Bring Someone Who Can Die

 A 5E party is a closed shop. Four special people, maybe five, each with a novel’s worth of backstory and a subclass that wants camera time. If one of them drops, the table flinches. The story was built around that face.

ACKS does not run that way unless you force it to.

Henchmen are not comic relief and they are not pack mules with hit points. They are how a campaign grows a population. You hire them because you are first level and the dark is larger than you. You pay them. You split treasure. You watch loyalty move when you are greedy, cowardly, or lucky. Some of them die in a hallway you do not remember the name of. Some of them live long enough to become the next problem.

That is the part the so-so games sand off. They want every figure on the map to be precious. ACKS wants the world to have spare people. A fighter with two retainers is already a small company. A thief with a hideout is already a rumor. A mage who can afford specialists is already touching the economy. None of that requires a domain turn. It requires wages, a reaction roll, and the nerve to send someone else through the door.

I used to skip this and call it speed. It was fear. If only the player characters matter, the dungeon is a ride. If the hireling with the lantern has a name and a morale score, the ride can go wrong in a way the story has to keep.

You do not need a kingdom on Monday.

You need one more person who can die for the gold, and a table willing to remember whether you treated them like loot or like a future rival.

Play It Monday

The books are on the shelves. That is not the same thing as a campaign.

Monday is when the hobby dies of preparation. You tell yourself you will start when you have the domain rules cold, the market tables copied, the mortal wounds chart memorized, and a hex map that would survive a dissertation. You will not start. You will open another system that asks less of you and calls that wisdom.

ACKS II does not require a converted monk. It requires a party, a hole in the ground, and the chapters you actually need tonight: characters, equipment, adventuring, combat. The rest of the Imperial Imprint is not a test. It is inventory. You take it off the shelf when the gold has somewhere to go, and the survivors have names the setting has to remember.

I have already made this mistake. I treated completeness like a homework assignment. The game felt heavy because I tried to lift the whole crate at once. The core loop is still B/X. You go in. You take risks. You come out with coin or you do not come out. Henchmen, construction, hijinks, and realms are what happen if you keep showing up.

Monday does not need a kingdom. Monday needs six ability scores, a class, and a reason to open a door. If the table is still together in three months, the Judges Journal will still be there. If it is not, you will have wasted less time than the people still outlining tax policy for a campaign that never had a first session.

The shelves are restocked. That was Saturday’s work.

Monday’s work is smaller and harder: pick a module or a hex, roll the fools who will die in it, and play before the rust comes back.

The Gold Is the Plot

The crate is empty now. The books are back on the shelves.

The first thing I forget, every time I leave ACKS, is that the gold is not a score. It is the plot.

In most of the games I wasted a year on, treasure is a pat on the head. You get XP from killing the thing. You get a magic sword so the next thing dies faster. Coins are inventory clutter you convert into potions and forget. The world does not change because you dragged a chest out of a hole. The next town is still the same town. The next duke is still the same duke. The gold evaporates into “lifestyle,” and the campaign stays a string of rooms.

ACKS does not play that game.

Experience from treasure is the old promise, written down and enforced. You get rich by taking risks in places that do not want you. Then the gold has somewhere to go. Hirelings. Mercenaries. Construction. A hideout. A market stall that is not flavor text. A stronghold that appears on the map and makes other people have opinions about you. The coin you earned in the dark becomes walls, wages, and problems with names.

That is why the so-so games felt thin. They sold me the dungeon and then shrugged at everything after the haul. ACKS already knows what a market can swallow, what a syndicate costs to run, what a domain does to a hex, and why a thief who levels up does not stay a dungeon specialist forever. He becomes a civic nuisance. That is not a subplot you invent on a Sunday. That is the book.

You can ignore all of it. Roll a fighter, kick in a door, count the coins, go home. The game still works. That is the trap and the mercy of ACKS: the extra chapters are not homework. They are the second and third acts, waiting until the table is ready to stop being tourists.

I put these books away because other systems were easier to start. Starting is cheap. Finishing a campaign is expensive. ACKS paid that cost in advance.

Tonight the shelves look serious again. Not because the spines are pretty. Because the gold in this game has a destination, and so do the characters who survive long enough to spend it.

Back in ACKS

The books came out of storage today.

Not metaphorically. A watertight plastic crate, stacked under the usual debris of a life that keeps buying games and then pretending the last one will be enough. I cracked the lid. The ACKS books were still there. No dust. No garage smell. Just that clean, sealed plastic smell of a box that did its job.

I have been gone long enough to get bored.

There was a stretch of average tables. So-so campaigns. Games that filled a night and then evaporated. I went back to 5E because the table was already there and the books were already on the shelf. That is the oldest lie in this hobby: it is good enough, and everyone already knows it. 5E is a competent night of play. It is also a machine for making characters who get louder without ever becoming more responsible. You get more spells. You get more hit points. You do not get a world that has to answer for what you did.

Then Old School Essentials. Excellent game. Clean, fast, honest B/X. I liked it. I still like it. After a few sessions, I wanted more meat on the fighter, more reason for the gold to matter, more of a campaign that did not stop being interesting when the dungeon was cleared. OSE does the core loop perfectly. It does not, by itself, take you the rest of the way.

Dungeon Crawl Classics stayed in rotation because it always does. DCC is the old standby for a reason. It is wild, lethal, funny, and it remembers that first-level characters are meat. I love it. I also got tired of needing the joke, the funnel chaos, the gonzo spike, just to feel like the session had a pulse. I wanted something more mature and more serious without becoming a lecture. I wanted consequence that was structural, not just theatrical.

So I jumped to flavors of 5E. The usual circuit. Someone’s “fixed” 5E. Someone’s gritty 5E. Someone’s domain 5E that is really just downtime worksheets stapled to a superhero math problem. Dragonbane got a look. Other old-school games got a look. Some of them are good. None of them closed the loop I actually wanted closed.

Good enough is not good enough for me. Average is a waste of time.

ACKS is the game that still means what the hobby used to advertise. Zero to hero is not a slogan on the back cover. It is the campaign structure. You start poor, scared, and replaceable. If you live, the gold you drag out of the hole is not flavor text. It buys hirelings, equipment, influence, a name. Later it buys walls. Later it buys a realm. The rules don't shrug and say, “the DM will figure out kingdoms.” The game already knows what a domain costs, what a market can absorb, what a stronghold does to the map, and what happens when a thief stops being a dungeon specialist and starts being a problem for a city.

That is the part I missed while I was touring other systems. Most games sell you the first act and then improvise the rest. ACKS wrote the rest down and playtested it until it stopped being a pamphlet and became a campaign engine. You can ignore half the book and still play Keep on the Borderlands. That is fine. The point is that the other half waits until the characters stop being wanderers and start being people the setting has to live with.

I do not need another game that makes me feel powerful at level eight and bored at level twelve. I do not need another ruleset that treats the world as a theme park that resets for the next party. I want the story that actually completes: adventurer, then conqueror, then king — or corpse, tyrant, exile, or footnote. ACKS will let the table finish that sentence.

The crate is open. The malaise is fading. The false hope that the next 5E patch or the next “OSR but easier” book would finally be the one is fading with it.

I already owned the best version of this dream. I just sealed it in plastic and spent a year proving that to myself the hard way.

Tonight I am not shopping. I am restocking the shelves.

Why Fight Wizards? Play ACKS.

I watched the latest kerfuffle with Wizards' D&D marketing and laughed. Companies do things to "fire troublesome fans," which is what they do. They dump the old and try to advertise to the people they want as their customers. Ideally, this is a part of a strategic plan, not just the employees "running the ship." You get these sick and dying companies, and they start to go "off the rails," and the employees are scrambling to try to save their jobs and trying to "be too popular," and you get this sort of mess.

But then another part of me says, "Who cares?"

Why are we trying to "fight to keep the old D&D alive" when we have better? We have people making the games who see them as "old school style" as we do, and in some cases, they are even better games.

We still have community-supported first-edition games! We don't have to buy PoD copies of the first edition (which are filled with scanning errors), and we can support games and communities that allow us to publish our first-edition adventures, settings, and rules expansions. OSRIC 2.2 and the upcoming 3.0 are two great first-edition games.

Adventures Dark and Deep is another fantastic game, expanding the first edition and giving us more toys. We do not need to "support 5E" or even care "what Wizards does" other than to laugh at them. Not at them, trying to turn D&D into a storytelling FATE-style lifestyle game, but at how incompetent they are at capturing the original core essence of the game we love. I am all for including others at my table, but they come here to play classic D&D and not experience more of the same pastel rainbows and unicorns life they already have.

The Wizards team does not understand the game and is out of touch.

But why fight a company that is that lost? We have better. I started with the first edition because that is the popular exit point for 5E and the classic game people seek. And this is not "bringing modernity" to the first edition; this is playing that same game that started all of this—to have that experience, to play the game the same exact way it was played in the 1980s.

ACKS is a game that is clearly better than current-day D&D, first edition, and most anything else on the market. Why am I wasting energy fighting a billion-dollar out-of-touch marketing team when I could be playing something cool? They want to make the game they think they can sell. Let them fail.

ACKS is more D&D than D&D.

The dream is alive here. The story of a character going from nothing to king, savior, or tyrant is here, supported, and the rules work exceptionally well. In D&D, what is your story? Become an overpowered and bored 20th-level superhero, mirroring the downfall of every superhero franchise in Hollywood, desperately trying to reinvent and reboot itself to stay relevant.

D&D is the story of a downfall, of a naive newcomer to becoming an overpowered and bored demigod.

Someone who never changes and becomes more dependent on their powers than the world around them. This one fact is the fatal flaw of every superhero story ever written. This is the "failing empire" plot, and it is embodied in every character in D&D, from levels one to the empire's end at 20.

I have this strange feeling in D&D that the franchise is more important than my character. In D&D, you can't change the world and campaign setting since it is a McSetting and a McUniverse, and it is a fast food franchise model that always must return to normal for the next group to wander through Playland and slide into the ball pit. This always bothered me about the direction D&D 4 took with baking in the campaign setting and universe model, and making the planes more critical than my campaign world.

ACKS gives you the tools to change the universe. The entire point of the game is to "wreck the campaign setting" and make it yours. The characters will shape the world, for good or ill, and change the direction, fiction, and history. You aren't forced to "play alongside" the Baludur's Gate 3 cast and have them be unkillable and insufferable GMNPCs, which the Forgotten Realms is notorious for. You will never be Elminster, the Harpers, the RPG characters, or anyone as crucial to the franchise. You will play alongside Ronald and his Happy Meal friends.

We have better.

We have a game that prioritizes you—not the IP, copyrighted content, marketing team, or characters—but you. The setting can change; shaping and crafting the future is yours. You and your story come first. Yes, you can do all this in D&D, but the game is becoming more about "playing with the Hasbro toys" than using your imagination.

The tools are here. I have used many applications and software that give me a third-rate experience, but they are popular, so I use them. Whenever I am forced to upgrade my software to something that works better, I wonder why it took me so long to make the jump, and I feel stupid. ACKS gives me the campaign and world tools I would have been sorry I did not use earlier.

Again, who cares about D&D and what they do?

We have something clearly better here.

Why Not ACKS?

Why not play an easier game?

Well, the statement is a bit deceptive, since ACKS is a simple game. Just because the books are filled with domain management rules does not mean the "core game loop" is huge. There is no real difference between ACKS and B/X when you are playing at the table.

Can't we play Old School Essentials and have the same game, just with fewer pages? While OSE does a "5E replacement" perfectly and gives you tons of character options that mirror that game (Tieflings, Dragonborn, etc.), ACKS is a better game if you want greater detail inside your character. OSE characters can feel "too basic" without an add-on, such as Into the Wild, and the basic fighter is a bit plain and uninteresting without a few optional rules printed in fanzines.

And given the "game play loop" in OSE and ACKS is identical, I will go for the game with the greater level of depth each time. Unless I have players wanting those 5E race options and that D&D 4E style world, ACKS II will be the more in-depth game with the better and more satisfying characters (without GURPS in the discussion, and if the players wants a d20 game).

In ACKS, you get the "real fighter." The game does not go overboard with layers of extra detail, but you get the best to-hit, cleave, and a flat damage bonus that goes up as you level. All characters gain proficiencies, and this skill system defines the game just like a feat system did in 3.5E. There is a chart laying out which ones you get on which level in each class, and also, each character gets four "training slots" available with extra study.

ACKS does have class design, and is race-as-class, so if you really wanted that Dragonborn or Tiefling you could develop a custom class in ACKS for them. It is not that hard. They have special ability lists for custom race-as-class options pages long in the Judges Journal.

Without having to add Into the Wild, the Carcass Crawler zines, or any other optional rules to the game - you have a solid core system that does not need tweaking and modification. In fact, ACKS II is the second edition of a game that has been play tested for over 10 years, so the rules are solid and work extremely well - in everything from characters to domain management. ACKS II is just about as solid of a game you can buy, with nothing else needed, no list of special mods, and you are not explaining your custom hacks to your game to anyone.

You are not buying third-party fixes or Kickstarter domain-play rules that weren't tested and shipped broken. This game is tested and works, and you don't need to keep spending money to constantly repair the game like you do in 5E. Playing basic OSE is fine, but if you want better character depth and classes with some meat on the bones, and you do not want to mod the game, ACKS is by far the better choice.

If I were playing with more casual players, and "small books" were a requirement? Sure, I would choose OSE or Shadowdark for such a group, we need to play to the audience. I am not forcing a game the size of encyclopedias on a casual gaming group unless they were really into it.

For a years-long game that goes into domain management? ACKS will deliver the better experience for an epic-scale campaign, and you won't need to keep spending money to fix the game or add options along the way. As a "complete and well-tested" game, ACKS will beat out every other B/X-based competitor.

ACKS YouTube List Added!

I added a list gadget to the sidebar for ACKS focused YouTube channels, so we can visit them regularly and support ACKS creators in the community. Anything we can do to get awareness to our creators is a good thing.