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.

Back in ACKS

I missed this game. I put ACKS aside for a while as I waited for the hardcovers and tried a few other games. GURPS was my main jam, and still is. The excellent Adventures Dark and Deep is another. Most of the games in my linked blog sites are my go-to games, with SBRPG being the catch-all site. Tales of the Valiant is my 5E game, since I support Open 5E as a principle. Cypher is an excellent narrative-focused game. Dungeon Crawl Classics is also on my list as a fun, chaotic, random game of insane happenings.

ACKS 2 speaks to me. This is the Bronze Age swords & sandals game I dreamed of having since my time with RuneQuest, but more in line with the OSR and the familiar d20 and hit dice mechanics that I grew up with. These are the tales of heroes and villains, monstrous beasts, lost civilizations, mystic dreams, and falling empires.

Author's art, @nightcafestudio

The game is beautiful too, the art is stunning, and it plays to classical sensibilities and heroes. This is not a game where intelligent plants, puppets, half-demons, and anthropomorphic animals wander about in a post-modern haze. The game is amazingly diverse, showcasing people of all skin types and colors, all of whom are proud, beautiful, amazing, and equally capable of heroism or villainy. Races here have no special powers or modifiers, since they are all human. Too often, modern games replace true diversity with silly cartoon races, and ACKS 2 shows us how to do diversity right, as it is based in the classical world.

If you've always wanted to, you can port in your favorite nonhuman races from OSR and B/X-style games. It is your game, but if you do, try to give them that mythic, Bronze Age feeling.

There is a conversion guide with the PDFs that is worth reading!

This is a massive game, worth the page count, filled with tables and helpful advice, and a primer on old-school gaming. The game delivers on the promise of dungeon crawler, to kingdom conqueror, to domain management play, where many OSR games fall short, or simply include building costs, and that is all they give for running a kingdom.

The game does put many OSR games to shame, but in a good way, since you can borrow all of this for any OSR system you have as a favorite.

The monster book is fantastic, and of an interesting note, and all the major monsters are represented. We have dragons and cacodemons (randomized demons). It's nice to see demons represented as randomized, evil entities, rather than having specific, predictable types. If demons are chaos creatures, then they should be randomly terrifying and each one unique! Why do we need massive catalogs of them, and do they never change? I love you, 5E, but don't let selling books overcome your game design senses. Demons are far better as an unpredictable design system than as player character options, and endless lists of CR-appropriate fiends.

I have five shelves of 5E books, and perhaps only 10% of them are worth keeping.

And you can use any OSR monster in this game, so have fun! If you want some of your favorites, just bring them in. The monsters in the ACKS 2 Monstrous Manual have tons of stats, from battle ratings in mass combat, to harvesting monster parts, spell components of various parts, and what you can get in gold for them. Also, what skills are needed to harvest them? This is the best OSR monster book ever, a comprehensive phone book complete with data, entries, and monsters, all in color.

The Judge's Journal is quickly picking up the reputation of one of the best books on refereeing of all time. Not only is there advice here, but also suggested step-by-step procedures that teach you how to play all the systems in the book, even exploration, dungeon crawling, travel, and so many other areas. This is a massive tome, filled with years of GM-ing experience, and it is close to being perfect.

The game stays in the Bronze Age of epics, myths, and heroes. It avoids the Renaissance 'New World' style of colonial fantasy we are used to in D&D. There are times when all this steampunk, gunpowder, clockwork, and high-tech fantasy is simply faux-modern pastiche. None of it enhances the story, and it is this modern style of colonial fantasy that feels vapid and devoid of soul, as it has no connection to myth or legend.

Author's art, @nightcafestudio

Myth and legend are written into our DNA.

These stories are passed down through the generations and have become a part of us. To deny them is to deny life and worship death. All these modern games are endless repetition of each other; I can't tell the art apart from Daggerheart, D&D, or even Pathfinder 2. None of them has a unique look or style. There may be a few exceptional artists, but what is being shown, drawn, and presented to us has this unnerving sameness to it all. It is a modern fantasy, corporate cosplay, colorfully empty, and endlessly happy, with almost a drugged look to it. It is soulless children's art that fails to challenge us or evoke any emotions.

Author's art, @nightcafestudio

The art in ACKS II blows me away. This is sword & sandal & sorcery at its finest. It dares us to live in a world of myth and history, magic and legend, wickedness and heroes. It creates a world in which you can rise to be a king or a queen, or fail and become a tragedy, about which stories shall be told for generations. It smiles as your characters grab fistfuls of gold and shove them into your packs, to return to town and revel in wine, song, and a partner of your choosing.

The game feels wonderfully mature and for adults, but it does not dip into the salacious or tawdry. This is what 'a game for mature minds' used to be. Like a movie with a deep plot, a depth of characters, and performances that take us into another world - those classic movies of the 1950s to the 1970s, which made no apologies for being what they were: mature fare that did not titillate, but engaged the mind. When we were kids, those movies were boring to us, but these days I seek them out since they give me something modern, flashy effects, and spectacular fights can't.

They give me meaning.

ACKS II is the ultimate OSR game.

Hardcovers!

My hardcovers have finally shipped. I was one of the ones who ordered the slipcases, and while everyone got theirs before me, I waited. And while I am not getting a slipcase since they were damaged in shipping, I am getting a nice copy of By This Axe as a wonderful apology, and I thank the fine people at Autarch for making that happen.

I am looking forward to this game; it feels like the be-all-end-all of OSR gaming for me. An ultimate expression of our hobby, and a magnum opus of gaming. Nearly 1,500 pages of game?

I look forward to tomorrow, when they finally arrive.