One of ACKS's main selling points is the attention given to world-sim mechanics. It has rules for establishing strongholds and running feudal domains. It has built-in models for population density, demographics, and economics that influence its encounter tables, the prices of products and the pay of hirelings. While I find this approach very interesting, I wonder how many GMs actually go through the trouble of using all this data.

Do you know of anyone who really built and runs their game world at this level of detail? Is this even feasible, or worth it? And how does all this high level numbercrunching of crop yield and army supply jive with a game that, for many sessions, is about how many torches an individual adventurer takes into a dungeon? It all seems a bit like it's the best game you never played to me.

Thoughts, experiences?

Like OD&D, it's a game designed to take you from a penniless wanderer making your own torches to a great ruler, allowing you to "tread the jeweled thrones of earth beneath your sandaled feet."

I get that this is the stated intent, but I wonder if / how people actually make use of the worldsim aspects. Is the GM expexted to work out how many hexes of land key npcs hold, how densely it is settled, how much it yields ... and then to use this data in determining how many units of light infantry he can field?

Yes.  We considered that a major part of the fun of being the referee.

Also, when you take wargamers and give them armies and lands and castles, you WILL get wars.  At that point the campaign goes to a whole new level.

I'm sure ACKS is great fun for many gamers. For me, the kingdom years are best told like the reign of Beowulf (aka, a short diversion between the big action scenes)

I used the worldsim aspect (and none of the dungeoneering) pretty heavily in building my historical game, Tyche's Favourites.

If you go to the ACKS forum at autarch.co, there are a fair number of detailed campaign reports over the past several years; it's clear some are using the world-sim pretty heavily, even before players hold domains.

Thanks fot the replies. I did a bit of digging on the Autarch forums and have a growing suspicion that most people make only selective use of the worldbuilding rules. IMO, as with GURPS, the rules appear to be more of a framework, a proof of concept, or a theoretical exercise in how to model the world - but in most games, guesstimating it and making it up as on goes are often good enough. Which is  understandable (you'd need a pretty hefty spreadsheet or database to do keep track if everything) but also a bit of a missed opportunity, as I'd really like to see it done.

Quote from: Jorunkun;878114Thanks fot the replies. I did a bit of digging on the Autarch forums and have a growing suspicion that most people make only selective use of the worldbuilding rules. IMO, as with GURPS, the rules appear to be more of a framework, a proof of concept, or a theoretical exercise in how to model the world - but in most games, guesstimating it and making it up as on goes are often good enough. Which is  understandable (you'd need a pretty hefty spreadsheet or database to do keep track if everything) but also a bit of a missed opportunity, as I'd really like to see it done.

I remember one campaign which was using those rules pretty much by the book, it's a three-part Actual Play that you might want to look for;).

I used it at the start of my game, to generate the economy of the region. I had to change some of the assumptions, because antiquity didn't run along the same lines as medieval Europe.

It meant I knew how much money the PC's employer had, how wealthy his rivals were, what sort of money they could splash around and so on.

I had a pretty detailed discussion on the Autarch forum about how to model things. It ranged quite widely, and you can see my calculations in there.

My ACKS game used it pretty much as written (a bit more complex actually, tracking population separately by race and ethnicity within a multi-racial and multi-ethnic settlement), but it was only for a single isolated settlement in a newly-founded colony.  So there was only the one settlement to track population, etc. for.

Towards the end of the campaign, they did start having a henchman run trade ships back to the homeland, so we also generated trade modifiers for a couple of the major cities, but that was as far as modeling the economy or power structures outside of our single settlement ever went.

Good advice all around. Here's my 2cp.

• You don't really have to stat up the whole world. Start with a 30 x 30 6-mile hex map, place 1d4 settlements on it ("points of light" and all) and there you go.


• Sinister Stone of Sakkara and ACKS Dwimmermount have fully statted-up settlements you can use as written, or as a didactic example.


• You can take a (sort of) bottom-up approach and fill in a settlement's "stats" as needed. Stuff like Market Class is relatively easy to determine upfront; ruling that Podunkville is a Class VI market should be enough for low-level play, and you can work from this tidbit to fill in the blanks when the domain-level shit hits the fan.