Mail Room: ACKS II

ACKS II is the Final Boss of the OSR. 

It does in three books of a thousand total pages what 5E does in three shelves of books. I have never seen anything like this game. The tomes are weighty and substantial. The page stock is thick and luxurious. There are rules for everything, from scrounging coppers to buy torches, to staging a naval invasion after a fleet battle, and laying siege to the evil lands of the beast-men armies with your allies. After you knocked everything down, you rebuild, create new cities, and establish taxes and defenses. The game takes you from listening at a dungeon door all the way up to a full-blown game of Civilization in a fantasy setting.

The art is glorious.

The setting grips me like the epic myths of old.

The classes and systems are so well thought out that they put many games to shame.

There is no OGL or SRD content!

The setting is superior to any I have ever seen: a Bronze Age, falling empire, marked by strife and chaos, where land is taken and made your own. It is a world of lost ruins, savage battles, and ancient sorcery. It screams at you to be a hero or become a villain, as the game makes no moral judgment for you.

This is your path to walk.

This is not cosplay Renaissance, planar hopping, Hot Topic meets steampunk, dyed Supercuts hairstyles, anthropomorphic animal masks, funny voices, devil-in-appearance only, gunslingers and goblins, clockwork androids, or modern theater gaming, where nobody wears helmets. The game is more diverse than D&D because it invests in its setting and presents a rich tapestry of cultures and peoples. You don't lose anything by cutting out all the modern cartoon flash; you gain more by getting a game that asks you to put yourself in the world with your people.

I am glad they threw out the OGL and SRD content, as it takes this game from "oh, another OSR set of rules to play not-D&D with" to its own thing. And the game rises like a phoenix from the ashes. It is a game for mature minds, without slipping into the salacious or tawdry, like an epic drama meant to make us reflect and take seriously. This is the good stuff.

I have had a friend mistake the deluxe, leather-bound game books for a set of encyclopedias or a bible set.

No, that is a game.

What sort of game is it?

This is a sandbox game, where the story comes from what you do, not narrative tools, pools of meta-currencies, or random drama dice. The story is you living or dying, the struggles of watching a friend perish, the glory of finding a roomful of gold, and the parties you throw in remembrance of those who passed along on this hero's path you all walk along. This is growing into a mighty hero, kicking in the doors of a fort of beast-men slavers, and freeing the town they hold under chain and terror. And this town of grateful souls heals, rebuilds, and becomes the heart of your dominion.

That is your story.

You don't need toys or tokens to tell it.

You need bravery, determination, wits, timing, and luck.

Your heart needs to beat like the drums of destiny.

It is a game that is equal in weight to Adventures Dark and Deep, a game I consider to be a definitive classic Greyhawk experience, but it comes along and does more with more. Where Greyhawk is content to be first-edition plus more, ACKS II is the game we were promised by the first edition but never truly got.

You start off as a lowly, first-level hero, crawling in a dark hole in the ground, and can die in an instant.

You end up playing a 4X game, building cities, clearing the land with your armies, forging alliances and getting backstabbed, and conquering the world.

Then, you birth heirs, and start all over again.