ACKsArpy Campaign 2024 October-November (Rules, Rulings and Best Practices)

Back in late May, while on a road trip with one of the Imperial Purple Campaign players, we were discussing potential future campaigns. Having just read Poul Anderson's thought-provoking book The Broken Sword and enjoying the high of a campaign that had been generally well received there was some discussion about trying to run a campaign run mostly on a chassis of the Adventurer, Conqueror, King, (ACKs) Domains of War (DoW) rules. Due to varying schedules these ideas were pushed back into the background until early September. Then everything began to come together. The campaign name was a corruption of the Heptarchy period in English history to draw in one player, while the setting was placed in an alternate 410-411 to lure in the most Roman player. 

There is a lot of difference in style for this book's covers.

The rules were not pure ACKs. While one goal in running the campaign with a basis in ACKS, especially to begin to understand DoW, I balked at running a pure grand strategy or grand battle campaign through Telegram. Therefore the original win conditions were copied off of the objective card model as seen in Twilight Imperium (4th Edition). 

I was not winning in this image...

In hindsight this was a mistake. Despite attempts to balance the objectives, they ended up being largely at odds with the natural goals of the players and the setting and in perhaps a third of cases a direct harm to the flow of the campaign. I don't think this invalidates the idea of card based objectives, but I think it is likely that they require more thought put into them than I did for this campaign. 

Sadly none of these secret objectives were drawn out of the 26 that were written up.

Each player was to be represented by a powerful character, left without restraint in the withdrawal of Roman forces. Using the ACKs Axioms supplement Cohorts and Dynasties (Issue 19) the players rolled up five random family members, generally enjoying the process of collecting a collection of borderline failures, rolled up a random inheritance system and random alignment. This was very well received at the time and generally enjoyed. We will come back to the random alignment system later.

In the background I produced the following map attempting to follow the ACKs rules for such projects laid out in the as of yet (I think) unofficially released Judges Journal. 

The map is meant to be a loose approximation of England as it would have been in the 410s, based on a number of maps from throughout English history. The towns generally don't follow a naming convention, which is unfortunate in hindsight. The closest thing to a rule was that I tried to take the easiest spelling, favoring Roman sounding names over names I took to sound Middle Ages. I regret this in the case of Venonis which is very hard to spell consistently over Holy Cross. Three towns were invented to 'balance' the map and assigned minimum population size to be recognized as a town in ACKs rules. The populations of other towns was generally derived from the Doomsday Book census summary on Wikipedia. The human populations were assumed to be sparse, except in the area around Exeter to slightly help the potentially weakest player option.

Light Blue and Dark Blue would both drop out early on. Not pictured, the elves.

The elves were added in a similar method, except their forests were rated as being as populated as Middle Ages Scotland (the thinnest spread on the Judges Journal chart) they were randomly given 4 fastnesses with only civilian populations and told they had the forests.  

This map shows the elven player's view point. The green stars represent his rare and very small 'towns.'

This was arguably a major mistake. Under this method elf player suffered 'elfpower' shortages throughout the game and basically forced to leave unguarded civilians in his isolated forests with no real methodology of accumulating an army of his own people. This is not correct to ACKs lore or The Broken Sword and led to undesirable outcomes. If I were to rerun this campaign, I would have the elven player roll up chances of having an elven fastness for every forest hex on the map and generate their own population from each of those lairs. This would have given them greater combat power and made them more aware the shortage of people they had throughout the campaign, compared to the numerous humans. 

Another error of judgement was the ruling to have the players roll randomly for alignment. Given my reading and discussions based on Three Hearts and Three Lions and The Broken Sword, there were certain expectations of the elves from myself and all of the palyers. They then rolled Lawful and I was confused how this was to play out. I then compounded the error by saying that Lawful for elves could be treated as Neutral for men. 

What effectively became the alignment map...

This led to a lot of uncertainty in game on the true goals of the elves and a chaotic escalation. In hindsight I should have used a different method of alignment for this faction specifically.

Mechanically another major choice made was to restrict information to the players in time. That is to say that for a npc to do something, they either needed to act on their own initiative (dice roll) or get a message originating from the player's main character to the npc in question. This was enforced with two exceptions; First, players could discuss as much as they wanted among themselves. Second players would have access to whatever rumors were going around London as this would keep me from having to figure out the granular movement of information across England for general rumors. I think this generally worked well, but is likely unnecessary for the average referee or GM.

The game was in large part intended as a learning experience for the both the players and the GM. It was also meant to test the ACKS DoW for purposes of playing a campaign through Telegram and Discord. This met with mixed results. Two of the players dropped out when instructed to read the rulebook(s) associated with the ruleset and given their busy lifestyles, this was understandable. The remainder of the players (and a late joiner) struggled through the tide of rules and my less than ideal rulings. Player action forced me to finally put in the effort to learn the weather cycle (so that the Sunflare spell did not scorch out every encounter in England) and then the movement on the map began to be both more painful for the players and more grandiose. Other elements of the rules eluded us until the final battle and further reading will doubt reveal more errors in my current understanding. Still, among those who remained to the end, the rules have proven thought provoking and less than a week after the end, there are already rumblings of interest in another campaign.  

One of my biggest misreads in the world building process was in the level of the combatants. Armies are very awkward and expensive to gather and the battles were somewhat small. The players began the game as three counts and two viscounts and the majority of the campaign was conducted by one count and two viscounts. Given the sheer difference in wealth scaling, this meant that the viscounts spent the majority of the campaign outspent in all categories. 

The last major change to happen mid-campaign was inspired by one of the BROsr challenges that was reported by Dunder Moose, the mustache of the BROsr. As seen below I gave this challenge to my own players and the campaign became even more memorable.  

The next article should be a collection of the essays written for wishes, some minor commentary from myself on the idea in general. The last article on this campaign should have AAR's from the players and my own commentary on the campaign as well as some of the memes and artwork composed for the campaign.