OSSR: ACKS Heroic Fantasy Handbook

[Thaluikhain]

The fact that the very first post has

Trollman actually accuses Alexander Macris of being a... "white supremacist" (whatever that means)

pretty much gives away the game.

In the modern day the only people who pretend to not know what a white supremacist is are white supremacists.

Yeah, that jumped out at me as well. Presumably they were going for the "anyone the radical feminists don't like is a white supremacist" thing and didn't put the work in.

Also "Trollman and his cuck brigade". Which is also a big red flag, or the name of a band. Probably a one hit wonder.

[Dean]

I see no reason to assume they were even doing that and not directly defending white supremacy. A bunch of people bragging about being at war with SJW's, calling people cucks unironically, and questioning what white supremacy could even mean probably shouldn't be given the benefit of the doubt about arguing from a neutral position. They're waving that flag as hard as they can in a non-white supremacist space.

[ETortoise]

An Echo Resounding is an interesting contrast to ACKS because it approaches the challenge of domain play from the opposite direction. Ot’s Very abstract, top down and games. Areas have military, social/civil and wealth ratings that they roll to do things on the domain level. It’s kind of cool, but definitely has some weird things because of the rule set. For example, classes all get domain abilities as they advance; but they’re tied to the character’s XP total rather than level, since different classes require different amounts of XP to advance.

In the early days of the OSR, most supplements were written for particular retroclones. If a writer liked AD&D 1e, they’d say it’s for OSRIC; if they liked Basic, the supplement would be for Labyrinth Lord. ACKS is from a later wave where people were trying to make their own new editions to obsolete editions of D&D.

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

A bunch of people bragging about being at war with SJW's, calling people cucks unironically, and questioning what white supremacy could even mean probably shouldn't be given the benefit of the doubt about arguing from a neutral position.

I wouldn't give people who use 'cuck' ironically the benefit of the doubt either, honestly. Irony is the first step to... unirony?

[Libertad]

I hadn't heard of Echo Resounding. Looks interesting. Certainly it's asking the right questions and promising the right things. Definitely something to look at.

The main red flag for me is that it's written up for Labyrinth Lord. That's just a weird thing to do.

The OSR "movement" is literally about embracing nostalgia over quality. Of doing things you know are wrong because it reminds you of happy times you had back when you didn't know better. It's the gaming equivalent of getting together with your highschool buddies to drink shitty cider down by levy.

That isn't to say that there isn't real work being put into these things or that there isn't real value being created. Not all of the ideas of 3rd edition were good! Some of the changes of 3rd edition were factually bad ideas and reverting them to concepts and systems of AD&D or OD&D and building from there is - in some cases - a positive step. But bringing back "paralysis saves" or count-down AC isn't a good idea. Getting rid of those things was good. It was not arguably good, it simply is good. Bringing back bad ideas from the 1970s is a bad idea, because it is obviously a bad idea.

3rd edition made big errors with its economy, with its skill system, and with its high level warriors in general. If you want to go to the well of the Stranger Things era to find ideas for what to do about magic item drops and castle ownership and diplomacy with monsters and other similar stuff that works very badly in 3rd edition, that's reasonable. But bringing back saves versus dragon breath or magic shields having a 'plus' that is added to an invisible number that is subtracted from your armor class is just bullheadedness.

But I'll definitely have to do some more research on Echo Resounding. It's making a lot of noises I like to hear even if the underlying 'Retro-Stupid Compatibility' pitch is indefensible on its own.

-Username17

To the bold: Crawford's reasoning for doing Basic D&D clones is several fold. He actually made a Reddit post outlining his reasoning in regards to his new KickStarter.

TL;DR it boils down to the fact that D&D terminology is something far more gamers 'get' from a quick glance than other works, it's a system he knows intuitively much better than other ones out there so he's sticking to his strengths, he's already got a guaranteed market in the OSR, and there's more easy content to swipe from than other newer systems.

To the underlined: I'm going to be honest. 3rd Edition D&D is a very risky market right about now, what with Pathfinder 2nd Edition and most of the indie/3rd party scene sticking with PF 1e. There's also the fact that in terms of personal experience and what I've heard from others, there is less casual and new blood seeking out 3.X stuff. A lot of players in gaming groups are those who already grew up with it, and it takes a lot more effort to build adventures, NPCs, reference rules, etc for it than many other rules systems.

I'm really at the point in my life that I found that GMing 3.X is more trouble than it's worth and contributes a lot more to GM Fatigue when there are other systems out there which can simulate heroic fantasy at a fraction of the world count.

And yes, Labyrinth Lord is baroque in many places, but I don't get that creeping sense of exhausted dread when I thumb through stat blocks and classes than when I plop down for a sesh of Pathfinder. And unlike 5e it doesn't have as many false advertising claims (miniatures optional, pro-LGBT,* rules-lite, etc) which can cause newer gamers to go "hey wait, what's this?!"

*Mearls palled with Zak S and said he was a fan of RPGPundit's blog to get them on as consultants, a saga I'm sure we're all familiar with by now.

Granted, one could probably make the argument that 5e has a large guaranteed fanbase and existing art assets on the DM's Guild, but it ties back into Crawford sticking to his strengths.

[Libertad]

A bunch of people bragging about being at war with SJW's, calling people cucks unironically, and questioning what white supremacy could even mean probably shouldn't be given the benefit of the doubt about arguing from a neutral position.

I wouldn't give people who use 'cuck' ironically the benefit of the doubt either, honestly. Irony is the first step to... unirony?

Posting there is like talking to a brick wall. In another thread someone reposted my news of Deadlands' Confederate Retcon, and you got people ranging from self-declared "I don't care about this" neutral attitudes yet making over a dozen posts on how they think it's a bad choice; how Shane Hensley's BEING TORN APART BY HIS OWN FANS for this in spite of it bringing mostly positive reception on the official boards (I even pointed this out); and of course "it's just a game why do people take this seriously" while getting angry in another topic about an S&M author making a "gaming consent checklist" as a free online tool.

And also talking about the 'value' of being able to play as an unrepentant violent racist PC, just like...Oscar Schindler?

[Blicero]

How much of the book is there left to review?

Not much. This post, and one more about a “Secrets” chapter.

This is kind of emblematic of how ACKS is better researched than most games of this genre and also nowhere near as well researched as it thinks it is. I mean, if you look up the "wiki-fact" of "how many active geysers are there?" you get the number 1000. Now first of all that one thousand isn't four significant figures of a one followed by three zeroes. If you look at an actual list it comes out to like 1,041. Which would be an irrelevant nitpick except that they are legit adding the number of geysers to the number of natural eternal flames (that they number at 11), but their rounding error is already higher than the number in the second term, so what the fuck?

But there's another point that I want to get to, which is that over five hundred of the active geysers on the planet are in Yellowstone. Talking about what the average square mileage per geyser is gibberish because almost half of them are in a single 3,468 square mile national park, and the other half are in the rest of the world.

These are good points. It’s not even like the rounding-error number of eternal flames characterizes the rarity of “greater places of elemental fire”, while volcanoes are “medium places of elemental fire”, and geysers are “lesser places of elemental fire”. The book’s actual distributions of size are:

The size of places of elemental power can vary widely. To determine randomly, roll 1d6: 1-3, Small, 3d6 x 500 square feet; 4-5 Large, 3d6 x 50,000 square feet; 6 Huge, 3d6 x 5,000,000 square feet.

Switching topics:

I hadn't heard of Echo Resounding. Looks interesting. Certainly it's asking the right questions and promising the right things. Definitely something to look at.

The main red flag for me is that it's written up for Labyrinth Lord. That's just a weird thing to do.

I’ve also heard positive things about AER, as well as Crawford’s other games, although I’ve never read them. I don’t think anyone actually plays Labyrinth Lord, though. It’s just an easily-modified rules-skeleton, so you use LL supplements while actually running DCC or Black Hack or your own house rules. Even if you say that you play LL, you mean that you play Basic D&D as you remember it. Also, it’s useful to remember that ACKS, unlike what I understand of AER, is more than just a set of domain-rulership systems: it’s also one of the tighter dungeon-crawling hacks I’ve seen.

Chapter Six: Heroic Monsters

This is a bestiary chapter. D&D is pretty good at them. Occasionally, with bestiaries, you get something weird like Fire on the Velvet Horizon that is as much a set of experimental short fictions as it is a monster manual, but mostly you get entries of things to stab in the face.

Many of the entries here are from Tolkien. You get balrogs, watchers-in-the-water, stone trolls, and ringwraiths. (Of course, the Tolkien kraken is distinct (and much weaker) than the core ACKS kraken, and the Tolkien stone trolls are totally different from the ACKS core regenerating trolls, but that’s kitchen sink fantasy.) Wrt Conan inspirations, you get giant slugs and giant snakes. Then there’s the stymphalian birds from the myth of Hercules, a dragon-rewrite that uses eldritch spells, and a variety of demons. This chapter’s exclusions are more surprising than its inclusions. There’s nothing from Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith, or Fritz Leiber, all of which one might reasonably have expected.

A surprisingly low frequency of dragons in ACKS can speak: a dragon has to get up to Old (14 HD, been around at least a century) before they have even a 50% chance to be able to talk at all. This is an implicit setting decision (of ACKS and other older versions of D&D) that I’ve always found pretty dissatisfying. It’s obviously something you can change super easily, and I bet a lot of people change it without realizing it, but I feel like bestial dragons and conniving dragons are sufficiently distinct that they merit separate stat blocks.

Chapter Seven: Heroic Treasure

Treasure tables for everyone

Mister Caverns who run ACKS are supposed to rely heavily on random treasure generation for loot. Monsters have different treasure categories (“Incidental” for beasts, “Raider” for evil humanoids, and “Hoarder” for things that like the shiny) and subtypes that determine treasure distributions. This book revamps the core treasure tables with the stated goal of making treasure take up more mass and volume. It’s accomplished both by shifting treasure amounts into low-value coins like copper and silver, as well as by incorporating more non-monetary treasure like paintings and livestock into hoards.

(Remember that ACKS’ encumbrance system is in terms of stones (abstracted to 7-14 pounds) rather than actual pounds. The underlying numbers are small enough that using encumbrance doesn’t slow actual play to a halt: the idea is that, even once you’ve scored it big, moving your ill-gotten loot back to town could be an adventure in and of itself. This is another aspect of ACKS that I really enjoy.)

In ACKS core, the treasure hoard of an old dragon (14 HD) used to only weigh 7.5 stone, but, in the HFH, the coin portion alone of that dragon is now 46 stone. I would argue that this is better, but, ultimately, still pretty sad. For reference, PC classes have a maximum level of 14, and leveling up takes a lot of real-time. So getting to the point where you’re capable of beating a 14-HD dragon could easily be a years-long campaign. The players might eagerly envision streams of wagons being needed to cart away this dragon’s treasure. But they’ll be in for a rude awakening when they notice that all of this 46 stone of coin can easily be loaded onto a single ox (medium load 45 stone) or a single mule cart (medium load 35 stone), and it can almost be loaded onto a pony (maximum load 40 stone). Even the hoard of a Venerable (20 HD) dragon is only 70 stone, right what you can put on that single mule cart.

The values of these hoards are also surprisingly low, relative to the sorts of purchases high-level characters will be wanting to make. That 14-HD dragon’s hoard will come out to around 25,000 gp total. A party that kills it will probably be King-tier, meaning that they will have their own domains and cities and armies shit. So that 25,000 dragon hoard might seem like a nice bump for their treasuries, but then you notice what upkeep costs look like in this game. For example, a unit of 40 heavy cavalry costs 2,400 gold pieces a month in upkeep. And it’s not like 40 heavy cavalry is a real force to be reckoned with: in the ACKS wilderness, it’s totally possible to casually run into orc villages with hundreds of combatants. For reference, some of the magic items later in the chapter have values in the hundreds of thousands of gold pieces.

I don’t know what the takeaway message for this portion of the chapter should be. On one hand, I assume that Macris has put more thought into costs and treasure amounts for ACKS than I have. But on the other hand, even this book’s enhanced treasure volumes are just sad. People have discussed paltry treasure volume in D&D since 2006 at least, so it’s not like I’m raising novel objections. We have to remember that ACKS runs off of a gold-for-XP model, so you can’t just adopt the Dungeonomicon solution of “past a certain point, gold doesn’t matter”. It’s possible that allowing monsters to have fun amounts of treasure would cause XP tables to blow up to an infeasible degree.

Loot

This chapter also has new loot entries, both mundane and magical. Some of the mundane table entries are fun ways to spice up a monster den.

• platinum reliquaries with crystal panes
• uncommon animal antlers, horns, and tusks
• bags of loose tea or coffee
• a captured equerry or lady-in-waiting
• opal cameo portraits of historical figures and aristocrats

Another minor-but-fun addition is weapon and armor frequency tables for different types of settings. By the book, you’ll only ever get that goofy chainmail bikini if you’re in a “sword & sorcery” setting, where you’re also likely to find more of the weird D&D weapons like whips, nets, and bolas. Plate and mail armor are common in “chivalric romance” settings and are less common in “ancient myth” settings. It’s the sort of “describe a setting by some random tables” design that the OSR does pretty well.

The new magic items are fun – they generally do more than just give you a numerical bonus or cast a spell on you – but they’re also the sort of thing you can find in dozens of other D&D books. Skimming through the lists, I don’t notice as many references to other fiction as I did in the classes and monsters. In particular, there are no “rings of power” or anything. This one is neat:

Iron Crown of the Sorcerer-Kings: This legendary regalia was created by Uragasi, first sorcerer-king of Zahar, conqueror of the Thrassians. It was worn by every reigning sorcerer-king thereafter until it was lost to history during the fall of Zahar. While the iron crown is worn, the wearer regenerates 3 hit points each round… Any limbs or body parts lost to mortal wounds will attempt to crawl or squirm back to the main portion of the body to reattach, and can be reattached instantly simply by being held to the stump.

That’s equipment and monsters. There’s one more chapter that has more DM-facing material.

[Username17]

I did start looking at An Echo Resounding. I'm not done with it, and I think some bits are going to take a while to digest. I think ultimately that I'm not going to be particularly happy with it, even though it does raise some interesting issues and have some entertaining bits on the random obstacles charts.

The first issue obviously is that it keeps calling back to Labyrinth Lord, which is not a thing you should do under any circumstances. The book does a lot to keep itself map agnostic, which is a problem that I'll get into next, but it should really be keeping itself more system agnostic. Every direct reference to Labyrinth Lord is a reminder that the entire OSR is basically just a joke that got out of hand. Like Hackmaster except they've mostly stopped even trying to be funny.

So the book is concerned with "points of interest" rather than the spaces in between. And from a simple scripting standpoint I can see how you'd decide that's what you needed to focus on, but that's not actually sufficient to really run a domain focused game. If you don't really concern yourself with what abstract territory is worth you really limit the amount of conqueror/king stuff you can do. Or to put it another way: we don't need a set of domain rules at all to do the story where we defeat the ghosts in the Haunted Mine and then it gets renamed "Dwarven Gem Mine" and we get seasonal kickbacks in the form of gems. We need the domain rules to step up when we push the border fifty kilometers west by driving the remaining Bugbears across the river and open up that chunk of the Lowlands to Hafling settlement. When the book tries to sell you on the idea that you can use whatever hex size you want or no hexes at all, that's clearly the book pre-emptively conceding that it isn't going to be able to answer that question satisfactorily.

I'm genuinely not feeling the Wealth/Military/Social scores. It seems like those should all be at least two scores each. I understand that reductionism is a goal in and of itself, and I can even see the argument that distinguishing between a wealth of cabbages and a wealth of silver is not worth the hassle (I disagree, but I can follow that line of thought). But I'm just 100% not on board with attempting to abstract military quantity and military quality into a single number. This is a DnD style world and we expect militaries to include both Goblin conscripts with pointy sticks and Demon knights riding dragons. I cannot accept that it would be acceptable to represent both with "+2 military."

The fact that the normal carrying capacity of "good" farmland is supposed to be one person per sixteen acres is so fucking out there that I think I need the author to show his work. The book tells me why it's embracing the "fantasy novel inside cover map" model of the map. I don't agree, but I understand the logic. But I don't know what the author thinks is going on in farmland. Even with pretty bad yields you should be able to feed a man on two or three acres tops, so are we assuming that like 90% of the food is lost to bandits or going to cities or what?

-Username17

[DrPraetor]

Spoilage is obviously an issue, but yeah, that's off by an order of magnitude.

https://jref.com/articles/kokudaka.284/
Has 11-15 koku (which is 1430 calories/day for a person, so you can eat but not well) per acre. I'm not sure if that is pre or post spoilage or what, but 20 acres would get you... I dunno... a modern Western diet in spite of medieval yields?

[Username17]

Spoilage is obviously an issue, but yeah, that's off by an order of magnitude.

https://jref.com/articles/kokudaka.284/
Has 11-15 koku (which is 1430 calories/day for a person, so you can eat but not well) per acre. I'm not sure if that is pre or post spoilage or what, but 20 acres would get you... I dunno... a modern Western diet in spite of medieval yields?

Those are hectares, not acres. It's suggesting a koku output of 4-6 koku per acre. But it's important to note that this is fifty to a hundred times the "forty people per square mile" reported by Echo Resounding's carrying capacity.

Now Dark Ages Europe had worse farming than Edo period Japan (and worse farming than almost all other periods and places, Dark Ages Europe had awful farming). And calorie outputs from animals and vegetables are like 10% of what they are from grains. But all that being true, I'm not getting to sixteen acres per person because that's legit insane even if these people are eating burgers every day.

---

So anyway, I appreciate the "domain turn" of one month. It's the time it takes for a Dominions turn, and it lets you call your turns shit like "Early Spring" and such. But "Player Character Domains take two actions per turn, NPC Domains take one" is bad. It breaks suspension of disbelief on both ends, shows the gears of the simulation too clearly, and brings very little to the table. Also the "you can get as many troops to participate in a battle as you could reasonably get there in a domain turn" exposes the fundamental issues with the topological map.

Many times in this book it is forced to confront the issue that its preferred scale is in fact real small with blocks of troops of 100 soldiers and the tracking of individual logging camps and barracks attached to individual locations just isn't scalable. The book's suggestion that you like aggregate things again and reskin bigger cities as smaller cities when you scale up the action is just a non-starter. If that kind of thing was workable we wouldn't need mass combat rules and a domain management game at all - we'd just take the normal rules for squad level 3e D&D and "scale them up" or whatever.

Bottom line is that there are some good ideas in here, but I can't see An Echo Resounding as being the way forward.

-Username17

[Blicero]

If anyone is curious, this is a reasonably in-depth discussion of ACKS and AER. SineNomine made AER, and Tavis was one of the main ACKS people, although he has since left Autarch.

[Username17]

Having read through it and thought about it a bit more, I would say that An Echo Resounding goes downhill fast. The mass combat minigame isn't complete and wouldn't be good if it was. The last thirty pages of the book are the author dropping in his campaign notes from a Labyrinth Lord game he ran one time. The book is at its best when its talking about how to quickly set up a starting area for a D&D campaign and it gets progressively worse the farther away from that modest goal that it gets.

So let's talk about Demihumans. An Echo Resounding has available traits "Dwarf Friend," "Halfling Affinity," "Burning Creed," and "Necromantic Cult" that respectively allow you to recruit Dwarves, Halflings, Elves, and Zombies. But there isn't an "Orc Cousin" or "Kobold Reverence" or whatever the fuck to let a region recruit Orcs or Kobolds. This is, quite simply, an unforgivable oversight. Even if you decided that you were sufficiently dick-hard about getting the old school vibe that you didn't want the players being Orcs, you still need to check your troop growth against nearby kingdoms that have Orcs in them. Because, well, fucking obviously. But beyond that, there's never been a time when D&D players didn't recruit their own Orc armies. Fucking Robilar had his own army of Orcs and he was a character in the second playtest game of Dungeons & Dragons in 1972. There have been player characters who raised their own Orc armies since before the first book was even printed.

Now, I don't think that AER is being racist by not including Orc and Goblin affinities or discussions of Human/Orc cities or whatever. Nor do I think it's being explicitly racist by talking about carnivorous ape soldiers from the jungles armed with clubs. But it is being excessively myopic and referential to older works that are racist and simply regurgitating that shit without commentary isn't acceptable in the 21st century.

Now I appreciate Sine Nomine's point that ACKS is very heavily entwined with some very specific assumptions of how the economy works and that makes it quite difficult to figure out the effects of campaign events. I would go one further that some of the assumptions of ACKS are actually weird and bad, making the ultimate work something of a GIGO situation. The ACKS people make multiple fundamental errors similar to the Geysers situation described in this thread, and disentangling them is a lot of work. But they do tell you what their assumptions are! You can laboriously comb through, check their work, and fix it up. AER doesn't tell you what assumptions it's working with, so when it makes insane declarations like a carrying capacity of 40 people per square mile of good farmland, I have legit no idea what the hell he's talking about.

I get that actually fucking around with a spreadsheet is undesirable. But if you swing far enough the other way that your system has no outputs at all for what happens if a military campaign pushes the border fifty kilometers from the tree line to the river, it's not actually good for anything. More specifically, AER's attempt to have Wealth, Military, Social, and Treasure as abstract numbers and have multiple die rolls to determine when a fortress is finished is actually more fiddly than just giving a palisade a GP and Manpower cost along with a build time. The statement "This will be finished in Late Summer of Year 2 of the Ascension War" is just so much easier than taking domain actions every month to roll dice and track successes and failures that I just can't even. I get that you don't want to track individual peasant laborers, but the abstract numbers of AER are legitimately more fiddly and less useful than just having a manpower pool.

I could see a "top down" approach to domain management working. AER isn't there. It isn't halfway there. There are too many questions like "I conquer some lands next to my domain, what happens?" and "I become chief of the Orcs, what happens?" that it just doesn't even attempt to engage with. The questions it does attempt to engage with are incomplete and unsatisfactory. The attempts to abstract GP into Wealth and Treasure is ultimately a failure. Not only do the players still have to track and use GP so you haven't gotten rid of that number, but you've added two more numbers and it's all super clunky.

-Username17

[jt]

I get that actually fucking around with a spreadsheet is undesirable.

Some people enjoy that sort of thing, so you could assume (hope) that you've got one in your group. Then you set up your domain management minigame so only one player is playing with hexes and spreadsheets, and the rest have other roles.

One way to do that is to have domain-level character classes, where exactly one player takes Monarch (or Steward), which does the spreadsheets and is nominally in charge, then the rest take domain classes like Emissary To The Elves and Court Necromancer, which are about managing something much more zoomed-in but still can provide benefits to hexes and troops to battles. The person looking at hexes generates adventure hooks by coveting their neighbor's hexes, your emissaries generate hooks by getting requests from whoever they talk to, your wizards generate hooks when they need rare ingredients or something goes all Sorcerer's Apprentice on them.

I could see a "top down" approach to domain management working. AER isn't there. It isn't halfway there. There are too many questions like "I conquer some lands next to my domain, what happens?" and "I become chief of the Orcs, what happens?"

Another approach would be that, instead of your characters having domain levels, your holdings have levels. Your military campaign expands your domain by 300 square kilometers, so your keep along that border gains 300 experience points. Maybe you give out more experience for better land, implicitly making a holding's "experience" some number convertible to koku. Then you know how many people are supporting this holding because it's the same as its experience points, so you can come up with a believable number of features for a level N holding to have.

Tracking everything in terms of holdings has scaling limits though. Becoming chief of the orcs means taking control of their holdings. They probably just have one, but you'll still likely average more than one per adventure and that can turn into a big pile of things to track.

[OgreBattle]

How exactly do y’all envision dungeoneering adventurer PC’s interacting with domains at the table, do PC’s do this when the session is over, does the DM just keep track for them, or is it active table time and if so how do PC’s Omanis interact with each other

[Username17]

Some people enjoy that sort of thing, so you could assume (hope) that you've got one in your group. Then you set up your domain management minigame so only one player is playing with hexes and spreadsheets, and the rest have other roles.

Going full spreadsheet mode would be reasonable if that's what you want to do. Once you had the macros in place, conquering five hexes of swamp with a few nomadic lizadfolk in it could be something you add into the sheet and the minuscule take home profits and tiny chance of getting death gems each season (or whatever) would be spit out on the final lines.

But I can legit understand the desire to have a system that doesn't need a computer to run. If you wanted to make the conquest of the Banemires be more 'top down' and abstract, I could totally accept that as a goal. It seems pretty reasonable.

Tracking everything in terms of holdings has scaling limits though.

Absolutely. You need ways to scale up and scale down. And that means that things need to smoothly aggregate. If you are doing a campaign about taking over the city and tracking individual bakeries that has to stop once you control a duchy that has multiple cities in it. The AER system of 'Points of Interest' with individual holdings and assets attached to locations just does not and cannot scale. You need explicit ways of zooming in when for some reason you really care about Halfling animal husbandry and of zooming out when you're requesting military aid from the King Under the Mountain.

How exactly do y’all envision dungeoneering adventurer PC’s interacting with domains at the table, do PC’s do this when the session is over, does the DM just keep track for them, or is it active table time and if so how do PC’s Omanis interact with each other

I expect that players will do a dungeon delve in substantially less than one month, so that a domain turn would be the framing device for a session. You'd declare your domain actions at the start of the session, then you'd go fight manticores or whatever, and the domain turn actions would get resolved and calculated at the end of the session. Sometimes you'd have a season pass with no dungeon delving and then you'd crank through a few turns before you got to a dragon hunt, but for the most part your heroic assault on a bandit camp or whatever is going to fill the bulk of a session with the growth and upkeep of the domain being accounting at the margins.

But you would assume that you'd get to the point where prosecution of the war was the primary focus and the vignettes of heroic actions during battles were intermittent asides.

-Username17

For scenarios where

[Blicero]

How exactly do y’all envision dungeoneering adventurer PC’s interacting with domains at the table, do PC’s do this when the session is over, does the DM just keep track for them, or is it active table time and if so how do PC’s Omanis interact with each other

For ACKS, I think it's common to resolve domain stuff between sessions, over email and the like. It is also the default case that the DM keeps track of everyone's domains. Group sessions get dedicated to events everyone can take part in, like dungeon crawls and mass combat. Some groups use a single jointly-ruled domain, and others will let each character go off and do their thing. The former is better for cohesion, but can lead to some thematic dissonance where, e.g., the city ruled by the party's Paladin of Law has a criminal underworld headed up by the party thief. I don't know that anyone has come up with a general solution to that problem.

[Username17]

How exactly do y’all envision dungeoneering adventurer PC’s interacting with domains at the table, do PC’s do this when the session is over, does the DM just keep track for them, or is it active table time and if so how do PC’s Omanis interact with each other

For ACKS, I think it's common to resolve domain stuff between sessions, over email and the like. It is also the default case that the DM keeps track of everyone's domains. Group sessions get dedicated to events everyone can take part in, like dungeon crawls and mass combat. Some groups use a single jointly-ruled domain, and others will let each character go off and do their thing. The former is better for cohesion, but can lead to some thematic dissonance where, e.g., the city ruled by the party's Paladin of Law has a criminal underworld headed up by the party thief. I don't know that anyone has come up with a general solution to that problem.

One of the things that is legit weird about various attempts to do Domain Management going back to Brthright and the BECMI books is the embrace of the unitary executive. Even going back to the 1970s, the assumed progression was Armsman -> Knight -> Baron -> Duke -> King. But D&D is normally a game about an ensemble of protagonists, so that's actually super weird.

You'd think that the default assumption would be some kind of "Noble Council" where the different player characters get one title that gives them a domain super power like they were players in Junta or Skeksis or something. You could have default class/councilor assignments like "Rogues are a good choice for Steward, Spymaster, or Sheriff." and you could have some generic positions like "Guildmaster" that weren't too fussed about what class your character was.

Just to state something that should be incredibly obvious: if your Domain management minigame isn't set up for the assumption that the Domain is run cooperatively by a council of 4-6 characters what the hell are you thinking? Individual Counts and Marquises that dictatorially run their own domains can certainly exist, but since close to zero percent of the ones the players will be running will look like that I honestly don't even care if the rules acknowledge such a possibility.

-Username17

[Emerald]

You'd think that the default assumption would be some kind of "Noble Council" where the different player characters get one title that gives them a domain super power like they were players in Junta or Skeksis or something. You could have default class/councilor assignments like "Rogues are a good choice for Steward, Spymaster, or Sheriff." and you could have some generic positions like "Guildmaster" that weren't too fussed about what class your character was.

When I've run domain-focused campaigns before, this is exactly what I've done. Each domain has a council with seven positions, each of which grants some personal-scale benefits (skill bonuses, minor spell-like abilities, etc.) and some domain powers:

• Arcane (Archmage, Incantator, etc.): creates ley lines, works with magical power nodes, casts domain-level spells, and so on.
• Diplomatic (Ambassador, Viceroy, etc.): changes other domains' attitudes toward their own domain, builds embassies, makes treaties, and so on.
• Divine (High Priest, Pontifex, etc.): foresees domain events, consecrates temples, casts domain-level spells, and so on.
• Financial (Treasurer, Guildmaster, etc.): establishes trade routes, converts special resources, builds infrastructure, and so on.
• Intrigue (Spymaster, Minister of Intelligence, etc.): spies on other domains' actions, sends infiltrators into other domains, turns foreign officials into double agents, and so on.
• Legal (Magistrate, Steward, etc.): issues decrees, annexes territory, mitigates domain events, and so on.
• Martial (Warlord, High Admiral, etc.): builds fortresses, trains and deploys troops, leads armies, and so on.

Each player gets one of those positions, and the others are filled by NPCs that the players outline (e.g. "We want the Archpriest to be a Joan of Arc-style pious warrior"), and each position can also double up on another position's powers at a penalty if needed (the Martial noble can declare martial law to use Legal actions, but lowers morale in the province; the Intrigue noble can use Diplomatic actions if he has agents in the right places, but loses assets if he fails; the Financial noble can take Martial actions through mercenaries, but pays more for the privilege) so one PC can support another or a PC can fill in for an NPC if they want direct control of something for a domain turn.

The King/Emperor/Emir/etc. position is either filled by one of the PCs Prime Minister-style if someone wants to be really domain-focused, or is a figurehead NPC who theoretically runs things but almost always does what his advisors say. I've found that the latter works quite well, since it lets you have random domain events like "Someone poisoned the empress!" or "The archduke slept around and now there's a succession crisis!" without unfairly and unilaterally putting a PC in the crosshairs.

[Blicero]

You'd think that the default assumption would be some kind of "Noble Council" where the different player characters get one title that gives them a domain super power like they were players in Junta or Skeksis or something.

You and Emerald raise good suggestions. I believe that ACKS took Dave Arneson’s games as a major inspiration for its high-level experience, so it’s not surprising that it clove to the unitary executive vision. Looking back, the original ACKS kickstarter launched in July 2011, and it was available on DriveThruRPG by February 2012. If it had not been released for another few years, I wonder if Crusader Kings II (released May 2012) and its council system would have been a stronger influence.

Finishing things up:

Chapter 8: Heroic Secrets

Another weirdly-titled chapter, as it is mostly DM-facing material.

The ACKS Core “Secrets” chapter was pretty good; it contains some of the best (and usefully specific) advice for setting up hexcrawl campaigns I’ve seen. This chapter is considerably less essential: most of it is extensions of the Player’s Companion systems for class and spell creation. My feelings on these systems is basically the same as it was five years ago: it’s impressive that they exist, but the Basic D&D sets of classes and spells are not something that a hella mathematical “rigorous” system will spit out as reasonable outputs. (The spell creation system tries to design around this, with its stupid-genius idea that the level of a spell is, within the game universe, a stochastic quantity, and, occasionally, a magical researcher will luck out and make something like sleep or fireball that is much better than other spells of their level.)

I’m not totally sure who is meant to be the intended end-user of these content creation systems. If you’re running an ACKS campaign, you’re presumably plugged into the greater OSR sphere. So you’ll be pulling from and adapting content by dozens of different content creators, each of whom is running some slightly different version of D&D. If you’re nominally running DCC or LotFP or GLOG, those minor incompatibilities don’t ultimately matter because they get overwhelmed by other differences. But none of those other systems has adopted a mathematical notion of balance in the way that ACKS has. If you’re not running an ACKS game and are just pulling elements to add to a 3e-base game or something, then these specific guidelines are even less useful.

In what I believe is a novel revelation, the class creation system tries to account for the fact that low-level campaigns are more common than high-level campaigns, albeit in some ill-defined way:

The Math Behind the Math: The Chosen’s [i.e., the “Thomas Covenant” class] trade-offs dos [sic] not follow the rules as written in Player’s Companion. The PC rules slightly subsidize the number of powers available when making trade offs… The trade-off subsidy is intended to encourage more tradeoffs and is balanced by the fact that most campaigns rarely reach the highest levels (despite my best design efforts to encourage it). When taken to the extremes used by the Chosen, however, the subsidy yields too many powers at high levels for play balance.

The other piece of this chapter (although it’s only a single page) is an “Appendix N” of inspirational books, comics, and movies. Almost all of the books were published before 1990; the only post-2000 fantasy book included is, of all things, “The Lies of Locke Lamora”. Weirdly, Beowulf, the Iliad, and the Aeneid are all listed, but the Odyssey is not. Also surprising is the fact that Hrolf’s Saga is recommended, but the Volsung Saga (a major Tolkien inspiration) and Egil’s Saga (a great all-around story) are omitted. I’ve at least heard of all of them save “The Deed of Paksenarrion” by Elizabeth Moon. The films include both Arnie Conan movies, as well as the Jason Momoa one and the 90s Kull movie. The 2012 John Carter and Wrath of the Titans movies get recommended, but I can’t say I’ve ever even met someone in real life who had seen either.

Chapter n/a: Wrapup

In its primary goals, I think this book mostly succeeds. Within the field of anything, much less elfgame supplements, that is a noteworthy accomplishment. If you reread “Beyond the Black River” or “The Tale of Satampra Zeiros” on a whim one weekend and start jonesing for a D&D-like that better echoes stories of that nature, this book is probably worth picking up.

It’s worth noting that no part of this book engages substantively with what is arguably ACKS’ killer app: the domain-rulership system. (I don’t really know why that is the case, you could skim through an Icelandic saga and come up with dozens of random events for King-level PCs to deal with.) Critiques I’ve seen of this system mostly seem to look like one of:

• “I don’t want to have to write Python scripts that will use the rules to simulate the monthly actions of each ruler I’ve created”, or
• “Giving each PC their own domain damages group cohesion” (as the above comments have discussed).

I don’t really see anyone saying “The rules produced nonsensical results that ruined my campaign”, so maybe Macris remains more or less content with his work. A few years ago, he put out a revision of the domains system for “faster, easier play, but I haven’t read them.

The rambling observation upon which I’m going to end this review vaguely pertains to the (de)merits of rigorously mathematical RPG systems. The ACKS Domains at War supplement presents a mass combat system that interfaces with ACKS PC-level rules. One of this book’s chapters is a list of statistics and costs for human crossbowmen, hobgoblin skirmishers, skeleton legions, cyclops brutes, etc. Another chapter talks about how to use formulas to create costs and statistics for new units. Years later, a forum poster tried to apply the book’s formulas to replicate the presented costs and statistics, but they were often unable to get the book’s exact numbers. The developer response was

All of the values were created using that formula. I have an enormous spreadsheet with numerous tabs and it took literally months. The formula is quite complex so that's why I did it all for you in advance. Some values for particular units were then rounded based on playtesting when they proved too cheap or too expensive… There are dozens of such case-by-case adjustments throughout the rosters - it would take me hours to outline every single one.

[Thaluikhain]

The films include both Arnie Conan movies, as well as the Jason Momoa one and the 90s Kull movie. The 2012 John Carter and Wrath of the Titans movies get recommended, but I can’t say I’ve ever even met someone in real life who had seen either.

I liked the John Carter movie. Out of interest, do they mention the original novels, or just the adaptations?

(As an aside, I think the movie of John Carter improved on the original stories in certain ways, notable you had women that did things other than be "incomparable" and get kidnapped)

[angelfromanotherpin]

John Carter was a perfectly okay movie. It's not Curse of the Black Pearl, because the performers mostly aren't as good and the plot isn't as tight, but it's big imaginative fun.

[Blicero]

I liked the John Carter movie. Out of interest, do they mention the original novels, or just the adaptations?

Yeah, from ERB, the Barsoom, Tarzan, Venus, and Pellucidar stories are all recommended. I've never read any of his work, it might be the biggest gap in my knowledge of pre-Tolkien fantasy and science fiction.

Thinking back, this book plays its fantastic aspects more or less straight, which is perhaps surprising given that pulp literature often didn't really obey genre divisions in our modern sense. Concurrent with this book, Autarch released a "Barbarian Conquerors of Kanahu" splatbook; I haven't read it, but I think it embraces more of the science fantasy inspirations that this book neglects.

[Username17]

The Deed of Paksenarrion is AD&D fanfiction from 1988 about a woman whose character class changes from Fighter to Paladin on account of being awesome. Apparently there was a made-for-TV adaptation of it in Australia in 2016? I had no idea.

Anyway, Paksenarrion is a perfectly fine piece of D&D fiction, but we're basically one step away from asking that people read War of the Lance or The Dark Elf Trilogy.

The Chosen’s [i.e., the “Thomas Covenant” class] trade-offs dos [sic] not follow the rules as written in Player’s Companion. The PC rules slightly subsidize the number of powers available when making trade offs… The trade-off subsidy is intended to encourage more tradeoffs and is balanced by the fact that most campaigns rarely reach the highest levels (despite my best design efforts to encourage it). When taken to the extremes used by the Chosen, however, the subsidy yields too many powers at high levels for play balance.

Wait, what? ACKS has its own XP charts, and in any case embraces old school bullshit where Fighters could like 3 hit points a level and nothing after an arbitrary point. If the author thought that a class they had written was too powerful at high level, they could just slow down character advancement such that they got to level 12 when other players got to level 14. Or they could pad things out with levels that gave shitty powers or no powers at all.

The entire point of not having sensible and comparable character advancement between classes is supposedly that you have full control over balance. If you just openly admit that you don't have that, shouldn't you fucking work on it a bit until you can at least pretend that you do?

-Username17

[SeekritLurker]

The Deed of Paksenarrion is AD&D fanfiction from 1988 about a woman whose character class changes from Fighter to Paladin on account of being awesome. Apparently there was a made-for-TV adaptation of it in Australia in 2016? I had no idea.

What? Ah, crap, I gotta find that for the spouse. Even if it's bad.

Paksenarrion is a pretty good read, though I didn't care as much for either the prequel duology or the followup series.

[deaddmwalking]

Frank, the folks over at theRPGsite decided to repost your comments for the specific purpose of making fun of you.

Macris responds.