OSSR: Adventurer Conquerer King: Player’s Companion
Kind of an odd picture for the cover, honestly.
The research rules gives additional depth to the spellcaster endgame. They take up almost a third of this book. Guess how many pages are dedicated to rules for characters who don’t cast spells? Go ahead now, don’t be shy. If your guess was somewhere between “fuck” and “all”, congratulations. As a prize, you’re allowed to go suck a wizard’s cock. Go you.
So let’s get into this review. Up first, we have new classes.
Ch 1: New Classes
As with the core book, the art in this chapter is really badass.
So here’s the classes.
- Anti-Paladin: Blahblah standard dark knight character. They’re good at becoming undead, which is cool. They don’t tank as well as fighters do, since they only get d6 HD, but this makes them level up faster. (Recall, though, that the ACKS fighter only gets 1d8 HD.) The title of a 1st level Blackguard is “Miscreant”, which puts me in mind more of a rebellious child than a servant of the dark gods, but whatever.
- Barbarian: Don’t actually get a Rage ability, oddly enough. They choose whether to be good at climbing, running, or precise shooting, which also affects what weapons they’re allowed to use.
- Dwarven Delver: Gimped dwarf-only rogue. They can’t pick locks, they can only find (but not disable) traps, and they take way longer to level up. In return, they get the standard dwarven abilities, and they have a 60% chance of remembering the path they took while navigating underground. Pass.
- Dwarven Fury: Dwarven berserkers that are actually pretty cool. Instead of wearing armor, they have magical runes that give them damage reduction and slightly subpar AC bonuses. The damage reduction works per die of damage taken, making it relevant. They do get rage, but they can’t retreat while raging.
- Dwarven Machinist: Steampunk ahoy! Lovely concept, terrible execution. Machinists get to design and create automata minions, but the guidelines for these minions are really really bare. Making anything other than a transport or an attack spammer is basically Mother May I with the MC. Automata are also crazy expensive at low levels: a basic 2 HD minion that can fly costs 9k gp. My suspicions are that, at low and mid levels, the Machinist does very little machining and is really just a shitty rogue. They might be more fun at high levels, I don’t know. Pass.
- Elven Courtier: An Elven bard- or troubadour-esque class. They get music and diplomacy stuff, level up slowly, and cast spells as wizards of half their level.
- Elven Enchanter: Elven mage who is particularly good at charms and illusions. Their leveling rate is only slightly slower than that of human mages, so they might be worthwhile.
- Elven Ranger: The Legolas class. They’re described as being the best archers in the world. Hilariously, there is no mechanical justification for this claim.
- Gnomish Trickster: Thief/illusionist hybrid. Kind of boring.
- Mystic: Monk. Another surprisingly cool class. They attack as fighters (making them relevant sword-dudes), but they have kind of shitty AC. At 4th level, they can start using a nonmagical version of the divination spell. The fluff for this ability is clearly stolen from the Bakker’s Dunyain, which I approve of. They can also charm people that they meet. By the standards of an ACKS class, the Mystic is pretty damn neat, with a decent mix of combat and noncombat abilities. The downside is that WIS, DEX, CON, and CHA are all your prime requisites, so you’ll probably level pretty slowly.
- Nobiran Wonderworker: Mystic Theurge. They level up really slowly, but they get a lot of spells per day. Since we’re not in the 3.x paradigm where you mostly fight level-appropriate encounters and thus need level-appropriate abilities, this might be a fair trade. You’re never going to get a chance to play this class though, since every one of your abilities scores need to be at least 11.
- Paladin: Holy warrior. Unsurprisingly, it feels like they took the anti-paladin class and multiplied everything by -1.
- Priestess: You’re a cleric who has exchanged your fighting ability for a shit-tonne more spells per day and some vaguely defined but probably annoying roleplaying strictures.
- Shaman: Druid-type class. You get divine spellcasting, an animal companion of a specific type, and eventually the ability to turn into an animal of the same type as your companion. The different animal forms don’t even try to be balanced. You could have a rat as your companion, or you could have a motherfucking bear.
- Thrassian Gladiator: In ACKS-land, Thrassians are badass lizard men. They fight better than fighters, and they also get nasty claws and innate natural armor. Pretty neat.
- Venturer: A class dedicated to being a merchant. You eventually get some spells, but you’re mostly kind of a shitty thief. This seems like maybe a decent guy to have around as a hireling, but I can’t imagine many players wanting to use it.
- Warlock: Evillllllllll wizard! Your spellcasting is more limited, but you also get to cast 3.5’s bestow curse on people, turn undead, summon baddies, and use a really really vague version of alter self. Also, at 14th level (which, recall, is the last level in the game), you are now able to learn cause disease, speak with dead, cause serious wounds, and finger of death. You don’t learn these spells automatically or anything, so you still have to go out and find scrolls or whatever. I don’t get what the meaning behind this ability is at all.
- Witch: There are differences between this class and the Priestess class, but they are exceedingly minor.
- Zaharan Ruinguard: The “I want to be Elric” class. An fun-looking evil-themed gish.
Ch 2: Class Templates
I’m also covering this chapter, because it’s short. Here we just get a bunch of tables that let you generate 1st level characters of any class really quickly. Each class gets 8 templates. Each template consists of a proficiency and some gear, all of which are thematically coherent. The templates ascend in order from poor to affluent. This is so that, when you’re making your character, you can roll for a template instead of rolling for your starting wealth. The templates don’t go beyond 1st level, because that would be too useful.
All together, the templates cover 20 pages, which is a substantive bit of pagecount for something that will probably see minimal use after the first few sessions of a game.
Next up: Custom class creation; Or, how to fail badly at a difficult task
