Kiero - Great to see you giving ACKS a try! Hellenistic Greece is one of my personal favorite eras of history, and is ripe for ACKS-style gaming. As it happens, I’ve also given some thought as to how you can introduce high level characters into a plausible historical world. So here’s my advice!
CLASSES
You absolutely can have your players use the Player’s Companion to design their own classes.
If you have the Player’s Companion, you should include the Barbarian and the Venturer into your campaign. You’ll need to modify the Venturer so that at higher level he gains bonus proficiencies instead of spells.
You might also consider introducing a version of the Machinist (removing the Dwarven racial powers) that could simulate a character like Archimedes of Syracuse or Hero of Alexandria. Allowing the PCs to field some of the wonders of Hellenistic technology could be justified from the history. Archimedes is attested to have built marvelous weapons such as “the ship shaker” and the “heat ray”, Hero to have built a working steam engine, and of course Demetrius I built a “taker of cities” (125’ siege tower) and 180’ long battering ram. Not to mention the marvelous anthykera mechanism.
The Mystic, with minor tweaking, could be an exotic character class hailing from the mysterious kingdoms beyond Bactria.
XP
In terms of balancing the classes, one thing that’s worth noting is that plate armor is less common in this setting, so the ability of fighters to wear plate is less useful. Therefore fighters are probably only at about 1,850xp/level instead of 2,000xp/level. That means the thief, assassin, and bard need to be increased to about the range of 1,850xp.
Therefore, if you want to put all the classes on the same foot XP-wise, without rebuilding everything from scratch using the PC, the following “hacks” could help:
- Thief: Increase thief HD from d4 to d6 and allow thieves to fight with weapon-and-shield.
- Assassin: All assassins get Skirmishing as a class power.
- Bard: Allow bards to wear medium armor and use shields. All bards begin with Performance (rhetoric) as well as one other Performance proficiency.
These are not perfect, but certainly very close.
With regard to XP as “book-keeping”, in ACKS at least XP is intended as an incentive. The assumption is that all player activities are driven by a desire to get XP, so that real-world behavior of getting XP drives in-game behavior of accumulating wealth, establishing kingdoms, conquering domains, etc. If you have players who will “do what makes sense” in the context of your setting without this incentive, you can certainly do without it, but I’ve found that in an ACKS-like sandbox the XP is a meaningful incentive.
If you want something more rules-light that allows you to increase the character’s level while still incentivizing them, you might try a staged system like this…
- To reach 3rd level, you must have accumulated at least 50% of that level’s XP in wealth and possessions
- To reach 5th level, you must have at least 4 henchmen (or max by CHA)
- To reach 7th level, you must have established a domain
- To reach 9th level, you must have established a realm (domain with vassals)
- To reach 10th level, your realm must be at least county sized
- To reach 11th level, your realm must be at least
- To reach 12th level, your realm must be at least principality sized
- To reach 13th level, your realm must be at least kingdom sized
- To reach 14th level, your realm must be empire sized
TREASURE
ACKS prices were actually designed to be historically accurate, although because precious metals and various items varied in price in time and place, it’s not perfect for any particular era. That said, it’s really easy to convert ACKS to Hellenistic Greece.
In ancient Greece, these were the main currencies:
8 chalkoi = 1 obolus
6 oboloi = 1 drachma
100 drachmae = 1 mina (or mna)
60 minae = 1 Athenian Talent
1 Athenian talent is about 60lb of silver. In ACKS, there are 100 coins per pound, so 1 Athenian talent is 6000 coins. There are (100 x 60) 6,000 drachma per Athenian talent.
However, during the Hellenistic era the average soldier received 1-2 drachma per day in pay. We can associate this with D@W wages of 6gp (light infantry) to 12gp (heavy infantry) per month. With 1gp=10sp and 1 month = 30 days, that translates to a wage of (60/30) = 2sp/day to (120/30) = 4sp/day.
Therefore, you can convert ACKS to historical prices simply by halving all prices, wages, and loot drops; or by saying there are 200 coins per pound instead of 100 coins per pound while keeping the ACKS numbers the same (so the same weight of silver has equivalent value).
UNARMED COMBAT
An Unarmed Fighting proficiency is available in Player’s Companion. I’ve excerpted it below for your convenience.
Unarmed Fighting: The character is an expert in striking with fist and feet. When brawling (see ACKS p.109), he may deal lethal damage. He can punch or kick characters in metal armor without himself taking damage.
Combat Trickery (Force Back, Incapacitate, Knock Down, Overrun, and Wrestling) would also be appropriate.
RULER LEVEL
By default, ACKS assumes that every normal man possesses the ability to become 14th level. To have rulers who aren’t high level, change this assumption. Maximum level is a characteristic rated 0 to 14.
When a character is created, roll 1d100 to determine max level. Add the character’s CHA bonus and his father’s maximum level to the die roll.
01-77 1st level
78-91 2nd level
92-97 3rd level
98-99 4th level
100+ Roll again on Heroic Level table (1d100), adding any value above 100 to next roll
01-60 5th level
61-75 6th level
76-83 7th level
84-88 8th level
89-91 9th level
92-93 10th level
94-95 11th level
96-97 12th level
98-99 13th level
100+ 14th level
EXAMPLE: Alexander of Macedon (CHA 18) is born to Philip of Macedon (13th level Fighter). Alexander rolls for his maximum level. He rolls an 94 on 1d100, for a total of (94+3 CHA bonus + 13 father’s level) 110. That means he gets to roll on the Heroic Level table at +10! He rolls 1d100 and gets a 90, +10 = 100. Alexander can achieve 14th level. Everyone who interacts with him at a young age can tell he has great promise of greatness.
ARMOR
The ACKS armors are already correlated with historical armors of antiquity. No modification is necessary. Plate Armor could, in theory, be worn (it would be a full hoplite panoply plus arm armor) but the heaviest armor is usually AC 4 (chain) or AC 5 (hoplite panoply without armor armor, or lamellar armor).