Fantasy has a bad habit with elves. They are beautiful, fading, and already defeated. Their forests are museums. Their kings remember a better age and then get out of the way so humans can have the plot. You are invited to admire them. You are not invited to let them take land.
ACKS does not owe anybody that eulogy.
An elven spellsword or nightblade is not a tourist from a dying postcard. He is a class with a future if the table allows one. Sanctums, holds, borders, the same brutal ladder as everyone else. The point of a long life in this game is not melancholy. It is compound interest. An elf who survives the dungeon has more years to spend the gold than the humans who hired him.
I got tired of “elegiac” as a substitute for stakes. Decline is a story you can choose. It is not a rule. If the campaign wants elven civilization to grow, the engine is already in the book: domains, war, magic as an operation, a map that can be wrecked in their favor for a change.
Play them fragile and fading if that is the poem you came for.
Or play the other version, the one the crate had room for: the spellsword who stops singing about lost kingdoms long enough to build one, and makes the neighboring lords live with an immortal neighbor who pays his mercenaries on time.
The thin games keep dwarves as a joke with an accent. Short, drunk, mines, axes, a one-note stubbornness you play for the table. Their halls are a theme restaurant under a mountain. Nothing about them suggests a civilization that could outlast your campaign.
ACKS does not bother with that costume.
Race-as-class here is not a limitation so you can feel old-school. It is a statement that a dwarf is already a vocation. Vaultguard. Craftpriest. A people organized around stone, work, and holds that are supposed to endure after the adventurers are bones. By This Axe is sitting on the shelf for a reason. It does not apologize for treating dwarves as a culture with law, craft, war, and a way of owning the underground that is not “the dungeon, but friendly.”
That is the tone I wanted when I got tired of mascot races. I do not need another short fighter with darkvision and a drinking problem. I need a character whose endgame is a vault, a craft, a hall that collects the gold instead of spraying it into lifestyle expenses. The mountain is not flavor. It is a domain with a ceiling.
You can still play the grim axeman who hates goblins. The game is not precious.
It just refuses to stop there. If the dwarf lives, the world should gain a door that was not on the map, set in stone, and paid for in coin you dragged out of somebody else’s dark.
5E builds a character out of shopping. Species, class, subclass, feats, a background that hands you tools like party favors. By session one, you are already a brand. The sheet is a catalog.
ACKS builds a character out of a few choices that have to last.
Proficiencies are the quiet system people skip when they bounce off the book. They are not feats. They are not a second class. They are the difference between a fighter and this fighter: the one who can ride, bargain, siege, or keep a ship from killing the party before the orcs do. You do not get a new personality every three levels. You get a small number of things you are actually trained to do, and later a few more if you study.
That limit is the point. A character with four extra slots still has a shape. He is not good at the whole Renaissance. He is good at the work that kept him alive long enough to matter. When the campaign turns toward domains, markets, and war, those picks stop looking like garnish. They look like a résumé.
I spent a year on sheets that were louder and less specific. Everyone could do a bit of everything if the subclass said so. Nobody felt like a person with a trade. ACKS will let you make a bland adventurer. It will also let you make a captain, a forger, a court rat, or a wilderness case without adding a new hardcover.
Do not collect proficiencies like stamps.
Pick the ones you are willing to be known for when the gold runs out, and the map starts asking who you are.
5E trained a lot of tables to treat the referee as hospitality staff. Keep the story moving. Soften the fall. Make sure everyone had a moment. If the world is cruel, you failed to curate the experience.
ACKS calls you a Judge on purpose.
You are not there to protect the campaign from the dice. You are there to let the world answer. The mortal wound table is a ruling waiting to happen. The market does not care about the party’s feelings. A henchman’s loyalty is not a friendship mechanic you fudge so nobody feels awkward. A domain turn is not a reward screen. It is a verdict on whether these people can actually run anything.
That sounds colder than it plays. A good Judge is not an enemy. A good Judge is the reason the gold, the scars, and the map mean something. If every failure is edited into a lesson and every treasure is sized for balance, you are back in the theme park. The players can tell. They stop bringing their own nerve.
I left games where I was expected to be a producer. I came back to a game where my job is closer to weather. I set the season. I apply the rules we agreed to. I do not apologize when winter arrives.
The Judges Journal is thick because the world is thick. You still do not need it on Monday.
You need the posture: stop selling them a plot. Start keeping the score.
The modern cleric is a medic with branding. He tops people off. He waves a symbol. His god is a spell list with a personality blurb. The temple, if the campaign remembers it, is a place to sleep and buy holy water.
ACKS still thinks a cleric is dangerous.
He heals, yes. He turns what should stay buried. He walks into the dark with the party’s luck riding on a creed. Then the gold and the glory accumulate, and the class stops being a support role. Congregations. Tithes. A stronghold that is not just walls, but a claim about how people ought to live. The end of that road is not “better slots.” It is a theocracy. A realm with a doctrine. Neighbors who have to decide whether your god is a blessing or an invasion.
That is why the so-so games made religion feel like costume. Nothing in the setting had to convert, pay, or resist. ACKS puts a church on the same ladder as a fortress and a syndicate. Belief becomes logistics. Heresy becomes a border issue. The party’s cleric can save a life on Tuesday and start a problem that lasts a decade on Wednesday.
You can play him as the man with the bandages. The first few levels almost require it.
The book is waiting for the session when he looks at a village that owes him its dead and realizes the next spell is not the point. The next shrine is.
In the thin games, the fighter is the simplest face at the table. He hits things. He hits them a little better next year. Everyone else gets a novel. He gets a plus.
ACKS does not pity him. It promotes him.
At the door, he is still the man with the best to-hit and the nerve to stand there. Cleave turns a winning round into a pile. The damage bonus climbs without a subclass binder. That is the dungeon job, and it is honest work. Then the gold arrives, and the class reveals its real shape. Mercenaries. A stronghold. A garrison. Borders. The fighter does not need a new book to become a war. The war was always the high-level version of standing in the doorway.
This is the piece 5E keeps missing when it tries to “fix” the martial. It adds maneuvers and resource poker so the fighter can feel as busy as the mage. ACKS makes him matter by giving him men. A captain who can hold a line is useful. A lord who can pay a line through winter is a fact on the map.
I got tired of fighters who peaked as action-economy puzzles. I missed the older, colder fantasy: the veteran who survives the hole and comes home with enough coin to make other people fight for him.
You can keep him as the party’s hammer forever. That works.
Just do not be surprised when the game starts asking how many hammers he can afford.
The 5E wizard is a gun with extra pages. More slots. More spells. More ways to delete a scene. His tower, if he ever gets one, is a set decoration. The laboratory is flavor. The campaign never asks what the tower is for.
ACKS asks.
A mage who lives long enough does not just know more formulas. He founds a place that makes things the setting cannot ignore. A sanctum. Rituals. Item work. The ugly options: crossbreeds, constructs, the temptation to stop being strictly alive. None of that is a prestige class you pick for a bonus. It is plant, staff, time, and gold with a locked door.
This is why “full caster” felt cheap in the games I left. Power arrived as a daily refresh. ACKS makes magical power look like an operation. You need coin from the dungeon to fund the work. You need specialists. You need a reason the local lord has not burned the tower yet. You need a campaign long enough for a project to finish.
The fighter gets walls. The thief gets a syndicate. The mage gets an engine that can bless a realm or poison it. Same ladder. Different smoke.
You can play a mage as a backpack artillery piece from level one to retirement. The game allows it.
It also allows the darker, better version: the man who stops adventuring because the laboratory finally matters more than the next door, and the map has to live with what he manufactures.
The 5E rogue is a solo act. Sneak attack, cunning action, a sad monologue about the orphanage. He picks a lock. He rolls out of the way. He is a specialist attached to a party, not a person attached to a city.
ACKS lets the thief become an institution.
At low levels, he is still the one in the dark with a ten-foot pole and a bad idea. That part is familiar. Then the gold piles up, and the book stops pretending he works alone. A hideout. A syndicate. Hijinks assigned to people who are not at the table. Smuggling, stealing, spying, the quiet work that never gets a battle map and still changes who owns the night.
This is the same promise as the fighter’s stronghold, just aimed at the alleys. The thief does not have to wait for “domain play” like it was a different game. Crime is a domain. It has payroll, risk, and a chance of getting caught that does not care about your backstory.
I used to treat thieves as trap-finders with extra steps. That is a job. ACKS offers a career. The party delves. The syndicate keeps earning while they are underground. When they come back, the city has news that did not wait for them.
You do not need this in session one.
You need it when the lockpicker looks at his pouch and realizes the next level of the class is not another die of sneak damage. It is employees, heat, and a street that now has his name on it.
In the average game, town is a vending machine. You arrive with a dragon’s laundry. The shopkeeper buys it all at list price. You leave with potions and a full sheet. The market never flinches. The village of forty souls absorbs a prince’s ransom and is ready to do it again next week.
ACKS assumes the town has a stomach.
There is only so much coin a settlement can throw at ivory, spices, monster hides, and “mysterious relics.” Sell too much in the wrong place, and the price tells you that you are the event. That is not bookkeeping for its own sake. That is the world noticing you. A haul that makes you rich in a border village makes you a rumor in a city. A haul that barely moves in a city would have wrecked a hamlet.
This is why I got bored with games that treated treasure as a private score. If nobody else wants the gold, the gold is fake. ACKS ties your success to merchants, demand, and the size of the place you are trying to fence your glory in. Suddenly the road to a larger market is an adventure. Suddenly a hideout and a syndicate are not optional color. They are how you stop taking retail prices from a man who cannot afford you.
You can handwave it. Plenty of tables do, and the dungeon still works.
But if you ever wondered why your last campaign’s treasure felt like points instead of power, look at the town. If it can swallow anything, it is not a place. It is a reset button with a tavern sign.
You walk through someone else’s streets. The archmage is immortal and off-limits. The king is a quest giver. The war ends the way the book already decided. When your party is done, the map snaps back so the next group can buy the same adventure. That is not a world. That is a franchise floorplan.
ACKS is built to let you ruin it.
A stronghold is not a victory slide. It is a new piece of geography with payroll. A domain is not “endgame flavor.” It is hexes that now have an owner, a garrison, a tax problem, and neighbors who did not vote for you. If you play long enough, the wilderness you used as a backdrop becomes a border. The dungeon you cleared becomes a quarry, a fort, or a tomb you failed to keep sealed.
That is the adult version of zero-to-hero. Hero is not a level title. Hero is what people call you until you start collecting rents. After that you are a lord, a parasite, a savior, or a mistake, and the map has to show it.
I spent a year in games that were terrified of this. They wanted my character famous and the setting untouched. ACKS assumes the opposite: if the player characters matter, the cartographer has to get out a new pen.
You do not owe the published world a clean ending.
You owe it consequences that stay on the page after the session ends.
5E taught a generation that dying is an interruption. You drop. Someone spends a slot. You stand up and the scene continues as if the spear had been rude rather than final. The body is a resource bar. The world does not keep the scar.
ACKS is ruder than that.
When a character goes down, the game does not assume a tidy fade to black. Mortal wounds are a table, not a speech. You might live. You might live wrong. You might lose an eye, a hand, a week, a name for courage. Recovery costs time and money you were going to spend on the next expedition. The party has to decide whether this fool is worth the cart ride back to town.
That is not cruelty for its own sake. It is how a campaign gets a past. A fighter who walks with a limp is not flavor you wrote on session zero. He earned it in a room that still exists on the map. A mage who fears a second critical is not “roleplay.” He has data.
The average games I bounced through wanted cinematic damage and cinematic recovery. Nobody is changed. Nobody is expensive to save. Nobody becomes a warning. ACKS lets the dice write a medical history, then asks whether you still want this person in the front rank.
You can play around the table. House-rule it softer. Plenty of Judges do.
Just know what you are throwing away. A world where wounds leave marks is a world where gold, henchmen, and next week’s plan suddenly have a job. The scar is not decoration. It is the receipt.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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!
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.
