OSSR: Adventurer Conquerer King

[tussock]

And that’s the chapter.

The endgame stuff in that chapter shows how easy (well, short in page count, if not easy as such) it is to drop basically functional content like that into the game. Be nice if they'd hired the guy for 5e.

Except, of course, no. Why have an endgame when you can so easily fill 500 pages with perfectly balanced 3d6 + push three squares (or gain a minor condition, save ends). Ah, D&D, such a frustrating thing to be a fan of.

[Seerow]

And that’s the chapter.

The endgame stuff in that chapter shows how easy (well, short in page count, if not easy as such) it is to drop basically functional content like that into the game. Be nice if they'd hired the guy for 5e.

Except, of course, no. Why have an endgame when you can so easily fill 500 pages with perfectly balanced 3d6 + push three squares (or gain a minor condition, save ends). Ah, D&D, such a frustrating thing to be a fan of.

Compared to most of the abilities we've seen from 5e so far, you'd be lucky to get something as interesting as deal some bonus damage and knock an opponent back.

Yes, it's that bad.

[Username17]

What's the page count on the legal penalties? Because of course, what you'd really like is to have several types of society with different punitive/normal/lenient penalties, and have several additional crimes that are fantastic and/or culturally specific such as Apostasy or Genesis for mono-religious states that forbid such things. Sounds like the game would want about six times as many legal charts so you could distinguish the law in a Drow Lolthian theocracy from the law in a Dwarven clan hold. And maybe 20-50% more crimes. So the actual wordcount would need to be longer, but considerably less than 10 times as long, and you could probably fit a fair amount of that information into the same charts, so the pagecount wouldn't have to expand as much as the wordcount.

-Username17

[Maxus]

Crimes like "Attempted deicide" and "harm against the firmament" and "encouraging evil overlords".

Hell, that'd be fun to make those charts...

[OgreBattle]

Drow matriarchies could use a sex change girdle to punish women by lowering them to the status of males.

[Username17]

So on the military units, it sounds like they needed maybe special and flying cavalry for about a dozen races. That and dragon riders and you're up to maybe 25-30 flavors of cavalry with highlights like Halflings on Giant Eagles and Drow on Giant Spiders and Orcs on Wyverns and Elves on Unicorns. Maybe another page or two for "wilderness recruits" (i.e.: stuff like Giants that you can add to your army if you control an uncivilized mountain range but don't pop from cities of any kind). Doesn't seem like it would be that hard to flesh out the army recruitment stuff to fill the needs D&D folks actually have.

-Username17

[Blicero]

What's the page count on the legal penalties?

There's not that much, unfortunately. You get a 2/3 page table that describes "all" of the crimes (there are only 11) and their ranks of punishment. And then about that much text talking about the general trial process.

The crimes and punishment bit seems to mostly be intended for NPC thieves who get caught while on missions assigned by their boss. So it's not as expansive as it could be. It would have been better if, at the very least, we had gotten two sets of punishments, one that could be carried out without the aid of high level casters, and one that was full of fantastical elements like mind worms and demon hands and shit.

I had forgotten that that Vornheim book (written by the one and only Zak S) has table with 20 weird ways for a trial in fantasy world to be held. They are all much weirder than anything in ACKS.

Trial by assassin. 20 citizens unknown to the defendant are invited to a brief hearing wherein both sides make arguments. The defendant is freed, but kept under observation. Each citizen secretly notifies the court of their personal verdict and, if they believe the defendant guilty, may attempt to kill the defendant over the course of the next 2 months. If the defendant
survives (slaying the assassins is permitted, but only if they thought the defendant guilty), s/he is considered innocent.

[talking about military stuff]

I don't think I mentioned before that Autarch is in the process of writing a mass-combat supplement. It sounds like this supplement will include more fantastic units. It's been in development hell for a bit.


Ch 8: Monsters

This is a D&D bestiary. There are many others like it, but this one is ACKS’s. Or something like that.

The entries are kind of hard to read, because they don’t tell you what a creature’s attack bonus throw is, they just give its HD. Similarly, they don’t say what a creature's saves are, they just state that it saves as a fighter of level X. This saves almost no space but is significantly less informative. Finally, the write-ups don’t try to denote where the description of a creature’s special ability begins and ends. It’s just a mass paragraph of fluff, background, and mechanics. Poor form, Autarch.

Presumably because of cost issues, we don’t get any illustrations of the monsters. Instead, we get silhouettes of most entries. They actually don’t look terrible, but they’re obviously not as nice as actual illustrations. Thankfully, there are a couple of excellent full-page illustrations in this chapter.

I don’t really care about any specific creatures, because there is nothing new here. (Okay, that is a lie. There is something called a “throghrin”, which looks like a hobgoblin, but is actually a (non-undead) mix of hobgoblins, troll, and ghouls. What the fuck?) Instead, I’ll talk about my favorite part of this chapter, which is the nouns ascribed to groups of specific types of creatures. They’re kind of eclectic. Here are some of the better ones.

1. a route of blink dogs
2. a sounder of demon boars
3. a throng of doppelgangers
4. a flight of pixies
5. a wing of sprites
6. a scourge of giant carnivorous flies
7. a sloth of werebears
8. a rake of mules
9. a clowder of phase tigers
10. a shiver of sharks
11. a parade of statues
12. a shepherd of treants

Most of these have real-world antecedents, but I still appreciate their inclusion here.

Okay, I lied again. There’s another thing that is kind of nice here. In ACKS-lingo, orcs, goblins, etc. are called “beastmen”. This means that they’re the crossbreeds of humanoids and some animal. The Monsters chapter helpfully points out what each particular crossbreeding was. So orcs are humans and boars, goblins are dwarves and gnolls (?), and gnolls are gnomes and trolls. I assume that the last relationship holds because people like trying to be clever. But maybe there’s some obscure bit of D&D history here that I’m missing.


Next up: Loot and Lucre

[tussock]

Throghrin are Thouls (which have always been Troll-Hobgoblin-Ghouls, back when Ghouls were "living" undead), but Thouls are one of the trademarked monsters from way back so you can't use that name.

Gnolls in OD&D are

A cross between Gnomes and Trolls ( ... perhaps, Lord Dunsany did not really make it all that clear) with +2 Morale. Otherwise they are similar to Hobgoblins, although the Gnoll king and his bodyguard of from 1 - 4 will fight as Trolls but lack regenerative power.

So it's a classic. Note that ACKS Gnomes are mixed Dwarf and Elf, so Goblins are a total of 5/8 Dwarf, 1/8 Elf, and 1/4 Troll. Halflings are similarly Dwarf and Human, so Dwarves really get abused quite a lot by Wizards. I guess not having any of your own hurts.

Old-time D&D Orcs looked like pigs because Orc rhymes with Pork. Kobolds were supposed to be annoying small dog-like goblins but the art of them in chain armour looked like scales so everyone thought they were lizards that sounded like dogs. So ACKS makes them Lizard-Dogs, it's great stuff.

[Blicero]

It's great stuff.

For some definition of "great", I guess.

Ch 9: Treasure

So yeah. Treasure. ACKS includes extensive tools for random treasure generation. The default assumption is that most treasure will be randomly generated, and the MC will will only hand-place items of special importance. Random treasure is not by any means a new concept, so ACKS is not treading any new ground here.

After the tables, we get the standard list of magic items. All of your favorites are here, because otherwise it wouldn’t be a pseudo-D&D game. Offensive magic potions require the target make a save against staffs, because ACKS’s saving throws completely exhaust possible effects and there is never any awkwardness.

If anyone cares, I can go into more detail, but the lack of new material in this chapter makes it less than exciting.

Ch 10: Secrets

Secrets is kind of a weird name for this chapter, because there’s nothing particularly secret about its contents. Unless you think that the game will be ruined if the players know how economic demand modifiers are generated. This is really just a “Tools for the MC” chapter. For what it sets out to do, it's pretty good. It doesn't cover a lot of basics, so it doesn't seem to be intended for people just starting to MC.

Unsurprisingly, ACKS recommends top-down world creation. So we begin with discussions on how to create your game’s playable region. This includes a classification of realms by size. This classification scheme is bizarrely discontinuous at points: Counties are realms of 4,600 - 8,500 families, and duchies (the next step up) are realms of 20,000 - 52,000 families. Perhaps realms with 15,000 families are expressly forbidden by the gods of ACKS-world.

Weird discontinuities aside, the rules here are pretty comprehensive. If the MC wants to, they can totally generate a region of realms with a internally consistent population densities, distributions of cities and villages, realm incomes, and so on. It’s not going to be a super quick process, but it sounds quite appealing to the number-whore in me.

You can also set up the basic economics of your region. These are as detailed as you would expect. For example, there’s a greater demand for weapons and armor in newly founded frontier towns than there is in ancient enclaves. And grasslands cities don’t really care about importing grain, but desert cities totally do. There’s even a neat bit of demand-interaction rules: smaller cities that are close to larger cities will have their demand modifiers shifted toward those of the larger city.

This is all useful for satisfying the MC’s inner number-whore. But it’s also quite useful for setting up adventures. Since all these data exist, the players can totally enquire about them, and use the results as the basis for their own mercantile ventures. It’s a nicely connected system.

With the basics done, we move on to dungeon and lair placement. We get detailed guidelines on how to setup your own hexcrawl. This is all going to be pretty prep-intensive at first, but then it seems like not a lot of work would be required to keep the campaign going from session to session. There’s a surprisingly perfunctory list of adventure hooks at the end of this section: Did you know that exploration, fighting evil, magical doorways, rescue missions, and quests are all useful adventure hooks?

We get a bit on dungeon design (a mix of advice and random tables), and then a slew of wandering monster tables, both for dungeons and outdoor areas.

Easily the stupidest ACKS-ism in the entire book is that of the “sinkhole of evil”. They are exactly what they sound like, and they function precisely as you’d expect, and there might not be a hokier name for this concept.

Finally, we get rules for starting with characters above 1st level. You can start as an Adventurer (probably level 5), a Conqueror (probably level 9), or a King (probably level 12). The levels 1-3 tier does not get a name; it would probably be Zergling or something like that. The guidelines have a kind of odd feature in which you pay some of your allotted funds for a chance to start with some magic items. So if you start as an Adventurer, you get 16k gp. You can trade 3k of that for a 25% chance for a weapon or armor, a 25% chance for a potion, and a 10% chance for a wondrous item. The probabilities seem pretty harsh.

And that’s the book.




As is probably evident, I like ACKS a lot, possibly more than I should. A tremendous amount of work very clearly went into the Equipment, Campaigns, and Secrets chapter, and it definitely paid off.

I ran a few sessions of ACKS over the summer, and it was a pretty enjoyable experience. We didn’t get a chance to try out any of the more advanced subsystems, but what I liked what I saw. If I had the time to prepare a game, I would definitely run one again. That being said, I don’t know if I would want to play in an ACKS game unless I really trusted the MC. Because the MC is definitely given the tools to fuck you over and is often recommended to do so.

I feel like you could probably hack the more interesting parts of ACKS into a 3E game with a little effort. The main issue you’d face are probably the difference in setting assumptions: 3E posits a much greater availability of magic items and spellcasting.

With the touchy-feely stuff out of the way, I’m not quite sure who ACKS is intended for. It’s definitely the most complex OSR thing out there that I've seen. But that is not a difficult criterion to meet. I get the impression that the OSR is mostly a bunch of middle-aged dudes who dedicated their youths to the futile and tragic task of making AD&D playable. And now they’re too old and burnt-out to learn how to play a better system. Judging by their favorite blogs, none of them would care about any of ACKS's benefits. But enough Gygaxisms remain in this game for it to be a hard sell to the average 3E person. It’s weird.

[Dean]

I really liked basically all of the Domain building portions of the game. It sounds like a lot of care was put into those rules. I have always badly wanted a domain ruling rpg ruleset that wasn't totally terrible. What else do you think would have to be made to make a functional 3e addition for domain building based on what you saw in ACKS?

[Juton]

I'm really enjoying this write up. Most games get reviewed here because they are horrible, ACKS seems to have good ideas and bad. I wonder how many groups would actually use the domain rules though, none of the groups I've played in wanted to deal with land holdings.

[Seerow]

I'm really enjoying this write up. Most games get reviewed here because they are horrible, ACKS seems to have good ideas and bad. I wonder how many groups would actually use the domain rules though, none of the groups I've played in wanted to deal with land holdings.

My group did a game making heavy use of the Stronghold builder's guide between levels 9 and 15ish, with the group basically settling a new barony in the middle of BFE where we had cleared out all of the goblinoids. While I'd hazzard a guess that the SBG was better for the purposes of developing the castle itself, it sounds like ACKs is much better for determining things like attracting population, income generated, trade ventures, etc (all of which are things we did, but more or less MTPed a lot of it).

[Username17]

The SBG version of economics is simplistic to the point of being kind of insulting. Every "income source" makes your fort cost a percentage more and gives you a percentage of the cost of the fort in income every month. It's easy enough to use, but it's weird that diamond mines, lush fisheries, and upwellings of raw chaos are completely interchangeable and it makes no difference whether your barony commands a couple of hamlets or a vast metropolis.

I would hazard a guess that a domain management system that was more rewarding and had more depth would see more use. I for one, would be very happy to have domain management stuff to do that had long term and complex effects.

-Username17

[Blicero]

[quote="deanrule87]
What else do you think would have to be made to make a functional 3e addition for domain building based on what you saw in ACKS?
[/quote]

That's possibly a hard question, since I don't necessarily know what domain management would look like in 3e. The viability and detail of ACKS's domain game is made possible by its basic economic costs and shit. And those costs have the consistency necessary because the fact that the writers had a decent amount of historical data to work off of. And that historical data is relevant only because the average ACKS setting is meant to be "Rome, but with a bit of magic!" or "Persia, with a bit of magic!" In contrast, the average 3e setting is "Magic, with a bit of Rome!" Anything less than that is going to get messily broken by your players really quickly. And that's bad, because you want the economic system / domain game to be something that your players can manipulate for their own benefit.

So your first order of business would be figuring out what economics and rulership quantitatively look like in 3e-world. I'm not particularly proficient in high level 3e-fu, so that seems like a nontrivial problem. Once you do that, you could probably start adapting and stealing other ideas, tweaking their numbers and fluff, and end up with something vaguely functional.

Personally, I would try to go in the other direction. Keep ACKS's underlying numbers and just add in features of 3E that ACKS does not have. That seems a lot more doable, assuming you and your players are cool with playing in "Persia, with a bit of magic!"

[hogarth]

I'm really enjoying this write up. Most games get reviewed here because they are horrible, ACKS seems to have good ideas and bad.

Most games reviewed here have good ideas and bad, but there's a double standard where a big company like TSR/WotC/White Wolf is supposed to know better but an indy, rules-light game gets credit for just showing up.

[OgreBattle]

So what would be some quick improvements on ACKS?

-Standardize exp for all classes, no level caps
-Roll d20+ attack bonus vs defense target number
-Reduce number of saves
-Combine some proficiencies together, make new ones

I like that ACKS has "Adventurer" as a proficiency all PC's have that covers basic fire making, camping and so on.

[Blicero]

- I would probably advise just making the fighter an NPC-only class. The barbarian, monk, paladin, ranger, and gish classes in the Player's Companion fulfill the same mechanical role, but they at least are interesting conceptually.
- Depending on how much work you want to do, you could either fix up the existing proficiency system a bit, or rework it much more extensively and hack in an actual skill system.
- For adding new proficiencies, the lazy thing to do would be to tell your players "If you find a feat in 3e that you like, bring it to me and we'll try to ACKSify it." That would prevent you from needing to do any systematic conversion efforts. The most powerful feats are far better than any ACKS proficiency, but I suspect a lot would transfer with minimal fuss.

The hardest part would probably be keeping each class relatively on par with the others after you institute standardized XP. The thief would definitely need a boost, for example. Luckily, we're on a forum with plenty of stuff to loot.


I'm assuming that hogarth is trolling, so I don't think he's worth responding to?

[rampaging-poet]

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.”

These sound like the kind of issues that could be solved by raiding other ridiculous critical hit tables for ideas. Split up Mortal Wounds by source of damage and make a table for each one. The quantum wounds issue can be mitigated with consistency in what d6 roll corresponds to what parts of the body. You could roll for the wound severity and type immediately to get a likely result, then apply the modifiers based on time and healing skill to the pre-generated roll when treatment is given. That would at least allow you to say something like "he got stabbed in the leg, and it looks bad" when somebody gets stabbed and then determine exactly how bad it is when first aid is applied.

If Tampering with Mortality just needs more results, there's always the Net Libram of Random Magical Effects to raid for more (mostly stupid but potentially usable) mysterious happenings when raising the dead.

Codifying a means of removing these effects or ignoring them when they would otherwise occur sounds like a useful improvement. It might also tie in to the domain management nicely if Lawful characters are encouraged to found prosperous cities to power their restoration rituals while Chaotic characters just sacrifice a dude.

In any case, this system definitely sounds interesting. I'll have to look into it further at some point.

[OgreBattle]

- I would probably advise just making the fighter an NPC-only class. The barbarian, monk, paladin, ranger, and gish classes in the Player's Companion fulfill the same mechanical role, but they at least are interesting conceptually.

I haven't seen the Player's Companion, what makes those classes stand out?
Is ranger something different from the explorer in the core book?

Being an elf that casts magic in full plate armor while shooting arrows and swinging a halberd already seems like the bestest class though.

[Seerow]

- I would probably advise just making the fighter an NPC-only class. The barbarian, monk, paladin, ranger, and gish classes in the Player's Companion fulfill the same mechanical role, but they at least are interesting conceptually.

I haven't seen the Player's Companion, what makes those classes stand out?
Is ranger something different from the explorer in the core book?

Being an elf that casts magic in full plate armor while shooting arrows and swinging a halberd already seems like the bestest class though.

Rather than just answering this, could we get an OSSR on the player's companion?

[hogarth]

I'm assuming that hogarth is trolling, so I don't think he's worth responding to?

For instance, if WotC published a splatbook with a "spell research" system that boiled down to "you get to pay XYZ gp, make a roll, and then beg your GM to allow your spell", they'd get heaped with scorn. (And in fact, that's basically how spell research works in 3E, isn't it?)

Here, the same system gets described as: "I like this system a lot. It’s not super extensive, but it’s totally functional."

[codeGlaze]

- I would probably advise just making the fighter an NPC-only class. The barbarian, monk, paladin, ranger, and gish classes in the Player's Companion fulfill the same mechanical role, but they at least are interesting conceptually.
- Depending on how much work you want to do, you could either fix up the existing proficiency system a bit, or rework it much more extensively and hack in an actual skill system.
- For adding new proficiencies, the lazy thing to do would be to tell your players "If you find a feat in 3e that you like, bring it to me and we'll try to ACKSify it." That would prevent you from needing to do any systematic conversion efforts. The most powerful feats are far better than any ACKS proficiency, but I suspect a lot would transfer with minimal fuss.

This sounds like the man might be pulling a genius bait-n-switch.
Bring in the grognards with O.G DnD and then jimmy in modern ideas with splat books of "optional" rules.

I could be (and I probably am) completely misrepresenting the situation though.

*sigh* It's fun to imagine, at least.

For instance, if WotC published a splatbook with a "spell research" system that boiled down to "you get to pay XYZ gp, make a roll, and then beg your GM to allow your spell", they'd get heaped with scorn. (And in fact, that's basically how spell research works in 3E, isn't it?)

Here, the same system gets described as: "I like this system a lot. It’s not super extensive, but it’s totally functional."

I'm sure a different reviewer would have had different thoughts on the spell research system.
Although, iirc Blicero liked having the beneficial mechanics for investing and keeping a library to research in.

Although reviewing is sort of a double edged sword, I think reviewers tend to take it a little easier on first time author/publishers. Big companies are expected to have (at the very least) managers/editors with enough experience to learn from past mistakes in the industry. Whether it's their own or somebody else's.

I'm pretty sure if one of Monte's indie books was reviewed, it'd be a very different situation.

[fectin]

Re: loss of limbs from stabbing:
That sounds like nerve damage, which, at a simplistic level, paralyzes you below [the knees, the waist, the nipples, whatever] based on where your spine is damaged.

Re separate xp tracks: does that even matter if you can't multiclass?

(edit: tags)

[Username17]

Re separate xp tracks: does that even matter if you can't multiclass?

Yes. It means that the same pile of XP is worth different amounts to two different characters. It also means that the same level means different amounts of assumed power between two characters. Also, it's totally inconsistent and bullshit because the numbers are pulled out of someone's ass.

-Username17

[fectin]

Re separate xp tracks: does that even matter if you can't multiclass?

It means that the same pile of XP is worth different amounts to two different characters.

But that assumes that character levels are roughly equivalent. Which is convenient, but not mandatory when you can't mix & match. As long as 15,000 XP gets everyone appropriately ready to fight $DIRE_TOAD, does it matter that the cleric is 9th level and the fighter is 4th?