Joined: Mar 2008 Gender: Male Posts: 571 Location: NYC Karma: 34
Adventurer Conqueror King « Thread Started on Jul 6, 2011, 9:26pm »
I'm part of the launch of a new take on the classic "world's most popular fantasy roleplaying game," the Adventurer Conqueror King System. It grew out of two old-school sandbox campaigns: Alexander Macris's Auran Empire (ninety or so sessions, started as B/X D&D plus a lot of notes on how to reconcile differences between each classic edition plus house rules) and my White Sandbox (37 sessions, OD&D plus house rules).
The goal of the system is to support campaign play across all levels; one of the major tools for doing this is an integrated economy, which Alex talks about here and here. One of the reasons to present ACKS as its own system is because the ways this economy gets worked into the rules are pretty far-reaching; the rules differences aren't major compared to any classic edition, but the tweaks to things like item pricing, hireling costs, etc. we made to the first-wave retroclones that were our rules chassis are extensive and subtle enough that there's some virtue to having it all laid out as a single volume.
Production of said single volume, and layout and illustration of its PDF incarnation, are being supported by our Kickstarter effort. Some of the rewards there I think are particularly cool are getting to write the art order for a piece Ryan will illustrate for the final book - this translation of my words to someone with talent's art was one of my favorite parts of being a freelancer - and a continuous demo of the game in a penthouse suite at one of the Gen Con hotels. Some of the seats in that game are reserved for Kickstarter backers, but others are held for friends; if you'll be at Gen Con let me know and I'll work to get you into the latter!
Joined: Nov 2010 Gender: Male Posts: 504 Karma: 67
Re: Adventurer Conqueror King « Reply #4 on Jul 6, 2011, 10:47pm »
I just had a look at the website and read the blog. This project is very exciting Tavis. I've been very interested in the subject of the domain-level game lately and have had a yearning to see such a thing combined with D&D in such a way that it is a natural fit at all levels, rather than feel like a tacked-on afterthought. What I've just read gives me great hope that you guys may finally achieve this. I'll be following developments with great interest.
What exactly do you mean by "campaign play," Tavis?
The name "Adventurer Conqueror King" is meant to convey the progression of character power across a campaign (without the assumption that the characters you make at the beginning will automatically become kings, or that there is a unitary end-game). The emphasis on a fantasy economy is important because earning and spending gold is a common element in the activities characters will pursue in their progression, from the point where they're selling swords looted off the corpses of orcs in a dungeon, through the level where they might commission enchanted swords or guide a caravan of exotic steel to the destination that offers the best profit, up to the point where their whims start wars that drive up the prices of weapons in a kingdom.
Re: Adventurer Conqueror King « Reply #7 on Jul 7, 2011, 10:04am »
Hi Calithena!
Yes, there are rules for tabletop military battles. The rules are organized around "stands" of roughly 25 cavalry or 100 men, for large-scale battles. I'm an avid tabletop wargamer (DBA, DBM, Armatic, Tactica) and this was an important goal. Through some clever math we "scale up" D&D combat so that the mass fights still use familiar mechanics and the outcomes mirror what one would expect given the capabilities of the combatants. The mass combat rules won't fit in the core rulebook (which is already 256 pages) so they'll be in a supplement.
There are integrated rules for fiefdom administration. In my long-running campaign (110 sessions) we scaled from the first player building his first domain, to, eventually, the players running an entire kingdom and waging a large-scale war against several other kingdoms, complete with recruiting and training troops, building castles, etc. I've discussed some of the assumptions on the Autarch blog. They are not wholly dissimilar to the domain rules in the Mentzer Companion set but with tighter integration into the rest of the game and some detail to make sense of things in the larger world.
calithena Moderator Official "Fight On!" Scribe member is offline
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Joined: Jul 2007 Posts: 2,699 Karma: 91
Re: Adventurer Conqueror King « Reply #9 on Jul 7, 2011, 2:52pm »
Hey Archon,
Sold! Get one of your fellas to review this for Fight On! as soon as it's ready for print. I understand not wanting to overload the first book, but I hope the supplementals don't take too long. Mass combat and domain administration have in my view never been adequately handled before, though there are some systems that a good GM can make work, so if you guys have a real improvement here it will be a big contribution. Hope it all works out well!
Sold! Get one of your fellas to review this for Fight On! as soon as it's ready for print. I understand not wanting to overload the first book, but I hope the supplementals don't take too long. Mass combat and domain administration have in my view never been adequately handled before, though there are some systems that a good GM can make work, so if you guys have a real improvement here it will be a big contribution. Hope it all works out well!
Great! Will do. I hope you end up liking what we put out.
Mass combat and domain administration have in my view never been adequately handled before, though there are some systems that a good GM can make work, so if you guys have a real improvement here it will be a big contribution.
If donations reach our Kickstarter limit - which is highly likely, given the rate of progress so far, although spreading the word can't hurt! - we will calculate the costs of publishing the mass combat supplement and set that as a bonus target. I had the chance to play these rules during a system-development visit to North Carolina (I played an army of beastmen, Alex commanded a legion of the Auran Empire) and they were fun, fast-moving, and substantially different from Delta's Book of War, the other mathematical-equivalent OD&D mass combat system I have experience with. Delta's rules operate at a smaller scale and don't introduce any assumptions that aren't in OD&D; Alex's rules are suited to handle larger-scale conflicts and simulate the historically decisive effects of flanking and charging, which add really satisfying elements of strategy. In combination with the domain management and spell research rules (both of which are in the core ACKS book, currently about 256 pages) I foresee really exciting things for the future of my White Sandbox campaign as the players marshall their resources to overthrow an occupying army of giants.
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