I'm helping to create a second-wave retroclone called the Adventurer Conqueror King System that builds on the insights into the original game I've picked up at Gary Con - in particular, the way that RPG scenarios like the moathouse from the Village of Hommlet make great miniatures battles, while Chainmail scenarios like Battle for the Brown Hills immediately evoke possibilities for RPG adventures like the one I created for the Gary Con Terrain Challenge. As a gamer who grew up with D&D, this connection to wargames wasn't at all obvious to me before Gary Con, but now I can see how it's woven all through the original little brown books, from stronghold building to the prices for hiring mercenaries to the naval and aerial combat rules. ACKS is designed to make this connection more accessible to modern gamers by presenting all this stuff as part of an integrated economic framework, so that all the activities characters might pursue throughout the course of a campaign - from selling swords looted off the bodies of orcs killed in a dungeon, to commissioning a master swordsmith to forge a unique weapon, to starting a war that raises the prices of sword-grade steel throughout the realm - organically inter-relate and flow into one another. I've talked to some folks at Gary Con who feel like the attention paid to retroclones nowadays eclipses the rightful place of the great originators, but I feel just the opposite. Gary said in Master of the Game that the highest level of mastery as a participant in RPGs is to give back to the scene by creating and publishing, and I'm eternally grateful that the first-wave retroclones made it possible to publish stuff that is clearly just adding a new buttress to the cathedral Gary built, instead of having to express both our our love for the original and our desire to create by putting out fantasy heartbreakers that are just like D&D, except not. As a second-wave game, ACKS builds on the work of previous retroclones, especially Labyrinth Lord and Basic Fantasy, but focuses on enabling a specific kind of play instead of a specific previous edition. But even here, the kind of play we're looking to support isn't something we're claiming to have invented; it's a style that I think Gary and Dave and Rob and everyone they gamed with back in the day knew how to do without being told, and the only reason we feel like it's useful to release a new system that shows how to do this kind of campaigning is that the knowledge of how to use the original rules in this way is scarce in my generation & subsequent ones. The publication of the core Adventurer Conqueror King rules has already been funded by Kickstarter, and we're currently working towards a bonus goal of publishing the mass-combat supplement. If you know folks who might be interested in this, sharing the Kickstarter link would really help us out - word of mouth is essential to crowd-funded projects like this. And if you want to check it out for yourself, ask me questions here, visit us at Gen Con - we'll be part of the Old School Renaissance Group in booth #1541 and also running a continuous four-day demo of ACKS in a penthouse suite at one of the convention hotels - or play in some of the games I'll be submitting to next year's Gary Con!
Any chancy you'll make it to Total Confusion to run a session or two? It's not so far from New York. There is a very good old school crowd at the event. Since you have some publishing credits and ACK coming out, you may be able to get some Guest of Honor hook ups to reduce your costs. They start taking event submissions in September.
This sounds great, Tavis. I hope I have the opportunity to get into one of your sessions. Cheers, Jeff T.
I had the pleasure of checking out Tavis' ACKS game he ran at the Omni Hotel at GenCon this year I was very impressed! I have often told my friends in the gaming community that any good RPG should include a logical progression that transcends simple character level advancement. In other words, as the players gain abilities and confidence (and gold!) they should be presented with new dramatic opportunities, such as leading large scale battles, ruling over dominions, leading crusades, engaging in political intrigue, etc. We see this in the Mentzer sets, and in some other systems. It looks to me as though ACKS taps into this nicely, and the system invites players to determine their course in the grand scheme of things as the adventure progresses--not before the game ever starts. I will certainly order a copy and check it out in detail. If Tavis is running a game at GaryCon, I will certainly sign up!
Thanks Jeff & Silas! I will definitely try to make Total Confusion - it's been on my list for a while - and will be working ACKS stuff into the GaryCon events I'm already doing (Terrain Challenge & Night of the Walking Wet), as well as hopefully scheduling some specific introduction-to-ACKS events.
Yes, I might use ACKS for the GaryCon Terrain Challenge, or might do some other demos. I also may have my son with me, so there are a bunch of variables in the air but I will definitely work it in somehow!
Tavis, I never made the connection that you were the same person that I played a short scenario with at Gen Con many years ago (?) until I notice the Behemoth3 logo! As I recall I was attacked by stirges at a dock. Minotaurs and Stirges great supplements! I know I have them somewhere.... Morgan Hazel
That sounds like the demo for A Swarm of Stirges - did it also involve crashing into the swamp in an airship? I'm thinking about republishing those for ACKS, with an emphasis on how to build domains using these monsters: digging out a labyrinth empire of minotaurs, or leading an aerial horde of stirges like Genghis Khan's...
I was on a panel at PAX called "Edition Wars" with guys like Ed Stark and Mike Selinker, as well as fans and wanna-bes like me and Kevin Kulp (who is a great guy and GM and author, I don't mean to tar him as a wanna-be by lumping him in the same category as me). Each of us nominally represented one edition (I got original D&D, yay!) but we disappointed the audience who wanted to see blood, because it's not only a small world - you also see the same fish in it, year after year. So being professionals meant that Ed and Mike had worked on lots of editions and didn't have a dog in the sectarian fights of people who grew up with one version of the game and were forever faithful to it. Back when I wrote Stirges, I tried to promote it at Dragonsfoot because I was like "we all love flying bat-suckers, let's count up all the classic modules in which they appeared!" Needless to say the fact that it was a 3rd Edition book meant this didn't go over well, so it kind of warms my heart to see that this, too, is now potentially the province of the Dead Gamers Society.
The progression to a larger role in the society as you gain levels was in the AD&D system. This was not spelled out, but the basics are in the PHB and DMG. Adventurers gain a reputation and standing as they go up levels (hence the cool titles) and about 9th level or so you can start attracting henchmen based on your achievement. The usual method is getting land granted to you by a noble, preist, Archmage etc in return for completing some service or quest. The alternate is going out to the fringes of civilization and clearing it of bad guys to build your own fortress. I never finished doing that because it meant stopping actively adventuring to manage the construction crews etc. Plus I was kept chronically short of gold due to the expenses of paying for training when I leveled and paying to construct travelling spell books and the like. I would like to get a look at the ACK system at Gary Con. It sounds pretty cool Tavis!
Yeah, basically all of our work on ACKS has been taking things that were in the rules somewhere and spelling them out a little better for our generation. This stuff probably needed no explanation to the generation of the Castles & Crusades society, who knew medieval history and had played Chainmail campaigns involving building castles and levying armies and paying mercenaries and hiring sappers and all that! Thanks! I don't think it makes sense to combine this with the Tower of Gygax/Terrain Challenge events that are the other competitors for my time. Maybe we can use the Night of the Walking Wet tradition on Saturday night to play with these high-level toys, though. Keep your Saturday night open until 4 am and I'll start a new thread.
Saturday I am busy winning the Circus Maximus Game run by Tim Kask. That usually runs to about midnight or 2 am. Time is always scarce at Gary Con. There are just too many great events to fit into a 2,3 and now 4 day period!
If you think about it...what a fitting tribute... Tavis...if I donate some more, can I get the hardback and a softcover for Melf? I honestly can't remember at what level I donated...
Rest assured that I will bring Melf his rightful tribute! I've been watching the Stormberg auctions to see if the Behemoth3 books we sent Gary will show up, and am looking forward to continuing the tradition of getting copies of everything I publish to the folks who inspired it.
They're mini-ecologies of the stirge and minotaur, adding new supporting monsters like an evil fairy that rides stirges and a minotaur offspring that acts like a bulldozer to dig the minotaur's mazes; see here for the PDFs. We sent copies to Gary with thanks for the inspiration.
