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Post by tavis on Jul 6, 2011 20:26:15 GMT -6
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! |
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Post by Deleted on Jul 6, 2011 20:45:43 GMT -6
This sounds like a very interesting project, and I've a lot of respect for you as a person and gamer. I'll be watching for developments.
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Post by tavis on Jul 6, 2011 20:55:38 GMT -6
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Post by tombowings on Jul 6, 2011 21:29:05 GMT -6
What exactly do you mean by "campaign play," Tavis?
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Post by Deleted on Jul 6, 2011 21:47:00 GMT -6
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.
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Post by tavis on Jul 6, 2011 23:27:12 GMT -6
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. |
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Post by calithena on Jul 7, 2011 8:45:11 GMT -6
Are there rules for tabletop military battles and fiefdom administration? Can you tell us about them?
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Post by Deleted on Jul 7, 2011 9:04:05 GMT -6
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.
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Post by kesher on Jul 7, 2011 11:58:41 GMT -6
Tavis, this looks awesome! (not that I'm surprised...)
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Post by calithena on Jul 7, 2011 13:52:09 GMT -6
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!
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Post by Deleted on Jul 7, 2011 17:36:30 GMT -6
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! Great! Will do. I hope you end up liking what we put out. |
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Post by tavis on Jul 10, 2011 14:24:43 GMT -6
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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Post by ragnorakk on Jul 10, 2011 22:52:35 GMT -6
Looks neat indeed!
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Post by tavis on Jul 13, 2011 23:24:05 GMT -6
OK, we just hit our Kickstarter target - bonus level coming soon! Thanks for the support, everyone!
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Post by Deleted on Jul 14, 2011 0:37:13 GMT -6
Congratulations Tavis and crew, great job.
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Post by Finarvyn on Jul 14, 2011 5:36:58 GMT -6
Very exciting. I know I'm watching to see what develops here!  |
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Post by ckutalik on Jul 22, 2011 15:40:31 GMT -6
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Post by tavis on Jul 22, 2011 16:19:17 GMT -6
Just realized I hadn't posted about this awesome development over here yet; glad to see you beat me to it! Just so you all know Hill Cantons: Borderlands (the new name for the "Domain Game") will be coming into existence as an ACKS-compatible product (the system, to its credit, has its own gaming license). So glad Alex put that in there, it was really a stroke of genius to have a better way to talk about 'these systems are designed to work well together' than the meaningless 'these both use the OGL.' The thing I contributed to the license that I'm proud of is that it gets around the problem Jeff and I blogged about recently at the Gameblog and the Mule where the OGL stops you from citing your sources; if you want to say "specifically, it is the following rules for thieves' guilds that are based on material originally from Adventurer Conqueror King", our stuff is published with a way you can do so without needing our permission first. Now to go send emails to the people I want to thank in the text to get permission to credit them... |
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Post by ckutalik on Jul 22, 2011 17:57:47 GMT -6
It's an important step forward if it does succeed at furthering cross-compatibility because it can allow us to focus more on the areas that inspire us more--and less on the ones that feel repetitious.
So instead of trying to re-develop yet another encumbrance system, you can point to say something like the simple, elegant one in LotFP and cite that while spending more time/energy on those groovy ritual magic rules or the like. In other words, it promotes cross-hybridization more.
In my case, being able to stop banging my head on my increasingly complex long-distance trading and production rules in favor of the inspired ones in ACKS is a great boon.
Maybe at some point I can make them work, but in the meantime I want pour more energy into having an interesting and diverse social advancement system.
Liberating.
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Post by ckutalik on Jul 22, 2011 19:50:56 GMT -6
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Post by tavis on Jul 22, 2011 22:37:37 GMT -6
I wonder if declaring mutual compatibility isn't the way to go forward for the second wave of retro-clones. Since we're all building from a common base in "the original fantasy roleplaying game" this is just a synonym for something we can't say under the terms of the OGL, and it helps address the complaint about too many different retroclones and needless fragmentation that gets leveled at OSR publishers by emphasizing the ease of cherry-picking between them.
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Post by tacojohn4547 on Oct 18, 2011 23:16:42 GMT -6
This project sounds very exciting! Congratulations to all involved!
Unfortunately, I wasn't really aware of this project's development and the kickstarter funding effort until it was essentially over. (RL has been brutal for me in '11.) It looks like you are still accepting patronage funding via kickstarter, though, from the website. Is that still the case? If so, I'm pretty interested in securing or preordering one of the hardbacks. Should I just do that via the kickstarter page, or should I reach out to your sales connection?
Thanks, and good luck on your continued endeavors!
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Post by kesher on Feb 3, 2012 15:42:14 GMT -6
I just bought the pdf (available here) and it is a thing of beauty! I can't wait to start reading it this weekend---congrats to Tavis and Autarch! |
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Post by tavis on Feb 4, 2012 0:32:56 GMT -6
Wow, I have been neglecting my homies! Thanks for the bump, kesher, and the kind words. tacojohn, you can get the PDF now; it's $9.99 and comes with a $10 coupon you can apply to the price of purchasing the hardback at your local store or from us online via Game Salute. Or if you get the hardcover - whether through a preorder or at GaryCon or at a local store - you get the PDF for free, through the Bits and Mortar program. Especially for folks who are overseas, talk to your local store about becoming a Game Salute Select store and ordering the Preview Nights Bundle - that will get you the hardback well in advance, and save you the cost of shipping. |
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Post by Mike on Feb 7, 2012 0:27:46 GMT -6
How many pages and is the PDF printable or too full of pretties to economically print?
Ta
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Post by Deleted on Feb 7, 2012 5:04:03 GMT -6
273 pages, numerous illustrations including lots of full page ones. Pages of text are printer friendly but chapter title pages are black with white writing (if I were to print the pdf I would take snapshots of these pages and reverse the colours in a graphics programme), the monster illustrations are silhouettes, and tables are in 3 to 4 shades of grey.
I'm a notorious printer ink stinge, but I'd be happy to print this one.
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Post by Mike on Feb 7, 2012 6:21:09 GMT -6
Brilliant, thanks Dave!
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Post by Mike on Feb 7, 2012 6:42:50 GMT -6
Anybody got a preliminary review. Or vibe even?
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Post by Deleted on Feb 7, 2012 7:23:39 GMT -6
JD Jarvis has put up quite a detailed and intelligent review on his blog.  |
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Post by tavis on Feb 7, 2012 8:50:20 GMT -6
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