OSSR: ACKS Heroic Fantasy Handbook

[Blicero]

ACKS: Heroic Fantasy Handbook

Not totally sure what’s going on with her torso, but it looks painful

What is Adventurer Conqueror King System (ACKS)?
It’s a D&D “retroclone” based on the basic / “red box” ruleset from the early 80s. Its key selling points are (1) a fairly in-depth economy system that gives Mr. Cavern guidelines for everything from how many daggers the PCs can expect to be able to buy in a small town to rules for running long-distance arbitrage mercantile ventures, (2) a much more fleshed out endgame in which fighters are lords with lands and armies, thieves run guilds, etc., and (3) more player-facing rules options than many other “OSR” games, in the form of a feats-lite proficiency system and a fairly wide range of character classes, and (4) “mortal wounds” and “tampering with mortality” tables that make both getting knocked unconscious and getting raised from the dead exciting and unpredictable.

Why should I care?
ACKS is the D&D-like that best captures what I want out of D&D. Things start out simple, deadly, and tragicomic, but compared to other high-mortality clones like LotFP or DCC, PCs can eventually gain a reasonable amount of stability and power. The economics rules encourage Mr. Caverns to be transparent about how their world works, which incentivizes player interaction with those systems. The rules enable play at multiple scales, from low-level dungeon-crawling, to mid-level hexcrawling and mass combat, to high-level domain rule. The rules aren’t perfect, and they have their share of anachronisms, but I find ACKS to require far less houseruling than, say, 3.x, to be good-enough.

Can I learn more?
I did an OSSR of the main ACKS book and a more-or-less finished OSSR of the player splatbook. Frank started sketching out how to apply ACKS’ insights to general 3.x.

Heroic Fantasy Handbook

This book, from the recent year of our lord 2017, is a combination of a bestiary, player splatbook, and Unearthed Arcana-style alternate rules compendium. It seems to have made pretty minimal impact on the RPG community, possibly because of who the author is. If you're willing to overlook its author's associations (which you are by no means required to be willing to overlook), I think it has some pretty neat contents.

Collectively, its contents try to take the “vanilla D&D” style of base ACKS, with +1 swords, clerics that turn undead, and wizards that cast sleep, and make it feel more like sword-and-sorcery (or, as the authors prefer to call it for reasons we’ll get to, “heroic fantasy”). Even more than normal old-school D&D, the HFH channels the literary inspirations of Robert E Howard, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, Tolkien, and others. As a supplement, the HFH draws natural comparison with 3e-era books like Conan d20 and Iron Heroes. Unlike Iron Heroes, it’s a functional product.

Its main contribution is three different systems for magic: improvisational “spellsinging”, relatively subtle “eldritch” magic, and scholarly “ceremonial magic” with time-consuming rituals. This is all still based on the ACKS D&D chassis, so you can take more-or-less any pre-3.5 D&D adventure, monster, or item and use it with a little bit of conversion. I want to emphasize that ACKS operates on fundamentally different assumptions than 3e and onward with respect to what constitutes a level-appropriate challenge. In ACKS, the power levels are low enough that clever and/or lucky play can often yield victory over high-level opponents. Your goal is to extract treasure from dungeons and return it to civilization, not wrestle each of the evil duke’s guard dogs into submission. Also, running into something that’s out of your league is meant to be an understood hazard: maybe you’ll lose a henchman or even a character, but the game will go on.

Chapter 1: Introduction

This “chapter” is only one-and-a-half pages long, and a lot of that is just an expanded table of contents. The key element is their definition of heroic fantasy, inspired by some essay called “The Demarcation of Sword and Sorcery”:

[F]or purposes of this book, we define “heroic fantasy” as what the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and Robert E. Howard have in common, once you remove what’s different… But though they are opposites, they are opposite faces of the same coin; and that coin is what we call heroic fantasy. Tolkien and Howard have more in common with each other, and with the epics, sagas, and heroic elegies of the past, and with contemporary luminaries such as E.R. Burroughs, Clark Ashton Smith, and H.P. Lovecraft, than with many of their contemporary epigones.

I can roll with that, but I’m not a scholar of the field or anything. I think the added rules do a good job for enabling Howard, Smith, and Lovecraft-style play. But, despite a lot of Tolkien-inspired classes, because everything is still based around XP-for-gold, it’s difficult to reconcile this book with the majority of Tolkien’s work.

This book is already full of alternative rules, but the author goes further and introduces alternative alternative rules, meant to even more explicitly evoke specific authors. This is an okay idea, but it kind of fails in practice, mostly because these alternative alternative rules are barely present. The intent seems to be that Mr. Cavern would say “I’m going to run a Lovecraft-style campaign” and be able to go through the book and identify what classes, spells, and rules changes are appropriate, but there’s literally only a single “HP Lovecraft rule” in the book.

Building on that specific issue, the book really could have used another editing pass or five. There are neither hyperlinks nor bookmarks in the .pdf. The first real chapter is almost seventy pages long; it includes new and modified rules, new and modified character classes, new and modified proficiencies, and new and modified equipment. In contrast, chapters 3 and 4 (more new and modified rules), are only thirteen pages long in total. It doesn’t fully explain its killer app, the new magic systems, until almost a hundred pages in. The first time you read this book, you won’t know what ceremonial magic is, but you’ll see it mentioned in six different class descriptions. Class descriptions tend toward unneeded verbosity. In contrast, the prior ACKS books were all pretty solid as products.

I won’t do all of chapter 2 in a single post, and I’ve been rambling for a while now, so expect new classes next.

[OgreBattle]

Cool didn’t know about this ACKS book, curious about the different magic systems

[Blicero]

Chapter 2: Heroes

aka

New classes

The ACKS art is generally really good

This is about fifty or fifty-five of Chapter 2’s seventy pages.

By the standards of any D&D-clone, ACKS has a lot of classes. The core book has twelve, the Player’s Companion introduces nineteen more, and this book adds another seventeen.

These classes are very much not all detailed at the same level of resolution. The core fighter is meant to represent almost anyone whose primary skillset involves stabbing people in the face, and (somewhat contrary to my comments in the original ACKS OSSR), it sort of succeeds at this goal. In contrast, this book introduces the “warmistress” class, which is a “female high-Dex high-Cha light-armor fighter” class that can basically only embody some convex combination of the REH character Belit and the Marvel Comics character Red Sonja. It also steps mightily on the thematic toes of the “female high-Dex high-Cha light-armor cleric” core class of “bladedancer”.

However, this sort of specificity is sort of necessitated by the implementation details of ACKS’ proficiency system. For example, core ACKS has a proficiency called “prophecy” that gives your character weekly access to the commune spell. If your only classes were “fighter, rogue, cleric, wizard”, you would want anyone to be able to choose the “prophecy” proficiency; it’s a cool thematic ability that doesn’t break anything. But once (1) you have fighters, gladiators, and warmistresses, and everything, and (2) you’ve decided that warmistresses should be able to get “prophecy” but gladiators shouldn’t, and (3) your fighter class is theoretically supposed to encompass both the warmistress and the gladiator, and (4) your knowledge of set theory is kind of nonstandard, then you can justify warmistresses getting “prophecy” but fighters not getting it. The intensity of this problem is exacerbated once you account for the existence of the “precise shooting” and “sniping” proficiencies, as well as a bunch more. A Classplosion was kind of inevitable.

So this book has a classplosion of “heroic fantasy” archetypes. We want to keep in mind that ACKS uses a sort of “race-as-class”, where demihumans can choose from a restricted subset of race-specific classes; these classes are sometimes more or less identical to their human versions and sometimes novel. The “dwarven vaultguard” is just a fighter, but the “elven spellsword” is a gish that humans can’t be. Also, different classes require different XP amounts to level up and have different maximum levels, but it doesn’t really matter for the majority of games, except when it does, since a few classes are generally observed to be either underpriced or overpriced for their respective XP tracks.

In ACKS, class writeups have a very natural language format. For example, instead of some table of the form

Bard
Attack: As thief
Weapons: As thief
Armor: Leather, no shields
Abilities: ...

the ACKS bard has this paragraph:

Bards advance in attack throws and saving throws as a thief, by two points every four levels of experience. At first level, bards hit an unarmored foe (AC 0) with an attack throw of 10+. They may fight with any missile weapons and any one-handed melee weapons, and may wield a weapon in each hand if desired. They cannot wear armor heavier than leather, and cannot use shields.

This works when you can describe an entire class in two tables and half a page of text. The core book accomplishes this. But as soon as you add any degree of player choice or extraneous fluff to a class, it quickly becomes difficult to scan. Almost every HFH class has player choices and extraneous fluff, and it’s not great. For example, every class begins with a lengthy quote from its pertinent literary inspiration. Some class writeups last for three to five pages, and ACKS’ fondness for uninformative bolding really bites it in the ass. Consider:

A freebooter’s plundering pursuits are shaped by his path to wealth. There are four paths to wealth available to a freebooter: Expeditionary, Ruffian, Scoundrel, and Wayfarer. Each path offers a different set of abilities reflecting that path’s preferred methods to accumulate wealth. When a freebooter is created, select a path for the character from the Paths to Wealth table below, and write down the proficiencies and powers of the path.

If you’re skimming this and trying to decide if you want your character to be a Freebooter, the bolding of “path to wealth” tells you nothing. You have to scan through more sentences to realize “oh, this is just a subclass”.

So, the new classes are:

• Tarzan (beastmaster)
• Beorn (berserker)
• Thomas Covenant (chosen)
• A priest from a CAS Averoigne story (ecclesiastic)
• Luthien (elven spellsinger)
• Both Fahfrd and the Grey Mouser (freebooter)
• Some generic hobbit “shirriff” (halfling bounder)
• Bilbo (halfing burglar)
• A source-agnostic “loremaster” (loremaster)
• Aragorn, with several variations (nobiran champion)
• A wizard from a CAS Averoigne story, cast as one of Tolkien’s wizards (nobiran wizard)
• A Conan-style occultist (occultist)
• A Viking runesmith (runemaker)
• A CAS necromancer, interpreted as an evil lizard-man (thrassian deathchanter)
• The aforementioned Belit/Red Sonja combo (warmistress)
• Sauron (zaharan darklord)
• A Conan-style sorcerer (zaharan sorcerer)

Astute readers will notice that some of the words in parentheses are made up, even by the standards of D&D.

• Nobirans are aasimars. They have very restrictive ability score requirements, so you won’t see many of them in RAW.
• Thrassians are badass sorcerous lizard-people. Every time I’ve run ACKS, they’ve been hugely popular.
• Zaharans are tieflings, with an unfortunate racial element of always being brown-skinned (in the game’s implicit setting).

• To reiterate from the first post, of these classes that cast spells, some do it via spellsinging, some do it via ceremonies, and others just cast spells. It may not have been clear before, but this book’s spellcasting framework is meant to be distinct from the existing arcane vs. divine divide.
• Sort of new to ACKS in this book is subclasses for some classes. For example, the Nobiran Wizard can either be a “Wizard of Artifice” (Sauruman), a “Wizard of Fellowship” (Gandalf), a “Wizard of Lore” (Gandalf again, maybe?), or a “Wizard of Nature” (Radagast).
• I’m young enough that my preferred Tarzan is George of the Jungle, but I’ve noticed that the original E.R. Burroughs Tarzan stories left their mark on a lot of older D&D players.

The magic-using classes mostly use a basic chassis for some flavor of spellcasting; the fighting classes mostly start with some pick-and-choose set of thief abilities and extra proficiencies. There are some new abilities that appear in this book: The Nobiran Champion gets extra hit points when their domain is happy and prosperous, and their domain loses prosperity if the Champion becomes corrupt. That’s a fun literalization of the Fisher King.

So most classes don’t get any ground-shaking abilities, but ACKS is just rules-heavy enough that interesting synergies exist. For example, here is an analysis of how to best use the Barbarian class:

• Be in the front line
• Enemy fails surprise about half the time because you are naturally stealthy. You, of course, do not fail surprise much because you have Combat Reflexes
• In the surprise round, you charge in with a spear or two-handed weapon and Ambushing and try to cleave up a bunch of guys in the surprise round and force penalized morale rolls
• If that works, then they flee and you win
• If that doesn't, they whale on you, Con and Savage Resilience keep you alive until the party can recover you or you can disengage.
• If you don't get surprise, you are sad, possibly fall back into the second row.

That’s fun, and it’s very different from how a fighter or paladin might approach a fight.

It’s also nice that ACKS remembers what previous books it has published, and so it designs new classes that can interact with other supplements. Its Domains at War supplement presents systems for mass combat and the sorts of situations one encounters while preparing and carrying out a military campaign. The Lairs & Encounters supplement gives systems for discovering monster lairs in large wilderness hexes and destroying them (this is a lot of what mid-level ACKS consists of). In this book, the Nobiran Champion-Ranger gets an ability that makes them much more effective at clearing hexes than normal characters, as well as an ability that makes them more effective at out-maneuvering enemy armies in the leadup to a battle. So this makes ACKS feel like a coherent product where everything is meant to work in concert with everything else.

This chapter also tells you how to modify some existing ACKS classes to adhere to HFH standards. For example, the ACKS Core Elven Spellsword now gets spellsinging (which the first-time reader still doesn’t understand) instead of arcane spells. This is all fine. There’s a couple of detail-specific modifications that could be hard to keep track of, but it gets much worse for proficiencies, so I’ll save those complaints until then.

Before I get into bullshit nitpicks, I want to emphasize that a lot of these classes are really cool! The Beorn class starts out with berserker rage, then becomes able to turn into a bear, and finally gets access to a spiritwalk that lets them bypass solid obstacles. That’s pretty neat!, and it has mythological resonance. The Thomas Covenant class is really more of a “develop your own character” class, and it has a bunch of options to theorycraft through, including spellcasting, fighting prowess, and weird supernatural abilities. The Sauron class can casually control orcs, goblins, etc. in the same way an evil cleric can control undead.

Some of these classes function as straight-up replacements of existing Core classes, and I find the HFH replacements to be invariably superior. As a lot of people on this and other fora have noted, the D&D cleric is sort of thematically incoherent. It combines necessary but general game-mechanical role of healer with very thematically specific spells inspired by Judeo-Christian stories and Hammer Horror movies.

In contrast, the HFH introduces an ecclesiastic class that represents a more specific “scholarly religious figure”. It doesn’t need to generalize to other faiths, because, in this book alone, religion-affiliated characters could easily be modeled by occultists, runemakers, or deathchanters. From the Player’s Companion, you can also have paladins, shaman, and witches, with the latter two reformulated to use this book’s new spellcasting. Because of the Healing proficiency, it’s also possible to spread out healing duties among the entire party. So, at least as far as the “Introduce rules that better conform to what Blicero thinks D&D should be” metric, this is really good!

My caveat is that, although I’ve run a fair amount of Core ACKS, I haven’t had a chance to run any HFH ACKS. So it’s possible that some of these classes could be underpowered or overpowered in non-obvious ways.

Something that pops out at me is the Freebooter (Fahrd + Grey Mouser) class. If you’re not aware of the general discourse, a common belief is that, in ACKS, and in other OSR games, thieves suck. In Basic D&D, and in ACKS, thieves have d4 hit dice, minimal weapon options, a backstab that’s significantly worse than the 3e sneak attack, and “thief abilities” like open lock, find traps, etc., that are very unreliable at low levels. (The preferred paradigm is to handle low-level traps in a case-based “mother may I” / “player skill” style that is independent of character class.) Their saving grace is that they level up quickly, but the jury’s out on whether this is worth it.

ACKS core had two thief hotfixes: The Assassin traded some less-used thief abilities for better combat abilities, and the Elven Nightblade was a thief/mage hybrid. ACKS core also enables a meta-strategy of relegating all the trap-finding, lock-opening duties to disposable thief henchmen.

The HFH introduces thief rules modifications, which I’ll discuss later, as well as a sort-of thief replacement class, the Freebooter. Unlike the core thief, the Freebooter attacks as a fighter, so they’re not totally useless in a fight. You choose from several subclasses (“expeditionary”, “ruffian”, “scoundrel”, “wayfarer”) that determine what specific thief abilities you get access to. But, ultimately, every Freebooter is still stuck with 1d4 hit die and light armor, while being saddled with worse XP progression than the base thief. (Keep in mind that ACKS characters shouldn’t rely on having a Con bonus.) So, in this case, I’m skeptical that the new class adds anything useful.

The classplosion introduces some namespace conflicts. Consider the following:

• ACKS Core has a monster entry for Berserkers; these are, mechanically, fighters
• ACKS Core has a proficiency called “Berserkergang” that lets you enter a barbarian rage in which you gain a bonus to hit and a penalty to armor class
• ACKS Core features a PC class called the “Explorer”; its descriptions notes that “barbarian hunters” are best modeled as Explorers. They’re not allowed to learn Berserkergang.
• ACKS Player’s Companion introduces a “Barbarian” class that is meant to model either Viking raiders, Central Asian horse archers, or Northern African nomads. None of these archetypes starts with “Berserkgang”, but they’re allowed to pick it up.
• ACKS Heroic Fantasy Handbook has the “Berserker” class. Like the ACKS Barbarian, it has a “savage resilience” ability that functions as an actually-good Diehard feat. The Berserker starts with “lesser berserkergang”, which amounts to the Berserkergang proficiency, and they eventually get a “greater berserkergang” ability that also imparts a bonus to damage in addition to the “lesser berserkergang” effects.
• ACKS Player’s Companion has a “Dwarven Fury” class. I don’t really know Warhammer, but I think this is meant to be a Dwarf Slayer. Like the Barbarian and Berserker, they get “Savage Resilience”, damage-reduction, and a “fighting fury” rage which gives them bonuses to damage, but none of the berserkergang effects. They’re not allowed to pick up the Berserkergang proficiency.

So this is all kind of confusing. If you walk into an ACKS game wanting to play “a barbarian”, there are a bunch of mutually contradictory choices you have to make, and you really have no way of making them beyond reading the nitty-gritty of the rules. And if you want something slightly nonstandard like an elf barbarian, you’re SOL. (To be honest, this might be an inevitable consequence of a ruleset that dynamically grows bottom-up instead of being designed statically top-down.) There’s a similar degree of namespace confusion with the Explorer, Barbarian, Elven Ranger, and Nobiran Champion-Ranger.

But, to ask the obvious question that most readers of this book will probably ask: If I want to be Conan, what class should I be? The ACKS Barbarian’s art is at least Conan-adjacent (you can see it in this post's spoilered image), but I don’t know that Conan is better modeled by one of {Viking Raider, Central Asian horse archer, Northern African nomad} than he is by the base fighter class. He’s definitely not an ACKS Berserker, despite the fact that he definitely goes into “greater berserkgang” rages.

My claim: If you’re making a “heroic fantasy” D&D hack, and you have a goddamn Thomas Covenant-specific class but you don’t have a Conan-specific class, you are probably doing something wrong.

Next up: I’m going to gather all the alternate and new rules that aren’t new classes. If there are any classes you want to hear more about, feel free to ask.

[Username17]

ACKS is different from MYFAROG in the sense that it has some good ideas in it. It is not different in the sense that supporting it financially in any way, even indirectly is ethically inexcusable.

Alexander Macris was the actual owner of the company created for Milo to tour the country radicalizing potential racist terrorists. Since then, 8Chan has been shut down for its close links to multiple terrorist attacks killing dozens of people. In any sane world, Alexander Macris would be writing these things from jail.

There was a time that I thought all the weirdness about racial character classes was just a bloody minded adherence to old school tropes for its own sake. Turns out that he's a racist shitheel who financed a terrorist network and is personally responsible for the deaths of dozens if not hundreds of people.

But it's also true that a bad man can paint a good picture or whatever, and ACKS has infinitely more good ideas to steal than MYFAROG or RAHOWA do. What is it about racist terrorists that inspires them to make acronymized names for their games? Should I be checking Steve Jackson's house for Confederate memorabilia?

-Username17

[Blicero]

My preferred justification is "any money made off of ACKS is fucking pennies; this is a game that quite possibly fewer than a thousand people have ever played". I fully acknowledge that this is a self-serving excuse: it allows me to casually peruse ACKS products without considering the awfulness my dollars may have indirectly enabled. It's a hill on which I currently stand but don't have any desire to die upon.

[Mistborn]

My preferred justification is "any money made off of ACKS is fucking pennies; this is a game that quite possibly fewer than a thousand people have ever played". I fully acknowledge that this is a self-serving excuse: it allows me to casually peruse ACKS products without considering the awfulness my dollars may have indirectly enabled. It's a hill on which I currently stand but don't have any desire to die upon.

If you want to enjoy someones RPG product but are leery of giving them money, there is an alternative.

[Omegonthesane]

My preferred justification is "any money made off of ACKS is fucking pennies; this is a game that quite possibly fewer than a thousand people have ever played". I fully acknowledge that this is a self-serving excuse: it allows me to casually peruse ACKS products without considering the awfulness my dollars may have indirectly enabled. It's a hill on which I currently stand but don't have any desire to die upon.

If you want to enjoy someones RPG product but are leery of giving them money, there is an alternative.

This definitely isn't how I got access to all the D&D 3.5 material. *shifty eyes*

[Username17]

Dungeons & Dragons has a number of tropes in it that are difficult to justify morally. Often we handwave that off with ideas that it's just a game, or that there probably is some overriding justification for whatever violence is used but that neither the justness of the Halfling cause nor the injustice of the orc position are particularly relevant to the story about dashing knights and cunning wizards fighting battles. Saturday morning cartoon morality may suffice because we're potentially telling stories in the genre and inspired by actual Saturday morning cartoons.

However, we can't really extend that kind of good faith to ACKS, because it turns out to be written by a guy who is almost exactly Osama Bin Laden. I do not make that comparison lightly or in jest. He literally and specifically financed and supported a quite significant network of people for whom radicalizing potential terrorists was a full time job.

So the stuff where in ACKS you're supposed to go to the homes of people who look different than you, murder them, and take their gold can't really be blithely accepted as being merely hockey the way the original Gygaxianisms could. Gygax was your racist but good meaning uncle, Alexander Macris is only you're uncle if you're a Saudi prince with a family fortune of blood money to protect.

Similarly you have various tropes and events in classic fantasy literature which are potentially offensive or things that give wood to white supremacists simply because of when they were made. Tolkien was explicitly against white supremacy as an ideology, but you can definitely see why actual white supremacists think his stuff about inherently noble and powerful Numenorians is him speaking their language. Tolkien writing then was him writing in as anti-racist a manner as he was able to given his time and place and background. We extend understanding and allowance for Tolkien that we would not do for someone writing the same things today. And indeed, when Alexander Macris writes Numernor expies, we don't give him the benefit of the doubt. We don't have doubt for him to benefit from. It's racist eliminationalist rhetoric that is disgusting when Alexander Macris writes this shit in 2017.

-Username17

[ETortoise]

The Kickstarter for this book actually led to me finding out Macris is an alt-right executive after reading a thread on Autarch's forums.

Vox Day put up the money to have a custom class put in the book. It was going to be a dark lord trope and he joked online about how the illustration would feature the Dark Lord "devouring SJWs." In the forum thread about it, I saw the inherent right-wing bias of the OSR movement, some bullshit "let's hear both sides" arguments, and some weird statements from Macris. The one that made me go, "Who is this guy?" was when he said he thinks boycotting business you don't agree with is morally wrong. Then he talked about all the companies he's run where he juxtaposed hiring trans and non-binary people with giving platforms to those who hate them as morally equivalent actions that prove he's "True Neutral." He also seemed like he was on speaking terms with Beale, which led me to do a little googling, which led me to give up on ACKS as a game.

In retrospect, the fact that he's a history buff interested in late antiquity was a huge red flag.

There are wars between races in ACKS, but they are Zaharans v. Thrassians, Elves v. Orcs, and so on.

Like you said above Frank, these tropes are common to fantasy literature and gaming, but are also part of the real worldview of right-wing lunatics.

On a larger level, I do not claim to have any answers to the deep divide that has shattered American civil society

The fact that he could say this while profiting on exacerbating this very divide is infuriating. At this point I think Macris's connection to Milo was still unknown to the posters on the ACKS forums. I can't remember when that got out.

[jt]

I didn't know that the ACKS guy was an alt-right shit. That's really sad: I like ACKS, or at least the ideas that ACKS repopularized.

And yeah, separating the artist from the art is one thing, but adding conquest to a genre that's already got some messy colonialist baggage is something I'd rather see tackled carefully, and by someone who doesn't think real-world races have stat modifiers.

[Blicero]

ACKS’ Auran Empire implicit setting has turned out to be mostly dissatisfying. Its ancient history is pretty neat: you have the swingy tragicomic nature of low-level D&D explained as the gods of chaos breaking the setting’s “tablets of destiny” and keeping the gods of law from ensuring that good actions consistently produce good outcomes. Successive empires of elves, lizard-men, and not-Persians all rise and then get corrupted by spacefaring not-mindflayers before falling, creating a huge diversity of ruins wherever you adventure to. There’s also a sense of XP as an actual metaphysical force that drives godhood and divinity.

The start-of-campaign time is less interesting, it can be pithily summarized with “Hey, what if Late Antiquity, but the Carthaginians and Egyptians were actual demon-worshippers, the Romans had the blessing of the gods of good, and the barbarians were replaced by chaos-spawned beastmen?” This, admittedly, works very well with the default dungeon-crawling assumptions of low-to-mid-level D&D, but it presents little opportunity to deal with the casual cruelty of Empire, the various “continuity vs catastrophe” theories about the fall of Rome, or a lot of other uses of the historical inspiration. And for reasons discussed by the posters in this thread, it may leave a bitter taste in your mouth.

Vox Day put up the money to have a custom class put in the book. It was going to be a dark lord trope and he joked online about how the illustration would feature the Dark Lord "devouring SJWs."

This is all true (the class in question is the Sauron one), but I don’t think it was ever seriously planned to include such an illustration. If it was, it didn’t make it in.

Alternate rules

aka

Chapter Two: Heroes, Chapter Three: Heroic Deeds, Chapter Four: Heroic Adventures

A bunch of different alternative rules intended to make D&D feel more like heroic fantasy. Some are neat, many are meh.

Increased survivability

ACKS can be a very high-mortality game, especially at low levels. To counter this, the raise dead equivalent only costs a few hundred gold pieces and is available in towns with more than a few thousand inhabitants. As we’ll get to, the default HFH rules make it more difficult to raise dead; as such, “heroic characters” get bonuses to their Mortal Wounds saves (which determine if, after being knocked unconscious, you’re dead, maimed, or mostly okay). Healing effects are redone so that they heal an amount based on their level and the target’s maximum HP, but, unfortunately, this second change is phrased in terms of the old “Does getting taken from 30 hp to 1 hp mean that you’ve been stabbed and cut a dozen times, or does it mean that your endurance was slowly worn down until an enemy got lucky” debate that some people care deeply about.

A monumentally bad “Khal Drogo Memorial Rule” tries to model sepsis but can require an incapacitated but recovering character to make up to forty-five (!) saving throws to determine if they survive. This is the sort of thing that gives low-magic D&D a bad name. More generally, I don’t know what a good way to model long-term healing in RPGs is. Basic D&D hit points work well for encounter-to-encounter play, but I find them dissatisfying from a narrative perspective. In ACKS, you may need to convalesce from a bad wound for up to a month, but, conditional on passing the initial save, your recovery is guaranteed. After Sundown has an interesting system for wounds and healing, but, when I ran it, my players and I found it difficult to internalize.

Proficiencies and equipment

A lot of proficiencies get modified, and a few new ones get added. The modifications are fine and thematically appropriate, but the issue is their presentation. If you’re making a character for an HFH game but using a Core class, you’ll choose some proficiencies from the Core book and then have to go to the HFH and check if any of the proficiencies you chose actually do something different. The Player’s Companion also introduces a few new proficiencies that you might want to choose from, which is another book to flip through. This book should have come with a .pdf of all the unmodified Core proficiencies and the new and modified ones from here.

This book also introduces a few pieces of equipment: arena armor, helmets, the cestus, and herbs that mimic healing and restorative spells but aren’t magical. I like the inclusion of the herbs, it shows the designer thinking about what changes need to be made to D&D for it to be low-magic but playable. (Recall that ACKS has equipment availability-by-town and usable encumbrance rules, so it’s difficult to stock up on tens of thousands of gold pieces of healing herbs a la Demon’s Souls.)

The helmet rules are just a copypasta from the Player’s Companion, but the armor is an actual chainmail bikini:

A set of stylized armor designed to expose the wearer’s attractive form and musculature while fighting. Characters with clean-limbed bodies (STR, DEX, CON, and CHA all 11+) gain a +1 bonus to Seduction rolls when wearing arena armor.

Heroic codes, funerals, and fate

These are simple but fun. For the former, if you adhere to a code where you act like a pagan hero instead of a paranoid murder hobo, you get bonus XP. I find that “OSR” D&D works best when players are constantly considering risk-reward tradeoffs that have the potential for great wealth or hilarious deaths. The paranoid murder hobo is a justified response to a certain style of killer-dungeon, but it can also drain the fun out of minute-to-minute gameplay, so rules that incentivize players to break out of that mold are good. A similar idea was proposed where character can make boasts about what they’ll accomplish on an adventure, and, if they succeed in those boasts, they get bonus XP.

The latent commonality in both of these suggestions pushes D&D toward more of a competitive regime: Alice has boasted that her fighter could kill this troll without any magic, but Bob’s worried that, if Alice misjudges and gets knocked unconscious, the troll will pierce the party’s frontline and wreck his mage. So he’s tempted to throw in a fireball if the going gets tough, even if that ruins Alice’s chances of bonus XP. I often like the play these sorts of structures engender.

For heroic funerals, if a PC dies and the player blows most of their gold and treasure on a funeral, the player’s new character gets to start at a higher level. Simple, but effective and thematic. Finally, there are fate points. These are basically the same as they’re presented in other D&D books (the first time I saw them was in Unearthed Arcana, but, for all I know, they appeared in some random 2e splatbook first).

Combat rules

Exploding twenties (old hat), critical hit tables (nothing new), and some fun special maneuvers.

The first is a “clamber” procedure for characters (most effectively, mid-level thief-types with climbing and backstabbing) to scramble atop large monsters, be fairly protected from their attacks, and deal large amounts of damage by attacking weak points. Clambering only requires two rolls to initiate and then one roll a round to continue, so it’s risky but not an iterative probability nightmare. The second is a “sweeping attack” that lets fighters push moderately large numbers of nearby enemies around the battlefield. If you can manage to remember that these rules exist, I think they’d be fun.

Finally, the book introduces a poorly-explained rule where larger monsters take attack roll penalties against small things but gain an equal attack roll bonus against armored things (with some caveats). So, against giants, dragons, etc., heavy-armor characters are treated the same, but light-armor characters are harder to hit. At the cost of more bookkeeping, this creates a kind of neat dynamic where large numbers of weak enemies can wear down a monk but struggle against a fighter, even though the monk will be better at dodging a giant’s club.

Thief buffs and more equipment

The clambering and armor penetration rules give thieves a way to contribute against powerful enemies, but they still suffer from the fact that their thievery abilities almost never succeed. So now it’s easier to pick up bonuses to your thievery skills: by having a higher dexterity, not carrying much, and buying special equipment like padded boots. This makes the characters more effective, and it’s good to have more reasons to spend money, but I don’t know that it saves thievery skills. Compared to the 3e take-10 / take-20 skill paradigm, the old-school thief does not come off well.

This section also contains a weird illustration of two sides of a closed door. On one side, a party of adventurers is carefully checking the door for traps and unlocking it. On the other, every type beastman is lined up waiting patiently. It has a much goofier tone than any other illustration in an ACKS book, more like something from the AD&D DMG, maybe it’s an homage to a piece I’m forgetting about.

So that’s most of the general rules alterations. The good ones are good, but even the good ones make ACKS a less usable product by forcing you to flip through multiple books in short succession. That’s the weakness of any toolbox sourcebook. Magic is next.

[Thaluikhain]

“Hey, what if Late Antiquity, but the Carthaginians and Egyptians were actual demon-worshippers, the Romans had the blessing of the gods of good, and the barbarians were replaced by chaos-spawned beastmen?”

After reading the above threads about the people behind this, that sentence stands out. I mean, problem there at the best of times.

[Username17]

After Sundown has an interesting system for wounds and healing, but, when I ran it, my players and I found it difficult to internalize.

You ain't kidding. You can totally tell I wrote that particular rule while in medical school. It tries to simulate a lot of things that can happen during the healing process, but ultimately it's too fiddly. The kind of long-running illness and weakness from serious wounds is something that can happen, but generating that dynamically out of a series of dice rolls is probably too fiddly to be a thing you ever want to do at the game table. It's not quite "45 saving throws" but I certainly understand how you get there if you don't have anyone on hand to slap you when you get lost in the weeds.

Actual healing of major injuries is slow, painful, prone to setbacks, and in very few ways compatible with ongoing heroic adventure stories. I tell my surgical patients to not lift anything heavier than a bottle of coke or drive a car that doesn't have soft touch breaks for two weeks. Deconditioning after bed rest is significant and takes quite a while to recover from. The pull of the desire to simulate wounds in a manner that's remotely realistic and the desire to have the game not come to a screeching halt for several months every time a character gets into a sword fight are very much at odds.

I'm not saying the memorial rule is good. It is not. It is terrible. But I understand how you get there.

-Username17

[Blicero]

Heroic Magic

This is another long, poorly organized chapter. (It also has an impressively ill-fitting name, as much of the magic it covers is pretty villainous.)

By this point, the reader can deduce by context that this book overwrites most of how D&D does magic. They’ve seen terms like “ceremonial magic” and “eldritch magic”, but they don’t have any specific inkling of what these words mean. One might expect that this chapter would, at least, start on a strong note by finally laying its cards on the table. Instead, the very first section is a jargon-y clarification on how illusions work. No attempt to meet the reader halfway is made; you don’t even learn what ceremonial magic is for another twelve pages. (I will try to be more organized here, but no guarantees.)

Looking at the credits for this book and for ACKS core, the latter has three people listed as editors, but the former only has two “copy editors”. You can really tell. This book made almost three times as much on Kickstarter as Core did, so I wonder why editors weren’t hired.

Types of Magic

First, all the magic in this book is “eldritch”, which ACKS uses to mean “arcane but less showy”, hewing more closely to the sorts of magic you see in Howard and Tolkien. That’s a cool idea, I’m down with it. As with ACKS arcane magic, eldritch spellcasters know a potentially-wide range of spells, can retain only a small subset as a daily repertoire, and cast spontaneously from that repertoire. I want to emphasize that I really like how this “spontaneous Vancian” system works in practice, it’s one of the small changes ACKS makes that improves its quality of play.

As I said in the first post, there are three flavors of eldritch magic-users:

• Eldritch spellcasters don’t get any dedicated nomenclature, they’re just guys who happen to draw from the eldritch spell list. Only Nobirans (Aasimar), Zaharans (Tieflings), and Thrassians (lizard-men) get access to straight-up eldritch magic.
• Spellsingers are only allowed to be elves, they use mana points, and they can design and cast new spells on the fly, using the system in the Player’s Companion. If your reaction is “Wow, I can’t wait to see what clever solution ACKS utilizes for the time-problem of letting a player do a constrained optimization problem every time they want to do something, well.
• Ceremonialists cast eldritch spells in the form of rituals that generally take at least ten minutes to complete. Ceremonialists can do fun thematic things like perform ceremonies in combination with a bunch of other cultistscollaborators and improv ceremonies from musty old tomes they’ve just discovered, but their ceremonies can fail and make the caster be devoured by demons. Unlike other types of magic, characters of certain classes can learn ceremonial magic by choosing a specific proficiency.

There’s some complicated accounting (because of course there is) where, because ceremonial magic doesn’t require inborn talent to acquire, and it requires less effort to master, its classes get a faster XP progression than other eldritch magic users. This means that pure ceremonialists also get (slightly) better saving throws than pure eldritch spellcasters or spellsingers.

To its credit, ACKS realizes that the dynamic spells spellsinging system has the potential to make turns last orders of magnitude longer. Unfortunately, it doesn’t present a solution. The relevant passage is

Extemporaneous spellsinging can be a powerful tool, but it requires a significant degree of system mastery from the player and Judge to use… As magic is fickle and no mere mortal can always comprehend its workings, the Judge may veto or re-design any extemporaneous spell at his complete discretion where necessary for balance and fun.

As I (loosely) understand it, the Pathfinder Words of Power system tried to do something similar with spontaneously-generated spells, but the threads about it that I skimmed here didn’t give the impression that Paizo found a solution to the time-cost problem. If nothing else, spellsingers can restrict their attention to spells that actually exist, but it will probably vary person-by-person whether this feels like an unjust self-nerf.

In addition, eldritch spells is divided into flavors of black, grey, and white. If you’ve ever played a Final Fantasy game or read a shitty Dragonlance book, you can guess how these work. What I like is that spell flavors don’t actually restrict a spellcaster’s set of learnable spells. So a naive lawful ceremonialist could come across a tome detailing the secrets of controlling undead, and then, in a tomb-crawl beset by hordes of zombies, call upon that ancient discovered ritual to save the party at the cost of damnation. It’s not an original story, but it’s a fun one, and the ACKS HFH better supports it than a lot of base D&D.

This damnation is game-mechanically represented via a corruption point system for eldritch magic. The basic form shares similarities with the 3.5 Heroes of Horror: You gain corruption points for learning and casting black magic, and for using grey magic against Lawful and Neutral people. Once you get enough corruption points (a threshold based on your Wisdom), your alignment shifts toward Chaotic, and you start to accumulate mutations and disfigurations. You can force yourself to retain your original alignment at the cost of more mutations. Heroes of Horror rather infamously introduced a prestige class that let you break the RNG by acquiring enough corruption, but ACKS avoids this mistake. Corruption is fairly easy to acquire, never beneficial, and, in certain circumstances, getting too much of it can kill you.

Uniquely among eldritch spellcasters, ceremonialists also have traditions, which ACKS uses to mean “a thematically suggestive concept that isn’t utilized to its fullest”. The presented traditions are:

• Antiquarian
• Chthonic
• Liturgical
• Runic
• Shamanic
• Sylvan
• Theurgical

You read that list, and you’re like “fuck yeah everyone’s going to have custom spell lists and feel incredibly differentiated, this is the best book ever”.

That is not the case, and every ceremonialist goes off of the same base spell list. The book really wants to you use custom spell-lists for each tradition and religion:

EXAMPLE: Balbus, an ecclesiastic, has advanced to 2nd level, increasing his repertoire from one to two 1st level ceremonies. He visits the local Temple of the Winged Sun and impudently inquires of his Patriarch whether he might learn choking grip or weave smoke. After a stern lecture on upholding Light and Law, Balbus is offered a choice of illumination or command word.

but it’s unwilling to do the grunt work for you. This is frustrating, but it mirrors the frustration of base D&D (and ACKS), where every cleric draws from basically the same spell list. An area where the game does go the distance is by giving each tradition a different set of ceremonial implements. These don’t have game mechanical effects, but they’re still appreciated. Each tradition gets a bunch, here’s a sampling:

• Antiquarian: small cauldron
• Chthonic: scourge
• Liturgical: rosary
• Runic: rune-carving knife
• Shamanic: animal clippings and parts
• Sylvan: candle set
• Theurgical: ceremonial sword

Spells that fail and go boom

In most D&D games, the failure mode of casting a spell isn’t “failing to cast the spell”, it’s “casting the spell but not affecting anyone”. This is not the case for a lot of eldritch magic in this book: on-the-fly spellsinging and all ceremonies have the risk of blowing up in the caster’s face. This risk is increased by accessing magic beyond what you would normally be able to cast, or (for ceremonialists) trying to complete a ceremony in combat time instead of in exploration time. On-the-fly spellsinging is easier when you’re chilling in a Dominions 3 site, and ceremonies are easier when the caster has a tradition-specific trinket, has cultistscollaborators with them, or is willing to go slowly. For ceremonialists, failing enough spell rolls (referred to as “gaining stigma”) can cause them to lose the ability to cast further, until they rest.

In 3e-inspired games like Iron Heroes, this sort of sword & sorcery was often based off of skill checks. This never goes well, because the 3e skill modifier system is broken and unpredictable. In this, the difficulty of an on-the-fly spellsong or ceremonial magic always boils down to the caster’s level and key ability score. Now, the target numbers are a bit on the harsh side. At first level, a spellsinger might only be able to do a spontaneous 1st-level spell effect on a 1d20 roll of 12+, and a ceremonialist might be looking at 8+. If you’re willing to buy talismans and take a Performance proficiency, you can get an additional +2 to your roll. I’m generally okay with this level of reliability, it matches the setting assumptions.

But ultimately, if you’re playing a game of this genre, you want your spellcaster’s failures to have the potential to either drive your character insane or TPK the party, and you want the rest of the party to be sort of afraid of you because of that. In the HFH, confirmed natural 1s on spellcasting rolls trigger mishaps: rolls on a random of table of bad things, with the general severity of the bad thing determined by the power of the spell you were attempting. To this book’s credit, it has a bunch of random tables of bad things, determined by a character’s tradition. These effects can be very bad. A spellsinger example is:

You accidentally open a gate to the elemental spheres. An 8 HD elemental appears adjacent to you and attacks.

This could feasibly happen at first level, in which case you are dead. Failing at a Chthonic ceremony could yield:

Your soul is surely damned by what you have wrought. You gain 8d6 additional
corruption points. If this leaves you at your maximum corruption, then you must save v. Death or die due to the shock to your soul.

or

You fall into a necromantic torpor. A wish or miracle can awaken you immediately;
otherwise you will awaken in 1d10 months. You do not age while in torpor.

A negative outcome of a Liturgical or Theurgical ceremony could be:

While performing the ceremony, you glimpse the Logos, the words of creation. You must save v. Spells or become feebleminded. A dispel magic from a 9th+ level caster can remove the effect.

Other failures can age you, destroy your equipment, or explode and damage you and those nearby.

The natural comparisons within the "OSR" for this sort of thing are LotFP and Dungeon Crawl Classics.

• LotFP has a notorious first-level summon spell that's like ten pages long and has the potential to drown the entire campaign world when cast, but most of its magic is otherwise fairly standard, albeit spooky-themed.
  • For ACKS HFC, you can very easily kill your character with a mishap, but you'll only cause a TPK in special circumstances (e.g., the party is huddled around you hiding from monsters while you try to summon an eagle to carry everyone to safety, but then you explode).
• DCC gives each of its spells a table of "ways casting this can go very wrong or very right" effects that gets used every time the spell is cast.
  • For ACKS HFC, the wacky mishaps tables are abstracted up to the tradition list, and they come into play less often, so they're less intrusive.

These sorts of riskful mechanics aren’t for every player or every playgroup, but I admit that I fucking love them.

Dominions 3 Sites

ACKS Core introduced the “sinkhole of evil”: a small region of the world that has been permanently corrupted due to violence or magic or whatever. The HFH extends the idea naturally to “pinnacles of good” and “places of elemental power”. Within these places, the sorts of spells you would expect to be super effective are super effective, and the sorts of spells you would expect to not be very effective are not very effective. If you’re a Lawful spellcaster who has learned and used a bunch of black magic, you really care about pinnacles of good, because they’re the only by-the-book way to remove your corruption points.

The book suggests occurrence rates for “places of elemental power” and justifies them as follows:

Note: The Judge may wonder how we decided how many places of elemental power there are in the world. On our own Earth, there are 11 naturally-burning eternal flames, 600 active volcanoes, and 1000 active geysers in the world—that suggests 1,611 places of elemental fire spread across the earth’s 5,300,000 square mile land mass. That’s one place of elemental fire per 3,295 square miles. Since each 6-mile hex is 32 square miles, that’s one place of elemental fire per 102 hexes, or about 12 places on a typical 1,200-hex regional map.

Spells

Finally, there’s a list of spells: fifteen per spell level for black, sixteen per spell level for grey, twenty-seven per level for levels one through three for white, and twenty-two per level for levels four through six for white. Some are taken from Core ACKS or the Player’s Companion, but a lot are new. The general theme of “eldritch magic is subtle” is maintained throughout: so fireball and lightning bolt don’t appear, but call lightning does, as do classics like hold monster, glitterdust, and invisibility. Invisibility is now a fourth level spell, so it’s rarer than in most D&D. The differences between magical flavors are also maintained: White magic gets a call of [foo] series of spells, any of which summons nearby creatures (wolves, bears, sperm whales) to willingly serve the caster. Black magic gets a conjure [foo] series of spells, any of which calls an extraplanar creature to serve as the caster’s slave, but the slave will turn on the caster if they lose their concentration.

Conceptually, I don’t think this chapter does anything you haven’t seen before. “D&D, but the magic feels like Conan” is an obvious concept, and a lot of people have tried their hand at it. But the implementation here is generally good, and it probably makes this book’s overall existence worthwhile. Next: monsters, and maybe treasure. For those of you who have played Iron Heroes or Conan d20 or other sword-and-sorcery hacks, I would be curious to hear how this seems to compare.

[OgreBattle]

I’m not clear on how eldritch magic is cast vs singing and ceremonial. Is eldritch spontaneous vancian?

[Blicero]

I’m not clear on how eldritch magic is cast vs singing and ceremonial. Is eldritch spontaneous vancian?

Sorry, I must have been unclear. Trying to list all the pertinent points:

• Eldritch spellcasters, spellsingers, and ceremonialists all draw off of the same spell list.
• Eldritch spellcasters, spellsingers, and ceremonialists all have a repertoire of spells known, subdivided by spell level and class level, and modified by Intelligence. A 3rd level Gandalf with +2 Intelligence can have up to five 1st level and three 2nd level spells in their repertoire.
• Eldritch spellcasters cast spontaneously from their repertoire like 3e sorcerers.
• Spellsingers cast from their repertoire, limited by a daily mana point reserve. Unlike 3e psionics, you never need to spend more mana to enhance a low-level spell.
• Ceremonialists cast from their repertoire, and have no theoretical daily limits, but, in expectation, will eventually gain enough stigma and need to rest.
• Spellsingers can also cast spells not in their repertoire with the on-the-fly spellsinging system.
• Eldritch spellcasters, spellsingers, and ceremonialists can all change their repertoire by removing old spells and/or adding new ones with the expenditure of gold and time.

So eldritch spellcasters basically act like normal ACKS arcane spellcasters, with the addition of corruption points.

[Username17]

Note: The Judge may wonder how we decided how many places of elemental power there are in the world. On our own Earth, there are 11 naturally-burning eternal flames, 600 active volcanoes, and 1000 active geysers in the world—that suggests 1,611 places of elemental fire spread across the earth’s 5,300,000 square mile land mass. That’s one place of elemental fire per 3,295 square miles. Since each 6-mile hex is 32 square miles, that’s one place of elemental fire per 102 hexes, or about 12 places on a typical 1,200-hex regional map.

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.

This is the kind of thing that ACKS does all the time, where it looks very shallowly into a problem, comes up with an answer that's laughably wrong, and then pats itself on the back for doing so much more thinking than the SJWs do. I'm glad someone's doing some thinking about this, but I wish the research phase was a little deeper than checking answers.com for how many geysers there are and then popping open calculator on the desk top.

-Username17

[Thaluikhain]

All "eternal" flames, volcanoes and geysers are places of elemental fire, and can't happen naturally? What happens when a coal seam catches fire, does it become magic or does that only happen due to magically means?

For that matter, all geysers are always places of elemental fire, and not, say, water?

[Omegonthesane]

Geysers are geysers because they're *hot* more than because they're *wet*.

I'd go with "naturally occuring elemental site becomes magic" myself if they're using mundane Earth to justify the number of elemental points

[deaddmwalking]

However, we can't really extend that kind of good faith to ACKS, because it turns out to be written by a guy who is almost exactly Osama Bin Laden. I do not make that comparison lightly or in jest. He literally and specifically financed and supported a quite significant network of people for whom radicalizing potential terrorists was a full time job.

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

It's almost funny that they're calling you out for libel and then engaging in libel.

[Username17]

However, we can't really extend that kind of good faith to ACKS, because it turns out to be written by a guy who is almost exactly Osama Bin Laden. I do not make that comparison lightly or in jest. He literally and specifically financed and supported a quite significant network of people for whom radicalizing potential terrorists was a full time job.

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

It's almost funny that they're calling you out for libel and then engaging in libel.

It's very similar to the 4rry trolls who used to do this from Something Awful. These people copy little bits from here to do their two minutes hate performances with because they do not think that that hey can win an actual argument. Outside their bubble they have nothing to say.

So obviously if you actually cared about Freeze Peach or whatever, you wouldn't financially support Milo on his world tour of "Red Pilling" people to encourage angry young men to go to 8chan and plot the twitter harassment of black actresses or mass shootings in a garlic festival. You wouldn't do that because that's an incredibly obviously horrible thing to do, and also because Milo already had a national platform where he could be a guest on Tucker Carlson's White Power Hour and say whatever the fuck he wanted. If you were in any way concerned about "deplatforming" and free speech and shit, you'd give funding to actual academics who had genuine expertise in one or more topics and weren't regularly invited onto national TV. There are thousands of those people, and anyone who had moneys and cared one whit about expanding the national discourse could promote fucking any of them.

But this guy didn't do that. He financed an already established network whose entire purpose is and always has been the radicalization of racist and misogynistic terrorists. That's not debatable or in dispute. Multiple mass murderers posted their hate manifestos to 8Chan and they were encouraged to do so.

Which brings us back to theRPGSite. Obviously it's run by RPGPundit, and he's a hateful toxic alt-right troll who has doubled down again and again on far right sewage. Anyone who still hangs with him at this point is at least complicit in his promotion of Neo-Nazism. And the fact that those assholes think they need to defend the honor of Macris is all the proof you need that Macris doesn't have any honor to defend.

If I talked shit about say, Kenson, obviously the RPGSite wouldn't come to defend some guy they view as leftist swine. They come out to defend Macris because he is a hateful fellow traveler. And when I say "come out" I of course mean "continue to shout and jerk each other off in their safe space" because they are fucking cowards.

-Username17

[Dean]

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.

[Libertad]

When Macris' GamerGate/Vox Day/Milo ties came into the public discussion, there was debate in various spaces of OSR clones which can do a similar level of domain-building that aren't tied to politically regressive writers.

Kevin Crawford's Echo Resounding was listed as one of the best alternatives. And as far as I know Crawford isn't on the far-right end of the spectrum.

I admit that I never gave it an in-depth read, and it doesn't necessarily have the implied setting and detail that ACKS has, but those aspects shouldn't be too hard to mine from other OSR games.

I will also note that there's a community of left-wing OSR fans known as SWORD DREAM who are trying to carve out their own niche and distancing themselves from the far-right omnipresent in their fandom. They're mostly present on Twitter and Discord, and while I do not know the reach of their influence (I left the OSR a while ago) they may be a worthy community to look into.

[Username17]

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

[OgreBattle]

How much of the book is there left to review?

On the art... Ryan Browning did the cover of that one I think, and the more 70's feeling ink art. I don't know who does the more sketchy+realistic art in that class lineup.