Half-Orcs and Half-Ogres

Non-essential backstory to my question:

I run ACKS Stonehell as my main game.  But I also run two games for kids: one is a newbie game, for which I use Labyrinth Lord, while the other is for my more experienced sons, each playing 3 characters, in Basic Fantasy RPG.  I'm disenchanted with BFRPG now and would like to move over to ACKS.  But one of my sons is really, really attached to his half-orc and half-ogre fighters.

Question:

Has anyone tried to make a half-orc, half-ogre, or ogre for ACKS? I'm trying to convince my son to change his half-ogre to a bugbear and his half-orc to an orc, but I haven't convinced him yet.

Thanks in advance.

This is as out of the "Half-Humans" supplement? I wouldn't begin to guess what an ACKSy build would look like, but as a straight conversion:

Half-Orc looks pretty easy - it boils down to something like

  • Darkvision 60' - can be had as Infravision, 60' for two powers
  • +1 Save vs Poison & Death  - that's a half a power
  • +1 to reactions "with creatures of human size or smaller"  - I don't know what that's supposed to be emulating, but it's probably half a power.

So, going by that, it's 3 powers. You could add the usual "4 extra languages" for another power. 

At any rate, you could apply a racial value of "Half-Orc 0" to however you're handling classes for something like 75XP (3 powers) or 125 XP (4 powers), using the guidance from this thread:

http://www.autarch.co/forum/gnomish-infravision-0

...simply by adding that XP per level and knocking off the 14th level of any class.

Half-Ogre seems to be doable via something like:

  • 1 Extra HD Value (500XP)
  • Infravision 30' - 1 power
  • Dungeon Bashing - 1 power

and that'd be something like 575 XP per level for "Half-Ogre 0". (625 with 4 languages) Half-Ogres read as not being officially "large" creatures, so that's probably enough...

Neither of these do anything about the +5% experience; I don't know BFRPG well enough to say how to convert that. I might add the dwarf's "+1 HP after 9th" to both of them, I don't think that has a notable XP value?

And I wouldn't have any idea on how to further either of those racial builds past 0 :)

Axioms #2 has examples of beastman racial classes done the ACKS way (I'm guessing that's why you've referred to the orc and bugbear options?), and may be interesting from a guidance perspective, but the racial values there are derived from the ACKS monster entry more than anything else - so they're complex and costly. It'd probably be enough to simply enforce the stat requirements rather than try and re-emulate certain things via the racial build.

For a straight simple conversion without a lot of hassle, the above is probably sufficient to achieve some semblence of balance.

 

Thanks for the ideas.  My lazy side is thinking of just calling the Axioms Orc a Half-Orc and the Axioms Bugbear a Half-Ogre.  Other than the bugbear's stealth. everything else works well enough, I think.

I would give a Half-Orc the following powers:

Infravision 30' (1 power)

Human Heritage; maximum level for a class is +1, so level 14 for Half-Orc 0 (1 power)

Beastman Heritage; +1 to reaction rolls for beastmen (1/2 power)

Inhumaity; -1 reaction to humans/demihumans (-1/2 power)

Beastman Tongues (1 power)

That's three powers net. I'm not sure how many XP that should be; the Axioms artcile states 40XP per power but leaves a lot of wiggle room to adjust that number.

 

For Half-Orc 1, 2, 3, and 4, you may choose to put a point in Hit Dice OR Fighting Value; each racial point in Half-Orc costs 500XP.

[quote="drkrash"]

Thanks for the ideas.  My lazy side is thinking of just calling the Axioms Orc a Half-Orc and the Axioms Bugbear a Half-Ogre.  Other than the bugbear's stealth. everything else works well enough, I think.

[/quote]

If going that route, just replace the stealthy with 'stand your ground' - the 1/2 ogres strength and size grant it +2 to saves to avoid being pushed back, knock down, in wrestling, and to avoid being overrun.

I think your lazy solution is a good one, Dr Krash, especially as modified by Jojodogboy. From there you can riff on additional classes for those races.