Well we’ve reached the end. After a long journey, we’re finally at the appendices, mostly filled with essential-but-not-particularly-interesting-to-comment-about-in-review stuff like “Conditions”, “Index”, and “List of Kickstarter backers”. Of far more interest, though, is the appendix detailing the baseline Auran Empire Setting. It’s pretty decent, although spare. Far more details are found in official modules and splats like the ACX series, the dwarf-focused By this Axe, and soon in the upcoming Before All Others for elves. For the purposes of this review, though, I’ll be keeping to the baseline Revised Rulebook. The other two core books Judge’s Journal and Monstrous Manual also will expand setting information, so I’ll note that when I come upon it.  
   First off, a note on RPG setting documents (books, appendices, modules). They’re…interesting. Technically, no TTRPG system needs a setting, because while rules do imply certain setting assumptions, there’s a lot of flexibility in terms of milieu and that’s the first lever most game masters will fiddle with. If someone tells you “I’m playing ACKS”, certainly don’t assume they’re playing in the Auran Empire. Nevertheless, these kinds of setting bibles are fun to read for entertainment if nothing else, and if they’re well-designed then the setting itself should inspire the reader, suggesting adventures and campaigns just from how all the pieces are set up on the board. At the very best end of the spectrum there are some settings so compelling that people play them even in different systems than intended. People playing Dark Sun in Shadowdark, for example…that’s the pinnacle.
   The Auran Empire is basically Rome. Yeah, yeah, I know, that’s not very specific, and a lot of settings have “Rome, but X”, here though you are in a very specific Late Rome, where I describe the current situation as “what if Septimius Severus heard about the Mongols and left along with the Persians to go fight them in the Steppe”. The Empire is crumbling on the borders, with many outer provinces lost recently to revolt or conquest, leadership completely focused on infighting, and a general sense of doom and gloom hanging over everything. Terrible place to be a peasant, but a nice hearty stew for adventurers. Couple it with all the neighboring kingdoms in a Mediterranean Sea region (but east and west flipped…don’t worry about it, most of us are a little Eastwexic), and you have a nice region ripe for adventuring, conquering, and yes, even kinging. 

   You might notice on the map and in my description that there’s not a lot of territory devoted to the Fantasy Standards of “dwarf holds”, “elf kingdoms”, “orc lands”, etc. Demihumans do exist in ACKS but they are very much given a short shrift in the core book. Dwarves occupy a dwindling territory inside a couple mountain ranges, while the elves only occupy the one woodsy kingdom to the east over there. “Bad guy humanoids” like orcs, ogres, goblins, etc, were all magically created by the Standard Ancient Bad Guy Empire From Long Ago via cross-breeding, so they’re all irredeemably evil beastmen with animal features (who’ve eaten every missionary they’ve ever met). Other sentients like giants, dragons, lizardmen, etc all do exist but they’re also pushed to the edges. You can play with your standards, but the setting assumes most stories are humans dealing with humans.
   Fantasy “races” aren’t at the forefront, but given this is a historically-focused setting, much attention is given to the different human races (nationalities, ethnos, etc). They might have different names, but there are Romans, Persians, Egyptians, Norse, Gauls, Greeks, Huns, and every other equivalent for the complicated mix of peoples profiting from the Fall of Rome. It’s made explicit by the table outlining Cybelean languages and their real-world equivalents. It’s cleverly done, even extending to how the lizardmen language (draconic) is derived from a real-world language isolate (Sumerian). Which means we should all get very nervous when the Judge starts speaking in Basque. We’re in a world extremely grounded in actual history here.  
   This does not, however, mean that we’re in a low fantasy, or sword and sorcery, setting. Magic is very common, with about half the classes some manner of spellcaster, and percentages found in population numbers (because of course there are) conveying a picture of a world where low-level casters can be seen daily in a city and at least monthly even in rural locations. Every race and species has access to magic, too, although the default classes imply that dwarves are restricted to divine lists while elves trade only in the arcane. The immediate objection from the genre-savvy “but what about tippy-verse”, where magic is so ubiquitous as to be silly, is answered by the fact that most spellcasters cap out at only level 6 spells, while the highest-level stuff is restricted to ritual casting out of special locations. The old “Gandalf was a 5th-level magic-user” canard is given the contempt it deserves, but high-level wizards and crusaders are pretty rare and even their worst manifestations aren’t in command of the whole world…
   Because ACKS II does something very deliberate with its balance; warriors command armies, and those armies are expected to be used as a core part of the game. Core AD&D is more balanced at high level than it gets credit for, but that’s mostly via fighters getting highly magical gear to keep up with the magic-users and clerics and druids and whatnot (thieves get nothing and they’re happy). ACKS certainly will have its high-level fighting types well-kitted out with magic, but even more by default every high-level fighter comes at the head of an army. With all the import and world-definition that implies. Your wizard may summon demons or unleash fireballs, but your fighter commands a canal to be dug or a city to be razed. The game doesn’t speak just in terms of half a dozen people in caves but wants there to be adventures dealing with battlefields and cities, too.
   Which, in turn, means the world is set up for different stories. In Greyhawk or the Forgotten Realms, a dread necromancer raising up vast armies of undead is dealt with by sneaking into his tower and killing him to break his McGuffin of Undead Control. That happens in ACKS II, but the story might just as well go that King Dave calls in favors from his allies and their forces meet in a pitched battle leading to dread necromancer’s defeat, or indeed even a massive campaign with multiple battles. Heroic man-to-man engagements still happen here, but not everything depends on a small band of adventurers. The State itself fights, and the world thinks not in terms of a pair of hobbits chucking magic rings into the nearest volcano, but in the collective story of evil being defeated by the Senate and the People of the Auran Empire. Which, curiously, makes how the game setting treats Law and Chaos very different.
   Rather than the Good vs. Evil focus of most D&D lineages, ACKS II has the one axis, Law vs. Chaos. This is reflected in the polytheistic pantheons, where Empyrean Lawful gods are set in opposition against the more primordial Chthonic Chaotic gods, and PCs are expected not to be dispositionally Lawful always, but by default are on the side of Law and civilization against the nihilistic Chaos. Game mechanics reinforce these defaults, in a way that ironically baseline D&D contradicts this tendency. Small-band D&D is fundamentally about the homeless, be they murder-hoboes or the more common band of well-intentioned drifters. Not so in ACKS; the game is focused on giving characters property and thus a stake in society. This isn’t the most heavily emphasized explicit message of the rulebook, but it’s an implicit assumption that seeps from every pore. The setting’s Auran Empire is in trouble, and while in some D&D games that would mean “hey, awesome, more quests get generated”, here in ACKS that means the world is set up to break down and threaten the beloved domains given so freely to the players. That’s a form of quest-generation too, but it means that your heroes of the setting at fundamentally defenders of order and stability.
   Clever, clever game. This setting teams up with the mechanics to make ACKS more focused on Law vs. Chaos than any other game in D&D’s storied lineage, and it does it not by shackling players by game-mechanical oaths and explicit alignment rules; it does this by handing them crowns. And then threatening those golden rewards.
   But of course, players are players and they also want to fireball dragons. Next time, I’ll move over to the bestiary and we’ll look at the much more workaday set of threats that will be the conscious focus for King Dave and his companions. 

   All the prep is done, we have our characters ready…so, what do? Well, handily enough, the next chapter is titled “Adventures”. Sounds fun. Maybe we should go on one of those. If we have a bunch strung together, we might even reach a couple chapters later, “Campaigns”.
   The rulebook here groups adventures into three different buckets; “delve”, “wilderness”, and “voyage”, with the last one getting its own chapter because that Odyssey stuff is a pretty different mode. Combat isn’t its own chapter, rather part of adventuring. Threw me for a minute, but makes sense organizationally after some consideration. If you’re like me, you immediately did twig on something big missing, but let us review first that which is, not that which ain’t.
   Delving is your D&D default activity, stumbling around in lightless depths with your only guide the thief’s vibes and a lantern held by a local whose only qualification as henchmen is that he was the lowest bidder. Dungeons, tombs, caves, lairs, sanctuaries, ruins…if it’s musty and abandoned outside of monsters, then you’re going to be doing what ACKS calls delving. The rules are, as expected, comprehensive but also not all that different from B/X. Thieves being the only characters with dark vision natively is an objective gameplay improvement, but there’s honestly not a lot to complain about in native B/X here, so there’s not a lot that changes.
   Wilderness adventuring is a little more expanded, but not immensely. It’s all your usual stuff, like “how to not get lost”, “how to live off the land when lost”, and “how to freeze to death”. I like that mapping is given consideration outside the dungeon too, keep that graph paper never busy while you’re outdoors as well as inside.
   This is where I’ll note that the term “ancillary activity” starts to crop up. Activities are split between “dedicated” (where it’s basically an all-day focused endeavor) and “ancillary” (where’s it just what you’re doing in the in-between times). They’re also classed as normal or “strenuous” (where you need to take regular breaks or else you get winded). Some will doubtless find this too rigorous, almost mechanical, but having everything broken down like this clears up a lot of potential rules arguments, plus these tags interact with proficiencies and spells and timekeeping in a comprehensive manner. It’s not obsessive like GURPS or Pathfinder, but these classifications do tamp down on the sillier adjudication debates.
   Combat section won’t throw anyone familiar with the hobby, either. As is only right and proper, it starts with encounter rolls, surprise rolls, evasion procedures, and reaction rolls, so there’s a good set of procedures to have interesting combat kickoffs by default. Once initiative gets rolled, the rules are, stop me if you’ve heard this one, comprehensive and well-explained. The only complaint I really have for any departures is ACKS’ lawsuit-avoidant replacement for THAC0, AC is ascending but starts at zero, which is then subtracted from the given character’s class-and-level-based attack throw. It’s not all that hard to process once you get used to it, but the difference is confusing for both old-school and new-school groups at first. I do like that the system assumes miniatures and battlemats, with things like facing and frontage actually mattering. It is so much easier to run theater-of-the-mind when there are real rules, rather than the “near/short/far” crap.
   Here’s where I must mention the odd omission. What I noticed missing, and you might have too, are cities as a potential adventuring venue, or at least a venue with special rules. City-crawls are odd and difficult to convey, not to mention less popular with players, but it’s odd that there isn’t anything special noted about urban adventuring. I’d imagine there’s another book for that, but we’re reading this as we go.
   Ship rules and seaboard adventures are where we start to depart far away from the stolid grounds of the Rules Cyclopedia. Do you need to know how a trireme handles crosswinds? We got that. Do you need to know how long a voyage from Rome to Gibraltar takes? We got that. Do you need to know what happens when the captain PC yells “RAMMING SPEED” in a mass battle? You betcher sweet bippy, we got that. Underwater combat and river voyages wrap up the ship chapter neatly and then its time to get into the real deal.

Running a REAL Campaign
   …because as solid and comprehensive as everything has been thus far, it is in Campaigns where ACKS differentiates itself from the rest of the hobby. We got domain and army and property and venture rules, and wooooo boy are these rules great.
   As discussed back in the classes section every single class in the game gets a custom stronghold when they ding level 9, netting them freebie followers and troops. How that stronghold is acquired is left to the Judge and player; some may be built, some may be renovated, some may be conquered, some may be manifested out of magic star-stuff after a yearlong quest. Where ACKS departs from a lot of the other “you get a stronghold” OSR systems is that it fully expects this building to be part and parcel of the GAME at this level, where your Adventurers, via Conquest, become Kings. Yeah boy, we’re into Domains.
   It’s difficult to properly convey just how complete these rules are. I’ve read a lot of RPG core manuals, and, because I’m silly like that, I’ve already read a lot of empire-building splatbooks stapled awkwardly onto said core systems. Many have good ideas for perfectly workable tack-on minigames to add to your game. Not so here. ACKS II makes ruling an empire central to the game, planned from level 1 as the final endgame goal. Rather than go through every single rule (trust me, your edge case is covered), I’ll describe how the level 10+ game seems to be designed.
   “How do I get a domain” is answered with a large number of examples, by the way, so don’t worry too much about that. Mr. Judge is assumed to dangle multiple domain opportunities in front of the players, something got conquered, don’t fret.
   First off, there’s a bit of a “main character” design here. The ruler is probably a fighter or something similar, with the other less-interested players acting as a ruling council. If multiple individuals want different domains that’s fine, but the game is assuming don’t-split-the-party here. All the characters are around the same level, so the domain has multiple strongholds, some (like the thief’s lair) not helping as strongpoints, but all adding infrastructure and interest. This is reasonable, out of my ~50 players in the main campaign, I have only 7-8 especially keen to rule something. We’re going to assume Dave overcame his intellectual deficits and is our well-advised king.
   King Dave, having built his castle within the newly-conquered border realm of Davetopia, now begins to attract not just henchmen, but also soldiers for the army and peasants to work the fields. There’s math to pay for all of this, but that’s handled by the wizard’s player. Zilban the Magnificent, speaking of which, has erected his tower and not only has apprentices, but is also beginning magical research, crafting magic items, and using ritual rules to cast level 7, 8, and 9 spells. Cleric…er, Crusader Alain makes a nice temple nearby, gaining not only henchmen but extra-fanatical troops, too. Finally, Scuz the Shifty is a full level ahead with his own thiefly hideout, embarking on “hijinks” which have real game-mechanical benefits but are also a wonderful method of introducing new quests into the campaign. Everyone is still very capable of entering a high-level dungeon and fighting a dragon, of course, but there’s also a ton of gameplay out and about, too.
   Dave the character is an idiot, but we don’t have to assume Dave’s player is. If he’s interested in getting into the nitty-gritty, he can do things like improve the lives of his people, plot court intrigues, deal with domain morale, and found new settlements. That math, and the gold income, is all there for the taking if he wants. Realms can also be left mostly in the Judge’s hands, being more or less inert nice showy houses for the party. Seems like a waste, though.
   If you noticed an organizational trend back in the adventuring section, then you know what comes next after domain-level campaigns…yep, we have four (!) chapters next for Armies, Maneuvers, Battles, and of course Sieges.
   This stuff right here? This wargame? That’s where the author’s true passion lies. Not only are the army lists comprehensive, realistic, and balanced, but they’re also FUN. Heck yeah I want to get into how Dwarven Crossbowmen and Elven Bowmen and Human Cataphract Cavalry work. Your units and armies can move around the map with a daily or weekly marching rate, there are cost breakdowns, mercenaries, bad guy (beastmen) army stats, specialists, conscription rules…I love this stuff. You might love this stuff too. Or you might not. But as long as at least one or two players at the table (including the Judge) are the kind of wargame nerds who like setting up these things, the battles themselves will appeal to everyone.
   Maneuvers are the preamble, but when we get to the battles all involved will have a blast. Despite the size and scope of army vs. army encounters, ACKS never forgets this is first and foremost a role-playing game. Heroes can have an enormous impact on the battle, charging ahead of the battle line in forays, risking character death in zoomed-in fights. Morale is key to victory in mass battles, meaning a lot of the prep beforehand and during the fight also impact that all-important morale score when arrows start flying. And once the losers break and run, of course you can loot all the bodies for XP.
   Sieges are more in the same vein, making all that obsessive construction and logistics matter once the baddies deliver siege to the poor embattled gates of Davetopia. Pitched battles may eventually result, but you also can also drive surrenders via starvation and disease, not to mention the usual intrigue-and-skullduggery options that player characters generate themselves. Once you take a city, you get XP for it, of course.
   This is all…really fun. It suggests a campaign, and this a game, rather different from the heroic set of buddies battlin’ evil that so much modern D&D assumes. All of these are the rules, but ACKS II ends with appendices and the most essential is probably Appendix A, the setting. There’s a direct setting document of course, but also an implied setting all these rules set up. In the next and final section of our Revised Rulebook review, we’ll look at both sources for setting to see how this game is played when the rubber at last hits the road. 

​   Next in our series, let's look at the ACKS II equipment...
   One oft-repeated canard of the OSR is that “the answer is not on your character sheet”. Like most such statements, there was originally a good point to it…when overcoming a challenge, some of the best game sessions are when solutions spring forth from the febrile imaginations of the players rather than mechanical point-and-click puzzles where we look for McGuffin-shaped pegs to ram into McGuffin-sized holes. That being said, the most creative thinking I ever see often does start with a player looking down at his sheet, considering how to put a rope, a mirror, or an illusion spell to use in an unexpected manner. D&D is not an escape room [citation needed], it is a game. The way players interact with a game is with its rules, using…equipment and spells. Typically written on some sort of character sheet. So a proper full game does, in fact, need a full range of gear and spells.
   And great news, ACKS II has both of those in droves.
 The Right Stuff
   Equipment in ACKS can be purchased at markets, which are usually associated with settlements but not always, classed by type from poor rural Class VI’s to the Imperial City’s Class I, where nearly everything can be found. Hirelings, mundane adventuring gear, weapons, armor, vehicles, everything...it’s all variably available based on the market class. The Venturer core class interacts with this bit of mechanical cleverness, too. This is something I remember from Pathfinder too but it’s explained better and implemented with more rigor than in the 3.P paradigm. 

​   As with previous game reviews, I won’t go into the long lists of equipment in detail, I’ll just note a few notable oddities, omissions (yeah right), or additions:
-Arena armor has the “revealing” tag, aiding seduction rolls if the character is 11+ in STR, DEX, CON, and CHA. That’s funny. No this doesn’t apply to being naked. Yes that silliness is lampshaded.
-Plate armor is CHEAP at 60gp compared to normal, it’s also scarce meaning only 50% as likely to be available in a given market outside of dwarf towns.
-NEED MORE POLEARMS, GARY GYGAX SNEERS AT YOUR PALTRY HANDFUL.
-Structures are completely priced out, including traps. Yes, you can rigorously value a dungeon.
-War machines are a whole page, be still my beating heart.
-There’s a set of tables for stuff gone wrong with scavenged equipment if your little loot-goblins are taking too much mundane crap.
-Hireling morale has a LOT of potential bonuses and maluses. Great.
-Spellcraft services, yes, indeed do interact with markets too. Your Venturer is a huge quality-of-life boost in ACKS.
   Since ACKS is “that domain game”, there’s also a great section on construction projects with costs, schedules, and benefits for all kinds of projects. All classes make a special building for 15,000gp at level 9, and you can bet your sweet bippy that this game isn’t going to handwave Dave’s castle construction as a simple “he cuts a check”. This is excellent for generating quests and more gameplay at those higher levels of play.
Check Your Spelling
   Of course, as we all know, the real main characters in any RPG are the spellcasters, and those spellcasters rely on spells. Casting in ACKS is universally Vancian off of limited repertoires, with divine casters (besides the witch and craftpriest) rocking the whole lists of their given deity, while arcane casters have the usual spellbook setup. Spells have type tags (e.g. healing, protection, transmogrification, etc) that interact with other rules and tags. This is of course rank heresy to the AD&D fan, trained as he is in the Gygaxian Hermeneutic of his preference, but it’s good for comprehensive design and really, really helps when you’re expanding the system, via homebrew, module, or splatbook. All terms, defined. Structure and levels, rationalized. Thus are the spells of ACKS.
   As an aside, keen-eyed observers might have noticed that all the human classes cap out at level 14. Since we’re following the regular progression of “new tier of spells every odd level” one would expect that limits our spells to level 7. In fact, it’s only level 6 that gets normally accessed; there are level 7, 8, and 9 spells in ACKS but those are done through ritual; over time and with more effort than the usual “memorize and cast” repertoire spells.
   Again, there are a ton of spells, so let me just note some standouts:
-The “Call of the [animal]” spells are fun, ten-minute-long summoning spells that let you go all Elisha on them kids, or call in horses if you’re going to reenact Krull. Fun.
-Counterspell is early, level 1 for arcane and divine casters both, and it’s what we usually call “dispel magic”, just on a single target. Interesting implications for buffs and debuffs, while it does not do what “counterspell” does in more modern systems (directly stopping an active cast).
-A lot of names are modified to hide from WotC legal after the OGL imbroglio. “Cure Light Wounds” is thus “Cure Light Injury”, etc.
-Light is gone in favor of Illumination, which is not something that can get cast on eyeballs. Sad, but makes sense.
-Level Water is a big deal for a lot of the adventures I read, it’s a Moses Spell that also enables interesting dungeon shenanigans.
-Sleep is now Slumber and 1HD targets can’t make saves against it, good. Still useless after 5HD.
-Spider Climb is only level 1, that’s impressive.
-Wall of Smoke is a nice and shapable version of Obscuring Mist, that’s a very good level 1 battlefield control spell.
-Command is now Word of Command with a pretty long set of exemplary words, very strong version of the spell here that makes clerics pretty nasty single-target save-or-suck casters.
   Plenty of other very solid spells here, including all your classics. BECMI spellcasting was famously kind of overpowered, and ACKS puts the breaks on a lot of the most broken spells, but don’t get it wrong…spellcasters are still the kings of battle. Less utility stuff than some lists, but plenty of heals/removes/dispels/divination for the out-of-combat side too.
   Going ahead a little to spellcasting in combat, casters must declare what spells they plan to cast before initiative gets rolled, giving a simple chance for interruption to whichever side wins the initiative. That’s about it for concentration and interruption, we’re not making this particularly complex.
   So, Dave and Dave’s Friends are all built after the first couple hundred pages. What do they do next? Well, that’s for next time when we finally get to Adventures and Campaigns…

   Once more into the breach, my friends. We’re reviewing ACKS II piece-by-piece, with the first part of this series a general overview of the system’s scope and scale. Looking practically, of course, our first interaction with the system is typically via generating characters. Before we even cover that, though, we need to tip down all our green visors and look at the core math. So, here we go…
​Green Visor Analysis
   ACKS II, like most fantasy systems in this space, is built primarily around the d20. Terminology is very sensitively worked over to avoid the litigious grasp of Hasbro, so rolls are “throws” most of the time, fumbles are botches, etc, but if you’re familiar with B/X (lineage via Rules Cyclopedia) then you’ll mostly know the core assumptions. If you don’t…well, welcome stranger, I have no idea how you got here but I’m glad you bumbled aboard.
   The rulebook doesn’t assume the reader knows what’s up, explaining not just how to roll, but giving the reasons for rolling different die sizes. When skill and luck have a broad range of outcomes, you throw a d20. When its less of a big luck swing, use a d6. When there’s a bell curve of possible outcomes, use 2d6, etc. Once again this book is rigorous, but all the reasons are given in clean, clear language, with helpful examples and in engaging prose. I really don’t think the “this thing as all numbers” crowd is being fair at all, because this solid darned manual writing.
   As a note on encumbrance, weights are given in “stone”. This mildly bugs me because that’s a proper old English weight near fourteen pounds but here in ACKS-land we assume “ten pounds ish”. There aren’t a lot of places where we’re imprecise like this with numbers, but just note that these do exist and they’re always in service of the verisimilitude of this Fantasy Dominate Rome world. Coins, because this is realistic and not Greyhawkian, weigh about 1/100th a pound, not 1/10th.
   Once we get to characters, you see the kinds of modifiers we’re expecting. Attributes (all standard) provide -3 to +3 modifiers, with only 3 or 18 maxing those out. Standard method of generation is template/array style, so most characters won’t be exceptional or utter dogs. I do like how attribute bonuses are added to % checks at a times-four, so a 16-STR fighter (+2 bonus) is bending bars at a +8. High Key Attributes giving mild XP bonuses to appropriate classes is present, but not at an absurd level. Proficiencies add a little bit of oomph, but nothing like D&D 3 or even D&D 5. It's B/X, but standardized.
   Combat statistics are slightly wonky for those familiar with old-school or new school versions of D&D; armor is ascending but starts at 0, which means different arithmetic for basically normal B/X attack progression results. By default, hit points are “class hit die OR 4, take whichever is higher” at first, then roll all hit die later, which means ACKSmen don’t typically topple over at the first sneeze. In addition to the fairly standard weapon proficiencies, characters also have style proficiencies which enable a given type of fighting without penalty. So if you want to sword-and-board, you need the Weapon and Shield proficiency in addition to proficiencies in said sword and said board. Little niche carve-out there. The rest is normal B/X for attack and damage progression, with the exception of cleave. Yes, your fighter types can keep hitting the next target if their first blow kills their current. This is cool.
   That’s mostly it. There are a lot of tables in the latter portion of this book, but they’re not core to the player experience. For most of the gametime, you’re in a B/X-like math schema with just a little bit of power creep less from any fundamental shift in the engine than just a range of options and setup rules that are player-favored, like the hit point minimums and the added proficiencies. System mastery will boost the performance of a character somewhat but a fighter with 10’s across the board, fighting with a sword and shield, will manage to contribute fine. Not that there aren’t a lot more options…

​Building Your Toon
   Okay, as is standard for these reviews, I’m going to roll up a guy to test things out, but first we can look at the general set-up for character creation. I’m interested in the way the PC chapters get broken out: Characters -> Classes -> Proficiencies -> Equipment -> Spell. Characters are first established as a mix of attributes, homeland, age, weight, etc before you hop into classes. Our classes are manifold, as is to be expected when any D&D edition accumulates cruft, but we do the B/X thing with race-as-class but also gives multiple classes for dwarves and elves. Level cap is 14 normally. Our baseline human classes each pair with a single attribute, which is neat, and thus slightly awkwardly adds two to the D&D standard four-man-band. We have:
-Fighters (STR): Standard issue fighting-man. All arms, all armor, best hit die, best attack, you know his deal.
-Explorer (CON): Kind of a ranger. All arms but medium to lighter armor, d6 hit die, can “ambush” for a mild extra damage die, otherwise pretty Aragony.
-Thief (DEX): Less crap than most thieves, with okay arms, light armor, d4 hit die, backstab, but a lot better skill success than a lot of others. CHEAP leveling XP.
-Mage (INT): It’s your magic-user, you know what that means. Wizard as a standard wizard, including the massive XP cost to level up.
-Crusader (WIS): Cleric but we’re scared of WotC lawyers. I actually like the name better, it makes it more obviously martial.
-Venturer (CHA): This is the unique one to ACKS, and I like it. Traveling merchant with meh arms/armor and average hit die, but TONS of special trading and business-owning abilities. Could be a party face in a dungeon crawl but it ties in to the domain side early and often. Awesome.
Demi-Human classes are some nice varieties:
-Dwarven Craftpriest is a Cleric Dwarf, limited to level 10 and with a spellbook. Neat.
-Dwarven Vaultguard is a Fighter Dwarf, limited just to level 13 but otherwise just good and solid.
-Elven Nightblade is a MU/Thief Elf, maybe more assassin, limited to level 10.
-Eleven Spellsword is a MU/Fighter Elf, also limited to level 10  
   Technically there are a couple human versions too with specific races’ classes, but I’d add them to the “campaign class” bucket. These are the weirdo hybrids that players always want, with added extra specializations to make other variants. Those are…(deep breath):
-Assassin: Like a thief that specializes in the murder-stab parts of the package.
-Barbarian: Like a fighter/explorer, you know the type.
-Bard: Standard-issue annoying jerk, not a full caster but has inspiration and can use magic wands.
-Bladedancer: Female-exclusive cleric who likes swords and hates wearing clothes.
-Paladin: You know the paladin. He’s a normal paladin, just peeved by the cleric’s “crusader” name.
-Priestess: Female-exclusive cleric who trades the fighty bits for slightly better spellcasting.
-Shaman: Basically, the druid, a cleric with an animal pet who can turn into that animal.
-Warlock: Mage who likes looking gross and evil and who your party will absolutely hate.
-Witch: Female-exclusive mage with a more earthy twist to her casting.
-Nobiran Wonderworker: MU/Cleric mix who can cast from both, limited to level 10.
-Zaharan Runeguard: Evil magic-fighter who gets bonuses if he turns undead.
   All the campaign classes are fine, probably slightly subpar vs. the Big Six but players love that crap and they do a pretty solid job of filling out archetypes often requested. These baseline classes all get further modded by random packages which grant free proficiencies and different starting gear packages.
   Oh, right, I should mention proficiencies: They’re feats. Like, D&D 3E feats, but if they were all created by a designer who was actually numerate and understood game balance. Obviously there are still trap choices, but those traps are much less punishing than the 3.P paradigm, and the proficiencies aren’t quite as “must plan out the tree” to get good stuff, either. I like them, but I like Pathfinder stuff too, so take that as you will.

Meet Dave (again)
   Okay, I’ve now spent far, far more time and brain cells on character options than any player even will in the history of all of mankind, so let’s conclude today by rolling up a guy. I’m thrilled to see if we get a zero or a hero. Let’s go line-by-line per the rulebook:
   Attributes. It’s 5d6 drop lowest 2, 2x 4d6 drop lowest, then 3d6, pre-picked. I’m going to skew martial here, so Dave’s got:
STR: 5d6 -> [1,4,6,2,3] -> 13, meh
CON: 4d6 -> [4, 1, 2, 6] -> 12
DEX:  4d6 -> [5, 4, 1, 2] -> 11, heh
INT: 3d6 -> [2, 2, 1] -> 5 LOL
WIS: 3d6 -> [5, 4, 3] -> 12
CHA: 3d6 -> [3, 5, 4] -> 12
   Okay, Dave’s pretty dang dumb (-2 mod), but he’s otherwise pretty average. Strength of 13 is just enough for a +5% XP bonus on a Strength-primary-attribute class, which means…Fighter. Hah. Okay, sure thing buddy. Dave the Fighter. That means I’ll roll hit points:
d8 -> 6, great. But no CON bonus.
   Starting age doesn’t make much difference, but magic aging is still a thing and there’s at hint that some campaigns will be doing the whole “decades pass” thing, so for Dave that’s:
17+1d6 -> [1] -> 18. Nice. Dave the Dimwit is also VERY wet behind the ears.
   Dave’s assumed to be 15 stone by default, and he’s too dumb to be anything but Lawful, so let’s go to class and see what we get next. On to templates:
3d6 -> [4, 6, 4] -> 14, so that’s a Gladiator.
   Being a gladiator nets us Weapon Focus (swords and daggers) and Seduction, plus 2 swords, heavy arena armor, a plumed and visored helmet, tunic and pants, sandals, small sack, amphora of oil (for polishing body), 1 week’s iron rations, and 38gp in arena winnings.
   Oh. Dave is a himbo. That gives me so much to work with. Despite the terrible INT and only one score above 12, this is still somehow a viable PC with a bright future ahead of him losing his last three neurons at the front of the party. I can dig this.
   Of course, there’s still equipment to look at and spells to select if we’re a magician, so that’s what we’ll focus on next time. Assuming Dave can find his way out of the arena…

​   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…

​  Once more into the breach, dear readers. I’m on a self-appointed mission here to dive deep into the very successful Shadowdark system. Last time, I looked at the player side of the game through the lens Dave the Priest. This time, I’ll be covering the GM side of the game, which has some very odd organizational choices let me tell you. There’s some genuinely decent advice in here, mixed with what I can’t help but feel are filler charts. Which, for a semi-indie product like this where printer costs must be a consideration, feels…odd.
  When Shadowdark is advising the GM, it does a pretty good job; Game Masters are enjoined to make challenging, interesting, and scrupulously fair dungeons and adventures for their player characters, while rooting for their players to succeed. Light notes about setting a dark tone flow into dark tactics about attacking light sources very well. A single page offers up “modes” for different styles of game, which include stuff like death immediately at zero, XP-for-monsters, and a “pulp mode” that hands out whole handfuls of luck tokens. I’m at a loss for how well the hypothetical doe-eyed naif picking this up as Baby’s First RPG can run a game using this book, but for the actual target demographic, it’s solid.
  At this point, I have to pause and give a nod to who I think is embracing this game system with such wild enthusiasm. It’s been billed as an “old school game with new school mechanics”, but who Shadowdark most truly appeals to is dungeon masters who are suffering. I have no idea how consciously the game is designed for this, but it’s almost perfectly fit to address every complaint 5E DMs make. They complain about immortal, entitled player characters who quote from their 20-page backstories while theatrically indulging in puffy-inflated-sumo-suit combat with monsters designed to look scary but not actually raise stakes. These DMs hit reddit and comment threads waxing lyrically about how much of the rules burden has been passed off to them while players get countless goodies. Maybe that’s unfair, I don’t know, but that is the message I’ve heard from burned out 5E DMs. Shadowdark strips down a lot of the puffy cruft from 5E while maintaining a lot of the mechanical smoothness of “modern D&D” that players (and 5E DMs) seem to crave.
  On the other hand, there’s another complaint I hear from OSR-adjacent DMs who have issues recruiting. This isn’t nearly so loud or persistent a complaint as what I hear from the 5E side, but there are definitely some OSR guys who are having issues filling tables with their AD&D or B/X-lineage systems because of the perception by game-shop-goers or online casuals that TSR-era D&Ds are mechanically clunky or awkward. Once again, this isn’t my personal experience, but I’ll believe them that that’s their own experience. Shadowdark’s mechanics are designed to be more “modern friendly” than anything stained with the whiff of THAC0. The hype train is part of the offer package for these DMs, if you’re trying to recruit a table of players who don’t live and breathe this stuff, the money passed to your Questing Beasts and other such channels for exposure is only more helpful. Genius marketing and genuinely filling in a perceived need for these two demographics.
  All of this to say that Shadowdark isn’t hurt too terribly by having some gaps in its rules, those will be spackled over with the DM’s own previous system knowledge, either 5E or OSR. The semi-mythical complete newbie who’s bought this book to run with his four middle-school friends would be in a bit of a lurch at times, but that’s okay…he’s a myth anyway. Nonexistent customers can’t be hurt. The real customers will be very happy with the game mastery section.
  The dog not barking, of course, is overland travel/domain/hex/city/social adventuring. There are next to no rules for how to run a hexcrawl, or a political campaign. Poking my head out of the book for a minute, I expect the new Western Reaches Kickstarter is devoted almost entirely to making up this lack, at least for outdoorsy hex stuff.
  There’s an enormous amount of page space devoted to random encounter tables, each a d100 with 52 entries that go from “somewhat to concerning” at 01 to “random boon” at 100. The details aren’t enough to really spin out a great encounter, but they’re less minimalistic than the old school of “4d20 beastmen” so that’ll help comfort some DMs. Hope you got the PDF once you’ve made that roll though, because there’s no index in the bestiary. 

​The Manual Monstrous
  Monsters in Shadowdark are mostly old standbys, sometimes renamed to avoid licensed IP. Their statblocks are generally simple, showing AC/HP/Attack(s)/Movement/Stats/Alignment/Level (which is hit dice, the HP is the average roll but game masters are invited to roll their own should the fancy strike them). Wonky little monster illustrations aren’t common but will be inspiring/useful when they do come up.
  Occasionally, a special high-level “boss monster” will be given a full-page spread. They’re nice and impressive specimens with very high hit dice and nasty abilities, accompanied by a large illustration. The blinded Beholder on the Shadowdark cover is one of the nastiest customers, with no rules for henchmen/hirelings it’s going to be a nasty 4v1 fight even at level 10. Monsters don’t use the precise set of PC spells, but rather have custom spells...up to ten of them in the case of the Legally Distinct From A Beholder Eyeball Boss Monster.
  Building new monsters is a little handwavy but there’s enough guidance for a confident and experienced GM to make something, and the book enjoins us to compare to something like an elephant to make sure power is in the right ballpark. Rival NPC parties aren’t precluded by anything in the system, but neither is there any guidance provided for making them using player class chassis.

  As is my wont, I scrolled down until I found the ogre entry for my baseline. A Shadowdark ogre isn’t given much of a description, but because the customer base comes with their own trope baggage, that’s fine. It’s a level 6 bruiser with low armor but 30 hit points and a pair of massive 2d6 greatclub attacks, I definitely wouldn’t want to tackle it at level 1 on anything like a level playing field, but a dedicated archer in a good position would certainly be able to defeat it, so that’s pretty standard. Given character hit points and the low AC improvement rate, even level 3s would probably find the ogre a real threat. It’s a standard-issue ogre, in other words, but one that makes me a little suspicious about the underlying math assumptions of the system (it’s assuming four PCs as normal, and says the ogre thus should be an average threat for an APL 2 party).

​Real Treasure is the Loot We Stole Along the Way
  All those monsters, by default, gain us nothing for being defeated. Character progression is from accruing treasures and boons, per the chart…and so the back fifth of the book is devoted to loot. We have massive d100 tables divided out into four tiers. We have detailed tables for magic items, along with special properties and quirks. We have item creation rules. We have consumables tables. We have an extremely brief thumbnail about blessings and boons. We have absolutely nothing nowhere that helps us narrow down the vague gold-XP connection beyond that tiny chart. I’m trying not to be annoyed by this, because this is almost just milestone leveling with extra obscuring steps.
  That’s not the only progress in a D&D game though, the other way characters gain power is through the items themselves, and those are actually really good. There’s a whole custom/named magic item “bestiary” that’s formatted almost exactly like the monster section. The items are varied and the first part of this book where I’d really endorse the product for use even if you’re not going to play the system itself. Obviously there are plenty of old standbys like a cloak of elvenkind or a flying carpet, but there are also fun things like a three-item regalia dedicated to Memnon, the god of chaos that all get boosts if worn together.  Good design there, I just wish I knew how much XP each bit was worth. 

Putting It All Together
  I’m not going to become a proselyte for the Shadowdark system. I’m happy with what I already run, and I think I’d feel a lack of crunch. However, I’m not the target audience for this system. Do I think it’s good for the target audience? I think it’s perfect. So good for Arcane Library there.
  A note on hype: As with any time when there’s a huge new Popular Thing, an answering backlash rises on social media from highly opinionated grognards that boils down to “Popular Thing sucks”. As a fellow highly opinionated grognard, I get it, trust me. In my weekly trawl of the freebies offered up by itch.io, it gets a little overwhelming to see every other adventure written for Shadowdark. But I don’t think you should worry about the system; it’s not competing with your Old Thing. Shadowdark is ideal for either a suffering 5E DM sick and tired of the system’s abusive players, or else an old-schooler who wants something a little more streamlined, with mechanics designed in this current millennium. Arcane Library’s delivered something pitch-perfect for those two large demographics. For them, the system feels like a tremendous breath of fresh air. The largest gaps in the core system needed to make it a truly complete TTRPG, namely outdoor hexcrawling, downtimes, and the domain game, are hopefully all being added in the new Kickstarter. I wish them all the best of luck.
  By all means, disagree with me, talk to me about it. How's your own experience with the Newest Hotness of Two Years ago treated you? I'm here or on Twitter to yell at.

  Welcome. We’re back in the saddle from part one of this system review, which you really ought to read first. We’re talking about building characters, though, so maybe it’s apropos to ignore all background and math calculations and instead flip directly over to character building.  Goodness knows that’s what the players will do. I’ll bumble along making my own guy as a lens here.
  First of all, our intrepid adventurer is directed to roll stats, 3d6 down the line. I will be using the first optional rule in the book and reroll if there are none 14 or higher, so that mercy is appreciated. My first garbage roll gets discarded, the second is STR 15, DEX 7, CON 8, INT 11, WIS 13, CHA 8. Oh nice, the classic “fragile fighter” array. Or a priest I guess. Wish I had a way to modify stats, but that’s up to talent rolls now.
  I’ll pause here and give an approving nod; the game has rules for 0-level characters. These poor jobbers are just stats, ancestry (the Artist Formerly Known As Race), a single hit point, and a few random bits of starting gear. I love this for campaign-starting gauntlets where each player is handed a stack of characters and may the odds be ever in your favor. I’m less impressed with the evolutionary argument that this yields better characters in general, those stats don’t improve your single-hit-point odds all that much. Still, nice idea.
  My own character is destined for greatness, though, I’m starting him out as a level 1. Ancestry is our next choice; they’re all pretty light in terms of game mechanics but that won’t stop people from really, really caring. Because that’s Shadowdark’s Whole Thing, nobody has darkvision. We have six options:
-Dwarfs, who are the same as all dwarves everywhere. +2 base HP, and roll HP with advantage each time. That’s pretty nice.
-Elfs, who are the same as all high elves everywhere. +1 bonus on ranged attacks and +1 bonus on spellcasting checks, very good.
-Goblins, who aren’t evil but they are green and fierce. They cannot be surprised, which feels…situational?
-Half-Orcs, who are the same as all half-orcs everywhere. +1 to melee attack and damage rolls, you know the deal.
-Halflings, who are all Bilbo Baggins. They can turn invisible for 3 rounds once per day.
-Humans, who are all diverse. They get an extra class talent roll at level 1, which is potentially huge.
Of course I’m going to be Normal Guy, so in this case I pick human. Welcome, Dave the human.
  Next up we have classes, our classic Big Four: Fighter, Priest, Thief, and Wizard. You instinctively know what they all do:
-Fighters fight, wear good armor, and kick heavy things. Archers and stab-men both find their expression here with Weapon Mastery, and a d8 hit die means that they have a chance to survive a few hits.
-Priests fight, wear good armor, and warp the nature of reality by magic spells. Yes, the fighter should feel a little sad but he can console himself that the priest is only rolling a d6 hit die.
-Thieves suck. They also backstab, so once per combat (at best), innumerate players can get excited by rolling a lot of dice. Advantage on sneaking, lockpicking, trapfinding, climbing…d4 hit die. Get wrecked.
-Wizards cast spells. I know that’s like what priests do, but they cast a lot of spells. Tons. Another d4 hit die class and no armor allowed so wizards are going to die in droves but keep chasing that dream baby.
Dave, being both strong and wise, will dedicate himself to the priesthood. Now’s the time for him to roll talents (twice, being human). Talents vary per class, priests get the following:

​I’ll roll twice, getting 8 and 10. So, “+1 on priest spellcasting checks” and “+2 to STR or WIS”. I’ll sink that into WIS, bringing Dave up to a 15. That’s solid, being able to add +3 out the gate helps. But now we’re on to the rest.
  I roll hit points. It’s a 3 on the d6. Add CON or +1 to the roll at level one, so Dave is up to an amazing 4 hit points now, with a 75% chance of surviving a single goblin hit. Incredible.
  The next steps are fluffy, picking background and alignment. Background has no strict mechanical benefits, but “work with the GM to determine if your background provides you situational advantages”, so special pleading time. I don’t care, so I roll a d20 and get 14. Soldier. Dave was in the army, that works. Alignment is next, one of Law/Neutrality/Chaos, and matters slightly more for priests. Dave is the lawful servant of Saint Terragnis, good enough. There’s a smart thing the book does where two of the nine gods of the baseline setting are “The Lost”, so That One Player can get excited about inventing his very own special deity. 
  Our final step before going to die in a hole to a dire rat in a single hit is outfitting Dave with his gear, his budget is 2d6 x 5gp…so 40gp. Leather armor, shield, mace compensates for Dave’s clumsy -2 DEX to grant an AC 11 and after that he loads himself to max with backpack, rope, rations, torches, flint and steel, crowbar, and a grappling hook. Gear isn’t weighted strictly, but ranked by slots, with each character carrying as many slots as strength stat or 10, whichever is higher. Simple, it works okay, but I’d love to see a poundage conversion somewhere in there.  Still, Dave just needs to pick his spells and we’re ready to go now. Which of course will be a whole other thing…

​Magic of Might and Heroes
  I’ve already spoken about the oddball roll-to-cast spellcasting system Shadowdark opted to go with, but what about the spells? There are five tiers of spells, unlocked at every odd level. The names won’t surprise anyone who’s played anything in the D&D family of games and are pretty self-explanatory. Priest spells are typically healing, divination, restoration, buffs, debuffs, and a few save-or-sucks. Wizards own nukes, AOEs, mobility, illusion, battlefield control, protection, and utility. All your favorites are here, just adapted to the system’s math.
  As expected in a relatively rules-light game, a fair few spells are a little ambiguous in their effects. Restoration, for example, is a touch to end a “curse, illness, or affliction of your choice” on the target. Does that include petrification? It’s not explicit one way or another, and there’s no definition of what an “affliction” is (at least I think, there’s no index, which is annoying)…so how is that resolved? There’s no Stone to Flesh, so otherwise all those monsters and traps are save-or-die. Fireball, a good midlevel baseline spell, explodes in a “near-sized cube” for 4d6 damage. That’s about a 5E level of ineffectiveness against anything big, but hey, there’s no save for half. Actually a lot of spells where I’d expect a save are instead just “persists as long as the caster makes the checks”. Stuff generally lasts for X rounds, where rounds appear to be variable based on combat vs. exploration taking place. It’s okay.
  Scrolls and wands are classic loot and they won’t surprise anyone with how they’re implemented here. Both require the caster to have the given spell on his list, although it doesn’t have to be in that individual’s spells known. Roll to cast as usual, scrolls are used up either way, wands return to use the next day after a spell failure, only breaking on a natural 1. You’ll be excited to know that critical wizard spell failures inflict a mishap table roll for scrolls and wands too, so give your wizard a Wand of Petard to hoist himself with.
  The most notable omission from the lists is any kind of Raise Dead option. If your PC dies then I hope you like being the lowbie because Dave’s new career is pining for the fjords and pushing up daisies.  

​Being Dave
  So by dint of luck or a concerned GM fudging die rolls, you’ve survived your first adventure and are on your way up the ten-rung ladder. How does this game actually play?
  Basic rules don’t represent any massive departures from D&D, particularly old-school D&D. Distances aren’t explicit, with “Close” being within 5ft, “Near” up to 30ft, and “Far” being within sight. I guess this is okay, but it does mean some awkward phrases like “moves double-near” crop up. Initiative is pre-rolled and rules-as-written seems to be strictly adhered to even during exploration, but once combat starts it’s a pretty standard sequence. TIME RECORDS are not STRICTLY KEPT because turns/rounds are a little fuzzy just like distances, and are used in variable ways depending on combat/dungeon/overland. The big selling point is the vaunted “real-time torches” rule…a torch lasts for one hour in real time, which is assumed to be an hour in crawling time, except when it isn’t. Feels gimmicky, but sure.
  The mechanical rules are relentlessly focused on delving in dungeons (ruins, tunnels, tombs, etc). Barely anything is given for overland journeys, no mules and carts here; towns are places of assumed safety and resting overnight restores full hit points and stat damage, which means not need for living expenses or training or property or anything else. Death is at 1d4+1 rounds after being brought down to zero. The only downtime rules given detail are carousing rules (spend gold for extra XP along with possible other boons/banes) and a detailed gambling game. I don’t see my players ever wanting a dice-based betting game but the carousing for XP is a fine fit.
  Characters advance fairly linearly, just needing 10XP per level to level up, with XP resetting to zero each time. So, to hit level 1 you need 10XP, level 3 needs 30XP, and level 6 needs 60XP. By default, XP is rewarded by the GM (it’s in the Game Mastery section) for “valuable treasures and boons they earn during an adventure”. Once more with the fuzzy avoidance of definite numbers, there’s a little table that gives examples for what treasures equal 1XP, or 3XP, or whatever, but that’s a gut feel thing. Wealth-by-level guidance is given at least a little bit, which is better than 5E ever gets, but the lack of definition hurts. Interestingly enough, getting XP for killing monsters is an optional rule. I’m not quite sure what the expected leveling speed is here, a 0th-level character is supposed to level up “after the first adventure”, but assuming 10XP per level you’re looking at a very long slog there at the end, whereas if the guidance in the little chart is given then you’re looking at incredibly quick level-ups even at the top. Vibes-based level-ups without the ugly word “milestone” getting thrown around.
  How will Dave’s adventuring career look, then? By Shadowdark core rules, Dave is spending his days in dank dark holes every day, resting comfortably in inns at night (occasionally spending excess gold not spent on regaining spells lost to natural 1s on carousing rolls). When he finds loot, there’s a mother-may-I moment with the suffering GM to see how many XP it is worth, but with the table rolls provided it seems like Dave will cap out at level 10 in about 30 sessions. The odd level-ups with new spell tiers and talents are way more exciting than the evens, but that’s how it goes and Dave’s player still wanders off without a dopamine level-up inducement going forward. Hearing how these actually go nobody in the last three years has actually played Shadowdark in a campaign this long, so Dave’s safe. Should be some fun one-shots over a three-month period.
  But how is this playing on the other side of the table? Next time, we’ll look at the Game Mastery section along with Monsters and Loot. After all, Dave is at the mercy of not one but two players here…

  Well, this is going to be something else. I’ve done a deep system review in the past, but the systems under examination couldn’t be more different in terms of TTRPG community impact. Heroes of Adventure ultimately charmed me with the one-man-show aspect and its DIY freebie heart despite the AI-sanding and somewhat generic building. This one…this one is tackling the biggest TTRPG system in terms of online hype in the world right now. I’m going to review Shadowdark.
  As of right now (March 2025), the Shadowdark official campaign setting/rules expansion/handy method of flipping off WotC/fan set Western Reaches is achieving staggering success on Kickstarter, breaking the original’s $1.3M in the first couple days. Those aren’t big numbers in some industries, but in the RPG space, where roughly infinity monkeys typing on nearly infinity typewriters release approximately infinity supplements for free daily, that’s a lot of dollars compared to the average ($n / ∞=$0).
  I have no play relationship with the Shadowdark system, but we have met many a time on the field of battle during Crapshoot Mondays…itch.io loves to write for that system more than any other. The sheer glut of content means there are quite a few stinkers out there, but there are some decent adventures made for the system too (and I was positive about the quickstart adventure). I certainly don’t recoil in horror when one floats up in my net. I’ve not heard anything about the rules that fill me with glee or excitement, but the devoted fanbase seems to find a lot of enjoyment from it and they’re out there actually playing games, so I’d call myself a friendly outsider. Let’s dive in and see how this rulebook works.

Book Basics 
  First of all…I’m a cheap Southern boy, this is the .PDF version. Charity makes me assume that the printed booklets are objects of staggering perfection, and I think the digest size means they’ll hold nicely. Information density is low, though, because of the massive amount of black-and-white art this puppy comes loaded with. Still, it looks clean and margins are generous. I’m not paying for print costs, so…sure thing.
  Art quality itself is…uneven. Some pieces are great and inspiring, some are a bit wonky and awkwardly placed. Your mileage may vary, however, and all of them are better sketch artists than I am. This is not an art review.
  Sprinkled throughout the book are cute little in-universe-relevant comments from a cast of iconics, like “Iraga, the half-orc priest, to Creeg, human wizard”. This is something that Dungeon did back in the day with their illustrations and it’s a cute enough idea. I’m not sure about the practical value but game writers need to have fun too. Also of dubious practical value, the book has random tables of fluff scattered throughout, like a d20 table for character names, or a d20 of dungeon adventure titles, or d100 tables loaded with extremely bespoke random encounters for different terrain types.
  As we’ve apparently all collectively decided is the correct order of operations, the core book goes in a sequence of Player info (Characters and Gameplay)-> GM info (Gameplay and Game Mastering)-> Monsters-> Loot (Treasure includes magic items here). Logical, because the players, being gremlins, will be diving in to rolling their PCs immediately anyway, and putting the loot in the back gives you half a hope that they’ll have wandered away before looking at the goodies. An SRD would help but that’s probably not going to maximize sales. Fine setup for a core book. 

​Green Visor Analysis
  I’ll start the next post by going into characters, but the first mechanical thing I look at with these system reviews is math. Everyone is interacting with the world with 1-to-4 through 1-to-20 random number generators, so it’s important to form a baseline here. The rulebook quite rightly tells you that absent pressure of either time or danger, trained individuals just automatically succeed at what they do, without the elegance of take 10/take 20. That’s a hugely important note, but given these games are largely focused on the moments of pressure, a lot of dice are getting thrown here. How likely are we going to be spending a lot of table time in failure? As a game system that claims ancestry from both D&D 5E and “OSR” (meaning Basic/Expert), there are definitely some cracks that show up.
SIDEBAR: The Genius of Take-20
  D&D 3E was oft-maligned for its enthusiastic “everything has a DC” approach to skill checks, ability checks, and darn near everything else-checks, but it was unfair when critics noted something like “crafting a horseshoe is DC 12, so a blacksmith with a +4 fails at that basic task 40% of the time???” The clever rule that the game used to overcome this was “take 10” or “take 20”. Without pressure or danger, any character was assumed to be able to avoid rolling, instead acting like he’d gotten a 10 on a d20 roll. So that smith is taking 10 in his day-to-day life, crafting anything DC 14 or under without a risk of failure. If a character was otherwise unconstrained and could take twenty times the normal amount of time on a task, he could instead “take 20”, meaning with careful and meticulous work the character would instead act like he’d received a 20 on his d20 roll for a given check. It was elegant and it all fit within the 3E “everything is math” rubric very well. Unfortunately, most players and game masters never used it, so it was largely neglected and forgotten.
  The first thing to note is that Shadowdark is mostly an ability-check system, not a skill-based system. Much like with any other D&DDNA-system created after D&D 3E, tasks are performed by rolling a d20, adding in bonuses, and seeing if a difficulty class (DC) is met. Easy tasks are DC9, Moderate DC12, Hard DC15, and Legendary DC18…and mostly, the bonuses are just whatever the appropriate stat gives. The 5E DNA means that every 2 stat points are a bonus breakpoint (so 16 is +3, 11 is +0, 7 is -2, etc), which combines pretty brutally with the B/X DNA’s “3d6 down the line” ability score generation method. The method means that average scores are 10.5, although there is an optional rule that allows rerolling if there are no stats above 13. Moderate tasks are thus being failed over half the time for over half the “heroes”. In addition to having standardized stat arrays, 5E at least has a moderately scaling proficiency bonus for skills. Shadowdark characters are Assumed Goobers when under pressure.
  Then I went looking for the THAC0 tables and I didn’t see anything. Then I looked for Base Attack Bonus progression and I didn’t see anything. Then I looked for at least weapon proficiency scaling and…
  Nope. Outside of the randomly-rolled “talents” that happen every odd level, the only to-hit improvement a level 10 character sees over a level 1 character is given by magical gear. That’s tight. Tighter than even B/X. Let’s look at how a 13-strength fighter with weapon mastery (+1/+1 attack/damage with a select weapon) hits, say, a goblin (AC 11). Nice, that requires a 9 on the die, so 60% to hit the very weakest enemy. Now let’s assume he’s managed a +3 weapon and to hit a +4 talent every time he can (+strength, or +1 to hit). If he’s swinging at the weakest dragon (black or green, AC16), he’s now up to hitting on a mere 7. Great, he’s 10% more likely to hit. Only swinging once per round still, by the way. Now Mr. Priest rolls up with a 18 strength. Level 1 priest is hitting the goblin on a 7. If Priesty McPriestpants doesn’t hit a single +1 hit talent as he levels (which he probably hopes, because BOY HOWDY does he want the spellcasting boosts), just the weapon, he’s swinging away at level 10 hitting the dragon on a 9. Only a 10% success swing, and he’s also only swinging once. I’ve seen more failure-biased systems out there, but it’s a very constrained curve.
  Damage scaling is likewise underwhelming. By my reading, strength isn’t boosting damage, only accuracy, so the best scaling we get is conveyed by the fighter’s weapon mastery (adds an addition half of level to damage). So Fighter the Exemplar hits with his trusty longsword at level 1 for 1d8+1, which means he’s killing a goblin (5hp) in 1-2 hits. At level 10 with a +3 weapon he’s at 1d8+9 (assuming magic weapon + adds to damage too, we need Tribal Knowledge for this). The Weak Dragon (58hp) survives 4-5 hits from the fighter. On the other hand, the fighter with d8+CON hit points gets gacked in a couple goblin hits (d4), while the dragon (2d8) needs about five hits to kill him…which is about the same number of rounds since claw/claw/bite is retained in a three-attack-per-round routine. We’ll dive deeper into this when we hit the monsters but basically, we seem to be following the “puffy hit points” power curve of 5E pretty decently. Spell damage is low too and keeps on this curve.
  I’ll get more into magic next time along with characters, but the math of magic casting is…whew. Both caster classes (priest and wizard) can cast infinite spells per day…if they succeed at making a casting roll. The DC for a spell is 10+spell level, with only the WIS or INT bonus helping normally. Thus, your level 1 priest with a 14 WIS is succeeding at casting his DC 11 cure spell only 60% of the time, and that success rate increases even more parsimoniously than to-hit. Whiffing on a spell is annoying, you lose access to it for the rest of the day, but what’s really punishing is that on a natural 1 casting roll the caster critically fails. For a priest the spell access is lost until “penance is performed” which sounds very wishy-washy but it boils down to a direct gold donation to your deity, scaled by spell level. That’s fine. The poor wizard, though, has to roll on a mishap table, which has results from “blow up slightly” (probably kills you at level 1), to “open up a black hole” at the max tier with…undescribed results. Have fun figuring out that one, game master. Please note again that critical failures aren’t rare, they happen exactly 5% of the time you cast. This is a shockingly gonzo/DCC/WFRP addition to an otherwise very cautious game.
  Mitigating all of this math is the nebulous luck token, and the occasional 5E-ism of advantage/disadvantage. Advantage isn’t quite as easily achieved as it is in 5E, but where it is gained (by the 5E method of special pleading, typically) it’s the usual nice benefit. Luck tokens are gifted for about the same set of arbitrary reasons as 5E’s Inspiration but rather than granting a roll-twice-take-best they’re instead a free reroll. Which is helpful sometimes, but ironically increases the odds that Mr. Mage blows himself up (because you know he’s going to reroll every failure he can).
  With that overview complete, next post we’ll cover the player-facing side. Until then, don’t roll any 1s…

Introductory dungeon by Kelsey Dione(?), levels 1-3.
Written for the Shadowdark Quickstart Guide.
  Okay, I need to see what the deal is here. The glut of Shadowdark adventures from “game jams” are generally somewhat bland, generally decently built, and clearly being formatted following a very strict template: Meaningless factions outlined, tiny random encounter table, semi-helpful rumor table, well-illustrated single-level map following the Cult of Loops, and descriptions followed by bullets in a single-column that really encourages A6/’zine printout format. It’s not an awful template, but what’s remarkable is how slavish these writers are in following this mysterious template. It’s also notable how I’ve seen ZERO “out of the box” adventures…nobody’s looking outdoors, wilderness, city…all of it is down in the dungeon and you’re going to LIKE IT, scrub. So, let’s look at the Shadowdark Quickstart Guide’s sample adventure, I think the credit/blame is usually laid on the introduction for systems like these.
  In the Lost Citadel of the Scarlet Minotaur, I first took a look at the map…AND I’VE BEEN CHEATED:
 
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  This isn’t a nine-room hole in the ground, this is, barely, a proper dungeon, with twenty-seven keyed areas, enough for some real exploratory gameplay. It’s more linear than it looks at first glance, with most of the looping accomplished by those secret passages, but there’s still some reasonable interest with both the layouts of individual rooms and with how the branches work. The traditional “designed to take up a single sheet of graph paper” shape of the entire complex makes sense, most of us do that, but the lack of verticality is a bummer. Labyrinths of minotaurs are traditionally equipped with mazes, but the one in the lower left is rather perfunctory. I didn’t detect a mapper role in my skim of the rules, but mazes are mostly for groups that use player mappers. It’s a functional map for scale I think…BUT IT HAS NO SCALE GIVEN. I’m assuming 1 square=5ft, but that’s not sure. Not highly naturalistic.
  My annoyance with the formatting in Shadowdark is mostly for its lack of efficiency. There’s definitely something to be said about overly fetishizing terseness, but this is something that feels…off. Some tables (like the NPC names/appearances/behaviors tables) look clearly padded to fill out a whole page, while some other descriptions feel slightly truncated do to the 40-point font in a single column. It’s not terrible, but a flagship adventure written for a seven-figure RPG system is held to high standards.
   I suppose I should talk flavor. The titular citadel is a lonely sandstone edifice in the distant scrubland, open to the sky in the center, with three entrances besides the roof-to-courtyard middle climb. It was once used by a Mad Max cult that worshipped a bull god, until the last king turned himself into a minotaur and killed most of his followers, with the rest of his men turned into beastmen who now hide in increasingly paranoid isolation. Minimalistic descriptions try and keep this flavor, at times successfully, the Scarlet Minotaur himself is nice and terrifying. There is a completely out of left field “faction” of ettercaps also present trying to loot the place, with no connection to the rest of the flavor and no presence on the map outside of random encounter tables after the first four rooms. A lot of the “completely disconnected from the rest of the world” thing I’ve been seeing in third-party Shadowdark modules is seen here, as the thing is almost completely devoid of greater context. Gogogo, we’re here to dungeon crawl, set us at the site and let’s get into the content.
  All that said, let’s look at the content itself. It’s fine. Not a ton of static monsters, which is a good thing with the monster-heavy random encounter table and the decently frequent rate. There aren’t a lot of traditional traps but there are fun and flavorful dynamic things like pillars that inflict nasty status effects and scattered magical motion-detecting bull statues that just charge in a straight line down a hallway, smashing luckless explorers. There’s decent telegraphing of the worst things, like the aforementioned pillars having a dead ettercap in the middle with wounds caused by their effects and one room with a smashed bull statue with its emerald-power-gem shattered, indicating how to deactivate them while also showing the danger. There’s a hidden checklist being ticked with “interactive room, monster room, portent room, treasure” repeated almost by rote nine times. The secret door areas being detectable by good mapping is nice, that’s the real exploration/discovery content available. Looks good on stream, I’m sure.
  Treasure feels weird, like anything with the semi-arbitrary “XP for finding significant treasure” handwave system. There are enough magic items to make for spice, while the cash bits lack the wow factor of a true gold=XP system. Most of the treasure is lackadaisically semi-hidden, although the “main hoard” is in a fantastically nasty rotting blood-choked pool of water hidden amidst countless bones, which is good placement, very tricky to extract…this also includes the only really flavorful bit of acquired loot, a bottle that holds a sorcerer’s soul. There’s potential in THAT, at least.
  As any decent system contains a reaction table, there is lip service given to talking/negotiation with the sentient monsters encountered within the dungeon, although both ettercaps and beastmen are also written to be slimy complete scumbags, craven and fairly useless/unreliable. There’s the faintest nod to ecology given in the beastmen eating rats and centipedes but we’re in the Common Dungeon Problem zone with a couple dozen human-sized beings living out eons within a few hundred square feet of territory, that’s certainly not a unique conceit but it starts breaking believability a bit if you examine their slightly thin motivations. The Scarlet Minotaur’s original identity being discoverable but not usable is a little bit of a missed opportunity.
  I’m not reviewing the whole Shadowdark system here, but I think I can generalize some lessons from the Citadel of the Scarlet Minotaur. There is some solid workmanship here in the room-by-room construction of the dungeon, a pleasing blend of combats, traps, and “stuff to mess with”, all in a space that rewards exploration somewhat. It’s only when I look at the (regularly spaced, good) treasure that I start to have pause…there’s an almost rote placement here, and there’s no “wow” factor to anything…which, coupled with the lack of explicit 1gp=1XP (or 1sp, or 5, or whatever) rules, means the entire exercise lacks goals. A 5th Edition adventure here would make it explicit, “kill the Scarlet Minotaur”, maybe with side-quests. A B/X adventure here would have it implicit, “this dangerous place has wealth to plunder, let’s sneak around to steal it”, maybe with side-quests (bounties). This middle-ground Shadowdark doesn’t have either, handing over a very intrinsically enjoyable little dungeon crawl utterly bereft of larger context, meaning, or long-form campaign hooks. There’s nothing mechanically wrong with this example adventure, but there’s also nothing here that makes me want to play a continuing campaign.
  All that said, is there value here? Sure. Playing it directly you’ll probably have a fun time. There all lots of little bits and pieces that I’m happy swiping too, from the slightly videogamey bull statues, to the magic curse/blessing sacrificing locations, to a few of the set-piece trap rooms. It is well made, and the mechanical solidity of this template dungeon is reflected in the imitators’ slightly above-par cobbling. I suspect a genuinely good campaign could be played using this, you’ll just have to add a lot of context and meaning.
  *** on this one, what should be average quality for a dungeon adventure. I just wish its imitators took away twenty-seven rooms as a minimum, not the high bar.  This might be literally the best it can be for the target market, though.
  The adventure, as part of the free quick start ruleset, can be found here.

  This is part 5 of my review of Heroes of Adventure, a work of biography as much as a review of the system. I’ve chronicled one nameless man’s polished heartbreaker product, going through his style, his mathematics, his hero design, and finally his passion for procedural generation. Now to cap it off, I’m going to look through his Monsters Compendium, the requisite bestiary for this thing, before finishing with my conclusions. I’m certainly not going to trawl through every single monster, if you enjoy that content that’s a different podcast.
  First, I’ll make a note again about AI art. I’m sympathetic to the view of “death to all AI art products”, both in terms of paying artists, and in terms of having coherent illustrations with soul. What AI does excel at, though, is making horrible-looking nasty monsters. Zero artist budget that this book has, still every single monster has art, weird-handed and spiky. It adds definite color to what would otherwise be a rather dry monster manual.
  Since I know the author loves his modularity I was interested in seeing how he builds his monsters, and needless to say there are tables available. Monster subtypes (roll), descriptors (roll), five sizes (roll), threat levels (roll), and abilities (roll our first d100, neat), all good. The ability tags are detailed in a huge table and all make sense (poison, web, slow, lucky, regenerate, etc), the old d20 monster feats basically. Which is interesting, because what is completely ditched from the process is the highly regimented hit dice building for monsters…we have a little table that gives a default set of size/hp/AC/skill die (to-hit bonus)/damage for monsters level 1-7, but there’s no formula for how these are derived. Which makes me worry that it’s gut-based at a point, that’s tough for the home hacker. It’s a wonderful set of specialized tools you have here but you left out the general ones, like a screwdriver. An organizational note; humanoid NPCs creation was actually handled back in the Referee’s Guide including stats for leveled-up NPCs.
  Then we’re off to the monster listings. Format is tight, packing 164 monsters in this relatively slim 64-page booklet; most pages have four monsters per page, with each entry having its compact statblock, a short flavor blurb describing it, an AI-generated little illustration, and a 1d6 “Hooks” table that basically describes how a party is likely to come upon the critter(s). This format is good, the content is…a little uneven. Sometimes the hooks look useful, but at other times it is six different variations of “you bumble into this monster”. I do like that the statblocks include “HARVEST”, which are the monster bits that can be harvested for potions and spells, that’s grisly but cool.
  As usual, I first flip to the humble ogre (actually, I click the link…the PDFs all have linked tables of content, good show). It’s…a lot tougher than I’m used to, but still gives us a look at a bruiser-type enemy. Level six, with a towering damage resistance 3 (that’s going to more than double its HP), a nasty d12 attack bonus, and power attack, which gives it advantage on its damage rolls. The only thing it has got going against it is the “Slow” trait, which gives it disadvantage on initiative checks. Big tough fighter, that’ll be a hard fight until your heroes are near its level, but as ever it is charmable or able to be ensorcelled, just hope your first level mage’s d20+d4 beats the defensive d20+d12.
  Going through the lists, you have all the usuals…elementals, giants, dragons, ogres, goblins, gnomes, hags, kobolds, harpies, ghosts, ghouls, lizardmen, golems, animals, dire critters (giant animals), demon types, manticores, zombies, etc. Biggest notable omission is orc but beastmen are present and can fill the niche (art is basically Warcraft Orc). I am disappointed by only three dinosaurs available. There are a few cryptids in the mix too, no big surprise. There is an entry for bear and an entry for “mutant bear”, which is…weird. There are eight human types (Adventurer, Bandit, Commoner, etc) but given they’re just differentiated by the worn gear I’m not sure if the value there. Final note, there are some entries for structures, which is interesting.
  There aren’t a large number of “new” or nonstandard monsters, but looking at what is different:

• The Ascendant, a magic immortal hero that demands adoration and ancient artifacts. Level 6, lot of homework because it’s a spellcaster, extremely dangerous to my mental model of level 6 HoA PCs.
• Ashen, shadowy teleporting chaos assassins with obsidian swords. Level…1, ouch.
• Behemoth, a colossal infernal Cthulhu expy with a cute chibi face. Level 10, good final boss.
• Fir Needler, just a fir tree that shoots needles. Level 3.
• Forest Maw, a big plant thing that just eats. Level 8.
• Sea Revenant, large shark/human swimmer. Level 4, kind of a bestial Sahagun.
• Shrill, small darkness-loving stab-beak bird creature. Level 1.

  I’m not going to call myself impressed with the content of the Monsters Compendium here, but I am impressed with the formatting, organization, and tech writing layout that was done. Fundamentally, a monster manual needs to have enough monsters (with art) to be useful in stocking adventures and random encounters that come up in planning and in play, and this book hits that use case very well. A good system should also either in the monster manual or in the DMG have robust rules for creating new monsters, and this book tries, but ultimately lacks the key tables or rules to make new monsters, with no hit die advancement (or devolution) rules. It’s a pity, because there is some underlying logic here, it’s just not explicated.
 
Conclusion
  So with all these books wrapped up, what do I think about Heroes of Adventure?
  Well, first of all, I’m impressed with the thing as an individual accomplishment. The Nameless Designer put in a vast amount of effort in making some extremely professional-looking books for a notably complete TTRPG game system, all with full-color art, good layout, and a good grasp of the fundamentals of what is needed to use these 192 pages to run years-long campaigns. All of this is done using his own computer and some Midjourney cycles, which is darned impressive. Moreover, he’s not trying to grab a cash from all this, given this system and all the adventures he wrote for it too are completely free on itch.io, with Creative Commons licenses. It’s a singular creator’s gift to the world, offered just in the hope that it’ll be appreciated and shared, and I think that is extremely laudable.
  But besides all that Mrs. Lincoln, how about the play? I think, ultimately, the Heroes of Adventure Fantasy Adventure Game is…fine. Can I imagine playing it and having fun? Of course. Could I imagine running it for a year of progress over a 1-10 campaign, discovering a compelling emergent story with my friends? Yes, if I could find four others interested in the indie system. But unfortunately, a dark secret that all reviewers of TTRPG products must admit is that these games are one of the most inherently fun and enjoyable activities known to mankind. It's actually quite difficult to not have fun with a good group of friends, eating pretzels, drinking beer, and throwing dice. Heroes of Adventure is a perfectly cromulent game engine to use for this.
  Unfortunately, the question any new TTRPG system released in the year 2023 must answer is “why?” There are approximately infinity game systems available now, for every conceivable level of complexity, difficulty, or depth. There are all manner of action resolution systems, dice schemes, and running procedures. Every conceivable subsystem, hack, and minigame has been released, with prices varying from “here’s my Google drive link” to “Kickstarted for $2,000,000”. It’s a glutted market, even on the relatively small platforms like itch. Even the free aspect isn’t something to really tout anymore, in this day and age paying money for a TTRPG product means that the consumer either wants a physical product, or else is making the conscious choice to donate money to creators in the hobby. For goodness’ sake the internet bullied Hasbro Inc. into releasing D&D Creative Commons. There are a few innovations here, but I’m not fundamentally seeing any game experiences that can take place in Heroes of Adventure uniquely. I think anyone wanting to pick this up a run it will have a good time, but I wouldn’t say that it’s worth the effort of a 192-page dive, plus the immense inertial resistance that is overcoming “but why not 5E?”
  As an aside, the funny little term “semi-compatible with OSR” needs a moment of thought. Heroes of Adventure seems to tip more to “tradgames” (think D&D 3, Pathfinder, and other d20 derivatives) to me. Characters, while admirably fragile and not the optimization-pits that 3.P can be, are generally more mechanically distinctive than those in your favorite B/X clone. Even more than that, XP being designed to reward completing quests and adventures first of all is very different than “gold=XP” as the primary leveling and advancement mechanism. The focus on hexcrawling is great, but to be honest that’s more “imagining things while looking at Outdoor Survival” than actual old school play focus. Could you play Keep on the Borderland with this system pretty easily? Probably. But it’s not really what I’d call OSR.
  All that being said, maybe it is worth checking this out. I’d say it’s to support independent creators, but this guy doesn’t even allow donations, it’s not pay what you want. There are a couple subsystems that I really enjoyed here, most notably alchemy and religion ones…so there are some bits of value. Worth paying $49.99? No. But it’s free, and I admire the gumption here. Certainly, Heroes of Adventure should be held up to shame cash grabs like Shadowdark or glory hounds like Cairn where someone takes their rules hack and markets it to the high heavens, the professionalism and love that went into this is just embarrassing for those products. I do hope some groups out there are enjoying this well-crafted heartbreaker…I just hope for their sakes they won’t run into an ogre early on.