Well look what just arrived!

Well I’ve been meaning to write this for a long time, and I’ve been talking about it for the last few entries, but here it is finally, a post about the Star Wars game we’ve been playing for the past few months.

I’m several days late on this but birthday celebrations and being on vacation have taken up the time I’d have normally put into this sort of thing. But it’s a rainy day here at the lake so I’ve got some blogging time.

The last time I talked about Dwimmermount I was hopeful it’d still get done, but things were still pretty grim.


Although it took over a year from that point (and around 2 and a half from when it was originally scheduled to come out) it looks like my optimism wasn’t in vain! Dwimmermount is finally here! The version for the Labyrinth Lord system is done and available for purchase. You can get the PDF at the link above, and the print copies should be in stores soon. The PDF’s of the Map booklet, and the Illustration book are also available. 

The version tuned for the Adventurer Conqueror King System (the one I’m getting in print as a Kickstarter backer) should be coming out next month, as should the mega-dungeon tracker, which looks like it’ll be a great way for a GM to keep track of the party’s progress through the dungeon and what all the various factions are up to. The mega-dungeon tracker also includes maps of each level, so it’s possible, if you’re only planning to use the maps for your own purposes as a GM you might want to wait and get that rather than the map booklet. Once I have them both I’ll be able to say a bit better on that though. The mega-dungeon tracker may also be most useful as a print product. I’ll write more about it once I have everything in hand.

Until several months ago even I had begun to lose hope for this project, as the slow but steady progress on it seemed to come to a halt several months back. There had been somewhat frequent updates and videos of production meetings between +Tavis Allison  and the others working on the book, but at some point those seemed to come to a halt. We didn’t hear anything about the project for several months.

Then, several months ago we got lucky and +Alexander Macris got some time to work on the project after working on Domains At War. Suddenly we weren’t just seeing meetings about how to proceed, we started seeing completed drafts of chapters, and lots of them. In a few short months the project was more or less done!

The Labyrinth Lord version above is probably closer to +James Maliszewski‘s original vision (though not exactly, a lot of work went into completing it after he left the project, though I hold out hope that he may some day return to the project and give us his “auteur” version), but I’m personally most excited about the ACKS version. The ACKS version is in layout now and if things go according to schedule, I expect it’ll be out around the middle of September. This is the version I’m most excited about. I think having an example mega-dungeon, and surrounding area with towns and domains all charted out will be very valuable and useful for people trying to get a handle on how ACKS really works. And even better since we’ll have both that and the LL version to compare we also get an example of how to convert something from one system into ACKS. Finally, I think the new monsters, spells, and other such things that this project will be adding to the ACKS repertoire will be really useful.

I’ve read the LL version of the dungeon in bits and pieces as the drafts were completed but I haven’t ready the whole thing together as a completed project yet. I’ll be doing that soon (though I may wait for my print copy of the ACKS version to do a real review). But from what I’ve seen, even though the dungeon is fairly vanilla, especially at the beginning (it get’s weirder and more interesting as you go deeper), it looks like a lot of fun. There are definitely some interesting mysteries to be solved and some fun looking encounters in there. I’m a player who really enjoys exploration and I think this dungeon would be something I would be really excited to explore as a player.

Anyway, if you’re interested in a huge, interesting, somewhat traditional, dungeon to use in your campaign or even just to read and pull ideas from I think you’ll find Dwimmermount worth picking up. More to come as I delve further into it.

Good gaming!
-The Duke of Brandonshire 🎲

Wow, it’s been a while since I’ve posted. Gotta get back on doing that.

So last time I wrote I think we had just started, or were about to start our Adventurer Conqueror King campaign. Well now after several months of play we’re moving on to a Star Wars game (using the current Fantasy Flight system), and after that we’ll likely give King Arthur Pendragon another try. I’m pretty excited about the Star Wars game which should start next week. But first I want to do a bit of a shore retrospective on ACKS and what I liked and didn’t like about it.

Let me start by saying I’m still a pretty big fan of ACKS. I think it’s a good system with a lot of fun tools in it, many of which can easily be ported into other game systems. I like the balance of simplicity and complexity in the character classes and I LOVE the system for making your own character classes. I think the system worked pretty well, though maybe not GREAT for our group and for the campaign we were running.

The biggest problem with the system isn’t a problem with the system per se but with it’s presentation. The main book is somewhat confusingly organized, and many passages are fairly ambiguously written. You have rules that are spread out all across the book. A few examples: if you want to figure out your movement rates in different situations you’ll have to look in several different parts of the book to get each kind of movement, and it’s not always clear where those bits of information will pop up. If you want to figure out when your character will get proficiencies, you won’t look at the level progression charts. Instead, you’ll have to read a very confusing passage about when different classes get them, and then ignore what it said, and look at a chart which lists the classes and when they get different types of proficiencies.

Now I’m sympathetic to how this happened. This is a system made by a group of semi-pro’s with day jobs. The main book was, from my understanding their first project. I doubt I could have done nearly as good a job as they did if I were asked to make a game system book. And they are improving. The Players Companion isn’t perfect, but it’s much better organized and information is better consolidated in it. A lot of the info for classes is better consolidated in this book (though still strangely not the proficiencies). Then there’s the fact that surprisingly often the answer to questions about the system (like information on encumbrance for some non-humans) is found in another book entirely, (Domains at War, the wargame supplement, in the case of the encumbrance question). Some day I hope they put out a revised edition which consolidates and reorganizes the books, and clears up some of the ambiguous writing of some of the rules. I’d buy it in a heartbeat.

The other issue I think we had was that our campaign was sort of built on a few premises that partially conflict with some of ACKS’s assumptions. We had a stable of characters and occasionally switched them out depending on the adventure which meant our XP and treasure was spread out a bit more than I think the game assumed. This wasn’t fatal at all, just caused a bit of weirdness here and there. We also started out almost immediately going to a big city, rather than starting out on the hinterlands and working our way up to bigger cities. This mean that even as 1st and 2nd level characters we didn’t have much trouble hiring fairly large groups of hirelings. Again, this wasn’t fatal to the game at all, and we had a good time, but it became pretty clear pretty quick that this wasn’t really the assumption the game was based on.

One thing that did work reasonably well was trading off GMing duty. That was a lot of fun and mostly worked pretty darn well once we worked out our own houserule for how much XP the GM of a given adventure would get to give to one of their characters.

Again, I’m still very impressed with and a big fan of ACKS. I hope some day to run another ACKS campaign, using the lessons learned from this campaign and trying to run things a bit more “by the book.” I might use the ACKS version of +James Maliszewski’s Dwimmermount, (which looks like it will finally come out in the very near future!). It’ll be great to see an example of an ACKS megadungeon put together by those who know the most about the system.

Heck, I think people were happy enough with the game that we might some day come back to the campaign we just ended. We did end on a cliffhanger!

Anyway, it’s been fun playing ACKS. I think I learned a lot about the system, and could do an even better job with the system next time. I’ll be back to it some day!

Now on to a galaxy far far away… 🎲

It’s been a while hasn’t it? Oh well.

So since I last posted quite a bit has changed in my gaming life! Our space game wound down thanks to summer vacations, baby’s and lots of other life happening. We started playing Dungeon World for a while in a viking heavy setting, and have now moved on to playing Adventurer Conqueror King System (ACKS) in another part of the same world where our Dungeon World campaign took place. We’ve only had a couple of sessions of actual play of ACKS but I’m enjoying it quite a bit so far.

We’re playing the game in an Arabian Nights inspired setting, using the map, though not the actual setting, from Al Qadim (we’re taking a number of elements from it but not everything). One of the things I really enjoyed that we did for this setting was to play a modified game of Microscope to come up with the background and history for the setting. We’ve got a pretty interesting history set out for this corner of the world, and a lot of interesting cultures as a result. I highly recommend taking a look at Microscope if you’re interested in collaborating as a group to make a game world.

It’s also quite refreshing to play a game with rules and character generation this quick. The books aren’t as well organized as I’d like, but now that I’ve learned where to find all the bits of info I need to make characters it’s pretty fast, especially if you use the templates in the book.

I’m also enjoying the rules from the ACKS Players Companion for making custom classes and races. We’ve already decided that there aren’t really any dwarves in this setting (well there might be, but they’re uncommon and they’ll have come from the south, the same viking inspired area we played in for our DW mini-campaign), and we’ve simply modified the dwarf template a little to replace them with Gnolls. We’re also working on creating our own version of the Sha’ir class from Al-Qadim for ACKS. It’s a neat system.


We’re really just getting started on this campaign but its been fun so far. I’m hoping we’ll actually make good on our plan to rotate GMing duties. I’ve already downloaded the Dessert of Desolation series from dndclassics.com to peruse and I’m thinking about other possible adventures for the stable of characters to tackle. Should be fun!

What are you playing?

Good gaming!

-The Duke of Brandonshire 🎲