Adventurer Conqueror King

Anyone here tried Adventurer, Conqueror, King? I'm giving it a shot with some friends here, but never done it before. Wondering if anyone has any suggestions for managing the game as a GM/Judge. It seems like a lot more moving parts than other systems.

Or if anyone would be interested in GMing one.

Not here. Have always meant to look into it, but you know -- death by 1000 systems!

Well, after many hours working with it, I've discovered a few things about it:

1) it's incredibly detailed where detail is needed, but it's not the 3.5/PF kind of detail where everything has a stat block. It's more, everything has a price tag. The game was clearly made by an economist, as PCs could spend their entire career arbitrage trading between cities.

2) its not very well-written, and the creator knows it. He's great with numbers but not with writing. Lots of typos, ambiguous paragraphs, and rules where you wouldn't think to look for them. Theres a multi page errata document, which is nice, but it doesn't resove everything. I've spent a lot of time on the Autarch.co forums trying to find answers to things, and usually do, but not always.

3) Overall though, great system. Once you grasp the rules they are quite cohesive and seem to scale well. Played as intended, the game eventually evolves from a P&P RPG, to a Wargame, especially if you utilize the Domains At War supplement.

4) The supplements are phenomenal. Rules for custom building monsters and classes that the creators used to make the game itself. Wealths of good ideas and drop-in pieces.

Overall, having not yet run it, i give it a 7/10 as a game, and a 9/10 as an OSR/BX Clone. Loses points for the poor Core Rules presentation making the high level of complexity almost overwhelming.


This wasn't gonna be a product review when i started typing, i swear, lol!! Once my first game gets off the ground and i get a feel for it, ill probably run another one here. Want me to keep you up to date on that?

Sure. Info is always good.

Is there anything in particular you need suggestions on? While there are complexities to the system, it seems like it starts as a straightforward osr hex crawl, then once you get familiar with that, you add in the strongholds, nation building and all of that market stuff.

Seems like you could use the azgaar fantasy map generator and the fantasy cities watabau sites for your maps. And donjon to build your dungeons and adventures and such.

I was just rooting through the book. Seems pretty cool i'd definitely be interested in playing it or I may try to run one if I get some bandwidth.

Well, I'm mostly looking ahead to managing/tracking player domain morale and income and troop expemnses (a looog way off yet, but i like to plan ahead). I have a homebrew setting for a lot of the NPC realms and cities, though following the books direction for setting development certainly made me expand on them quite a bit. In retrospect i did way more work on the frontend than needed, but it was fun work so not really work.

Other than donjon I have not heard of the tools you mentioned. Mind posting links? They sound useful.

Yeah, I can post some links when I get to a computer.

Other than google sheets I don’t have any real advice on the tracking. It does seem like there is a lot of nuance in there.

Azgaar Fantasy map. It will make a whole fantasy map and world for you with all sorts of filters for geography or political boundaries, etc... It will also populate it with various races, demographics, gods. But you can modify or update whatever you want. Pretty flexible. And you can save the data to your computer to keep it.
https://azgaar.github.io/Fantasy-Map-Generator/

Watabau: Generates modifiable towns and cities. If you mess with the settings right, you can get some labels and make it look like a blue print which is what I use for modern campaigns. Azgaar also uses this to build the individual towns.
https://watabou.itch.io/medieval-fantasy-city-generator

I would think as far as your domain's and stuff go, you can probably use these to get a good sense of scale.

Whaaat!? How did I not know of these things before now? Thanks much, friend!

Yeah, I'd like to make my players keep track of their own domains, but unfortunately, given my particular group, thats unlikely for all but one or two of them. Hopefully its not as burdensome as it looks, or it may well stall the campaign.

Whaaat!? How did I not know of these things before now? Thanks much, friend!

Yeah, I'd like to make my players keep track of their own domains, but unfortunately, given my particular group, thats unlikely for all but one or two of them. Hopefully its not as burdensome as it looks, or it may well stall the campaign.

Oh sure. I hope they're helpful. I use them pretty often for my games.

Who knows, maybe they'll keep dying before they can become conquerors, lol.

Another thing that may be helpful and always seems to help my players and me is if you build a flowchart for the big items and orders and hand that to the players. If you add in some references, it can really cut down on all of that other noise in the book.

It would give them a con isnt place to get there dice roll numbers and orders of operations for everyone and you can cut out the more advanced stuff until they are ready for it themselves. Should make it easy to do baby steps.

The flow chart idea is a good one. I'll have to do that. It would probably help cement the rules in my head too.

That’s what I think. I’m running a game of Cortex Prime on here, and that book and rules are confusing too. But once I started making my usual flow chart and customized character sheets, boom. It’s all coming together. At least the simpler stuff. And then the more complex stuff is almost common sense.

I've done that in the past for new players with combat rules for 5e and Battletech. makes the game much more accessible when you can tell a new player "Everything you need for the first few games is on this one sheet of paper."

To backtrack a little: In my search for cool gaming tools, I have also come across this:

Campaign Wiki Apps

There are some pretty neat tools in there, and it just occurred to me you might enjoy them.

Nice. I can definitely incorporate some of this.