It has begun! Click here to support the campaign: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/autarch/lairs-and-encounters
Lairs & Encounters is the ultimate supplement for fantasy RPG sandbox campaigns. Designed for use with the Adventurer Conqueror King System™ (ACKS™), it is readily compatible with other fantasy role-playing games built on the same core rules. In Lairs & Encounters you will find:
More than 135 ready-to-play monstrous lairs - that's at least one lair listing for every possible monster lair mentioned in the Adventurer Conqueror King System. The lair listings are designed to be used both as dynamic points of interest that can be discovered while wandering through the wilderness and as obstacles to a would-be ruler’s attempt to secure land for a domain.
New subsystems for sandbox play, including rules for populating 6-mile hexes with lairs based on the terrain and extent of settlements in the region, and rules for searching for lairs in the wilderness factoring in terrain density, aerial reconnaissance, splitting up to cover more ground (never split the party!), and more.
Additional mechanics for monsters, including ability scores for monsters, proficiencies for monsters, and young monsters.
A complete system for taming and training monsters, with details on the lifespan, roles, tricks, trained and untrained value, supply cost, training period, and the trainability modifier of every monster in the game.
A complete system for creating your own unique monsters. In the ACKS Player's Companion we gave you mechanics to create balanced new character classes and new spells; now we bring our same rigorous attention to balance and customization to monsters.
This looks even better than I imagined. Backed with gusto.
Training and taming monsters looks great! Do "pet" monsters gain XP and level up? (I'm pretty sure most groups have "that guy" who wants an animal companion or exotic mount)
I read Update #1, and there you mention that the current backers look to be ACKS loyalists. What would be the draw for folks new to ACKS, or using another system. I've backed the KS, but I'm trying to think of how to increase the audience for this KS.
Perhaps a new pledge level that allows getting the core rulebook at a minor discount? (Assuming that doesn't already exist, I didn't read in too much detail).
I will say this is something I've been waiting for quite a long time to see, because it makes extemperanous game mastering in ACKs substantially easier. Knowing that you'll always have at least one lair ready the first time the party stumbles upon such a thing in the wilderness takes away an immense amount of prep work. I think anyone curious about running ACKs who was willing to spend the money might be interested in getting this new book while they're at it.
edit: it occurs to me that the information being offered in Lairs & Encoutners is information useful to any old school gaming rules system. Perhaps the campaign page could be edited to quickly explain potential backers who primarily use other systems how it could be used by them.
Off the top of my head I believe Labyrinth Lord and Lamentations of the Flame Princess are some of the more popular formats with cross appeal. Perhaps something to the effect of: "LotFP players, you can use this book by adding 10 to all AC values and treating all treasure values as though 1 GP = 1 SP" and "Labyrinth Lord players: just take 9 - the listed AC to get the correct AC". Other editions of D&D might require more finagling. I'm not super familiar with 5th edition, but I have seen people online run LotFP adventures with 5th ed characters and rules so it can't be that hard.
The traditional way to run OSR adventures with 5E is to simply use the 5E stats for the monsters listed, or an equivalent, instead of trying to convert anything.
Encounter design sometimes becomes a problem, but 5E does better with the classic ‘horde of monsters’ that shows up a lot in OSR products than 3E or 4E does. (Putting 4E characters up against 50 bandits would be a slaughter, as well as taking six or ten hours to run.)
Looks like that email that just got sent out this morning to the SSoS backers did the trick. How long before we mail out to the other Kickstarters? I have to assume there's a way to make sure you only email each person once if they participated in multiples (not that I would care, but some people might).