Blogs

One of the donation tiers on our Kickstarter page is that of 'Visionary', and its unique perk is the chance to give me the art order for an illustration that will be included in the final ACKS book. We've only got one visionary so far: a Mr. Justin Clouse (thanks Justin!) and I just completed his art order today!

He wanted to see an illustration for the Assassin character class, and had a few ideas about how it might look:

Of the many challenges of developing a mass combat system for Adventurer Conqueror King, the greatest challenge is the one that Valamir points out on the Story Games forums: Namely that the military tactics of a society where wizards can hurl fireballs would be very different from those of the ancient or medieval world. It is easy to imagine a world where 20th century tactics developed, with magic as the equivalent of air strikes, rangers moving in loose squad-based formations, and so on.

In assembling the mechanics for campaign play, we wanted to make sure that all of the different classes had enjoyable opportunities for activity that reflected their class. Fighters and Clerics, for example, tend to be the most focused on domain-building and mass combat, while Mages focus on magical research and building dungeons filled with exotic beasties. Thieves... Thieves get to run thieves' guilds!

In the earliest iteration of the classic fantasy game, using the combat rules from Chainmail, fighting-men packed real punch. [Game mechanics are noted in brackets to explain my math.]

Vancian magic is one of the topics that old-school gamers love to argue about. Most love it, some hate it, everyone discusses it.

Dragons have always been the iconic monster of the classic fantasy game, and we lavished a bit of extra attention on them.

A secret ratio recurs repeatedly throughout ACKS. It is 1:33, and it is implicit in many of the game mathematics. Interestingly, the 1:33 ratio *emerged* from the  assumptions of the system; it wasn't initially designed in. The first place the secret ratio appeared was in the average rate of return on gold invested per month in support of mercantile activities, which is 3% (3/100 or 1/33).  I noticed the ratio when I was building spreadsheets to model landlords and merchants.

As the illustrator, I thought I'd throw in some pictures here to show my process for creating an illustration. This is the illustration for the Cleric character class, and I've done it in an ink wash. I'll be doing some line art for the book as well, but I wanted to start off by developing a great greyscale technique for some of the illustration. I'll do another post later about creating the painting on the cover - that was a big long crazy and awesome project!

Perhaps the biggest difference between 1est edition and Classic versions of our favorite fantasy game was  "race as class". In 1e and its descendants, race was a selection made separately from class. You could choose to be an Elf, and then choose to be a Fighter, Magic-User, etc. In Classic (B/X, BECMI, and Rules Cyclopedia), the various races were actually classes - Elves were of the Elf class, Dwarves of the Dwarf class. These differences have manifested again in the various retro-clones.

Fantasy gamemasters attempting to create historical plausible game worlds are faced with a major problem whenever and wherever they include elves: The elven lifespan. Tradition dating from the middle ages carried into D&D by way of Tolkien has elves as immortal, or nearly so; the 1st edition D&D had lifespans as long as 2,000 years from some elven sub-races.