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.