Review: ACKS Imperial Imprint
The three “core” books are the Revised Rulebook, Judges Journal, and Monstrous Manual. There’s also the upcoming Treasure Tome kickstarter, and the back archive of ACKS books that for the most part are compatible with ACKS II. I will review all three books to give you a more complete picture, because each book has its own appeal and use even outside of ACKS. Actually, I already mentioned and praised some parts of these books in the past, but I was using the WIP documents, so now let’s take a look at the actual release version.
REVISED RULEBOOK
The first book is the Revised Rulebook, which is the equivalent of the Player’s Handbook. This is a dense tome of 550 pages, almost as long as GURPS Basic Set, which says something. The introduction is clear and concise. The only thing that I’d like to mention is the damage type icon table. Generally, I do not like icons replacing words because the Pathfinder 1e Bestiary monster type and habitat icons were illegible to me. These ones seem quite clear, so I won’t hold it against the author.
The first chapter is titled Characters. If you’re familiar with AD&D, you will find pretty much the same thing here, but streamlined and perfected. I think you will hear this combination of words a lot of from me. Like in AD&D, you roll your stats first, and only then choose a character class. All six “classic” stats are there, but Wisdom was renamed to Will (probably to bury the dead horse that is the “uuuh, what’s the difference between Intelligence and Wisdom?” question). Instead of each class having unique attribute minima and maxima, now each class has one or more key attributes, meaning that this attribute must not be lower than 9. Streamlining!
Another concept that is introduces is activity. Activities are divided into dedicated activities, ancillary activities, and incidental activities. Dedicated activities take eight hours to perform. Ancillary activities take one hour to perform. Incidental activities require virtually no time at all. For the most part, this is used to streamline the different actions so you know how many activities you can perform per day. It’s not very granular, but it does its job well, and due to the relative lack of granularity, it improves the speed of resolution.
The second chapter is about the Classes. Here, we have something that is actually new. Across the D&D editions, there were times when non-human races were classes, when races had class restrictions, and when there were no restrictions at all. ACKS does something in between – each race has a list of unique classes. Thus, humans have the regular fighter, mage, and thief, while elves, for example, elven nightblade and elven spellsword. Thus, by picking a class you pick both your class and your race. I find this to be an interesting compromise, even though I prefer the unrestricted classes of D&D 3.X.
The core human classes are fighter, explorer, thief, mage, crusader, and venturer. They are called core classes, because each of them showcases a different area of the game in order of complexity – combat, wilderness exploration, dungeon exploration, arcane magic, divine magic, and mercantile ventures. Isn’t that a great idea? After that, there are nine additional classes, called “campaign classes” that use the core classes as a base and alter them in certain ways. The classes are assassin, barbarian, bard, bladedancer, paladin, priestess, shaman, warlock, and witch. Then, there are several demi-human classes.
Classes have different numbers of levels, and the experience progressions also are different, just like in 1e AD&D. Thus, this wasn’t streamlined, but there’s probably a good reason for that. I’ve never played AD&D or ACKS, but everything written in ACKS seems to have a good reason for its existence. Each class has a short assortment of class powers. For example, the fighter only has three class powers. One class power of each class is tied to domain-level play – usually, this is the ability to attract followers and henchmen by acquiring a castle or a similar structure. I should note that this is not mandatory – if you want to avoid domain-level play, you can continue to delve into dungeons. However, I think that you’d be missing out on a lot of enjoyment.
Also, what I found interesting that the number of hit dice grows only up to nine dice, and each level after that merely gives a static bonus. I assume that this is done to avoid the HP bloat of more modern D&D editions.
Each class also has a list of eight templates. A template consists of a preselected list of proficiencies and an equipment loadout. What’s special about it is that the template is determined randomly. If the template you rolled doesn’t suit you, you may choose one from a lower roll and not a higher roll. The interesting part is that while there are eight templates, you do not roll a 1d8, but roll 3d6. Thus, the templates are on a bell curve, and you’re more likely to land somewhere in the middle. For example, for a fighter, you’re more likely to be an auxiliary or legionary, but you still would be able to be a corsair, ravager, or thug. The higher roll, the better the equipment seems to be, as the higher rolls give you options to become a gladiator, signifier, or even a cataphract. I actually really like this.
I should give a special mention to the venturer class. While fighter, thief, mage, crusader, and explorer are quite self-explanatory and familiar, the venturer is something that you won’t see in any other system. A venturer is an adventurous merchant with class powers tied to mercantile ventures, because the rules for them in ACKS are quite extensive and nothing like you’ve seen anywhere else.
The next chapter is titled Proficiencies. If I were to use the modern D&D terms, I’d say that proficiencies are something between feats and skills. While the majority of ACKS II seems to be inspired by AD&D 1e, the proficiencies are clearly inspired by, well, proficiencies from AD&D 2e. A proficiency typically allows you a certain new action or gives a bonus to other actions. I can see that the OSR players would seethe while reading this chapter. One proficiency deserves special attention – Land Surveying. I actually don’t know what GURPS skill would do what this proficiency does. Perhaps, I will have to add Expert Skill (Land Surveying) or something like that.
Next up we have Equipment. The title is a bit of a misnomer, because aside from actual equipment there are prices for vehicles, structures, lodging, hirelings, etc. This is not a dig at the author – I don’t know what title would even work better here. Now, here’s the best part about ACKS. The first page of the chapter has a costs of living table and for the most part correlates with its GURPS counterpart. Since ACKS has a detailed and realistic economics system that I will talk about later, this means that it’s easy to convert ACKS gold pieces to GURPS dollars. The conversion rate seems to be 1 gp = $100. This simple thing makes many of the ACKS rules GURPS-compatible, including the domain management rules that GURPS lacks (I don’t consider GURPS Realm Management functional). Isn’t that amazing?
This is the chapter where the concept of market class is introduced, and it’s an important one. There are six market classes – from Class I to Class VI, where Class I represents a metropolis bazaar and Class VI represents a small village market. The table of Equipment Availability by Market Class tells you how many items of a certain price range are available for sale in each Market Class each month, and the same limit applies to the market purchasing items from adventurers. Even though I’ve read 1e AD&D DMG beforehand, I do not remember anything like that there, but I certainly do remember a similar concept of GP Limit by Settlement Size from D&D 3.0. ACKS expands this concept and ties it into other different subsystems, such as hireling availability and mercantile ventures. The Market Class concept is one of the things I’m definitely going to borrow for my GURPS games.
Apparently, the topic of encumbrance is controversial nowadays, even though I don’t understand how you can even play without the rules for encumbrance. ACKS measures weight not in pounds, but in stones. Historically, stone varied from 8 to 14 pounds, but ACKS assumes it to be around 10 pounds. This is a semi-abstract combination of mass and bulk. While it is less granular than using pounds, it makes bookkeeping easier. I’m okay with this approach.
Of course, there are also rules for hirelings, henchmen, mercenaries, and specialists. While they did exist in AD&D, here they are more both more streamlined and detailed. Rules for loyalty and morale are also there. Another highlight is the rules for spellcasting services that I may have to investigate in more depth and adapt to GURPS. This is a very important moment, in my opinion. Rules for construction projects are pretty simple and quite similar to those found in GURPS. Nice.
The next chapter is Spells. I can’t really say much, for the most part, it’s all the stuff you’d see in AD&D but renamed. As far as I know, this was done to distance the system from the OGL after that entire debacle. A reasonable decision.
The next chapter is titled Adventures. This is a big one. First, it talks about dungeon delves. Just like in AD&D, dungeon exploration is done in turns and rounds, where a round is around 10 minutes, and a round it around 1 minute. The concept of a “dungeon exploration turn” is something that should return to modern systems. It makes tracking time much easier, and time tracking is extremely important. Dungeon turns and rounds also play nicely with different tasks that can be performed methodically or hastily, such as searching for traps or picking locks.
There’s an entire page about marching order and mapping, something that many players seem to ignore. Personally, I’m tired of asking players about their marching order again and again and being met with silence. And then they get mad because the order they had in their head was different. Why is it so difficult? But anyway, let’s stop whining about my personal problems and continue looking through the book. Rules for light and darkness are clearly defined. To be fair, they always were pretty straightforward in D&D, it’s GURPS that for some reason had to obfuscate the rules as much as possible.
Now, there’s only half a page about traps, but it’s not without new ideas. You may find many discussions about traps in TTRPGs online, with many people saying that traps are lame because they basically are a HP tax with a skill check. The OSR says that every trap should test the player’s skill instead of the character’s skill, basically becoming a puzzle or a game of “read the GM’s mind.” In D&D, you just trip a wire, then fall into the pit if you fail a save, take damage, and hear the GM cackle in glee. In GURPS, it’s actually exactly the same. In ACKS, there is one tiny change that greatly improves how traps work and makes them so much more fun. I’ll quote the book: “When an adventurer takes an action that might (but not necessarily will) activate a trap, such as walking down a corridor with a tripwire, the Judge will secretly roll 1d6. On a roll of 1-2, the adventurer has accidentally activated the trap. On a roll of 3-6, the adventurer has accidentally missed the trap entirely and it remains inactivated.” I think the implication of this small rule are huge. First, the vanguard of the party not necessarily is the one who takes the brunt of all the traps. Second, player characters have to keep in mind that they simply might’ve missed a trap and that the passageway may be not as safe as it seems. Third, if you are retreating, you (or your pursuers) may trigger traps even if you are taking a known route? Isn’t this great? I’m going to borrow this for my GURPS games.
The next section deals with the wilderness expeditions. For the most part, it’s pretty similar to the wilderness exploration rules from GURPS, but with the addition of better rules for land surveying and searching the wilderness areas.
The Encounters section is something that I want to adapt to GURPS because GURPS doesn’t actually have proper rules for that for some weird reason (aside from the Ambushes rule from DF16). I believe that these rules are extremely important and that they’d fix many complaints, for example, about ranged weapons. You may hear GURPS players complain that range values for weapons do not matter because the GM always starts the encounter within 10 yards or so, but they never seem to question why the GM does that. The answer is because GURPS doesn’t have rules for encounter distances. Here, ACKS gives you a set of rules to determine encounter distance based on terrain, elevation, and some random rolls. They take up two pages and aren’t complicated – I definitely will GURPSify them.
The rules for surprise and encounter evasion are something that I will adapt to GURPS, because the surprise rules in GURPS are infamously bad. In short, surprise depends on two conditions – foreknowledge and line of sight. There’s a Surprise Matrix that you can check to see the result. The Reactions rules are simple, but very much functional. However, I find rules from GURPS Social Engineering more appealing. There still may be some things worth looking at, such as the rules for repeated attempts to influence somebody.
Then we have the combat rules that I’m mostly going to skip in this review. In my opinion, it’s difficult to top GURPS combat, but it is also difficult to compare two combat systems when they have very different time scales. In GURPS, combat uses one-second rounds, while in ACKS, the rounds are abstract time intervals ranging from 10 seconds to 2 minutes. When rounds are this long, the combat must have “lower resolution.” That’s fine, but I prefer the hi-res combat of GURPS. However, there is one mechanic that seems to be unique to ACKS combat – cleaving. Cleaving, i.e. getting a free step and an attack after felling a foe, is something of a universal mechanic in ACKS meant to simulate powerful heroes chopping through weak enemies quickly.
Finally, we have a section on earning experience. Experience in ACKS is earned by defeating (not just killing!) monsters, and from treasure recovered on adventures. Back in the day, I thought that “gold-to-XP” is stupid, but I changed my mind a few months ago when I was introduced to the BrOSR paradigm. It just makes sense to me now.
The next chapter is titled Voyages. I do not have much to say here because my knowledge of how ships work and all other naval stuff is very shallow. I do remember reading the D&D 3.5 Stormwrack and AD&D Of Ships and the Sea that tackle this topic more in-depth, but most of the details still elude me. I’m a landlubber and do not feel comfortable with being on board of a boat. However, I still very much appreciate the visibility, navigation, weather, survival, and encounter distance rules for sea voyages. I do love underwater combat, but the rules presented here are very barebones, surprisingly. I’m probably the only person who cares about underwater rules this much.
The next chapter is a big one – Campaigns. This is the “meat” of ACKS, something is unashamedly flaunts in front of other systems. Even GURPS has to kneel in respect, and because of that I will have to borrow these rules and GURPSify them. This large chapter deals with everything that is not adventuring. I like it how it straight up dumps you into a page-long list of possible activities to showcase just how much you can do that isn’t related to dungeon delving.
As I mentioned before, each class has a way to attract followers by building a stronghold or another similar construction. This chapter tells you what kind of followers you attract and what their gear is. After that, we are given the domain management rules, because adventurers are expected to advance to conquerors and kings. While parts of these rules were present in AD&D, here they are streamlined and perfected. In my opinion, ACKS II strikes the perfect balance between abstraction and complexity. There are rules for securing domains, attracting peasants, population growth, domain development, building urban settlements, collecting revenue, paying expenses, population morale, vassal domains, and many more. It may sound like you’d need to do a lot of calculations, but in truth, it usually boils down to subtracting expenses from income and multiplying by population. Sure, I’m skipping some parts, but there is nothing a relatively simple spreadsheet wouldn’t be able to do, and there are many fanmade domain management spreadsheets floating around. And, most importantly, these rules are compatible with GURPS, which is the best part for me.
Next up, we have a section on Politics and Power, where we are given rules for political power accumulation, intrigue, and other going-ons in a senatorial republic. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen something to this effect in some obscure third-party D&D 3.0 book, but I can’t for the life of me remember the source. Maybe I’m hallucinating. But anyway, this section deals with different policies objectives senators might have and how they may influence you and you may influence them. I think this is an excellent way to produce hooks for more “traditional” adventures to drive the game forward. After all, some people call domain management games “lemonade stands” because you sit idly and wait until the GM gives you something interesting to do. In my opinion, this is more of a passive player problem, but these senate rules also would be helpful in such situations.
The next subchapter is one of my favorites – Hideouts and Hijinks. There were some rudimentary rules for this in AD&D 1e, mostly in the form of assassination prices, and I seem to vaguely recall something in Pathfinder 1e. Here, the rules once again are expanded, streamlined, and perfected. You can assign, plan, or perpetrate sabotage, arson, assassination, smuggling, spying, stealing, and many other covert activities. I don’t think I have anything bad to say about this – this is as perfect as it gets.
Now, the next chapter is something that I haven’t seen in any D&D editions or D&D derivatives – Mercantile Ventures. GURPS, however, has got this partially covered in Eidetic Memory: Medieval Sea Trade (Pyramid #3-87) and Low-Tech Transportation (Pyramid #3-95). These are excellent articles, but they can be expanded or adjusted by the ACKS rules. This subchapter deals with mercantile ventures – buying and selling goods in bulk, paying tariffs, tolls, and taxes, transporting goods and passengers, assessing supply and demand, and influencing the market. There are three kinds of mercantile ventures – arbitrage trading, passenger and cargo carriage, and passive investment. The rules may seem complex with lots of moving parts, but after you read them, you realize that they are quite streamlined and written in a way to provide you more opportunities for travel and adventures. Even passive investment isn’t as passive as it sounds, as random vagaries can provide adventure hooks. This is another excellent part of the ruleset.
The next subchapter is titled Sanctums and Dungeons. This one talks about sanctums – a stronghold equivalent for arcane spellcasters where they can research magic, train apprentices, and conduct experiments. Now, you may ask – but how are dungeons related to all this? Because as a character, you can construct a dungeon, attract monsters, harvest monster parts, and extract arcane power from the dungeon to use in magical research. I don’t think I’ve seen anything like that in other systems. The magical research can take form of researching spells, creating or identifying magic items, designing and manufacturing constructs, performing crossbreeding or necromantic experiments, or cast ritual spells. Almost everything from the list either already exists in GURPS or has frameworks written by me long ago. You should also keep in mind that all this research also grants experience. Also, many research projects require special components in the form of monster parts, and I’m already incorporating such special components in my GURPS games.
Finally, we have the Congregants and Divine Power section. While the previous section was for arcane spellcasters, this one is for the divine ones. You can draw divine power from your congregations and/or blood sacrifice. Divine power then can be used to consecrate altars, fields, rulers, magic research, or it can be returned to your god to gain XP. Neat.
The next four chapters are all interconnected – they are Armies, Maneuvers, Battles, and Sieges. They present you a pretty damn good mass combat ruleset that doesn’t just resolve battles, but recruiting troops, moving them, supplying them, etc. The battle rules are quite abstract, but not as abstract as GURPS Mass Combat. I haven’t tried these rules out, so I cannot say how they work in play, but I’ve heard good things about them. Yet again, I have to say that they are compatible with GURPS. If you’d like more detailed mass combat rules that use hexes and counters, consider buying Domains at War: Battles. While they were written for ACKS, I do not see anything that would preclude their use in ACKS II, and even the book itself refers to it in a few places. I have a Youtube video where I showcase Domains at War: Battles, and I believe that it’s the best fantasy mass combat ruleset on the market right now.
Next, we have a quite short chapter devoted to the setting, the Auran Empire. It seems to be modeled after the lands surrounding the fantasy equivalent of the Mediterranean Sea, but unlike typical fantasy settings, it’s set in the classical era and not the medieval one.
After that, we have some miscellaneous stuff, like conditions reference, tables of permanent wounds that remind me of Rolemaster, and character, domain, and henchman sheets.
What can I say? I expected Revised Rulebook to be the one I have the least to say about, but this review is already on its sixth page. I’m genuinely impressed by the work put into it and the amount of ideas I can borrow for my GURPS games. But we have two more books to go.
JUDGES JOURNAL
This is the Dungeon Master’s Guide equivalent, and I immediately have a minor nitpick. The book is titled “Judges Journal”, but the Revised Rulebook refers to it inconsistently both as “Judge’s Journal” and “Judges Journal.” While I prefer “Judge’s Journal,” I will assume that “Judges Journal” is the correct spelling. This book is smaller, it’s only 486 pages long, but it is densely packed with useful information.
The first chapter is titled Foundations. Even if you’re not playing or running ACKS, I highly recommend reading this chapter to both GMs and players, because it explains the art of gamemastering very well. In my opinion, if everyone read this, you’d see much less online shitflinging about agency, dice fudging, problem players, etc. I’d like to talk about what’s written here in more detail, because it goes against a lot of GM advice you may read online or hear on some Youtube tabletop slop channel nowadays.
What’s in a name? talks about the role of the gamemaster in ACKS and in tabletop RPGs in general. I can imagine that this page would rile up many modern GMs who just want to tell a story. ACKS judge is called judge because the main role is similar to that of a referee in a miniature wargame, harking back to the days of Braunstein, Blackmoor, and Chainmail. I couldn’t agree more, and this is how I approach my GURPS games.
It’s not your job to make sure people have fun is exactly that. To be fair, I am guilty of saying “just make sure everyone has fun,” and now I realize that I’m wrong. The GM should create an environment in which everyone could have fun, but being a clown is not his job.
The agency theory of fun is something that resonates deeply with me. It eloquently explains why dice fudging (more on that later), “quantum ogres,” GM fiat, “rulings, not rules” and similar advice you read online is absolutely retarded for the lack of a better word. If you are not giving players meaningful choices, they have no agency. If your players cannot predict consequences of their actions (but not with a 100% certainty), then they have no agency. If you are not following the rules and bending them at any chance, then your players have no agency. And why did you buy the rulebook in the first place? I’m a strong proponent of the agency theory of fun. I’ve been guilty of some of the bad things I listed in the past, but I’ve gotten better.
Today’s rulings are tomorrow’s rules is something I constantly advocate for. If as a GM, you encounter a gray area that you have to adjudicate on the fly, better use this precedent to write down a consistent rule. If you’re not following your precedents, your players do not know what to expect and hence have no agency and no fun. It’s very simple and clear, but the OSR crowd has some strong feelings about this.
Letting the story emerge also is something I constantly advocate for. Whenever I issue a call for players, I often get questions such as “How long the story arc is going to be?”, “What will the story be about?”, “Will X be in the game?”. And the answer is “How would I know?” I think I only ran what ACKS calls a “directed story” once, but the game was actually great despite that. For the most part, I try to go with an emergent story that results from the players’ actions and consequences. I didn’t get a hang of the process immediately, of course, and had plenty of duds, but I’ve gotten better. Gamemastering is a skill that requires practice to get better. The story web approach suggested in ACKS is definitely something I’m using and having success with.
Adversarial action not only describes well how an adversary should be played by the GM, but also reveals some reasoning behind different game design decisions that affected how ACKS is supposed to be played. It also suggests learning and understanding the rules before your houserule them away, which is something I definitely can stand by. Many times I’ve seen a GURPS GM talking about houseruling something in a way that made me understand that he barely has a grasp on the ruleset.
Handling combat has some good advice for making combat impactful and how important are risk and stakes. This is something that resonates with me. The only D&D 5e game that I played was very frustrating because there was no risk at all. Even if you lose all your HP, the system just refuses to let your character die! However, there is a part that I disagree here – The Spectacle Must Be Awesome. The book suggests you to graphically describe hits, misses, and all that, to make combat more visceral. In ACKS, this advice stands, but in GURPS, there is no need for that – the one-second combat resolution writes the spectacle by itself!
Abducting the action is something that I’ve been using for a long time – it’s a way to transform random tables and wandering monsters into a living game world. I even made tools for that back in the day that I’m still using.
Fudging the dice discusses a contentious topic of, well, fudging the dice. I agree with the book that it detracts from the agency. If you fudge a roll, why did you roll in the first place? Why did you lie to your players? Why don’t you just hand the players the script? However, there are some caveats described in the book that I actually agree with. Give it a read.
Balancing player skill versus character skill is another topic that the OSR scene fumes about. This part shines light on all sides of the debate, and it a must-read text for GMs and players.
Most of the rest of this chapter is devoted to general topics, such as handling problem players and hosting your game. It also tackles the difficult topic of politicization of gaming in an eloquent manner.
Now, let’s get to another meaty part of the book – Adventures. This chapter outlines procedures for adjudicating dungeon delves, wilderness expeditions, sea voyages, and settlement adventures. I haven’t seen such clear instructions in any other system, unfortunately. This sort of stuff is an immense help for the GM not only as a clear sequence of actions required to adjudicate something, but even as a checklist to make sure you didn’t forget anything, because the generic procedure may differ from a specific case. I’ve already talked about this on my blog and even showcased a GURPS adaptation of the ACKS wilderness expedition procedure.
The wilderness expeditions subchapter also has an impressive weather generation table that I’m definitely going to adapt to GURPS because the weather mechanics in GURPS are different and more granular.
The wilderness encounters mechanics in ACKS II are sublime. They are more complex than what you usually see in other games, but I think this complexity is worth it. The rate of encounters depends on the time of day, activity of the party, and the type of area – civilized, borderlands, outlands, or unsettled. Encounters are split into civilized, monster, dangerous terrain, valuable terrain, and unique terrain encounters, and their frequency also depends on the degree of settled-ness and the presence of the road. Things aren’t as static as they seem, because, for example, if you roll a 1 on the “Civilized or Borderlands + Road” column, you shift to the “Borderlands or Outlands + Road” column and roll again. Thus, you can always get surprised by something new and may encounter a monster that usually is only present only far away from settlements. Why is it there? That’s where you use the abduction principle, and the story writes itself. I think that’s a wonderful approach, and I will have to borrow it.
Monsters also belong to one of four rarity categories – Common, Uncommon, Rare, and Mythi- I mean Very Rare. Terrain encounters are an excellent way to fill out a hex with points of interest that your players may interact with and probably come back to later, yet again using the abduction principle to weave random results into a cohesive story. There also are some additional rules for poisons, diseases, and places of power. Surprisingly, the disease rules have been greatly simplified from 1e AD&D.
Next up, we have the Campaigns chapter. This one outlines the sequence of play for campaign activities – when you roll for random encounters, when you calculate population growth, etc. This chapter also has several tables for random domain events, domain encounters, mass combat vagaries that may shake things up. In addition, the rules for hiring henchmen are expanded to divide henchman classes into different rarities. Good stuff!
The next chapter is titled Treasure. Each monster is assigned a treasure type that defines what kind of treasure it may have – accidental, hoarding, or raiding – and how much. There are two treasure tables for the GM to pick from – classic and heroic. Heroic table differs in that it has many more coins while keeping the total value the same, and magic items are generated not by type (sword, shield, wand, etc.) but by rarity (common, uncommon, etc.) I can see the merit in both approaches. Also, there are some cool magic item traits tables that add some flavor.
The next several chapters are all about worldbuilding. I remember saying in the past that I consider the AD&D World Builder’s Guidebook to be the best worldbuilding book, and I began reading the setting design chapter of ACKS II expecting to see if it’s better or worse, but to my surprise I found that they barely intersect at all. While WBG tells you how to build a world, place terrain and civilizations, JJ avoid that almost entirely, focusing on how and why you should build a setting that gets the most out of the system, and how to build a proper sandbox with the so-called story web. I cannot say which book is better because they complement one another in a synergistic manner. I’m impressed.
After discussing the setting at large, the book delves into domain and realm creation, because your conqueror and king characters will need some domains to conquer and rule over. What I found surprising is that both the setting and realm design chapters lack random tables.
However, what doesn’t lack random tables is the settlements chapter. City design is a complicated subject, and it was tackled both in AD&D World Builder’s Guide and D&D 3.5 Cityscape. ACKS II Judges Journal, in my opinion, does it even better. You’d have to check it out yourself to see the details. The Dungeon design chapter is very competently written, but doesn’t have anything extraordinarily new.
The Non-Player Characters chapter talks about designing NPCs, discussing the difficult topic of demographics of leveled NPCs. This chapter also has many random tables for anything you can imagine being relevant to NPCs. Certainly a useful one.
The next two chapters are quite special indeed – Abstract Dungeons and Abstract Wilderness. You may have a kneejerk reaction and say that this is unnecessary, but I think that it’s actually brilliant. This is a way to resolve a dungeon delve or a wilderness expedition in a few die rolls. In a conventional game, it can be used to, for example, “fast forward” through the weaker dungeon levels when returning to a megadungeon, or through a bunch of random encounters on your way there. In a proper ACKS II game, this can be useful when sending henchmen to clear out dungeons. However, I think there’s extra potential for these mechanics in the BrOSR games. One of the most difficult concepts in BrOSR games, in my opinion, is that you have to finish a dungeon delve in a single session and return to your safe place. These abstraction mechanics can be used when the party gets stuck in a dungeon or wilderness, but there is no way to return home before the session ends. Thus, you play what you can in person, and the rest is abstracted. Isn’t that great? I’d like to adapt these rules for GURPS, because I think that they are great and novel. But… where are the abstract voyages?
Next up, we have several chapters for customization – how one can create new classes, races, spells, and magic types. The Custom Rules chapter also has a bunch of optional or variant rules if you’re not satisfied with the default ones. The best part is hidden in the Advanced Characters subchapter, where the author talks about multi-tier play, patron play, and 1:1 timekeeping that is all the rage nowadays. I believe ACKS is perfect for this type of play.
I will skip over adventure scenarios and cosmology, and say that the Economics chapter is pretty cool. ACKS is praised for its economics system and it’s nice to see the entire thought process laid out in front of you. ACKS uses historical wheat price as a benchmark, and as far as I know, so does GURPS, which is why the costs are so easily convertible between the systems.
Anyway, that’s it for Judges Journal. This is an excellent volume for any GM regardless of the system. Personally, I found lots of useful stuff here even though I’m running GURPS and not ACKS. However, we have one more book left.
MONSTROUS MANUAL
This is another hefty tome of 438 pages, but this is not just a list of monster statblock – it’s something much greater. I’m actually not going to discuss every monster. First of all, you may see many familiar monsters under new names, and as far as I know, this was done to distance the system from OGL, just like what was done with spells. That’s a reasonable decision. Most of the classic monsters are here, and even some that are probably obscure for the modern audience. For example, the hobgholl – a combination of a hobgoblin, troll, and a ghoul. That may seem like an original creation, but this is a D&D thoul in disguise – a monster with a very peculiar meta origin.
But anyway, the main cool thing about the Monstrous Manual is the statblock format. What I love about ACKS MM is that monsters are much more than just something for the characters to fight. Each monster has a block of secondary characteristics that I find very interesting. The characteristics are expedition speed, supply cost, training period, training modifier, Battle Rating, lifespan, reproduction, untrained value, and trained value. While the primary characteristics come into play in personal combat, the secondary characteristics come into play in mass combat and domain management, tying into mechanics for breeding and training monsters. Each monster also has a list of special spoils that can be harvested from it, be it pelt, poison, antlers, or special components that can be used to enchant certain magic items. I recall reading an interview of the author where he said that doing these characteristics was the most tedious part of the process, and I’d like to say that the effort is appreciated and respected. My own GURPS Monstrous Compendium project was largely inspired by ACKS II Monstrous Manual because I saw what a good monster statblock looks like. In my opinion, this book should be the golden standard for RPG monster books.
After the long list of monsters, there are additional monster rules. My favorite part is the monster parts, pun unintended. The book describes in detail how monster parts are harvested, what they are worth, how much they weigh, what proficiencies they require, and how long the process takes. This applies both to mundane parts, such as claws, horns, pelts, or meat, and special parts that are used in research and enchanting. While some of equivalent rules exist in GURPS, not all of them do, and the missing ones are relatively easy to adapt. I absolutely love it.
CONCLUSION
What can I say? I
think I’ve said before that if I haven’t found GURPS back in the day, I would’ve
switched to ACKS II because it seems to take the classic D&D concept and
refine it until it’s perfect. I still stand by my words. Even though I’m not
running or playing ACKS, I find these books immensely useful. In addition,
reading it is inspiring – you can see the passion of the author and his competence.
I cannot even imagine how difficult of a task writing these books was, but I am
sure that the author feels satisfied. Anyway, tirades aside, I can’t see how
anyone could rate this book as anything lower than 10/10.
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