Blogs

Recently the afterschool roleplaying class I teach for kids 8-12 at a public elementary school in NYC has switched over to using the Adventurer Conqueror King System; next semester it's officially reflected in the title of the class.  Previously we had used mish-moshes of the D&D rules of one edition or another. The class grew out of a D&D birthday party I donated to the school's PTA fund-raising auction. The boy whose family won was part of a group of sixth-graders who knew how to play 4E (or thought they did), so we started out with a greatly simplified set of 4E house rules. However, things like daily and encounter powers make the assumption that multiple encounters will happen in a session, which is rarely true for our 80 minute classes. Advancement has been another persistent problem. Kids want to become more powerful, and we just don't see enough play time to make that happen with the usual XP systems. And new kids enter the class every semester; it makes sense to start them off with easier-to-learn first level characters, but the returning kids bitterly resent having to stop playing their uber-characters and go back to being chumps.

The impetus to start using ACKS - apart from its being a great game that I'd like to see more people playing - was the support for making characters at different stages of play.

Artist and illustrator Michael C. Hayes, whose work will also appear on the cover of the ACKS Player's Companion and Domains at War, unveiled the work he's been doing for the forthcoming Auran Empire Campaign Setting at Illuxcon this weekend. It can be seen in the wild on the far left of this picture of his booth: 

[[{"type":"media","view_mode":"media_large","fid":"305","attributes":{"alt":"","class":"media-image","height":"287","typeof":"foaf:Image","width":"480"}}]]

The lead designer of the Adventure Conqueror King System, Alexander Macris, talks about its forthcoming mass combat system, Domains at War, in a news story recently posted at EN World. The piece does a great job of getting into a number of interesting topics, from Alex's background in wargames to the ways a wargame battle system can exist within a role-playing game.

Here's an update on the status of the Player's Companion, and some glimpses of what the PDF will look like when it arrives in September! As you know if you've been following the internal development closely, we released the final manuscript for download by our Kickstarter backers and pre-orders at the end of June. We expected we'd take some time catching errors in that manuscript with our backers' help, which is always time well spent.

Hey guys,

I've been running a lunchtime sandbox campaign with my co-workers for the last few years, and I've found that ACKS is the best system to handle such small chunks of gaming time. Other systems either have combats which take too long, or are over way too fast, leaving the Judge (me) scrambling to come up with content to cover the remaining break. (Nobody wants to go back to work early, that's crazy talk!) With ACKS, I can have a fight, some exploration, and some pleasant roleplaying all happen in the same one hour session.

We're pleased to say that you can get the Adventurer Conqueror King System in hardcover at your local gaming store! Here are a list of locations we know ordered copies of ACKS; it's possible they've since sold out, so you may want to contact them first to make sure they re-order if necessary.

Why are magic items so expensive to make in ACKS, and why is it so hard to sell them? That's the topic of today's blog post.

When veterans of other fantasy games, particularly D&D 4th Edition and Pathfinder, begin to play Adventurer Conqueror King System, almost all of them express shock at how expensive and time consuming it is to create magic items. A simple potion of healing, for instance, requires 500gp and 1 week to create. The exact same item in D&D 3.5 requires 50gp and 1 day. Magical research in ACKS is 10x as expensive! 

We're pleased to confirm that the Adventurer Conqueror King System books have been shipped. To everyone who has a hardback or softcover coming from the Kickstarter or pre-order: it is in the mail!

We're working with Game Salute to fulfill these orders. Questions about your shipment can be best answered by contacting Game Salute  - although don't hesitate to communicate with us through Kickstarter or at support@autarch.co either.

We've gotten glowing reviews on the cover for the Player's Companion. The piece, called "Inheritance," was created by Michael C. Hayes. While you've doubtless seen his work on books, games, and Magic cards, today we thought we'd introduce you to the artist himself.

AUTARCH: Many RPG players are influenced to buy a book based on the cover artwork, but cover artists don't get as much recognition for their work as the designers do. Could you please tell us about yourself?

The Lakeys have completed another round of illustrations for the Adventurer Conqueror King Player's Companion. The one shown above depicts a class created by Patron Deity Jeffrey Binder, who described the iconic image thusly: