OSSR: ACKS Heroic Fantasy Handbook
Posted: Sat Sep 28, 2019 8:37 pm
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”:
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.
Not totally sure what’s going on with her torso, but it looks painful
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”:
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.[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.
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.