# The Adventurer Conqueror King System tags: #game/rpg/acks ![[Adventurer Conqueror King System (cover).jpg]] ![[Adventurer Conqueror King System - Imperial Imprint Revised Rulebook (cover).jpg]] **The Adventurer Conqueror King System** — **ACKS** for short, pronounced "axe" — is Alexander Macris and Autarch's answer to the old-school question "what's the point of all this gold?" and it may be the most elaborate answer the hobby has produced. Built on the bones of the older Basic/Expert **[[Dungeons and Dragons|Dungeons & Dragons]]**, it takes the B/X chassis and grafts on a full economic simulation: internally consistent price lists, cost-of-living tables, markets, mercantile ventures, and domain management that makes "counting your money" the actual endgame. It's the game that made the spreadsheet a selling point and, to its continuing credit, largely earns the pitch — it's one of the rare systems where the numbers genuinely *work* together. The default world is the **Auran Empire**, a setting of fantasy late antiquity that one reviewer handily boiled down to "what if Septimius Severus heard about the Mongols and left along with the Persians to go fight them in the Steppe." It's a tottering, decadent empire whose borderlands are being gnawed at by Chaos — chthonic cults, monsters, and barbarian kingdoms — and the player characters are handed property and domains precisely so they have a literal stake in keeping civilization alive. Where most of the Dungeons & Dragons lineage runs on a Good-versus-Evil axis, ACKS runs on a single **Law-versus-Chaos** axis, written into a polytheistic pantheon of Empyrean (lawful) gods opposed by more primordial Chthonic (chaotic) ones. Don't assume anyone who says "I play ACKS" is actually playing in the Auran Empire, though — it's the *default* setting, not the only one, and demihumans make only a brief stop in the core books despite getting their own racial classes. ## Mechanics The engine's ambition is stated right there in the title: you start as an **adventurer**, become a **conqueror**, and end a **king**. Mechanically it hangs on two bundles of resolution. The **Throw** is a d20 + modifiers rolled against a target number baked into your class and level — expressed not as a difficulty class but as "you need a 9+": attack throws, saving throws, proficiency throws. The **Roll** covers genuinely open-ended outcomes: 2d6 reaction and morale rolls, 1d6 surprise, initiative, and damage. That's most of the action, one mechanic aimed at "did you succeed" and the other at "how did it go." The real signature is the **economy as progression**. Gold is experience: you level up off treasure recovered, and later off domain and mercantile income, hijinks, and magical research. The gear and price lists are built to be internally consistent — the same economic model runs the equipment you buy, the hirelings you pay, the fortress you build, and the kingdom you tax. A character who stops delving and starts ruling is still earning XP, just from a different column of the ledger. That's the ACKS promise: the dungeon-crawling and the bookkeeping are the same game, and money is both the fuel and the score. ### Character Creation Roll your abilities, then pick a class. The 1st-edition core offers the familiar Fighter, Mage, Cleric, and Thief, plus the "campaign classes" — Assassin, Bard, Bladedancer, Explorer — the mercantile **Venturer**, and a set of demi-human racial classes (Dwarven Vaultguard, Elven Spellsword, Elven Nightblade, and so on) so dwarves and elves aren't just humans with pointy ears. Characters cap out around level 14. Everyone also takes **Proficiencies** — something between 2e proficiencies and modern feats/skills — drawn from class and general lists. The 2nd edition nudges stat generation toward 5d6-keep-3 for a primary score, renames the Cleric the **Crusader**, and promotes Explorer and Venturer into the core class list. ### Campaigns, Domains, and Money The Campaign chapter is where ACKS shows off, unashamedly. **Domain management** lets your adventurers become lords: strongholds, garrisons, agriculture, vassals, taxes, and the looming threat that the empire is collapsing around the holdings you were just handed. Mages get **sanctums** instead of strongholds — places to research magic, train apprentices, and run experiments — and there are mercantile ventures, senatorial politics, and mass combat via the _Domains at War_ rules. This is the adventurer → conqueror → king ladder, and it feeds straight off the integrated economy: here wealth isn't a reward for adventuring, it's the currency of the whole campaign. ## Editions - **_Adventurer Conqueror King System_ (1st edition, 2012)** — the original B/X-derived core, an OSR release originally built on the OGL. Fighter/Mage/Cleric/Thief core plus campaign and racial classes, capped around level 14. - **_Player's Companion_ (2013)** — not an edition but the first expansion and arguably the most influential ACKS book: point-buy class construction, spell design, 19 new classes, and monster-building, the toolkit that let every Judge spin up their own setting. - **_Domains at War_ (2014)** — mass-combat and army rules (_Battles_ and _Campaigns_), making the "king" tier playable in earnest. - **_Lairs & Encounters_ (2016)** and the **_Heroic Fantasy Handbook_ (2018)** — encounter and monster tables plus a Conan/Lord-of-the-Rings-flavored heroic variant ruleset, alongside the recurring _Axioms_ magazine. - **_Adventurer Conqueror King System II: Imperial Imprint_ (funded Oct 2023; released 2024–2025)** — the 2nd edition, funded at $333k on Kickstarter. Dropped the OGL entirely and split into three hardcover tomes: the **Revised Rulebook** (the Player's Handbook equivalent, ~550pp), the **Judges Journal** (treasure, economics, NPC demographics, and class/race/spell-building for the Judge), and the **Monstrous Manual** (~430pp of rebuilt bestiary, including rules for taming monsters and forging magic items from their parts). A companion **Treasure Tome** and the _By This Axe_ dwarven compendium round out the line. ## References - [Official site and product line — Autarch](https://autarch.co/adventurer-conqueror-king) - [Buy ACKS II core books — DriveThruRPG (Autarch / ACKS II)](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/publisher/4277/autarch/category/51457/acks-ii) - [Buy the 1st-edition core rulebook — DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/99123/adventurer-conqueror-king-system) - [ACKS II Imperial Imprint Kickstarter](https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/autarch/adventurer-conqueror-king-system-imperial-imprint-acks-ii) - [Review: ACKS Imperial Imprint — Enraged Eggplant](https://enragedeggplant.blogspot.com/2025/01/review-acks-imperial-imprint.html) - [Tabletop Preview: ACKS II — The Scholomance](https://scholomance.substack.com/p/tabletop-preview-adventurer-conqueror) - [Review: Welcome to the Auran Empire — B.K. Gibson](https://www.bkgibson.com/blog/adventurer-conqueror-king-system-imperial-imprint-review-welcome-to-the-auran-empire)