ACKS II vs. Castles & Crusades

I love my Castles & Crusades game. There is no better game for doing everything that 5E does, but fitting it all on a 4x6" index card and tossing the rest out. I saw a few posts on ACKS videos commenting that C&C is still a great game, and guess what, it is! Don't drop C&C because you have ACKS, since I would play C&C in the classic settings of Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms, and be just as happy as I would in 5E. It feels close enough to the original game that it works, and it works very well.

And I love Troll Lord Games' business model, which is printed in the USA. They are building a new print shop factory and keeping jobs in this country. They are a fantastic group, ethical, and worth spending your gaming dollars with. They love the game and keep it for everybody.

Castles & Crusades kills any need for me to have any interest in 5E. It does the "D&D thing" well enough, and I do not notice the difference. If you want to play a game more like classic D&D, then C&C should be your jam. C&C is the D&D killer, and it was the last game Gygax was involved with. It is the true heir to the kingdom, where Wizards squandered its legacy and allowed the game to be tarnished by a mix of corporate interests and silly Internet psychology fads and memes, most of which have come and gone, but are now immortalized in the game.

C&C has maintained the course since its founding over 20 years ago, and the rules have remained unchanged across five D&D editions and various point versions. It costs a lot of money to rebuy your books every five years.

C&C, even without the OGL, is traditional. It feels like old-school AD&D and plays a lot easier. The characters are more expressive and fun. The SIEGE Engine drives the fun. Leveling means something. You grow in power to fantastic levels. You get that "high-level character" feeling here, and the optional rules are amazing. If you love C&C, there is no reason to switch.

If you like "what makes D&D, D&D," then stick with C&C. It does not change the formula too much, but improves it in every way, while keeping the things we love the way they are.

ACKS II is a different game. The focus at the higher levels is not "the most powerful monsters and biggest treasures," it is on domain-level play. You still get that high-level character feeling here, but you are more than just a hero. You are a possible conqueror and a future king. Your character can be a unit in a mass battle; you are that powerful.

Also, ACKS II is closer to its setting, a mythical "fall of the Roman Empire" setting of antiquity, where the lands are filled with chaos and strife. It is not your typical Dungeons & Dragons setting. It's sandbox play, starting in the dungeons and extending across domains. You can be a mad wizard and build a dungeon, luring in monsters and adventurers, and farming the dungeon for monster parts. Or farming adventurers. What the heck is this game? This is cool!

Found a thief's Guild? Build a kingdom? Run a pirate fleet? Be a merchant prince? Run a merchant fleet? Be a senator? Run a temple of good? Run a temple of evil? Do magic research? Build constructs? Breed monsters? Be mercenaries? Run a mercenary army? Fight in gladiatorial combat as a senator's champion? Work your way up the ranks and become a general? Be a spy or assassin? And the list of things to do in ACKS II goes on, and on...

Think of all these things as the "minigames" you get to do later on in Grand Theft Auto. Things open up, and hey, wow, I am sure having fun going out to get treasure so I can build my castle or hideout a little bigger. You may not want all these distractions, and you want your games to be more adventure-focused. While ACKS II can do that too, I see why you may want to stick with C&C.

Or play both, and have the best of both worlds.

ACKS II is like a traditional role-playing game that starts out exactly like you are used to, but slowly morphs into the macro-game of your dreams, be it a 4X build and conquer game, a merchant trading sim, a game of political intrigue, or a game about being a general and putting down rebellions. In this game, you can run a dungeon, explore the world on sailing ships, or live any other fantasy you have about the classic world. It goes beyond the dungeon and does all the things you imagined classic D&D could do, but the game never delivered rules for.

Where C&C focuses on the classic heroic adventures and dungeon crawling aspects of the game, ACKS II is like Breaking Bad meets Game of Thrones, with a little bit of GTA 5 in there in a Bronze Age setting. No other game lets you do this much "stuff" outside of the standard "find a dungeon and adventure" gameplay model of most OSR games, and that includes C&C.

Some may not want all this extra stuff! That is fine, C&C covers the basics and does a fantastic job.

I love both games for different reasons. It is also possible they co-exist, and you can use the ACKS II tables for C&C games. This is the OSR! Stuff works together here, and everyone plays well together.

The reasons I would play ACKS II instead of C&C?

• The ACKS II Setting
• Domain Play
• The End Game Activities
• Bronze Age Myth and Legend
• Playing a Game Different than the Usual

If you were tired of dungeon crawls in 5E, you will still be weary of them in C&C. The system is far better, though, and you may rediscover the fun in C&C.  If you want something more, then ACKS II deserves a look.

Stretch Goals, but ACKS Includes Them

It's fun to watch other Kickster projects for different games, which include stretch goals for features that ACKS includes with the basic rules. Some of them are even in expansion books and should be considered a part of the core game. The goal is missed, and we wonder what could have been.

But, again, ACKS has them.

No stretch goals needed.

Video: 5 Reasons to Ditch D&D 5e for ACKS

Tom's Game Table hits a home run with his video today on ACKS, giving an overview and comparison between ACKS II and D&D. Please like and subscribe to his channel, and watch the video the whole way through! Let's lift up our YouTube creators who provide good content and coverage for the games we love. Show the comments some appreciation, too, as every bit of interaction helps.

Here is a slightly cleaned-up part of the transcript to get his point across:

"...all right, I have teenage boys and cousins. They have not really jived much with modern D&D. Let's say they don't they don't really - not all of them, I don't want to speak for all of them - but some of them have a sense that Dungeons and Dragons has gone a different direction than the appeal and ideas that they really like. 

These are guys who play Warhammer 40,000, old-school Warhammer Fantasy, and they play other war games. They play their video games like Call of Duty and Battlefield. 

ACKS seems to speak to them."

That feeling exactly. ACKS has this mature, responsible, serious, and masculine feeling, much like Warhammer 40K, Call of Duty, or Battlefield. It isn't excluding females at all; some classes in ACKS are female-only, and some of the deadliest, most needed, and most potent in the game. The game gives every sex a moment to shine as "the best." Some classes are for elves or dwarves only. Everyone has a role to fill. Nobody is excluded, but there is nothing wrong with having a game that feels like it speaks to you.

D&D is still here! It is what it is, and that is a good thing. There is Daggerheart, too! Different games can appeal to various people and groups; this is what we aim for in the hobby.

There is another very nice comment from Black Lodge Games (subscribe to them as well, they are fantastic) about learning the game, and this is going to help me a great deal:

"+1 for Sinister Stone. It is easy to run and a great introduction to a sandbox region. The important chapters in the core rules for GMs and players to read are Revised Rulebook: Chapter 1 - Characters, Chapter 6 - Adventures, and for GMs in particular: Judges Journal Chapter 1- Foundations, Chapter 2 - Adventures. The rest can be consumed more slowly, but those are the most important for the core rules imo."

An excellent video, and one of the best on ACKS I have seen. Please check this out!

Fantasy Rome > Fantasy Renaissance

Fantasy Rome is far better than the typical Fantasy Renaissance of D&D, if you can even call it that with D&D's settings. I'm not familiar with D & D's settings, and they were popular in the 1990s when the paperbacks were released, or perhaps early on when Gygax was writing them to sell adventure modules at the beginning of the hobby. However, they have mainly been squandered since then.

If I look at Baldur's Gate 3, they are science fiction settings in fantasy cosplay. It's a great game, but not what I remember from the original grey Forgotten Realms boxed set, which was made for AD&D back in the day. Not the heavily censored Second Edition, which bankrupted TSR, but the original game.

None of the TSR settings do it for me. I may have fond memories of them, but these settings hold little meaning for me today. They are just paper-thin nostalgia.

With a Fantasy Rome-style setting, we have a story set in the decline of an empire, marked by strife, factionalized politics, regional violence, deep-rooted corruption justified by factionalism, and countrymen at each other's throats. You have false prophets, influencers, new religions, and con men swaying large groups of disenfranchised, sheep-like followers, and easily led. You experience massive shifts in population due to wars, famine, and internal strife as they assimilate, or refuse to, and divide nations even more.

Sound familiar? Yes, that is today. Fantasy Rome is a metaphor for today.

This holds a greater meaning to me in my gaming twilight.

D&D, and 5E by extension, can wear the Fantasy Rome clothing, but they paint over the strife and conflict, preferring to put on a happy face instead of facing the truth and metaphor. D&D exists as an antidepressant, a drugged reality of happy, smiling demons, talking animals, and the fakeness we usually reserve for children to tell them, "Everything is going to be all right."

When, as adults, we know that it won't be.

If I were a pharmaceutical company, I would call D&D, Fantasium, or some other silly, made-up drug name. They use childlike imagery and nostalgia to put your mind into a play state, a softer reality where violence is "just numbers" and even the monsters "have no alignment" and "everyone can get along." What is more important is going to the Monster Prom, dating each other, and posing for the camera using your "free VFX magic" like an MCU hero nobody has heard of.

The worlds that D&D has turned into were originally compelling, like Gygax's version of Lord of the Rings, but with more chances to sell adventure modules. Where we have gone since there is a mixture between nowhere and worse off. The creators today try to ride the coattails of Gygax and company.

Still, these teams will never write another Tomb of Horrors-type masterpiece all their own, no matter how long they continue writing and pushing out art and text that feel like filler. When Shadowdark can tell you something in two sentences, the same thing that D&D does in an entire page, you have a problem.

Also, do not walk the paths of nostalgia. The destination is only sadness and heartache, for you will never truly ever return to that place. Nostalgia is a form of depression, a longing for a lost past we can never visit again. The only way out is to create a new golden age, with new memories of greatness, with what we have here, today. That is what those original creators did; now step up and take the challenge yourself.

You can do it because they did, and they were much worse off with the collapse of the hippy movement, no Internet, runaway inflation, and the end of the Vietnam War. You have it easy today. There is no reason you can't be great, too, even if it is in just a few games you play on the weekend.

The glory of past empires is gone, and we are left in a state of semi-civilized ruin. What was once a gleaming kingdom of light has fallen into despondency, deviancy, and disrepair. Temples to Chthonic gods and devils open up down the street, where sacrifices are made nightly, and people defend them as a choice. Families and societies are torn apart by a toxic mixture of blame and "get mine" profit, and what was once a common good is allowed to be painted as evil. Men would rather be homeless than raise a family, as they have given up the way, with no one to lead them.

Overseas empires that worship pure evil are allowed in to whisper honeyed words to raise strife, while they hold poisoned daggers behind their backs. There is money to be made from them, you know, so do not call them out for who they really are. The merchant class smiles as they jingle their bags of blood money, only caring about their comfort and not the millions enslaved overseas to import the fine goods which make the wealthy classes happy. And a massive underclass of 'pretend rich' and their influencer shepherds of greed tell you, you too can live like the rich, if you just buy their words and ways of life.

The Gods of Good have been replaced by The Lies of Sin.

Fantasy Rome settings are the best reflection of the world we live in. And, honestly, if you can play and love Warhammer 40K,  you can play in a Fantasy Rome setting since you are halfway already.

Also, today's faux-Renaissance settings are muddled, coming from the birth of colonialism and nobility, and the seeds of all the sins we live with today. All the cool stuff has been done. The Greeks had their Iliad and Odyssey, and after that, what? Shakespeare and King Arthur? Noble and literate, yes, but epic, no. Give me the minotaur, cyclops, hydra, and medusa any day.

And what is sad is that today's games will take these beasts of legend, soften them, remove the nature of the evil they are supposed to represent, and present them as player options. Sure! We have Medusa as a playable "heritage!" You level up your stone-turning powers! You get special snake-hair abilities. We even have anime-inspired art that's cute! Look at these class and heritage options!

What was once a monster born from the metaphor of being so vain and self-important that you destroy all around you, becomes another pill in the bottle of pharmaceutical escapism to idolize abhorrent behavior as normal. The people who sit in their cars and scream at their phones? Harpies, and soon to be another player option in these pharma-games. It is sad, really.

Real men and women think about the original trilogy of Rome, not the Renaissance England by way of Wall Street sequels.

ACKS II, Myth, Legend, and Culture

ACKS II is stunning in its representation of cultures and peoples who brought the original myths and legends to the fantasy gaming genre. Finally, we have a game for mature minds, but not in a salacious or exploitative way. It does not pander to us by falsely attempting to replace entire cultures with monsters, and then claim diversity because the monsters are now player options.

Modern games just do not get it. They are hopelessly off course. They ignore actual history, culture, myth, and legend. They replace it with the cultural equivalent of processed foods, those artificially flavored and powdered carbohydrates that pretend to be nourishing, but slowly kill us with their toxic ingredients, designed to create generational food addicts.

You need to go back to your history books to learn culture. Read. You need to talk with grandma and grandpa, and hear about their grandparents and how they grew up. You aren't getting authentic culture from D&D.

Yes, the "but it is fantasy" argument applies. But, still, this is toxic Wall Street culture designed to create truths to replace your ideas of what actually happened, and all the things passed down from your ancestors. They just want to sell you fake culture as identity, replacing actual outstanding achievements and cultures with fictional fake concepts and identities that are corporate IP.

You can't have culture unless it's owned by a corporation. The ideas, myths, and legends of your people become theirs to profit from.

ACKS 2 Revised Rulebook, page 498. Copyright © 2025 Autarch, LLC.

ACKS II raises the bar unapologetically, and it is not sorry for what it is, how it presents the subject, and how it plays. Finally, we have a game that does not apologize for what it is or for the bad things in the hobby that came before, but celebrates what the source cultures have brought to the hobby. ACKS II is also far more diverse than D&D, with parallels for every Mediterranean racial type existing in the setting, depicted beautifully, with pride and strength, and as iconic role models of what heroes should look like.

Look at the above picture as the book's depiction of the Kushtu people of the Ivory Kingdoms. These are possible adventurers and heroes. Put one way, this is ACKS II's "D&D heroes" that will put on leather armor and pick up the short sword, learn magic, and fight off the beast-men attacking their homes. They will be the ones rising to found kingdoms and driving evil from the lands. They will be the ones clearing the dungeons and slaying the dragons.

You respect a culture by tracing its roots back far, honoring its identity and myths, all the way to its ancestors' ancestors. You don't give them steampunk clothing, dyed hair, and Supercuts hairstyles. You present their history as strong, heroic, capable people. They are every bit a part of the myths and legends that built this hobby, just like the European parts (and Asian, and Indian, and Central American, and Middle Eastern, and so on).

Modern games are content to give us dozens of cartoon character races, talking anthropomorphs, and half-demons, and tell us, "Look, we have diversity."

ACKS II also does not cartoonishly paint its enemies, like Pathfinder's Goblins, D&D's Demons, ToV's Kobolds, or Orcs in all of these games. The monsters are a corruption of good, and they are entirely evil. They are not made to be appealing. They don't represent anything. They are also quite different than what we are used to in D&D, as goblins are short, furry, wicked little beasts.

Hollywood, Westernized anime, MMOs, video games, tabletop games, and these other manufactured corporate properties have destroyed the historical myths and legends on which our concepts of fantasy were built. When our original sources of myth are generations removed from the original content, we lose the original meaning. They become more about corporate IP than they do about what is real to us as humanity.

The ACKS II setting is one of the greatest fantasy settings, just because of its representation and refusal to bend the knee to the Wall Street tropes and the artificial culture-for-sale. Even though it is all human, the robust and respectful representations of the diverse mix of cultures raise this above the cartoonish modern-day Forgotten Realms, or the ever-sleeping Greyhawk that gets pulled out for nostalgia every few editions. I still love those settings, but they have their flaws.

Modern designers often become lazy, incorporating elements from every culture into a single piece of art and claiming to promote diversity. The settings are everything in a blender, and they press the speed setting of ten. Even many OSR games lean too heavily on European tropes and ignore the best parts from older and more influential cultures. Some games feel like Renaissance Faire theme parks with silly places like Egypt World to wander around in, dressed like an Arthurian Knight.

Give me a game with actual cultures based on history, presented realistically and respectfully? I can play this game as a resident of the Ivory Kingdoms, and learn about their traditions and unique culture?

ACKS II is that game, and about 10 years ahead of the curve here. Just wait, soon, these big companies will be designing "respectful representations" of "authentic cultures" in their fantasy games and trying to do what ACKS II already did.

We can play that game today.

The Hardcovers are Here!

My ACKS II hardcovers are here! Finally!

Wow, these are impressive books - huge, heavy, with leather covers and thick, glossy paper. They look like religious tomes, and I am impressed.

I opened these up, and they are so full of tables and charts that I had a 2001: A Space Odyssey moment. I see charts! So many charts!

This is seriously better than AD&D or even my current favorite, Adventures Dark and Deep. The tables here are packed with information that I can use in every type of situation, and are focused on each section of the book very nicely. The charts in the first edition tended to be random miscellanea.

The game has this unified look and feel that I love. Previously, ACKS I had this split personality between the base game and the Heroic Fantasy Handbook. Now, without the OGL? This is its own world and game. This is a d20 answer to RuneQuest, but not as alien and strange in some aspects. We have no ducks, trolls, dragon-newts, or other special races; we have only humans, elves, and dwarves. There are many human kin to choose from, too, so they are amazingly diverse.

We have two spheres of gods: the Empyrean and the Chthonic. This is a nice order versus chaos split, and helps define the setting's faiths nicely.

We have condition and recovery charts, almost like the crit charts from Rolemaster.

There is no OGL to be seen anywhere. We are finally free, brothers and sisters! ACKS II is its own game. Familiar monsters of myth are all presented, and the spells are all de-OGL-ed. While this looks and feels like a B/X-style game, it is its own thing.

The depth of this game is fantastic on every level, and you can drill down as deep as you want anywhere in the game. You can run a wilderness exploration campaign, a sailing game, a kingdom game, or just wander about as adventurers. You can clear land and settle it. Attract settlers. Collect taxes. Build improvements. Construct a class stronghold. Establish a senate. A wargame is built into the rules for mass battles. There are costs for town services, market rules, item availability, monster harvesting, and so many little details are everywhere if you ever need them.

This is more than an OSR game. This is a comprehensive role-playing world experience, spanning three books. Three shelves worth of 5E books could not give me a game like this.

My name is in the book as a backer.

Life is good today.

ACKS, Teaching the Game, and Structure

ACKS II has amazingly high production values, not only in art and appearance, but also in design. The game lays out the play step-by-step, and then informs you that you don't have to follow the checklists, but they are provided for those who are unfamiliar with the game and need a framework.

Many of today's games were never taught correctly in the first place, and then the game's design was altered by this lack of knowledge to appease players who were not playing it correctly. Role-playing became this sort of 'extreme rule zero' hobby, where the rules were 'anything you wanted them to be' and the entire hobby slipped into storytelling, personal identity reflection, and wish fulfillment.

But even then, teaching the game is moved so far to the back burner that people stumble their way through it. They mostly learned D&D by watching live-play shows on YouTube, which caused that part of the hobby to fork and diverge with Daggerheart. That is a good thing, since it gives the story-gamers a place of their own, and a game specifically tailored for that playstyle. It leaves D&D in a worse place as a game that does everything, but nothing specific that well.

Learning Daggerheart will be 'watching the show,' and the game is designed for that.

Even Shadowdark rolls this notion of 'what is the game' and 'how do we teach it' way back, forcing everyone to play the game in a structured turn order, on a map, with movement critically important, and a torch time in real time ticking down. Shadowdark is 5E with defined play procedures, and people eat this game up. It is tense, fun, edge-of-your-seat, and incredibly immersive. The real-time play prioritizes teamwork and table efficiency. The play structure and procedure define the Shadowdark experience and have become its brand and popularity.

I like it when publishers can teach the game. There have been games I had on the shelf for months, and I couldn't figure them out. There are still games I have that are far beyond me, just because of the way they are written, left for players to figure out, or they are a jumbled mess of ideas and concepts. I had Cypher System a year before I figured out what was going on with it, but now it's one of my favorite games. Pathfinder 2 remains a game that eludes me as a mess of tags, class-specific terms, and particular actions, even with an excellent Beginner Box. At times, there feels like too much for one person to remember.

But I can handle GURPS well, and that game is notorious for layers of depth and complexity.

Additionally, if the game does not teach how to play it, it will be left to YouTube to do so, and I cringe at the amount of horrible play and GM advice that pollutes that platform. If I were to take the general D&D content creator's advice on YouTube, the first thing I need to play D&D is an S-tier, highly optimized build, multiclass mix of paladin and warlock, pre-planned from levels 1 to 20, and with maximized DPT.

For GMs, the advice is even worse, with it being anywhere from no-prep to ultimate prep, to give up and spend a week reading a module to have your players instantly go off the rails on the first encounter. Some will suggest the GM use oracle dice, others will fall back on GM prep books they want to sell you, and others will just say 'make it all up' and give up, while still presenting the topic in a viewer-friendly and conversational way. Others are just eye-candy or a reflection of personal validation.

YouTube is a terrible place to learn anything from. You will be on the platform for months, listening to bad advice from everyone, and eventually find something you already knew that validates something that may have worked for you once, most likely by random chance.

Somewhere, I bet there is a 'learn to draw' channel out there with the advice, "The first step in learning to draw is to close your eyes before you move the pen." It sounds cool and interesting, like some secret technique was just discovered, but what the heck are you doing? Then, the creator goes on to sell a few million dollars of books titled "Drawing With Your Eyes Closed" to people who are fans of the channel, but are learning nothing of any actual value. When pressed by actual art instructors, they will come up with some nonsense like, "I am talking about the inner eye."

I swear I should go sell nonsense books on YouTube and be a millionaire instead of writing blogs.

Tales of the Valiant puts a little more effort into teaching and laying out procedures, but the 5E market has moved on to 'doing it my way' so hard that it falls on deaf ears. ToV does an excellent job streamlining character creation, and their GM's Guide is a 10/10 book, with many examples and suggestions on how to handle the situations that come up in real games. There is 'actual stuff you can use' in that book, instead of the 2024 DMG for D&D infamously spending pages of text to ultimately tell you to, 'just make it up yourself.'

The amount of bad advice that ultimately drives players away from the hobby, sitting out on YouTube, is shocking. The core books of D&D (2014 or 2024) do little to address the problem.

ACKS II teaches, often starting a chapter with a checklist or numbered sequence of play, outlining the steps and what to do in each one. There is even a play procedure laid out for dungeon exploration! If you do it all your way and it works, fine, keep doing that. If you are a new player with no clue, it is here for you to read through, understand, and use as a framework to develop your style. However, you are always starting from the best place —the one the designer intended, which is proven to work and deliver fun.

And the ACKS II Judges Journal is up there with the ToV GM's Guide in usability, helpfulness to running a real game, and stuff you can use. In fact, the ACKS II book far surpasses the ToV book in helpfulness to the actual play of the game. Checklists, teaching people to play, and the amount of helpful information put ACKS II over so many OSR and modern games.