Adventurer Conqueror King System (ACKS)

Another AD&D inspired game is the great Adventurer Conqueror King System, or ACKS for short. This game feels like AD&D went off in a direction more along the lines of Sid Meier's Civilization and rebalanced the entire game for end game kingdom building, mass battles, and realm management.

This is the 4X meets B/X game I dreamed of.

It holds up the late-game promise made in almost every version of D&D from first through second, third felt a bit weaker, and then in 4th and 5th they dropped the whole "let's be a king thing" and kept adventurers as adventurers all the way to maximum level. I really feel once they dropped the promise of becoming the ruler of the land that D&D lost something vital to its core.

The reason why you adventure.

Why Fight?

There is this assumption in the older games that you are fighting evil, solving problems, and helping the place where you live. You are making the world a better place with every epic quest. The natural progression for this game is to become the person in charge of a part of the world. To be the king or queen. To build a better society and corner of the world how you would want it to be. To fight the threats that come for your people, the ones you care about, and the corner of the world you build.

The older games had that nod in them, at 9th level you can build a stronghold and attract followers - and that was it. The AD&D Dungeon Master's Guide had castle construction rules. The pieces were there, but no edition of the game felt like it really put it all together.

ACKS does. This is very much like a game of Sid Meier's Civilization with a B/X flavor, and you get to play that high-level game of building kingdoms after your adventures set you up for greater glory. You start much like any B/X game does, but where this game goes - and could go - could change the history of the world in more ways that a one-shot story module could ever dream of doing.

You get to write that history.

And that answers the question.

Kingdom Management in D&D

I can see the seeds for getting rid of kingdom management being planted in 3rd Edition. When Wizards came in, they wanted D&D to be more like Magic: The Gathering, and characters were put together almost like deck builds with leveling, multiclassing, the feats you chose, the gear you got to buff your builds, and lots of OP and sub-optimal paths built into the game. There is a leadership feat that allowed you to attract "cohort" NPC followers, but nothing much in the way of construction and domain management. The last time was saw those rules were in the old TSR 2nd Ed Birthright setting.

And then 4th Edition came out, and making the world a better place was dropped. The game went almost completely a "powers as cards" based design. You went to the planes! You adventured in the outer realms! You fought the gods! Please move on from your starting kingdom like this was some MMO and the old zones suck and aren't worth your time please!

I feel they kept this "adventure all the way to max level" assumption for the 5th Edition of the rules, and I am sure there are some "kingdom building" adventures that are more a series of linked scenarios. But the game feels like that void of kingdom building is still missing. The 5e DMG has all this information on travelling between planes, running adventures, and mapping, but nothing about kingdom building.

It has been a weak spot in D&D for a while now, and only the Kingmaker adventure path (and one of the 1e Pathfinder expansion books) covered this topic at all from the big two publishers, but it felt like a sideshow at best. I am sure there are third party guides, but this is not how the game is presented in the core books.

ACKS Lore

Something I like about ACKS is it keeps a consistent myth and lore.

Certain classes are one race only, such as the dwarf machinist or elven nightblade. This is true to the spirit of B/X where they had demi-human classes, but puts some variety and specialties in the demi-humans in order to give them flavorful class options of their own. In B/X, for the most part unless the game allows race-class options, and elf is an elf. Here, elves have a few special choices that no other kin can take.

It crafts its own world, and it also has class design in a companion book, so the flexibility for you to come up with new demi-human classes, demi-humans themselves, and backgrounds for your own game world is very cool. Let us say I added dark elves to a world and came up with six unique demi-human character classes for them. All of a sudden my world is much richer and those dark elves very flavorful and unique. Nothing is stopping you from doing that with goblins, trolls, mer-folk, fairies, or any other specialized kin you want to add to your world.

You don't really plane and world hop by end-game, because the focus stays on the world you grew up in and eventually (if you make it happen) rule over. I like that narrow focus, and the world you started on stays important and does not become an "old MMO zone that is too low level to have fun in."

The world you fight for and the people there stay important.

Very B/X

ACKS sticks close to B/X retaining the specific saving throws, hit dice, and a different (but easier) way of attack rolls and AC. A lot can be freely interchanged and pulled in from any B/X material you own, and this is sort of a rebuild of a B/X rules set that remains backward compatible but diverges at key points to simplify play and also rebalance the game for high-level kingdom management play.

I could see using a lot of my existing B/X adventures and books with this system just find, drop in Barrowmaze and we are good to go, and a lot is directly rules-compatible. With Castles & Crusades you need to drop in their monsters and do a few other things differently with saves and ability rolls, but ACKS sticks closer to B/X and maintains a lower-level of compatibility with a few changes here and there (mainly AC and attack rolls).

Oh, and you get XP from both monsters AND gold. Very nice. This encourages smart play and not just hack and slash combat gaming. Why risk fighting the owlbear when you could just sneak a thief in and grab that 700 GP ruby? Smart plans equal profits and experience.

An AD&D Feel

The game has that AD&D feeling I like. Lots of rules sections with suggestions, ways to handle things, and coverage of important topics. This is one of those games I would say tries to be an AD&D replacement, but without gaining all the complexity of that game. It is very much a simple B/X game at heart, only the game has a lot of new things to try and depth as you explore its options.

My other AD&D replacement game is Castles & Crusades. Where C&C is more a modern set of rules that emulates AD&D, this is more a B/X game that rebuilds AD&D from the ground up and with the goal of the endgame 4X strategy: battles, building, exploration, and management.

If you like the adventure to max-level sort of world and plane-hopping adventure that is more 3E to 5E style, Castles and Crusades is your game. If you want a 4X style D&D game, ACKS is the way to go.

Monsters

The monster list feels a little light to me, and there are no extra-planar monsters like demons or devils. But hey, I have books full of B/X monsters, demons, devils, Lovecraftian beasts, and all sorts of monsters that can be dropped right in and with one AC conversion (9 minus the base-9 Labyrinth Lord style AC) - ready to go. Monster base attack rolls are based of monster hit dice, so B/X has all you need stat wise for ACKS compatibility and the conversions are trivial. Damage, saves, and attacks are as written.

I would be a little careful here, since the monster list feels light for a reason. I am betting what we get can establish a great B/X world, but the endgame should be more kingdom management than fighting 28 HD city-eating monsters at high level.

The true end-game monsters are the other kingdoms and how you interact - or conquer - them. That said, if you wanted high level monsters and a great variety, pull them in from B/X. Since the rules are compatible, you are good to go.

Where it Differs

ACKS rebalances the spells and classes for high-level kingdom management play. Fireballs have a reduction in blast radius as not to make them battle-ending spells. Fighters get buffed damage so a single fighter can stand on the battlefield and be the hero-unit of a tactical wargame. All of the classes are supposed to be tweaked to make them play better in that endgame kingdom management and mass battle game.

This makes sense, and it is something any serious game designer does when they are tasked with taking a tabletop game and making it do something it was never intended to do. You see this in D&D videogames, and it is nice to see this logic and design care applied to the mass battle game. Why design a great tactical game and leave some spells broken and over- or under-powered just because "that is how they were originally?" Change them to make the entire game work better together. This is game design, and game design is great.

Other things were changed to simplify things, The AC and attack roll system is essentially THAC0, but AC zero is no armor, and AC adds to the base attack roll as it goes up, making the target harder to hit. Simple and not THAC0, and honestly, the way THAC0 should have been.

Hex Crack

Mix ACKS with a hexcrawl generation tool? Pure hex-crack. Not only you are living the hex-crawl dream of exploring and adventuring around an infinite procedurally generated world, but you can go back and conquer the entire thing when you reach high level, settle it, vanquish evil kingdoms (or be an evil one), and build your own world.

Yeah, pretty much the 4X meets B/X dream game I always wanted.

It is like pen-and-paper Civ 6 swords-and-sorcery.

Getting bored of random stuff? Drop Barrowmaze or any other B/X adventure in a hex. Drop in an established city setting. Take Keep on the Borderlands or the Isle of Dread and drop those somewhere in the world. The original Tomb of Horrors. The Slave Lords series. Take pre-gen NPCs and add those in too if you need personalities to fill the gaps. B/X monsters! Put an evil kingdom down where it would be fun, or change a roll here and there to make it happen. The world is yours, and no one says you have to 100% stick to the dice. If there is something fun you have for B/X or AD&D to drop in somewhere - use it!

Take those dark elf classes and start your dark elf civilization somewhere on the map and play that way. Play as dwarves. Play as trolls with troll classes. Lizardfolk. Fae. Play as a non-leveling monster, such as a dragon and explore the world as you age and grow in power to build your horde. Like the great Microprose game Master of Magic, don't limit yourself to just one race or kin. Play multiple main characters of different kins and backgrounds and find one you fall in love with and run with that.

Why not do this with B/X?

Well, the thrill of going back and settling the lands, building grand cities, mining and farming, establishing trade routes, exploring, sailing the seas, building forts and castles, raising armies, negotiating with new found cities and civilizations, and destroying your enemies is reason enough for me. Oh, and yes there is an assumed lineage game to all this, so you can produce heirs, retire your heroes, and keep the fun going across hundreds or thousands of years of play. Not only are you building a world, you are writing the history of it.

Need an excuse why? The universe is destroyed and scattered to an infinite number of fractured realities. No one knows why. The impenetrable magic fog (like Forbidden Lands) is lifting and it is time to see what's out there. Want to make things better? Start your civilization, let it rise and fall, and keep creating new heroes to explore the frontiers and have fresh adventures. Let the old heroes rule and become powerful leaders. Or play evil characters for a while and tear it all down.

And when you have done it all, start a new world and do it again.

I know there is a pre-established setting for ACKS and it is a great one, but as you can probably tell, I love my random world Civilization games like an addiction.

ACKS and C&C

ACKS and C&C are both great games, both AD&D-like, and I could see myself playing either of them depending on my mood. What ACKS has is the kingdom end game delivered in spades, the infinite possibilities of hex crawls, legacy gaming, and a simple game built on a solid B/X base. I can see ACKS being my B/X game of choice.

What C&C has is the familiar later edition D&D plane-hopping, adventure to max level, fantasy superhero style experience. The rules are modernized but everything else is trivial to port in. C&C can be flavored with different mythical eras and cultures. I can see C&C being my Pathfinder 2 or D&D 5 replacement.

Both have that familiar AD&D feeling, so both are cool.

Where ACKS shines is in telling the long-term story of a world and its people, the one that comes with the game, or one you create yourself.