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.

YouTube: Is my favorite RPG too complex?

One of the best videos on ACKS is out recently, and it touches an issue which I wrestle with. Is ACKS II too intimidating? Do people bounce off the game and never return, fleeing back into the cave for easier systems, such as Swords & Wizardry and Old School Essentials?

I bounced off and this does not seem like thoughts in isolation.

But please, this is an ACKS II YouTuber! Let's watch this video, like and subscribe, and support our content creators! We need to lift up those who give us great content, so the best way is to watch and support the people who spend the time to make things for the game we love. 

At its core, ACKS is like any other B/X system. All the core components are in place, and the underlying "game engine" is no different than what we are used to. This game plays exactly like OSE, how could people bounce off?

I am betting this is the expectations we put on ourselves. We want to be instant experts, rapidly proficient, and "get our fix" within the first five minutes of opening a book. We put these expectations that "if we own the book, we are an expert" and the is the fallacy of "bought knowledge."

If all you are doing is playing ACKS II with basic characters, fighting orcs in a dungeon, and grabbing bags of gold, then we are playing the game just fine. There is no need to go into the local ruler's tax structures, kingdom influence, random seasonal events, influence factors, trading caravan rules, naval combat, stronghold construction, and all the other rules in the book.

Those rules are there is we want to explore them, but the game is fine without them.

If all we want to do is play "Keep on the Borderlands" with ACKS II, there we go - it works and we are just fine. But what about all those other rules we aren't using! We aren't playing the game right!

Here is another secret.

The "extra rules" in ACKS II are the game's future-proofing. These dominion, trading, stronghold, kingdom management, and other rules for every subject are there to save you money on an endless stream of grifter Kickstarter projects that poisoned the well of games like 5E, and are doing it for Shadowdark.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/autarch/before-all-others 

Except, of course, for the Autarch ones! Those are cool and we always jump on the premium levels, since we support what we love. Click on that link above since we need that Elven book! Get notified on launch, and then you can actually play a game where elves conquer land, grow their civilization, and build their own dominion. Elves in ACKS II don't always need to be "dying and in decline."

It is your choice, to be honest. 

But we will not need much else to play this game, and it "comes out of the box" future proof and complete. However, we do not need to use all those rules, or even all the "how to play" rules in the Judges Journal. We don't! Stop hamstringing yourself and running back into that cave!

Those rules are there for later, just like algebra and calculus are there for later in mathematics. And like math, not every problem is geometry, so put away the protractor when all you are trying to do is tell an adventure story of beating up orcs and goblins.

Stop. Being. A. Perfectionist.

You don't need to master the game to play it. In fact, going in with that expectation will lead to self-defeat. You will never master the game since you will get intimidated, disappointed, and give up early. Don't be like the 90% of college majors who give up before they ever achieve their dream.

Be one of the 10% who stick it out and find true happiness as mastery comes after months, or even years, of study and effort. The journey shall be well worth it at the end. 

So pick up that copy of B1 In Search of the Unknown and get your heroic, vaguely Mediterranean, suntanned butts in there! I will give you a "free pass" to ignore 90% of the ACKS II rules, and just use the characters, combat, equipment, and magic chapters! In fact, 90% of those chapters you will just skim and maybe use later. Just roll up some level one characters and go.

Most of pages 100-200 are lists of gear, spells, and skills. This is just "find what you need and go" so this is not "actual page count needed to understand the game." Pages 263-314 for the Adventures  chapter is what you want to focus on, and the best parts are 263-271 for dungeon delves, and 288-309 for combat. So, the core of the game that "makes it like B/X" are thirty easily understood pages, and since this is "just like B/X" those will go quick, and you already know most of this stuff.

In fact, print these delve and combat pages out, staple them together, and toss that to your players.

Just play with chapters one through six in the Revised Rulebook. This is your "basic set" and the rest of the book is dominions, voyages, and mass combat. For B1, we don't need any of that! Sorry, that is all fluff and "saving you money on Kickstarter" stuff.

Most of the combat stats can be used as is. Even the old descending AC values in B1 can be converted easily (as per the System Compatibility Guide):

• BX, BECMI, LL, LOTFP, or OSE: AC = 9 – Original AC

Do we want to pull in the intimidating Judges Journal into the mix? All you need to learn is the three pages of dungeon delving rules on pages 35-37. Three pages out of nearly 500! The wilderness rules that come right after this are mostly encounter tables, but also save those for our "expert set" and for B1, we will not need them. If you find magic treasure, maybe flip to the magic item chapter. The rest of the Judges Journal? Guess what, "saving you money on Kickstarter" stuff again.

The Monstrous Manual? Flip to a page and use a monster in it. I doubt you will need more than a dozen monsters here, if even that since most you will just use "as is" from B1 directly.

It is easy to see those huge books on the shelf and feel like you should reach for Old School Essentials instead. ACKS II is so comprehensive and complete that it looks far more complex than it really is.

But flip through the tables of contents of the books, and ask yourself, "What do I really need to play?"

Most of the book is a catalog of choices of classes, skills, magic, and gear.

Very few pages are "actual rules" for "basic adventuring."

A good 70% of the books are domain management, and not needed for the basic game. 10% are wilderness and voyage rules, and can be considered "expert" rules. About 20% of the pages are all you need to play, and most of those are just "lists to pick from." That last 5% of the game? Uh, those are rules pulled from B/X. You already know those.

 

Understand the classes, combat rules, and turn structure to exploration. Those are your "Ten Commandments" of playing ACKS II. And yes, that is my Bible. Gamers of Faith should be proud of their beliefs and not hide them, and that book sits on my shelf right beside ACKS II (and GURPS). The Bible is the best "rule book" ever written.

And those few sections of ACKS II are all you need.

When you are done the adventure, then you can start taking over the land in B1 that "Rogahn and Zelligar" built this dungeon of madness on, and take on those "barbarians of the north" that those two fell to. Basic D&D, AD&D, OSE, S&W, Shadowdark, and all these other "flee back to the cave" games don't give you the rules you need to play "the rest of this adventure" but ACKS II does.

And ACKS II saves you a lifetime of random Kickstarter money since it comes with "batteries included."

Don't settle for second-best.

Play ACKS. 

ACKS II vs. Runequest

Oh yeah, here we go. This is going to be a good one. We are putting the two best early-era fantasy games head-to-head today.

ACKS II and Runequest are both set in a period of time before what is commonly associated with D&D. As D&D has been published over the years, it has slowly crept forward in time, from the Middle Ages, to the Renaissance, and now we are seeing a Victorian era feeling in the 2024 edition of the rules. The 2024 books are filled with Steampunk, Victorian, and magi-punk sorts of art where everyone wears fancy outfits, nobody wears a helmet, and style is king over survival.

ACKS II is more of a Late Antiquity game (350 AD), happening in a temporal-framework set at the end of the Roman Empire as the world slips into the Dark Ages.

Runequest happens earlier, in the Bronze Age (3300-1200 BC), in a world a thousand or so years before the ACKS II world's general technology level and historical model.

D&D? Here is where it gets complicated. We need to go by the availability of plate mail, which is about 1200 AD, far later than even ACKS II. This is the High Middle Ages, or about 1000 to 1300 AD. This transitions into the Renaissance, and then the Modern Era. During the Reinsurance, that is the "Age of Discovery" and the beginning of colonialism.

If I were to peg D&D editions to eras? B/X would be Late Middle Ages. AD&D 2nd Edition would be Early Renaissance. D&D 3.5 would be Renaissance. D&D 4E and 5E would be Early Modern Era (with magic supplanting technology). The new "Steampunk Era" of 2024 D&D and Pathfinder 2E is more Victorian in look and feeling. You can push things an era forward or backward, but some of the concepts are firmly rooted in one era or another, especially the concept of universities outside of religious training.

Granted, all of the above is a highly simplified breakdown, and there are better experts than I on this, but this is a more simplified gamer-oriented view of the timeline. Where ACKS II is more "Fall of the Roman Empire" inspired, Runequest is more "Greek Myths and Legends" inspired.

In ACKS II, not every character has magic, and we begin to see the formation of the standard tropes of fantasy, like the fighter class, the rogue, and so on. Magic is beginning to become specialized and rare. This sort of reflects a world where the art of magic is beginning to become a lost art, only available to the few, and on a historical decline. This sort of mirrors the Tolkien themes of elves, dwarfs, and magic leaving the world. That isn't a strong theme in ACKS II, but magic is not everyday, and there aren't elves and dwarfs everywhere. We can also trace the downfall of traditional magic and sorcery to organized religion and the Crusades wiping it out.

Plus ACKS II is more Late Roman Empire than any other game. All that fun stuff you see in the movie Gladiator? Yeah, you get all that with ACKS II. This game is all that and more. These two games are not the same thing.

In Runequest, every character has minor magic, an era where magic is not as specialized and powerful (unless you specialize in it), and the use of it is more commonplace. It isn't "fireball and lightning bolt" level artillery, but starting fires and mending minor wounds is common. It would be like if Star Wars had an "Early Jedi Era" where everyone knew minor Force powers and it was a part of everyone's lives, and nobody felt it was strange.

You don't need to develop a lot of technology, like how to start fires, since there are people that can "just do that with their fingers." You are getting into a speculative world here, where you need technology for some things (writing, wheels, inclined planes, construction, food storage and preservation), but not for others (medicine, repair, spirit communication, item enhancement, the telescope).

Also, this mirrors the common themes of antiquity, where it is generally assumed that "magic was more common in the early ages" and "we lost the ability to call upon it" in our lives. Where every village had a grandma shaman who knew the old ways and taught them to the children. Everyone has a little magic in them, and this was a more wondrous and connected age of spirits, the afterlife, shamanism, nature, and the flows of magic upon the world.

Runequest's "end days" would be in the fall of the Greek and Egyptian civilizations, but that feels like a long ways off and we are in the golden age of the civilization. With ACKS II, we are in the fall of the empire, and things are already going sideways. There is a stronger "call to action" in ACKS II and much more political intrigue, along with the collapse of local authority with beast-men banging on the gates. You have the crumbling empire and a senate trying to backstab each other and survive. You have the characters forging their own future and taking land for themselves.

In Runequest, your stories are smaller, like heroic tales, haunted sites, warring tribes, preparing for a festival, and often survival stories. We have rampaging monster stories, mysteries, thieves, farmers with problems, rampaging trolls, and the Lunar Empire are easy bad guys to use as the heavies. The Epic of Gilgamesh is a great example of a Runequest story, sort of "the myth and tales" of a hero or small band of them, wandering the land and doing great deeds. The focus in Runequest is smaller and more personal, and a quest to smith a great weapon could be an entire adventure arc.

Runequest is a lot like Minecraft in a way, where you are building your own gear, finding things to buy what you can't craft, and exploring a wild and untamed land where civilization has not reached every place on the map, and many places are lost to time and forgotten. This is why some critique Runequest harshly as a "basket weaving game," but hey, if you had to go kill a dinosaur to get those rare colored reeds, bash some trolls to get the turquoise for the beads, and crafted baskets that were worth a lot of coins, it was all worth it in the end and you have a big sack of wealth to live nicely on. Bonus points if you enchant the baskets to slow food spoilage. I can see that story happening in some "deep crafting" Minecraft mods, too, and there are parallels there between the games that some get really into.

Also, you are not conquering land and building massive kingdoms in Runequest. You "can" in a story-sense, but if you like dominion building, ACKS II will be the better game for you.

Also, if I were to play a Roman or D&D-era game with the Chaosium rules, I would opt for the excellent Basic Roleplaying system, but you would have to do a little more work here to set that game up. This would remove the "everyone has magic" assumption of the earlier era, and allow you to simulate the "magic-less professions" a lot easier and keep that separation. With ACKS II, it is all done for you, and the system is d20 and easy to get into.

Both are amazing games! They are not the same thing, as some may think. Which one you prefer comes down to your preferences and what inspires you. If you like Gladiator and the Roman intrigue, go all-in on ACKS II. If you want the more personal stories of an earlier era where everyone has magic, Runequest will be your thing.

They are both fantastic games with unique focuses. Where D&D tends to try to be "everything for everyone" and do all things poorly, these two games do their focused areas perfectly.

I like the focused and themed games far better than the generalist. My stories here are far better and more meaningful to me. 

Before All Others Cover Reveal

The elven sourcebook for ACKS II got a cover reveal today, and check it out over here:

https://arbiterofworlds.substack.com/p/before-all-others-covers-revealed

There is also a wealth of great information in that post, including details about the livestream, the collector's cover, and much more - this is worth reading for fans and new fans alike!

ACKS II: System Compatibility Guide

I love these conversion guides that come with games, and ACKS II includes a great one.

"If you are arriving here by way of D&D Fifth Edition or Pathfinder, then this book may seem a strange and surreal tome, alien and perhaps even old-fashioned. As an OSR product, it emulates the design ethos of the golden age of role-playing games from 1974 – 1983." - ACKS II System Compatibility Guide, page 1.

ACKS II is an OSR game, and like any of the games, such as Labyrinth Lord, Old School Essentials, Swords & Wizardry, AD&D, ADAD, Castles & Crusades, or the ...Without Number games - they all play so well together.

One aspect of ACKS II that I love is that it flips the whole descending versus ascending AC argument on its head. The game uses descending AC, where an AC of 0 is excellent, and gives characters a target number to hit, such as a 14+ on a d20. Then, AC is simply added to the attack throw. A higher AC is easier to hit, such as an AC 7 target, which is a +7 to the roll.

ACKS II also clarified the language using a throw versus a check, which makes the game far easier to grasp and play.

"The throw mechanic puts the emphasis on the character, rather than the situation. A player understands that if he has “Listening 14+” in most circumstances his character can eavesdrop on a roll of 14-20. If there is a modifier to this chance, it’s transparent to the player: “A penalty of -4 to your roll due to the loud noise”. 

In contrast, systems such as 5E or Pathfinder, which use a fixed bonus against a variable difficulty, put the emphasis on the Judge’s decision as to the situation. In some games, the Judge is actually encouraged to calculate what chance he wants for success, and to then ‘customize’ the Difficulty accordingly (this is explicit in D&D 4E). 

These sort of accounting illusions are unnecessary in ACKS. Where we believed a task should be equally challenging for characters of varying level, we simply use a type of throw that doesn’t change with level (such as the proficiency throw to bash open doors)." 

- ACKS II System Compatibility Guide, page 1.

That explanation tells you all you need to know about ACKS II. The game isn't "grading on a curve" when it comes to high-level characters, and arbitrarily making all the locks in this castle DC 25 because there happens to be a higher-level adventure going on in here at the moment. Or else they would be too easy! Right? We can't have that.

I love how this example calls out D&D 4E for "massaging" the chance to succeed and "faking it" - well done. That game was so full of tricks and deceptions to make you feel more powerful than you actually were, such as the fireball spell, which was only valid as a "minion mop." That game was one of the largest shell games played in the hobby's history of D&D. In D&D 5E, they hid things a little better, but a lot did not change, especially getting weaker as you leveled, and fights still took forever.

A "Listening 14+" throw tells me precisely what my character can do, and gives me the odds right there. If the referee wishes to make it easier or more complicated, that is their decision.

That solid design ethos is baked into ACKS II, and the system will not let you down.

This game is not particularly challenging. The core concepts are the same as those of Old School Essentials and other games. To get started with ACKS II, begin by using the conversion guide and applying your existing OSR knowledge.

Kickstarter: Before All Others, The Cyclopedia of Elven Civilization

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/autarch/before-all-others/

The prelaunch campaign for the Elven book for ACKS II is now live, so you'll be notified when it launches. These are great sourcebooks, so sign up to be one of the first to know and jump in.

ACKS II as a Dungeon Game

ACKS II works as a dungeon game.

While a lot is said about the endgame options, and this is a strong and well-detailed part of the game, you don't really need to use it. ACKS II makes a fine dungeon-based game, and even more so when the Treasures book ships and is released soon.

The end-game content provides a wealth of campaign inspiration for the world around the characters. You could be searching for a lost tomb and wander into a regional war, or even a small-scale skirmish between two kingdoms that hate each other and are fighting over farmland. How do beast-men raiding parties work? Entering the Temple of Evil and Darkness nearby may be a lot more risky, considering a raiding camp is situated a few miles away and poses a constant threat to getting in and out with the treasure.

D&D has "wilderness encounters," but they are presented in a way that makes them appear as "random table results," and they function similarly to the random map encounters in a Final Fantasy video game. That double-rush sound effect plays, and the battle music kicks off.

Why are the beast-men here? Are they part of a bigger group? Do we usually see wyverns around here? Are there more giant ants in a nest somewhere? No, I rolled a 40. Please make some skill rolls or fight.

But as a dungeon game? ACKS II would do fine. This can be played at the low to mid levels without worrying about dominion building as a "hero game," and it would be a lot of fun.

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.

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.