big city. They’ll have everything we need, and this dump won’t.” So you get a bunch of mundane details that add depth and verisimilitude to the game. You can also add plot development from the results. “We haven’t been able to find anyone willing to make our war galley here for the past three months. Maybe the shipbuilders have some sort of grudge against us.”

Unsurprisingly, ACKS has a very extensive list of things you can buy. (The list and accompanying descriptions go on for 8-9 pages with only one half-page illustration.) I don’t mind this level of detail, and it probably would have given my teenage self a nice stiffy.

Minor equipment and armor observations.

In ACKS, Plate Armor only has an AC bonus of +6, and it only costs 60 gp. I don’t know if that is how it was in AD&D as well, or if this is just some new decision.

Silver-tipped arrows and silver daggers are given distinct entries in the equipment table. This might mean that other weapons are not regularly silvered, and casual searching doesn’t provide an answer. If that’s the case, then fighters just got boned a bit.

At low levels, you want to use a spear, because its reach helps you not die. You’ll switch to a sword or axe at some point, though, for the extra damage.

ACKS also manages to have the only encumbrance rules worth using that I’ve ever seen in a tabletop rpg. Which I think is a pretty impressive accomplishment. The game abstracts weight to the value of a stone (7-14 pounds), and there’s nothing more granular than that. We get a couple of quick guidelines to figure out the weight in stone of a given item.

1. Armor weighs one stone per point of AC bonus.
2. Carrying six “medium-sized” items weighs 1 stone.
3. Heavier items are 1, sometimes more stone.
4. 1000 coins weigh 1 stone.

Encumbrance is not an especially "fun-n-games" mechanic, but it can be a useful balance mechanism. Which might be worth something. I don’t know anyone who ever did anything but eyeball or ignore outright encumbrance in 3.5. ACKS does make the concept pretty useable. You’d probably want an Excel spreadsheet or something if you have more than a couple of hirelings, though.

Like any pre-3.0 D&D game, the game expects you’re going to be running with a bunch of hirelings. And so there is a fair amount of rules content dedicated to hiring and maintaining servants. There are three types of hirelings: henchmen are your loyal, competent sidekicks and potential PC replacements, mercenaries are hired swords who don’t go into dungeons, and specialists have particular skills or knowledge.

As with equipment, ACKS has vast tables that tell you how many hirelings of a given type are available in a given city. For example, you can find 1d10 exotic animal trainers in a Class I city, but you only have a 33% chance of finding any in a Class IV city. Despite the depth, the list of mercenary and specialists is kind of staid. Most of the entries are clearly inspired by history (light infantry, slingers, heavy cavalry, armorers, sages, etc.). The two exceptions are mounted crossbowmen, available in dwarven settlements, and wolf riders, found in Chaotic settlements. Both of which are slightly more fantastic. It would have been cool to have hippogryph riders and giant spiders and shit like that. Hell, even elephants would have been appreciated.

To determine if a prospective hireling will actually work for you, you roll 2d6, modified by your Charisma. You might get other modifiers if you offer extra money, or if the job seems especially dangerous. The odds are against PCs, since you need at least a 9 to get a hire. (If you get 6-8, then you have to sweeten the deal somehow before they agree.) If you’re hiring a regiment of light infantry, I don’t know if you would have to make this roll for each individual dude. That would be a bummer.

Henchmen don’t always stay with you forever. Every time a henchmen levels up, has some traumatic experience, or finishes an adventure, you roll to see if they still want to work for you. There’s some MTP-heavy advice on how players can positively affect that roll.

Finally, we get another chart that tells you how difficult it is to find someone capable of casting spells of each level for each class of city size.

My general feelings toward this chapter are that, if you’re willing to take the time and use all of the charts, you could get a lot of utility out of them. The charts can be pretty dense at times, though. And their scope is kind of limited to historically inspired fantasy. If the fact that three different types of saddle and tack are listed here, or if you’re running a story-heavy game, then very little of what I’ve discussed here is at all relevant. That being said, I don’t think this chapter has anything too cringeworthy. Which is kind of commendable in and of itself for a retroclone. (Unless you count a surfeit of partial MTP as cringeworthy. Which I generally don’t when it comes to social mechanics.) The next chapter does have a few more “lolwut?” moments, though.

Next up: Proficiencies; Or, How to Almost Have a Sort of Decent Skill System

[Username17]

Why do the cities count down instead of counting up? If Class VI was the biggest instead of the smallest, you could add an expansion that introduced Class VII cities to account for truly massive metropolises like Teotihuacan or Sigil. Seems like a weird and senseless design choice, limiting potential expansion without any particular advantage.

-Username17

[Blicero]

Frank: My best guess is that the city-size numbering is meant in the sense of a first-class airplane ticket being better than a second-class ticket. As to being able to extend city size indefinitely with your numbering system, it’s possibly something the writers never considered? In the DM’s section of the book, there’s a table giving various realm sizes. And the largest Realm Population is 4,000,000+ people, which has a recommended largest city size of 40,000+. So the designers may have just considered Sigil-sized cities as being outside the scope of their model.

Ch 4: Proficiencies

For this chapter, I’ll need to take a few drinks. So I’ve resurrected the Christmas ale.

As we all know, many grognards have a raging hate-on for the concept of a skill system because reasons. It is surprising, then, that ACKS actually includes a halfway functional proficiency system a la AD&D. As with AD&D, it features things that 3E would call “skills”, and things that 3E would call “feats”. It’s not particularly great, for the reasons you’d expect and some others. But it’s existence is something of an anomaly. So four for you, Autarch Publishing.

Sidenote: On a grognard website, I once saw someone give “chaos theory” as a reason that the codified DCs of 3E were a bad idea. Time for our first drink of the day.

On to the boring mechanics bits. ACKS has two types of proficiencies, General and Class. Some proficiencies are listed as both General and Class proficiencies, though. Each class gets its own Class list, but there is only one General list. Also, some proficiencies appear on the Class list for multiple classes. You get 1 + Int mod General proficiencies at at level 1, and an additional proficiency at levels 5, 9, and 13. Your Class proficiency rate is based on your saving throw progressions. So:
- Fighters get them at 1, 3, 6, 9, 12
- Clerics/thieves get them at 4, 8, 12
- Mages get them at 1, 6, 12

These rules are summarized in a helpful table that represents acquiring a Class proficiency with a “C” and acquiring a General proficiency with a “G”. So it’s actually fucking hard to read because those two letters look really similar in the font they’ve used.

The first thing to notice is that proficiencies are acquired at a really slow rate for everyone but fighters (yay fighters not getting totally fucked over). And these are not character-defining buffs for the most part; a lot of them are things like “You can detect and avoid sinkholes in the wilderness.” Some are a bit more interesting, but most are not. So you’re probably not going to care about most of your proficiencies. Which might have been the intent? It’s just a subtle grognard troll? (oh man oh man oh man a conspiracy theory)

ACKS has the usual problem where there are both proficiencies that basically add flavor to your character (like the sinkhole thing) and proficiencies that make you better at killing things. Since they’re purchased with the same resource, most players are going to make the same choices over and over again. Also, some classes start with extra proficiencies at level 1. For example, Bards start with UMD-esque proficiency, and they pay for this with slower XP advancement rates. This is bad design.

[Take a moment to drink.]

There are maybe 30 General Proficiencies, most of which are shit. It might have made more sense to give classes with a faster proficiency rate a longer list of proficiencies. Y’know, to allow for greater character diversity. Instead, as is apparently explained in the character splatbook, the size of a Class Proficiency list is precisely equal to:

42 - (the maximum level that class can achieve)

That is not a joke. This is apparently a measure to assist in class balance. Ladies and Gentlemen, we have finally stumbled across the key to ULTIMATE BALANCE. How has no one on the Den ever used this balance mechanism?

This was the first result on google for “ultimate balance”, so maybe it inspired the developers.

[We drink here, by the way.]

The full list of proficiencies is hard to parse because, while the book tells you if a given proficiency is a Class proficiency, it doesn’t deem to mention what classes can actually take it. This is a bad, whoever did it should feel bad, etc. etc. etc. I don’t know how you’re supposed to look through the list and pick out proficiencies for your character without copying down your specific list and keeping it as a reference. +1 for lazy design, and time for another drink.

Some proficiencies require a “proficiency throw” to be activated. Sometimes you can select the proficiency multiple times to increase your chance of a successful activation, and sometimes your chance just scales to your level. Intelligently, the things that scale to your level are generally things you'd use in combat, and the things you can choose multiple times are things you pick up for shiggles.

I’m not going to go through every proficiency because that would be boring. So here’s a selection. (A lot of the General proficiencies are things like “Bricklaying” or “Engineering”, meaning things you hire other people to do for you. On one hand, I like that ACKS tries to justify how NPCs know how to do things. On the other hand, a lot of this chapter is basically useless to adventurers.)

1. Acrobatics: (Assassins, Bards, Bladedancers, Spellswords, Fighters, Thieves) With it, “The character is trained to jump, tumble, somersault, and free-run around obstacles”. This might mean that, without Acrobatics, your character doesn’t know how to jump. The game-mechanical benefit is that you get +2 to saving throws “where agility would help avoid the situation”. Which could apply to almost any type of saving throw. Yay shitty design.
   
   The main reason you choose this is if you have a backstab ability. Then you can make a proficiency throw to make your opponent backstabbable without needing to argue with your MC about how stealth works. This ability works on a proficiency throw of 20+; the threshold for success decreases by 1 for every level you have. This is a proficiency tax for stealthy characters. Thieves probably take this at level 8 and suddenly become combat badasses.
2. Animal Husbandry: (General) This lets you play animal doctor. If you take it 2 or 3 times, you can cast healing and restorative spells on animals.
3. Arcane Dabbling: (Assassins, Nightblades, Thieves) Basically Use Magic Device, except less likely to work. If you fail to activate a magic item, the attempt ambiguously “backfires”. So expect to get fucked over by your MC.
4. Art: (General) You can make and sell art with the power of MTP. Goodie.
5. Berserkergang: (Vaultguards, Fighters) You can enter a rage that gives you +2 to hit, immunity to fear, and -2 to AC. Probably not especially worthwhile, since AC tends to be pretty low in ACKS.
6. Black Lore of Zahar: (Mages, Nightblades, Spellswords) Become able to rebuke undead and get a nontrivial buff to your necromancy spells. You probably want to take this.
7. Blind Fighting: (Assassins, Vaultguards, Nightblades, Spellswords, Explorers, Fighters, Thieves) You only take -2 when finding invisible/concealed opponents instead of -4. Pass.
8. Caving: (General, Dwarves) You can keep track of where you are if you’re underground with a proficiency roll. Wow.
9. Cat Burglary: (Assassins, Thieves) Basically the Balance skill from 3.5, plus a chance to catch yourself if you fall. This might mean that normal characters don’t know how to balance on precarious surfaces.
10. Combat Trickery: (Assassin, Bard, Bladedancer, Cleric, Vaultguard, Nightblade, Spellsword, Explorer, Fighter, Thief) Unlike a lot of retroclones, ACKS has rules for special combat maneuvers like disarming and tripping. This proficiency makes you marginally better at them.
11. Contortionism: (Assassin, Nightblade, Thief) Use the Escape Artist skill, but only on a roll of 18+. You might just be able to keep trying it, though.
12. Divine Blessing: (cleric-type classes) +2 to all Saving Throws (which I’m assuming you interpret as a bonus). You probably take this.
13. Dwarven Brewing: (dwarves) You can brew special dwarven booze.
14. Familiar: (Nightblade, Spellsword, Mage) Get a familiar. The best part of this is that your familiar gets to choose their own proficiencies, and they get as many as you do. As written, there’s nothing stopping a familiar from having its own familiar. Which is kind of fun.
    
    
    It’s gonna be familiars all the way down.
15. Fighting Style: (Almost everyone) Gain a +1 bonus that you’ll probably forget about when fighting in a particular style (two weapons, two-handed, etc.)
16. Gambling: (General, Assassins, Vaultguards(?), Fighters(?), Thieves) You can play a gambling minigame described only in this proficiency write-up.
17. Healing: (General, Bard, Cleric, Craftpriest) This is the money. If you take this twice, you can use CLW, neutralize poison, and cure disease once per day per patient on a roll of 18+. If you take it three times, you can do CSW on a roll of 14+. I’m not sure if you can try again if you fail.
    
    A good tactic is to give your familiar a bunch of healing proficiencies. Then during battle you can have them scuttle around and rez people.
18. Knowledge: (General, Bard, Cleric, Craftpriest, Mage) Get access to wikipedia for a chosen subject. If you take it three times, you can work as a sage for your chosen subject, which is kind of neat. There are a bunch of proficiencies that basically function like Knowledge for some specific topic. Which is kind of redundant.
    
    A fun idea would be to give your familiar a shittonne of Knowledge proficiencies. Then you could cart around a toad or something that has access to all of mankind’s collected wisdom. You could hire a bunch of mage henchmen and have all of their familiars do this.
19. Mapping: (General) You know how to map your surroundings.
20. Precise Shooting: (Assassins, Bards, Nightblades, Spellswords, Explorers, Thieves) Without this proficiency, you flat-out cannot fire ranged attacks at people currently engaged in melee. With it, you can do so at a -4 penalty, -2 if you take it twice. This is proficiency tax for anyone who wants to be an archer.
21. Soothsaying: (Mages) “The character is subject to premonitions and dreams of the past and future.” These premonitions have to be both “cryptic” and “useful”. You can also use the spell contact higher plane 1/week.
22. Swashbuckling: (Assassin, Bard, Bladedancer, Nightblade, Spellsword, Explorer, Fighter) Get a scaling bonus to AC when wearing leather or lighter armor. You take this.
23. Weapon Finesse: (Assassin, Bard, Bladedancer, Nightblade, Spellsword, Explorer, Fighter, Thief) Just like 3.5. Close to a proficiency tax.

Actually, I might take back what I said earlier about complimenting Autarch for including a proficiency system in their game. This chapter is not great. Even though there are a decent number of proficiencies, most classes have a few they’re always going to want to take. So the proficiency system doesn’t add all that much variation to characters. The lack of a codified skills system really hurts ACKS, I think. The coverage proficiencies give is kind of piecemeal. As written, it’s unclear whether a mage knows how to jump. Because there are rules for jumping, and the Mages just don’t have access to them. It probably would have been better to go full-on MTP for most of this stuff, or to add some sort of skill system.

[tussock]

In ACKS, Plate Armor only has an AC bonus of +6, and it only costs 60 gp.

That's from Basic D&D, where the AC numbers are 9 None, 7 Leather, 5 Chain, 3 Plate, and +1 (which is -1) for a shield, and the cost of any armour is 10gp per point. Same for stat mods, equipment lists, domains, endgame, proficiencies, monsters, and so on.

@Cleave: good points bro, but you were talking down the ACKS Fighter a bit, and you shouldn't.

[OgreBattle]

I built a Nightblade character who had a snake with healing/alchemy proficiencies. Snake familiar also has a death attack.

I think there's some proficiency combination that lets you apply venom to weapons too, so a snake familiar is really handy to have.

[Blicero]

@Ogre: I think the familiars might be the most interesting part of the Proficiencies section. In the few ACKS sessions I ran this year, they ended up being both useful and fun.

Anyone who’s interested: The rules say that the MC gets to pick your familiar. But if you have any choice over what it is, you probably want the Spitting Cobra. It has a save or die poison, which is hardcore.

In a later chapter, there are rules for extracting venoms from monsters and harvesting toxins from plants. Unfortunately, extracted poisons are weaker than in their natural forms: spitting cobra venom only does 1d6 damage, and targets get a +2 modifier to their save (which I’m assuming is interpreted as a bonus). It’s still a neat little minigame, and I don’t remember ever seeing something like it in 3E. (I have no idea if it ever appeared in older editions.)

@Tussock: I figured that that was how some older version of did it, since ACKS seems to avoid changing the basics when it doesn’t have to.


Ch 5: Spells

This section is going to be pretty short, because there’s not a lot I particularly want to talk about here.

First we have “blah blah blah this is what a spell is this is how you cast it”. You could look at the beginning of any Magic chapter in any pre-4e D&D book, and you’d see this. The important thing to note is that taking any damage while you’re casting makes you lose it. (This will get mentioned a bit more when I talk about Initiative next chapter.)

Repertoires

ACKS’s more distinct spellcasting feature is the repertoire. Like I said in the Classes section, arcane spellcasters have a repertoire of spells they can cast from spontaneously. For each spell level you have access to, you can know a number of spells equal to your daily limit plus your Int modifier. (You don’t otherwise get bonus spells.)

This is kind of a weird quote:

Mages may collect spell formula from many sources, but only the most intelligent and learned arcane spellcasters can maintain a repertoire of more than a few spells at a time.

It’s an odd quote because it’s not unusual at all for a 3rd level mage to know like 6 spells, which is probably more than “a few”. And 3rd level dudes are not even uncommon in the standard ACKS setting. It’s a surprisingly rare instance of flavor/crunch disconnection.

Adding spells to your repertoire is normally free; the exception is if you already know the max number for that spell level and need to remove one. Adding takes one week; the remove+add process takes one week and 1k gp per spell level. (The downtime is not a huge issue, since most classes in ACKS have decent reasons to sit around for a few weeks after every adventure. I like this, because it lengthens the in-game time between level ups without making the process take significantly more playing-time.)

If you are less than 9th level, you are presumed to have a master who is willing to teach you spells each time you level up. He’ll actually teach you as many spells as you’d be capable of knowing, assuming you had no Intelligence bonus. This makes him a pretty decent guy.

Now that we’re all feeling warm and fuzzy, I want everyone reading this to take a moment and guess whether ACKS lets you pick your starting spells.

…

Okay, now if you guessed that you can pick your own, you are stupid. Congratulations. The MC picks your first spell. (Although it is recommended to be charm person, light, magic missile, protection from evil, or sleep. That being said, you’re getting fucked over if it’s anything other than sleep.) Any spells you know from high Intelligence are randomly determined. If you roll the same result twice, it’s specifically noted that you just start with one fewer spell than you would be otherwise entitled to. Yay dickery.



Like many older D&D games, ACKS emphasizes the idea of reversible spells more than 3E did.

[backstory]
In ACKS and some other older versions, Cure Light Wounds and Inflict Light Wounds were just listed as “Cure Light Wounds”. However, you can reverse CLW and make it into an inflict spell. All of the curing spells were like that. Other examples were Light/Darkness, Bless/Bane, Flesh to Stone/Stone to Flesh, etc. The most extreme example in ACKS is probably that, when you reverse Restore Life and Limb (works like Raise Dead and/or Regeneration), you get Finger of Death.

A spell and its reversed form count as two separate spells for the purpose of an arcane repertoire.
[/backstory]

Lawful clerics get kind of screwed over here, because they are only supposed to use spells in their normal forms. The text is a bit vague here. Sometimes being Lawful and using the reversed form against anyone who’s not Chaotic just gets you dirty looks from all of other clerics. Sometimes your god might just straight up not give you access to them.


Now we get to the spell list. I’m not going to go through each spell, because I don’t want to. Most of them are also in 3E, and I would imagine that almost all of them appear in B/X or AD&D. The descriptions are basically the same as they are in 3E, save that they tend to be less codified. If anyone has specific questions about spells, then I can answer them, I guess.

A couple of random observations:

1. Create water is a fourth level cleric spell, and create food is fifth level. Feeding yourself is srs bznss in ACKS-land.
2. Resist cold is level 1, but resist fire is level 2. The effects of the spells are otherwise identical.
3. Sleep is totally badass. It offers no save and affects up to 2d8 HD of creatures.
4. If you cast contact other plane, ask 3 questions (the minimum number possible) and are level 11 or below, you have a 5% chance of going insane for 3 weeks. Which seems kind of harsh.
5. In general, things in ACKS have significantly fewer hp than they do in 3E, but damage-dealing spells do the same amount of damage. So blasting is totally viable, especially since monsters save as fighters. So they become very resistant to save or ____ effects starting around level 10.
6. The ritual spells (level 7 and 8 for mages, 6 and 7 for clerics) are not included here because reasons. Instead, they appear in the Campaigns chapter.
7. The illustration for find traps is kind of odd, in that the cleric casting it appears to have already sprung all of the nearby traps.

That’s it for now.


Up next: “Adventuring”; or, all the other random rules players will regularly need, including combat, long distance travel, and experience.

[Blicero]

Ch 6: Adventuring

There’s a lot of content in this chapter. That being said, I don’t think much of it is especially distinct from B/X or maybe even AD&D. So I’m not going for any comprehensive coverage. (For reference, there are two upcoming chapters that have a lot of interesting material that I’ll try to be a bit more thorough in discussing.)

Before we get into specifics, I’m going to complain about the organization in this chapter. It is not super helpful. For example, the general structure to the first few pages is “Movement in the Dungeon, Movement Outdoors, Movement at Sea, Encounters in the Dungeon, Encounters Outdoors, Encounters at Sea,…” It would have worked a bit better if they had just grouped all of the dungeon topics together, all of the wilderness topics together, and all of the sea topics together. As is, MC’s are going to spend a lot of time flipping through this chapter during combats or whatever. Which slows things down a lot.


For the completely uninitiated, I’m going to try and set the scene. As previous chapters have suggested, ACKS is very much into simulating the dungeon-delving process. As a player, you shouldn’t expect or even want your adventure to consist of a succession of roughly level appropriate fights. Instead, attrition is meant to be a major issue. This means that navigation, wandering monsters, and timekeeping are all important for the game to work. If the necessity of those concepts makes you vom, then you know why they’ve more or less vanished in modern D&D. So let’s put on our archaeologist glasses and go back in time.


These are what archaeologist glasses look like, in case you're curious.

Navigation

In ACKS, the players are actually supposed to be mapping dungeons out as they get explored. I feel like this would be really unpleasant in actual play, especially if you’re dealing with anything more architecturally complex than “10’ x 10’ room with orcs in”. The map you make is meant to be a physical object in the game world, something that you could conceivably copy and sell to others.

Getting lost in ACKS-land’s wilderness is a serious concern. If you’re just wandering through some mountains, you have a 30% chance of getting lost each day. It’s worse for jungles or deserts. There’s a proficiency that reduces this chance, but it’s otherwise independent of your level or other characteristics.

Turns

The basic unit of time while exploring in dungeons is the turn, which lasts 10 minutes. (This is not to be confused with a round, which has to do with combat.) You can only move 120’ in a single turn, which is crazy slow. For most dungeons, you have a 1-in-6 chance of triggering a random encounter every other turn. Given the size of most older dungeons, this means you’re going to get swamped by random encounters unless you move really quickly.

You also have to rest for 1 turn out of every 6, which seems kind of weird and excessive. It’s supposed to let you catch your breath, but you’re not really exerting yourself with a 12’ / minute movement rate.

Reaction Rolls

These appear, but they’re pretty basic. It’s just a 2d6 roll plus the “lead” character’s Cha mod. MC’s are totally allowed to ignore the results if they want to.

Chases

Chases are kind of common, so they get a mention. In the dungeon, both sides just keep moving round by round, and the MC has the participants make a save vs. paralysis whenever he thinks it’s appropriate. (Unlike other vs. paralysis saves, your Dexterity modifier affects the result because yay consistency.) If you’re chasing or being chased, you’re not allowed to map your surroundings. You can assist your chances of escaping by dropping food and shiny things to distract pursuing monsters, which is fun.

If you’re outside, the party being chased has to roll a d20 to escape, with the DC being set by the sizes of both groups. The DCs for this are actually kind of weird. The basic difficulty is set by the size of the escaping group. If you have four or fewer people, you escape on 11+, and this scales up to groups of 25+ escaping on 19+. But then you get a bonus to your escape chances as your group of pursuers gets larger, relative to your own size. So 2 people escape from 1 person on 11+, they escape from 2 people on 7+, and they escape from 3 or more people on a 3+. I’m not sure if this system makes any sense to me at all. I guess all chases in ACKS look like Scooby Doo, and members of large groups do nothing but collide with each other for comic effect. Regardless, the MC is given free reign to make up additional modifiers for chases.

If the escapers succeed on a check, they successfully escape. If they don’t succeed, then the chase continues and the pursuers might get closer.

In both the dungeon and wilderness cases, avoiding capture often comes down to just having a higher speed than your pursuer. Which is odd, because there are not that many distinct speeds you can have in ACKS. So a lot of chases are going to be ties until the MC makes up a way for one side to win.

Initiative and Rounds

Initiative is handled quite differently than in 3E. It’s only d6+Dex, and you reroll at the beginning of every combat rounds. This obviously makes things more unpredictable, which hurts the PCs.

If you’re going to cast a spell, you have to declare it before initiative is rolled. This seems like a pretty clever way to make casters more cautious in battle without introducing the full complexity of an AoO system.

Similarly, if you’re engaged in combat, you have to declare you’re going to move before initiative is rolled. I think the intent is that moving without prior declaration lets your opponent gank you. But as written, you might not be able to move at all if you’re engaged and didn’t declare.

There’s a section labeled “Other Movement” where you would expect to be told whether or not you can move even if you don’t declare. But, rather than talking about other types of movement, it tells you what you can do with your move action instead of moving. Which is curious. (Note: ACKS does not have things specifically called move actions or standard actions, but they still clearly exist.)

Cleaving

As tussock mentioned earlier, ACKS has a Cleaving system. Every character in ACKS has the Great Cleave feat, except that the number of times per round you can Cleave is limited to your level (if you’re a warrior-type class) or half your level (if you’re a cleric or thief type thing). Mages can’t cleave. You get to move up to 5 feet in between each cleaving, which is a nice bonus.

You can also cleave with ranged weapons, although here the weapon you’re using has a max number of cleaves it can make. You’ll probably be using a composite bow, in which case you can cleave up to 4 times per round.

This is pretty much the only way you’ll be able to attack more than once per round, since iteratives don’t exist, and dual-wielding just makes you more likely to hit.

Mortal Wounds and Tampering with Mortality

ACKS features two major additions to the D&D corpus on death and dying.

MORTAL WOUNDS

In ACKS, you go unconscious at 0 or fewer hitpoints. Whenever someone tries to heal you, you get to roll on the Mortal Wounds chart. This is a d20 roll, modified by:
- how long it took for someone to get to you
- how badly you were wounded
- how skilled your friend is at healing
- you constitution mod

The best-case scenario of this chart is that you can get up immediately. You’re more likely to be dealt some sort of lingering wound. These wounds tend to be things like:

1. Lose some of your teeth: people react poorly to you
2. Take -1 to initiative in cold or rainy weather
3. Lamed leg: reduced movement speed and Dexterity score
4. Destroyed eye: -2 to attack rolls
5. Severed arm: obvz
6. Loss of genitals: penalty to reaction for anyone who knows about it

If you roll poorly enough, you die. ACKS does not otherwise have death by hp loss. So if you get KO’d, you won’t necessarily know if you’re dead until someone comes to check on you. Which I find to be a pretty clever and tension-inducing rule.

The Mortal Wounds chart is a d20 to see how bad your wound is, and d6 to determine which specific wound you get. The downside to the uncertainty about death is that it’s impossible to look at a dying person and tell if, say, they’re missing an arm or both of their legs. You can only tell this by walking over to them and trying to resuscitate. There’s probably some joke you can make here about existentialism or something.

TAMPERING WITH MORTALITY

Tampering with Mortality is the same idea as Mortal Wounds, except that you roll on it each time someone casts Restore Life and Limb on you. (Restore Life and Limb heals you of any Mortal Wounds that you have. So you’ll be having it cast on you a lot.) These effects tend more toward the “lolrandom” than the “fuck that’s terrible”. Some of them are still pretty nasty. Examples include:

1. You switch genders
2. Undead see you as glowing
3. Horses hate you
4. You become sterile
5. Your hair grows at a prodigious rate
6. You lose the ability to cast divine spells
7. Your soul is lost forever

Conceptually, Mortal Wounds and Tampering with Mortality add a bit of flavor to the process of death and dying. If your group is down for that sort of thing, it could be fun. Although I'm not sure why both tables include a result that makes you unable to procreate.

The issue is more of scale. There are maybe 30 different Mortal Wounds, and slightly fewer Tampering With Mortality effects. It’s not uncommon to have party sizes of 12 or more in a typical ACKS campaign. All of these characters are going to keep getting fucked up. So you’re going to keep seeing the same wounds effects over and over again. The lead designer posts his campaign journal on the local forum, and you can totally see this repetition in practice.

There’s also no guarantee that your Mortal Wound will be especially representative of how you got wrecked. It’s totally conceivable that you lose a bunch of teeth after getting fireball’d, for example. In the campaign journal, several characters have had their Mortal Wounds fluffed as: “Your kneecaps shattered when you hit the hard ground after getting knocked unconscious.”

We see that most ACKS parties are going to start looking like a bunch of war refugees after an adventure or too. To his credit, Macris seems to realize this. In his campaign, he sporadically lets them get access to magical effects that remove the entire party’s mortal wounds and resurrection side effects. I don’t see something like this ever being recommended in the rules, and I’m not sure if ACKS is playable in the long-term without it.



Before the next section starts, we randomly get a table containing every set of save progressions in the game. This tells us nothing new, since all of this information is also given in the Characters chapter. And if you were curious about a particular class’s save progression, you’d probably look at its writeup, in Ch 2. So I don’t know why this table exists. The same page has a (very) brief description of each saving throw. We’re helpfully informed that you’d make a Petrification & Paralysis save if someone were trying to paralyze you. Thank you, ACKS. THACKS.

Special Maneuvers

ACKS includes the full slew of 3.5 special combat maneuvers. Generally, using one involves making an attack with a -4 penalty. If this attack hits, your opponent has to save or be disarmed (or whatever).

Early on, you’ll miss if you try to use a special maneuver. And later in the game, most enemies will probably make their save. But there might be a sweet spot in the middle where using them is not a bad idea. Particularly if you’re trying to knock a wizard’s staff out of his hand or something.

XP

Like most older D&D games, ACKS gives minimal XP from killing things. Instead, most of your XP comes from taking gold and valuable items from dungeons and returning them to civilization. You get XP from finding magic items, but only if you sell them immediately and do not use them at all.

Weirdly, ACKS formalizes the process of character replacement. The easy thing to do is to make someone (probably a henchman) your heir to get your stuff when you die. If you want, you can leave your things in a bank for the heir to retrieve at some point. But the bank in which you store your stuff will charge 10% of your treasure before your heir can take it. (My assumption is that most groups would just take a dead character’s stuff and give it to the player’s replacement. But maybe this sort of thing was common 30 years ago.)

If you don’t take over one of your henchmen after dying, you have to start with a 1st level character. This blows, so you can ameliorate the situation with the odd concept of reserve XP. Suppose you have some character. You can choose to splurge some of their wealth in a way that doesn’t explicitly benefit them. (So you can’t buy items or research spells or whatever, but you can throw feats for the town nobles or commission public art.) If your character dies and you don’t have a handy henchman nearby, then your new character can start with XP equal to 90% of the gold your dead character splurged.

I can’t tell if this is a brilliant rule for internalizing character replacement into the underlying mechanics, or if it’s completely batshit and is the sort of thing most groups would ignore or not even notice.


Next up: Campaigns; Or, finally, another interesting chapter

[OgreBattle]

In a game of ACKS I played the Explorer got bear hugged below 0 HP. He rolled on the Mortal Wounds table and got "Your reproductive organs are destroyed"

He chose to have that character die instead.

[Blicero]

Another possibility for Mortal Wounds is:

1. You're a fourth level fighter with like 25 hp but no Constitution bonus because lol 3d6 in order. You are a total badass.
2. At some point, you get shanked by a small girl with a knife. We'll say this brings you down to -1 hp.
3. Your friends don't tend to you until after the fight is over because damn those were a lot of angry orphans.
4. To be generous, let's say you then get treated by a cleric who has Healing and casts cure serious wounds (a 3rd level spell) on you. Then you have slightly more than an 8% chance of having had either both of your legs cut off or both of your arms cut off.


I'm not automatically opposed to a Mortal Wounds system for low fantasy type games. The one in ACKS makes treating KO'd characters a priority task in battle, which is a good thing. (A speedy response can make the difference between being ready to fight again immediately and needing to rest for a night. Or from needing one night's rest and needing one week's rest.) This might be an improvement on 3E, since dying is such a slow and deterministic process and in-combat healing is almost always a bad idea in 3E. Assuming the MC knows to sporadically let you get rid of all of your wounds and shit, I don't even mind that you're going to get wounded on a fairly regular basis.

That being said, ACKS's implementation really hurts the game's verisimilitude. And since verisimilitude of design is literally ACKS's biggest selling point, that's a big problem. At the very least, you'd want a much larger list of bad conditions, and some system for only getting wounds that "make sense" (for some definition of making sense) given what caused you to get fucked up. The quantum uncertainty about what wound you get is also an issue. Even if you mutter something about "in the confusion of the battle you can't check on your friend", it should still be possible to know whether an unconscious character has lost his legs.

I guess the radical solution would be to say that, in the game world, it's unclear how badly the character has been wounded. Falling unconscious wraps you in an impenetrable cocoon or something like that. That would be really weird, but at least it would be internally consistent.

[Seerow]

That being said, ACKS's implementation really hurts the game's verisimilitude. And since verisimilitude of design is literally ACKS's biggest selling point, that's a big problem. At the very least, you'd want a much larger list of bad conditions, and some system for only getting wounds that "make sense" (for some definition of making sense) given what caused you to get fucked up. The quantum uncertainty about what wound you get is also an issue. Even if you mutter something about "in the confusion of the battle you can't check on your friend", it should still be possible to know whether an unconscious character has lost his legs.

Well you can sort of handwave that as instead of your limbs being literally ripped from your body, they got infected to the point where if the Cleric is saving you, he's doing it by amputating the leg. So at a casual glance, it's not clear if the player lost his leg or his arm, but it's obvious he's injured and needs treatment soon or may die.

The really weird issue with what you described is the possibility of losing both limbs. I could totally see losing a leg to complications after getting stabbed in the leg. I can't imagine any situation where you get stabbed once, and lose two limbs. Like that makes no sense to me.

[Blicero]

You can extend your logic, I guess, and say that one of your earlier wounds also festered. So the cleric needs to amputate that limb as well. This doesn't account for edge cases like the 1st level wizard who goes from full to KO'd after getting shanked by an orphan but still needs to get both his arms amputated. But it's a lot more functional for a lot of situations. It probably fits within D&D's hitpoint abstraction to say, "Okay, your leg needed to be cut off? I guess you got hit there at some point."

[Blicero]

Ch 7: Campaigns

Campaigns is kind of a weird name for this chapter. It describes the new rules players get at high levels, along with a few things you can do whenever. So this chapter introduces a lot of new systems. Since this is an old-school game, they tend to be kind of openly written. But overall, if you are not a person with an irrational hateboner for any D&D product released after 1985, this chapter is why you care about ACKS.

Brief aside: I’ve been sort of sporadically using ACKS’s terminology for dice expressions. It’s kind of novel, so I guess I had better formally state it.

In ACKS, dice throws are used for actions that have binary results (like saves or attacks). Dice throws are notated in the form X+, indicating you need to roll at least X to succeed. Dice rolls are supposed to for things with non-binary effects like damage or initiative. Except that this kind of useful distinction is not even applied consistently: surprise is a binary effect (you’re not surprised on 3+ with a d6) described as a roll. It’s very puzzling, especially since it’s explicitly stated that a throw need not always be resolved with a d20. Weird contradictions aside, the throw/roll distinction is kind of useful, maybe? It might just be evidence of Alex Macris’ intermittent desire to add completely new but minor structures to his game (see: the new AC system).

Semipointless griping aside, let’s take a look at the chapter. The organization is again kind of poor. We start by looking at spell research, then we jump into other spellcasting stuff, and then we talk about the domain management things everyone has. After that, we talk about mercantilism, which you can do at any level. It might have made more sense to start with the universal stuff and then jump to class-specific abilities. But Autarch did not do this. If this review seems to jump around a bit, it’s because the book does.

Research

Starting at level 5, spellcasters can perform magical research. What exactly magical research entails is left unexplained at first. Eventually, the book reveals that “magical research” means researching spells (new and old) and crafting items. In both cases, this is resolved by working for a few weeks, spending a lot of money, and then making a dice throw. The base difficulty of which is set by your level and then usually modified by other things. It’s noted that a result of 1-3 is always a failure on these rolls. Which is weird, because the chance of a 14th level caster succeeding at magical research is 3+. If you’re not yet level 5, you can still assist in magical research. Your master will never let you help him, though, because your chances of success are hilariously bad. (At first level, you succeed on 16+.)

If you want to be good at magical research, you’re going to need to invest in a library. Your library needs to be of a given size (determined by how much you spent on it) to be able to research spells, with higher level spells requiring larger libraries. Having a significantly better than is needed library gives you a bonus on your research throw. Each time your perform research, you end up with notes and such that also increase your library’s value. I like this system a lot. It’s not super extensive, but it’s totally functional. Wizards and clerics are encouraged to pump money into their libraries, which is totally genre-appropriate. Magic item creation gets workshops, which work in basically the same way.

You perform research to add spells to your repertoire. These can be ones you’ve seen but don’t have scrolls for, or they can be new altogether. Creating a new spell is a very loose process: you write out a mechanical description of what you want your spell to do, and then the MC tells you if it’s allowed and what level it would be. (The Player's Companion book for ACKS contains a hella complicated spell-creation system that tries to quantify the process a bit more, with unsurprisingly mixed results.)

Crafting works in a similar manner, except it’s more complicated. There’s a passably detailed chart that tells you how much your item will cost. It can get pretty expensive in time and money: making a magic flashlight would take 100 days and cost 25k gp. A single +1 weapon costs 5k gp in ACKS, as opposed 2k gp in 3.5, and a +3 weapon costs 35k gp in ACKS, as opposed to 18k gp in 3.5. Presumably, the hefty prices are meant to dissuade casual magic item creation and ensure that the dungeon remains the most important source of powerful things.

As a neat touch, using precious metals for item creation makes you more likely to succeed.

Finally, magic items usually require pieces of monsters to be made. Unfortunately, it is left almost entirely up to the MC to decide what these are. A few examples are given, and they’re all things like “ichor of 150 invisible stalkers” or “fangs of 20 hellhounds”. Which is about as boring a way to handle monster components as is reasonably possible. Say hello to WoW-style farming.

Rituals

As previously mentioned, these are the high level spells. Learning them and casting them is handled with the research system. You only get five of them, and then the book tells you to take others from “other compatible fantasy games”. The least traditional is Harvest, which increases the fertility of farmland over a 500 sq mi area. (This actually has a precise mechanical effect in the Domain rules.) Another example is wish, and it is recommended in its description that MCs try to turn whatever you wish for against you. Also, it’s described kind of oddly:

Wish is the mightiest spell that can be cast. By simply speaking aloud, the caster can alter reality.

I had been under the impression that all magic functioned this way.

Minion Creation

Starting at 11th level, spellcasters can create constructs and undead. Wizards can also create crossbreeds. These are quite useful systems.

CONSTRUCTS

Unfortunately, the term “construct” is never given an explicit definition. The word never actually appears in the monster writeup for golems, but I assume that it applies to them. It does turn out that gargoyles are constructs in ACKS.

Creating a construct is similar in creating a magic item. For reference, a bone golem (which is an 8 HD monster) costs 21k to build and takes about a month. This is really quite reasonable, which I appreciate. I would rather have a golem than a +3 sword anyway.

You can also design your own constructs. This is a vague process mostly because there’s little to no guidelines on what a “special ability” for your construct minion constitutes.

CROSSBREEDS

Crossbreeds are basically what they sound like. They’re also totally boss, as this picture shows.

Finally, rules for how a wizard did it.

You crossbreed two different types of creature together. You can then pick and choose what qualities of the sources will be transferred to the melding. Luckily for the Dr. Moreau’s out there, the system shares the surprisingly reasonable construct creation costs. If you go dumpster diving through every monster manual ever published, you’re going to be able to break this. But if you don’t try to break the game, you have a pretty comprehensive method of making new creatures. And since this is something you do during downtime, designing your children won’t slow down the rest of the game.

UNDEAD

Creating undead works more or less the same way that any of the other creation systems work. This is only available to Chaotic characters.

Divine Power

Divine spellcasters get an extra bone in the research game. When they’re doing research or crafting items or constructs or whatever, they can ignore some of the material cost of their research if they have large numbers of congregants praying for their research to work. Every 50 congregants nets you 10 gp toward your research per week.

There’s a brief set of mechanics for how you can increase the number of congregants you have. You can go around and cast spells for the people, send your hirelings to do the same, or erect religious structures in the area / use them if they already exist.

Eyeballing the numbers makes me think that amassing congregants will not always be a great idea. For every 1000 gp you spend (or effectively spend, since casting spells for the people gives you virtual money toward this cost), you gain 1d10+Cha congregants a week. And you still have to deal with an upkeep cost of 1 gp/congregant/week. If you rule a domain, you can just command your people to convert, the efficacy of this depends on their general loyalty. This doesn’t seem to have a specific upkeep cost. Getting congregants might be useful if you don’t have access to some important material component. But otherwise, I’m not sure if it pays off in the end.

The easier way to amass Divine Power is to engage in BLOOD SACRIFICE, although this is only possible if you’re chaotic. (If you’re getting the impression that Chaotic characters get all the fun toys in ACKS, I don’t think I can dissuade you.) You can sacrifice non-willing or willing non-Chaotic creatures and willing Chaotic creatures. The more badass your sacrifice is, the more divine power for research you get.

Conceptually, the divine power idea is pretty neat, and very genre appropriate. That being said, I’m not sure how financially viable attaining divine power via congregants is. And I kind of wish that having enough congregants actually made your research better as opposed to cheaper. Then you could have an evil priest-king who has dedicated his realm to a wacky evil ritual that is much mightier than he could achieve by himself. And one of the ways you could fight him is to just start murdering his people.

Domains

Now we get to the actual mechanics for controlling, expanding, and conquering domains. These might be the 16 densest pages in the entire book. They’re all really important, but not the sort of thing that summarizes super-well. I’ll try to point out the interesting bits. Normally, all of this stuff kicks in at 9th level.

The game makes a massive jump in complexity at domain-level. With a lot of the systems introduced, it seems that you’d want the players to make most of their big decisions in between sessions. Then you can come together and resolve the actions that involve everyone and maybe get a bit of adventuring done.

Playing the domain game requires hex map of the region. Most domains cover 1 6-mile hex, but the largest cover up to 16 such hexes. Depending on the closeness of other cities, your domain is going to be civilized, borderlands, or wilderness. Civilized land is the most profitable, but also the most expensive starting off, because you normally have to buy it from the local lord dude and swear him an oath of fealty. You randomly determine the base income level of your domain, this is supposed to represent fertile vs. infertile soil and shit like that.

If there’s not already a stronghold in your domain, you have to build one, so there’s a list of castle components and shit like that. I never looked at the 3.0 Stronghold Builder’s Guide, so I don’t know how it compares. In most cases, you’re probably going to takeover an existing ruin, so these features are mostly here for addons.

The type of domain you get depends on your class. Fighters, clerics, and their ilk make castles that get surrounded by cities. Thieves and assassins found criminal guilds inside cities. And wizards build towers. Clerics and fighters share a system for ruling over areas and having vassals and lieges and population growth and shit like that. Thieves get a system for running criminal operations. Mages can engage in the city-ruling minigame, but it’s not their main focus. They mostly just chill in their towers.

Wizards

The wizard tower is pretty neat. To do magical research, you’re going to need a bunch of monster components. So you start constructing a dungeon underneath your tower, and you try to draw monsters to come and live in your dungeon. Then you have a constant supply of monster parts and shit. Based on random encounter tables, you’re going to sporadically draw adventurers toward your dungeon. They want to murder your monsters and take the loots. When this happens, the game recommends running a minisession in which the rest of the players play as this new party and you do the whole Halaster thing with them.

Fighters and Clerics

Once you have a stronghold built, you start attracting peasant families to till your land and whatever. This growth rate continues after the domain game has started, and you can affect it in a variety of ways, such as investing money into the agriculture of the area. You make money from your domain in a variety of ways.

Player characters can only be personally in charge of one domain. They can control more, but the extras have to be handed off to vassals, who count as henchmen. You can request duties of your vassals (such as demanding taxes or raising levies), but if you do that too much, you’ll risk losing your vassal. You can assuage their anger by offering them titles and arranged marriages. There are loose guidelines for running liege lords if you’re the MC, but a lot of the specific behavior is going to be up to you. Finally, we get rules for the morale of a domain and rules for establishing and running settlements. Settlements work like mini-domains within other domains.

It’s not quite Crusader Kings, but it’s surprisingly expansive.

Thieves

As mentioned, thieves start criminal guilds within existing domains. This means that they have a decent change of running illegal operations within their party member’s realm. I don’t think the rules ever give advice on how to deal with this situation, so I assume that most player-controlled realms are going to be pretty corrupt.

Once your criminal syndicate is up and running, you can assign criminal tasks (called “hijinks”) to its members. You can assassinate people, carouse for rumors, smuggle goods, spy on others, steal shit, and hunt for treasure. Each hijink works by having the criminal assigned to do it make a thief skill check. Some of the hijink - skill associations are a bit awkward or minimalistic: Treasure Hunting works off of Find Traps, and Spying works off of Hide in Shadows.

There’s a system to determine what happens if your criminal fucks up that comes with a (very brief) set of legal rules. The legal system appears to have been taken from historical sources, since the punishments are all very harsh, and there is no mention of magic with one minor exception: The worst possible punishment for the worst type of crime (heresy, high treason, or regicide) has as an example punishment being crossbred into a monstrous creature.

Mercantile Ventures

In addition to all this, we also get a system for running merchant-based adventures. There are two types of mercantile ventures presented, arbitrage trading and passenger transport.

To facilitate the arbitrage trading system, domains get assigned demand values for different types of goods. Demand value is kind of a misnomer, though, because a high demand value for a particular good indicates that it’s difficult to get ahold of that good. Which sounds more like supply to me, but whatever. The different types of good are sadly mundane.




Most of these things net you a decent amount of XP. This is good, because they’re primarily things you do instead of adventuring.

And that’s the chapter.


For a group interested in more than killing things, this chapter seems really neat. Some cost issues aside, this is easily the best endgame content I’ve seen for an RPG. As usual, I wish that the game had tried to be a bit more fantastical in nature with these systems.


Up next: Yet another D&D Bestiary

[Seerow]

There’s a system to determine what happens if your criminal fucks up that comes with a (very brief) set of legal rules. The legal system appears to have been taken from historical sources, since the punishments are all very harsh, and there is no mention of magic with one minor exception: The worst possible punishment for the worst type of crime (heresy, high treason, or regicide) has as an example punishment being crossbred into a monstrous creature.

Okay, that actually sounds kind of awesome.

I can imagine playing a character who was a henchman to a master thief running a guild in a major city, who got hung out to dry on the big job and is now half-(something unusual and cool).

[name_here]

There’s a system to determine what happens if your criminal fucks up that comes with a (very brief) set of legal rules. The legal system appears to have been taken from historical sources, since the punishments are all very harsh.

Out of curiosity, what sort of punishments are we talking about here? A lot of the really old law codes mostly assign fines for everything, and jail as punishment instead of temporary pre-trial storage is from somewhere in the late middle ages.

[Blicero]

@Seerow: It's details like that that make me wish Macris had gone more gonzo in constructing the ACKS implied setting. It could have been neat while still retaining the background consistency.

@name_here: Each crime has a punitive punishment, a standard punishment, and a lesser punishment. Which one you get is determined by 2d6, modified by your Charisma, how good a lawyer you hire, whether you try to bribe the judge, etc. Most of the punitive have an "eye for an eye" feel. So eavesdropping gets your ear cut off, thievery gets your hand cut off, smuggling gets both hands cut off, etc. You might get publicly whipped, put in the stocks, or branded. If your punishment is execution (which might happen if you get accused of sedition, murder, treason, or heresy), example execution methods are crucifixion, being torn to death by wild animals, and being drawn and quartered. The lesser punishments often have fines as part of them. I don't see jail sentences anywhere, although that could be because getting sentenced to jail is boring for the game.

That being said, brief forays into google aren't revealing super-reputable looking websites that talk about this sort of thing. So I could be talking completely out of my ass here. What old law codes have you seen?

[name_here]

The Law of the Salian Franks was particularly big on fines for basically everything, including murder. I've mostly specifically looked at early medieval (11th century and earlier) codes; the later ones got more diverse. Sounds like the one in question is heavily Roman-influenced, so it's likely either late middle ages or classical.