Adventurer Conqueror King System: Imperial Imprint Review: Grappling With Goliath

​   Pray for me, my friends, while I embark upon this great voyage. I have done deep dive system reviews before, from a popular little indie darling to a freebie labour of AI-enhanced love. Both systems were about as light as you can get while still being legitimate real systems. Say what you will, they can be read in a single sitting, characters can be rolled up, and then all involved can enjoy months of fantastic adventures. All well and good. But within this hobby, there are some systems for hairy-chested men, who long to leave milk behind for meat. Those rules-heavy systems all have their specialties, designed for games lasting years with those Brobdingnagian, labyrinthine, rulesets. Each crunchy advanced game has its goals:
-Pathfinder for the power-fantasy character building to eventually achieve Super-Saiyan.
-GURPS for the obsessive desire to emulate every single genre in history to down to every boring bit of set dressing.
-Runequest for an in-depth exploration of an early-iron-age setting where failure and frustration is all part of the process.
-AD&D for, well, the perfect “D&D” campaign experience without flaws or warts, nevertheless cloaked by its arcane language to the perfect level of mystery, making understanding the system a matter of spiritual ability as much as intellectual capability.
   This one, though, might be the single most ambitious mega-system ever created. ACKS II, the legend, the myth, a monument to simulationism. The promise is that ACKS (I’m going to drop the II for the rest of this review) will enable a Referee to run A Whole Entire World, from tax policy to orc demographics to exactly how many silver pieces are in any given baron’s coffers on April 15th. If one were to listen to people online, one would think that absent massive and continuous dosing of Tylenol from an extremely early age no mere mortal could hope to comprehend the system’s vast complexities. “Oh, it’s amazing, but I’m just not smart enough to run ACKS” is a frequent refrain. Such is its reputation.
   Count me a skeptic there. Let me discuss my own (modest) bona fides. My first interaction with ACKS was not in fact with ACKS, but with its associated mass-battle system, Domains at War. My campaign has always been geared towards domains and players accumulating armies and fleets, so of course I’m a prime customer there. Rules work great. Then, when I decided to slice off a high-level section of megadungeon for No Artpunk III, I decided to adapt it into ACKS since there were mass armies in the place, and ran the playtest with a high-level ACKS (1st edition) party. We had fun, but I wouldn’t call it a perfect test of the system. Still, at darn near max level, the thing ran pretty nice as a dungeon-crawler.
   For all that, I think there is something to the complaints about the system’s scale. This thing is big. And thorough. That’s undeniably bringing a lot of depth to the gameplay, but to reiterate an old rubric I stole from The Angry GM: Complexity is the coin you pay for Depth. More depth is more or less always better, but if it comes at a complexity cost that is too high, then it’s not worth it for the slightly better game depth. Everyone at the table has their cognitive load limit, and when a player hits that limit, he’s done, he’s checked out. While ACKS has a undeserved reputation for complexity at the table, where it runs as smooth as butter, there is a very large complexity load away from the table, with not only the subsystems all over the place but also with the sheer comprehensiveness of the rules as a whole bogging down away-from-table adjudications.
   My initial impression is that every single bit of complexity here is smart, well-thought-out, and adds to the depth of the game. Moreover, this system is built on the B/X chassis, which means that all of these many complex bits are explained clearly, fit logically, and are comprehensible to most English-proficient adults and larger children. This is a system, thus, designed, not something in the AD&D tradition where the rules have evolved, red in tooth and claw, and are conveyed to the wide-eyed reader in the rambling manner of a wizened old sage who’s appeared out of a snowstorm to squat a while by your fire. The latter is an advanced game requiring not just poetry in the soul but also a cultural context steeped in wargaming clubs of the 1970’s. The former is a manual usable by anyone capable of sitting down and RFM’ing it. This shows when you see the two systems’ adherents, where the slightly befuddled acolytes of AD&D speak in hushed tones of the religiously converted. Not so here, these are rules understood by the mind, not the heart.
   This gives an unkind impression of the writing itself, however. ACKS II is well-written, its rigorous tables and data never getting in the way of the friendly, readable prose that calls the reader to adventure every single page. You’d read this for pleasure easily enough, and it’s made to game gosh darn it. This might harm ACKS’ reputation among its fanbase, but it is actually fairly accessible. As long as someone doesn’t get the vapors over its immense scale.
   In the end, I think ACKS II is wise to specialize in “most doorstopperyist” here. The way to make money in a crowded market is to either play up to the crowd, or to specialize to a small subsection. Light systems are always going to be popular with the largest mass of people, but the issue with chasing the mass market is that you’re competing with a bunch of other people chasing that mass, and the people are fickle. OSE was the darling of the vaguely OSR-ish mass for a while, until a prettier system that did rules light better (not better rules, maybe, but definitely lighter) came in the form of Shadowdark. ACKS II isn’t made for the masses, its made for the fans, a group of passionate people who want the single most complete game in the world. So, this. And the author’s making a comfortable living by giving his fans what they want.
   So what do they want? Well, next time, we’ll see how they start…