ACKS Review: Don't & What to Play Instead

[From the Future: I have made a follow-up post to this one here]
I have only recently discovered the Adventurer Conqueror King System (ACKS) and have poured through its pages and a selection of its supplements. ACKS is a B/X D&D-based retroclone whose twist is an emphasis in the end-game of the campaign (“domain” level play) and a nice way of customizing characters while retaining its OSR, BEC simplicity. Throughout the review I will make comparisons to the Basic Fantasy RPG (BF RPG) and I will make suggestions on how one might port and hack material into the BF RPG. I will refer to the BF RPG for reasons illustrated below.

So what’s so OSR or B/X about this game? Well, it’s got the OSR Ability Scores. It’s got: the 3d6 right down the list generation; the ability scores and their derived bonuses/modifiers follow typical OSR conventions; there are prime requisites for classes (which is, to qualify for a class you must have a 9 or more in a certain ability score); and, finally, those prime requisites affect experience accumulation.

The game has the classic four classes of Cleric, Fighter, Mage, and Thief. A variety of ‘campaign’ classes can be constructed using the guide in the Player’s Companion. I was fairly impressed and excited by this. The campaign classes that can be constructed are all based off of elements of the four core classes. The races of the fantasy dwarves or elves and so on are presented as racial classes. These classes are built as campaign classes, but also include elements from races. The advantages of elfhood or dwarfhood are balanced by level caps. For instance, Elves have, in the core book, two classes: the Elven Nightblade (a mage-thief fusion, max level 11) and the Elven Spellblade (fighter-mage fusion, max level 10).

As I said, the guide and option to create your own campaign classes from the Player’s Companion impressed me. With the proficiencies (described below), it grants the players even greater ability to customize their characters and their campaign. This is, however, able to be done with BF RPG. The Downloads and Showcase sections of the BF RPG website provide plenty of character class options. While the creation and use of these classes isn’t as formulaic as that of ACKS, BF RPG still has a fan-based forum which continually play-tests its materials. Admittedly the ability to create campaign classes with an eye to formulae is an advantage over the BF RPG.

In the introduction of the game, the author sets some bizarre dice rolling conventions. He makes a probably unnecessary distinction between a “roll” or, a roll, and a “throw,” or a test, check, or success roll. A “roll” refers to a “roll of the dice,” where there is no success/failure to be determined but a method of randomly determining something (typically how many lizardmen the Party is going to kill or be slain by). The “throw” is the random determination of success or failure. I tend to feel that this distinction was not unnecessary to make, but I guess plenty of other RPG systems mention it. Perhaps folks newer to the hobby might not find the difference between something that determines a range of outcomes and something that determines either success or failure as intuitive as those who’ve been a part of the hobby for a while. Somehow I doubt that. 

The Saving Throws are very Old-School, having individual saves for each kind of supernatural attack: Petrification & Paralysis, Poison & Death, Blast & Breath, Staffs & Wands, and Spells. They are very near the progression of Basic Fantasy RPG. That’s a bit more esoteric and old-school than even Dungeon Crawl Classics (DCC), which has adopted the Fortitude, Reflex, and Will of incarnations of D&D following 2000.

Now we come to a somewhat annoying aspect of the game. The game uses an ascending Armor Class (curse AC!), though it applies it as a modifier to the throw (either a bonus to the target number or a penalty to the die roll). To hit AC 0 (yep, that’s what he was trying to do, besides be different) one must roll 10 or more on a d20. Brilliant. Depending on your class, your likelihood of striking an unarmored opponent increases. Effectively, it’s the base attack bonus (BAB) of 3.x, but done with a different appearance. Why was this necessary? It’s not at all and it actually makes things more difficult by complicating things and making folks who might be used to 3.x get a headache trying to wrap their heads around both how it works and then why he made such a silly design choice. Maybe it’s a Harvard thing. Thankfully, it’s very simple to change its appearance back to what it really is – 3.x-style BAB, just add 10 to the AC for the target number and subtract the attack throw value from 10 to find the BAB (or bonus/penalty to hit). I provide the reorganized charts at the end of this post.

Besides the fuckery about the attack throws I discuss above, there is a cool thing about the attack throw progression. The numbers for attacking stay fairly low, despite how high level one gets (the maximum level is 14, btw). Mages have a max attack bonus of +4, Clerics and Thieves have a max bonus of +6, and fighters can only ever get up to +9. To put this into perspective, the AC (according to my ‘correction’) of a Venerable Dragon (which is what ACKS calls a Great Wyrm) is 22. There are some fiddly things that can change the attack bonus, however, which will bring me to my favorite part of the system.

Proficiencies make this game much better. The end-game can be done in Basic Fantasy pretty easily. There’s a section for it. Not as much. But the material for the end-game, domain-level play could just be a supplement for Basic Fantasy (free isn’t the Harvard way, though). Anyway, Proficiencies are what makes this game worthwhile at all. To illustrate, I wondered where the barbarian was (actually, the barbarian is in the ACKS Player Companion). Then, I started looking through the chapter on the Proficiencies and discovered what they were. They have been described as a combination of skills and feats from 3.x and later versions of D&D.

There are two kinds of proficiencies – class and general proficiencies. General proficiencies are proficiencies that anyone can get. Class proficiencies are those proficiencies that are available explicitly for a class. Proficiencies allow you to do something a character normally wouldn’t be able to. Taking a level or three of the Healing proficiency allows a character to heal somewhere between 1d3 and 2d6 hit points. There are, naturally, plenty of Proficiencies to choose from. Intimidation gives +2 on reaction rolls for characters s/he threatens. Leadership lets a character grab an extra henchman (or retainer). Lip reading, lockpicking, Knowledge, seafaring, etc. are just a sample of the many proficiencies available. And then, I found the fighter's proficiency that I didn’t know I was looking for: berserkergang. With Berserkergang, you may enter the berserker rage for +2 attack and -2 AC for the whole of the combat. So that’s how to make a barbarian (unless you want to look at the class from Player’s Companion). There are even more proficiencies, most listed for the classes that are included there, in the Player’s Companion.

Proficiencies are what, to me, at least, makes ACKS worthwhile. If it weren’t for the proficiencies, I would simply tell myself and the readers to just play the Basic Fantasy RPG. As I was looking through the BF RPG I would think back to AKCS’s proficiencies and sigh that there wasn’t a better way to customize one’s characters in BF RPG (that you wouldn’t have to homebrew). There is one BF RPG supplement that almost approaches: Quasi Classes by Kevin Smoot.

I’ll note very quickly that ACKS has nothing, beyond the Proficiencies which concern very specific tasks, that deals with general tasks which are covered by later (read: 'modern') games. BF RPG even has its own system of dealing with that – ability rolls. While I was searching for a method to determine task resolution (Jesus fucking Christ, why don’t we just play GURPS) I found an interesting way of doing it. Unfortunately, I lost the link to the person’s suggestion, but it was rolling two, three, or four six-sided dice (depending on how difficult the task) under the relevant ability score as task resolution (which reminds me, why the hell am I not just playing GURPS?). There’s also GLOG (There’s also BF RPG) (There’s also BF RPG with GLOG) (There’s GURPS).

The other thing I like about ACKS is how it handles spells. In general, the magic system seems more robust than the BF RPG, allowing ritual spells (one of the things I really like about Beacon d20) and more in-depth rules for necromancy, constructs (tin soldiers, golems, and the like), divine retribution power, and playing god with monster DNA creating crossbreeds. I could live without that, however – or just look through BF RPG custom-built rules for something similar or simply make my own (and add that to their Workshop).

What I really liked about the magic system in ACKS is that, although it is vancian, it is almost less vancian. I should note that I thoroughly dislike vancian magic systems (except in GLOG, the only place it makes sense to me), despite enjoying D&D every now and again. My dislike of Hit Dice, AC, and vancian magic are what brought me directly into the arms of GURPS. What ACKS does better with its magic system, besides the upper-level options mentioned above, is its ‘spell repertoire’. Instead of memorizing/preparing spells in a vancian manner and using the fire-and-forget delivery, ACKS spellcasters may cast any spell they know (i.e. in their repertoire) when they decide to cast a spell. They are limited by how many spells of whatever level they may cast. To illustrate, a 3rd level mage would be able to cast two 1st-level spells and one 2nd-level spells. S/he wouldn’t need to declare to the GM which spells s/he prepared that day, simply that s/he was casting one of the spells of a level that s/he still could. This twist on the vancian almost makes the magic system seem that it’s based off of mana, not some really weird fantasy novel that Gygax really enjoyed. If it weren’t for spell levels, it’d succeed in this manner. It doesn’t need to, though: it’s obviously D&D and if we wanted a truly robust magic system we would play GURPS and make sure we had Thaumatology at hand.

Obviously, the ‘spell repertoire’ tweak on the vancian magic system can simply be house-ruled into any BF RPG game. This house-rule would also be the easiest to do, as it simply requires the GM to hand-waive explicit preparation. I’m sure many a mage would be happy to hear of it, also. Do your mage a favor and slowly chip away at the vancian chains that have held him/her down for 44 years.

Macris suggests that the player make 5 characters in character generation. Two are reserved for back-up PCs for that player (not a bad idea in an OSR game) and the other two are given to the GM to populate his/her world. That’s good, because Macris puts a lot of tedious work on the GM in building up the domains. I suppose it makes sense for the eventual domain-level play of later character levels. (Unimaginative segue) Macris has a lot of arrogant prescription in his books, and quite a bit of it encourages adversarial GMing (anyone who’s older than 16 should know that’s near enough the worst GMing). I’ll quote one passage to illustrate this point: “To kill adventurers with unexpected traps is a hollow pleasure for the [GM]; to kill them with traps they decided to trigger, despite every warning of the lethal risks, is deeply satisfying” (ACKS 241). ‘Sarcasm’ you prompt in response? Is it sarcasm? Is it true that killing characters is a pleasure ranging from deeply to shallowly satisfying? I guess it depends on what kind of GM or person you are. Who knows? Maybe it’s a Harvard thing.

The monster statistics are interesting. It has a mechanic to determine whether the Party has stumbled into a “lair” of a given monster. This kind of attention to detail can easily be given to monsters in BF RPG. Like BF RPG, monsters from older modules and versions can easily be converted into the game. Reflecting poorly on both ACKS and BF RPG, neither of the games has Mud Men. What shitty design a shame.

I should note that the system imparts a heavy reliance on wandering monsters and random encounters. Random encounters are a staple of the OSR, but today and before, a reliance on random encounters is generally tiring and plain. I’ve used random encounters before and I’ve had a blast with them. I remember fondly a time when I wound up pitting my characters against a winter wolf, some dire wolves, and even more regular wolves (I had warned them, and offered that I reroll since I’d rolled the most challenging result, but to their credit they declined and slew the wolves anyway). Incorporating wandering monsters as a necessary component of the game takes it a little too far. One thing I might do to remedy it is to prepare one encounter for each terrain or area, and roll for the chance of that encounter happening (or grow some metaphorical GM-balls and decide where to insert the encounter).

As I looked at ACKS further, the more I concluded that the only thing it really has going for it is the Proficiency system. That system can easily be hacked out of it or replicated into a game that’s both free and not written by a fascist. The domain-level play is what initially attracted me to look into the system. As I read through it, however, I began to question why it would be necessary. The rules for domain-level play aren’t as fully described in BF RPG, but they’re there. Besides, in D&D you should be the domain-level heroes with kickass titles who are still running around killing dragons and fighting domain-level monsters. Besides the many-headed hydra of D&D and its clones (both retro and otherwise) there is the elephant I bring to every room – GURPS. It might be a pygmy elephant, but I love this elephant nonetheless. One can easily run domain-level play in GURPS – I’m doing it right now. The rules are all set for that. Mass Combat is very effective and does exactly what mass combat should do in a role-playing game – not simulate a war game. City Stats and the Low-Tech Companions answer the questions about what’s in the domains, if the GM doesn’t already have a method of his/her own of world-building. How do you determine whether a character has achieved the ‘level’ for ‘domain-level’ play? Roleplay it and pay the points for Status and Allies.

Macris is a dirty, sexist pig incorporates needless elements into the system which point towards what might be called misogyny. Including sex-specific classes is a strange thing to see in the new millenium. The Bladedancer campaign class (a cleric that can use edged weapons) only admits women (so only women are allowed to deal with bleeding … that’s something and we all know exactly what it is). Naturally only a woman would become a Priestess of a powerful Goddess (so I guess, fuck off Wiccans?). It’s an easy thing to fix, but a weird thing to see. While I was looking through ACKS, I found a section on slavery. That’s not too strange to see. GURPS has rules on slavery. I’m running a campaign based around orcs and orc society, so there is plenty of slavery. I did find something weird, though – notes on sexual slavery. Incorporating slavery into your game is one thing. Noting the cost and monthly upkeep of “pleasure slaves” is another. If you’re already familiar with Macris, you might be familiar with The Escapist and its escapades with misogyny and transphobia as well as its support of racists. A pity What schmucks.

The saddest thing about ACKS is that the author is an alt-right fascist promoter and manager and an unscrupulous opportunist. If you want some more information about this, check Axes and Orcs and the contained link and D&D with Pornstars. I don’t feel like I have to elaborate on this aspect much. That’s a pretty hefty problem with the system. Don’t wanna support a fascist. Wish I had known before I got the damn books. But we’re here now … at the conclusion of this post.

You may have noticed that I haven’t provided any links to the website of ACKS while I have provided links to pretty much everything else not related to it. You may have also noticed that I indicate ways that aspects of ACKS could be hacked into another system and that I regularly make suggestions of using an alternative system. Perhaps you noted that my respect for its proficiency system is grudging. This is because you shouldn’t support the game or its publishers because the author is a fascist or supports fascists. He has a bad policy of choosing whatever is lucrative despite who is supported. There are some neat things about the system. Maybe when the company is under someone else’s management, I’ll put in links and say: hey, ACKS is cleared. But as of now, there’s a stain of transphobia and white supremacy lingering over its pages. Instead of ACKS, play Basic Fantasy – it’s free, community-driven, and involves only the monsters of fantasy. 

…

Shit, Lamentations of the Flame Princess is better than ACKS… In the future, I may include some more remarks on how one might hack Basic Fantasy to include further character customization. I will not, as I believe I mentioned before, convert those modules I’ve been working on to ACKS. Instead, as I suggest to the readers, I will convert them to Basic Fantasy.