LAST CHANCE: Lairs & Encounters: Monster Lairs, Wilderness Rules, Monster Creation

[Koewn]

Autarch has launched a Kickstarter for Lairs & Encounters, a new supplement for Adventurer Conqueror King and other versions of the world's most popular role-playing game.

You will receive:

* More than 135 ready-to-play monstrous lairs. 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 - as balanced and full-featured as the custom class and spell creation systems from the ACKS Player's Companion.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/autarch/lairs-and-encounters?ref=enworld

LAST PUSH: If the project hits 25,000 before the end, ALL bonus monster statistics and lair entries are unlocked!

 

[Badwe]

Just wanted to reply to this and add my own 0.02.

I have played ACKs extensively for about 2.5 years in a play-by-post. It is by far my favorite old school rules settings.

But maybe you have your own favorite and you're not ready to convert. No problem, this book, and many of the ACKs books (which you can acquire a collection of at higher tiers of this KS) can be useful to you. Many of the subsystems are easily ported to other systems and used. Using ACKs systems allows you to do things like let players own land, create mercantile trade missions, conduct magical research, attract a congregation, or raise armies to go to war and gain XP in the process!

I have successfully converted Labyrinth Lord adventures (mostly Dyson's Delves) to ACKs for use in my campaign, and so conversion in the opposite direction is trivial. Here are some basic bits of information you need to know in order to use ACKs content in your game:

1) AC starts at 0 and is ascending. This means you can convert to later-day AC systems by adding 10, or to older THACO style by subtracting the listed AC from 9.

2) The game assumes 1GP looted and brought back to civilization = 1XP. This tends to be fairly universal among systems that grant XP for treasure, with the exception of Lamentations of the Flame Princess which would need to calculate all treasures as though 1GP were 1SP.

3) The game assumes a fighter needs 2000xp to level up and that 4/5ths of it will come from recovering treasure. If your target system doesn't use GP=XP systems, you can either multiply XP values of monsters in ACKs products by 5, or figure out the ratio of 1600gp to expected wealth of a character at level 1. Use that ratio to size up or down treasure hoards listed in ACKs products, and then either grant that much XP, or XP at a ratio of 2000 to how much a character needs (ie: if level 1 characters need 1000XP to level up, you can assume 2GP = 1XP if you wish to use that system.

4) ACKs goes up to level 14. While many D&D games claim to go up to 20, in practice most of them rarely go past 12 and don't work so well when they do. Thus, you can either try to create a ratio, or just run things as is and either stop at 14 or extrapolate.


I encourage anyone curious to give the game a try, and especially check out this kickstarter, which offers a product that any OSR player should be able to seamlessly make use of with minimal modifications, and possibly check out ACKs full time if you like what you see!

 

[Koewn]

The thing I usually mention in the same breath as the "14th level limit" is that ACKS is designed around a few fundamental economic decisions that add up to mean a 14th level character is capable of holding an empire of millions under his or her rule.

Gold == XP == Level == Actual Power, applied by expenditure of that selfsame gold.

You're not compelled to become an emperor, by any means, but the system completely supports it if you do wish to do so.

It's a subtle thing; and a refreshing break from the "additive bonuses" level rewards in other versions of the game.

 

[Koewn]

Stretch goals have been reached - as a backer, you will also get a PDF of Guns Of War, a Renaissance warfare expansion for D&D that includes firearms and cannon, as well as compatibility with the mass battles rules of Domains At War.

 

[Moorcrys]

The Autarch guys are awesome. They make some incredibly well-thought out, great material. If you're an OSR person, I think their stuff is a must-have, particularly if you have any interest in trade and mercantile ventures, large scale battles, or high level play. I can only imagine how much the lairs and monster creation rules will expand on that. And of course having over 100 lairs to drop into a game when your players take a left turn when you thought they'd take a right one is always welcome.

And if you're a 5e DM, just substitute 5e statblocks and you have 120+ ready-made encounters to draw on. Golden.

Only a day left!