Adventurer Colonist King

How to Hexcrawl and Settle the Wilds with ACKS

Many people see ACKS’ excellent domain rules and are inspired to run a game of settling the frontier and pushing back the wilderness. I certainly was. But in doing so, we commit a grave mistake, as evidenced by the many difficulties that emerge and make such gameplay fail to accomplish the desired structure and aesthetic.

ACKS is very intentionally a game of adventurers who become conquerors, and the game structure reinforces and incentivizes this. As written, it is frankly not a game at all about settling the wilderness, except as a stepping stone to the triumphant return to conquer pre-existing civilization. The ACKS II Judges Journal makes this structure more clear.

But this leaves the question: is there a way to transform ACKS into a game of settlement and development, rather than one of conquest? It is subtle goal, a problem of many parts, but I do believe it possible. The hallmarks I identify as characterizing this playstyle include the following:

1. A focus on hexcrawling as adventuring in its own right as opposed to a means of travel between dungeons, and therefore an expectation that most gameplay (and XP) will derive from hexcrawling and lairs.

2. An expectation of early entry into domain play.

3. Domain play focusing on clearing and settling new land, outside the boundaries of civilization.

Technically, such a game could just focus on the third point, but they usually come packaged together. This is good, if it can be done without breaking ACKS — they reinforce one another, and for someone looking to build this style of game I’d recommend using them in combination. Given that many of my suggestions for how to hexcrawl have been developed in order to enable the later concepts, I see little point in splitting it all up across multiple posts.

The Problems

There’s not nearly as much fiction to reference on the topic (Pern comes to mind as touching on it often enough, and some narratives around the American colonies, but little else comes to mind), and most games lack the economic rigor to pull it off in any event, so there is little experience to draw upon in how such a game should be set up.

A few key problems thus tend to emerge then when people attempt to run such settings, both in my own experience and as reflected by the questions and complaints posted to the ACKS Discord.

First, a focus on hexcrawling as the core gameplay loop demands exploration. ACKS wilderness densities are, however, extremely high. Multiple lairs per hex make it nigh-impossible to see meaningful progress in pacifying a region of wilderness, and lead to more moving pieces that a DM can reasonably manage. On average, one 24-mile tile of woods contains 4 brigand/bandit camps, 1 berserker clan, and 7 villages of beastmen or demihumans - that’s only a small fraction of the 80 lairs expected in that one tile overall, and we’re already at quite a few more active factions than most dungeons.

This also leads to a high density of treasure per unit area. Just those lairs I specifically called out above will have an expected treasure value over 130,000 gp. For a party of four, with two henchmen each, that’s enough loot to be hitting 5th level, from just the large communal lairs within a single 24-mile hex. And it’s not unique to woods — I ran the precise numbers for Clear/Grassland and Hills/Mountains on the ACKS 1e encounter tables, and got an expected 218,000 gp and 726,000 gp per hex, respectively (not including magic items). Those numbers seem outrageous!

As an aside, taking the upward adjustment for number of lairs in a Clear/Grassland hex recommend in Ecology of Aurepos surprisingly resulted in increasing the expected treasure to a whopping 896,000 gp. This is higher even than mountains, I believe largely because so many of the entries for this terrain don’t make lairs (thus increasing the relative likelihood of any given lair being a dragon, troll village, or the like).

Dungeons appear to exist (from a gamist perspective) not as concentrations of wealth and danger, but as spots low level adventurers can venture that aren’t too dangerous while remaining reasonably valuable targets. ACKS II makes some changes to ameliorate this problem, and to better fit the changes described above, but they’re not on the scale to truly fix it from the perspective of trying to run a hexcrawl-settlement game with lots of hex clearing.

Thus, a group that decides to clear some land for settlement won’t end up actually exploring much, because of the high adventuring density (in both treasure and table time). Moreover, said group probably can’t feasibly attempt to clear land for settlement at all until they’ve gotten some levels under their belt, just because of the high danger and large scale of such encounters. Even just exploring the wilderness is perilous.

But if they did clear the land, and begin to settle it, then they’d encounter the last key issue: settlement happens slowly. This is realistic, but it means that even for a domain where players do everything possible to speed its growth, it’ll be a matter of years or even decades before their domain reaches a respectable size. This is intentional of course, as an incentive to go conquer something, but it’s not what we want from this style of gameplay. So how do we fix it?

Hexcrawling Solutions

In designing the setting and region, the Judge needs to keep their goals in mind. This is going to mean changing some of the normal rules, to better enable this style of play.

First, I change lair densities to be one sixteenth the standard given in Lairs and Encounters (effectively, I use the given number of lairs per 24-mile tile instead of per 6-mile hex). Thus, a 24-mile tile of woodland has 5 lairs, not 80. This both makes the amount of treasure more reasonably manageable, and provides the push to explore because things are naturally more spread out. It also makes the hex stocking ratios much closer to those in a dungeon - about one monster per 3 rooms, about one monster per 3 hexes. Then, at the level of individual 6-mile hexes, I assume they have the full number of lairs indicated in specifically animal lairs - still non-trivial to clear (though easier), but not active factions or dynamic actors that a DM might need to keep track of. It also leads to a more plausible number of animals in the wilderness.

Using the dungeon stocking table for keying hexes is actually a solid start to this; the Stocking the Wilderness article in Axioms 8 (revised and expanded in the forthcoming ACKS II Judge’s Journal) also works well and is better tailored to suggest interesting wilderness sites.

Using dungeon stocking tables, you’d get the following on average, spread across the 16 6-mile constituent hexes: 5 empty (1 with treasure), 5 monster, 3 trap (1 with treasure), 3 special. By Stocking the Wilderness (in Outlands), you’d get 6 empty, 5 monster, 2 dangerous terrain (i.e., trap), 2 valuable terrain (i.e., treasure), and 1 unique terrain (i.e., special). Thus, we see that woods terrain receives an appropriate number of lairs under this framework; better yet, the Ecologies of Aurepos article (and ACKS II) revise lair numbers per hex upwards to 2d4 or 1d10 in most terrain types, so this method is fairly generalizable.

In using the above, it’s also worth mentioning that I don’t necessarily make those all full-size wilderness lairs, either. When I roll a beastmen lair, I often peel off some of its warbands to garrison nearby watchposts and important sites nearby their lair, as they sensibly might. This would be excessive in a game where those nearby hexes might have their own villages, but by decreasing monster density there becomes room for beastmen to have domains that spread out like human settlements do.

Over a couple of 24-mile tiles, I might spread a couple of beastmen villages, a nest of flying creatures (hippogriffs, griffons, giant hawks, rocs, whatever, it’s good to have something like this on the random encounter table for the region), a major intelligent actor (dragon, lamia, etc.), and a number of constrained actors (lairs that won’t go out hunting, or will do so in predictably constrained ways, e.g. a barrow full of wights or a skittering maw that haunts the river). I then build a random encounter table for that 2-4 tile area, stocked with whatever creatures show up within it.

As an aside, I also often add tracks and sign to the the random encounter tables somewhere, either on an overloaded encounter die or onto the Stocking the Wilderness table variant I’d use in play within a prebuilt region. Likewise, use or make weather rules, they add a lot to hexcrawling that can’t really be understated. If characters want to rest and heal or recover spells, that requires warmth, food, water, good weather or shelter, and no interruptions (not even a watch shift - with the interesting consequence that the middle watch generally doesn’t have casters). Adding those constraints creates a lot of opportunities for fun “edge-case” play where the SOP gets disrupted, breaking up what can otherwise become repetitive by adding texture.

One other key thing to note is that horses can’t generally feed themselves by grazing while also traveling. Most parties will be on foot, with donkeys as a baggage train (because donkeys can forage on the march, as ACKS II helpfully notes).

In my experience, this largely solves the problems that emerge with hexcrawling. How about the transition to early domains?

Domain Solutions

First, by decreasing the density of truly monstrous threats in favor of more animal lairs, hexes become feasibly clearable around 3rd-5th level, a good range for when people might start to look towards domains.

Second, the hexcrawl should by this point be seeded with old forts and ruins. These are the bastions that prior lairs occupied; Stocking the Wilderness has a pretty good table for this, though the gp values will tend low for places that are supposed to be occupied and used to control a hex. Once players are strong enough to remove nearby monstrous lairs, they’ll also be strong enough to claim their forts as strongholds with which to secure fledgling domains. After much testing, I strongly recommend not granting XP for captured strongholds - stronghold XP should be granted only for actual money spent on stronghold construction, otherwise characters will rapidly shoot through a level or two on stronghold conquests. That may sound fun, but I’ve played through that a few different times now and it’s rather disorienting, better for them to still adventure some and to level from domain income later.

Third, there must be some source of additional settlers, to explain why these wilderness settlements grow more quickly than a generational timescale. Colonists sent by a patron, refugees fleeing the collapse of greater powers, immigrants rushing to a boom town, a diaspora regathering to a homeland freed of the monsters that cast them out; these are all quite fun and playable.

This can also be accomplished by seeding the wilderness with conquerable domains that can be added to one’s realm - when I ran the Scaled King in BDub’s Dubzaron game, I had no trouble building a domain of lizardmen in my swamp kingdom, because there are a lot of lizardmen already in the swamp that I could easily integrate into my existing realm. Wilderness homesteads and refuge-sites (like we see frequently in the Lord of the Rings) can be a good way to do this for human characters, as could the possibility of lawful beastmen. Recruitment of various random encounters into one’s domain is likewise how Macho Mandalf made it (though in AD&D, not ACKS, of course).

Fourth, given that the number of independent actors in the wilderness has now been dramatically reduced, take advantage of that by giving them their own plans, plots, and schemes to make the wilderness dynamic and alive, a world in motion just as one does with settlements and dungeons.

As a final point, I’d suggest that when rival actors start to look towards such a domain, that they might offer vassalship rather than leading with open warfare. Even if it’s a beastmen warlord or the great dragon of the mountain, receiving some mumbled allegiances and monthly tribute is a pretty good deal for everyone involved and very much worth considering. PCs should likewise consider making such an offer on their end as well; a serious random encounter might yet be averted by gifts and obeisance.

Other Comments

A few other general areas present themselves as being worthy of discussion in the context of such changes, even if they don’t directly have a lot of bearing.

In terms of resource management on long wilderness expeditions, mundane resources become more difficult to replace. However, spells tend to become comparably more abundant (because you have less content-interaction per day). The simple proposal I’ve considered to address that has been (in eldritch, ceremonial magic systems) to only let characters recover from one point of stigma per day instead of purging all of it (leaving low level characters largely unchanged, but requiring increasingly longer rest periods for high level characters). A moderately harsher translation to normal slot based spellcasting would be that each night of rest recovers one spell slot instead of all of them (or only allowing recovery within civilization, or tying spellcasting more strongly to physical components).

In terms of gameplay loops, I will reiterate that if the game is to focus around exploring the wilderness, dungeons shouldn’t really be super present. If they are, they should be spikes of extreme danger (in my Frozen North game, where the players fought goblins in the woods, and stone trolls in the dungeon; a party high enough level to easily handle the trolls could also have cleared the dungeon entire in a session or so). Dungeons are generally much more concentrated in terms of gameplay content per unit in-world time, and as such will be preferred by players looking to make money quickly; if they exist and are common, dungeons will supersede wilderness-focused play (up to the point where players have lots of mercs and see lairs as a safer alternative - but that in turn is adjusted by the rules above, because the lower density of lairs means in turn that lair-hunting expeditions will have to look farther afield and search longer, shifting the cost-benefit calculus back towards adventuring parties with a small to moderate amount of mercenaries as a supporting force).

Overall I have found that these changes can make a dramatic difference to the style of play that develops, making it much more viable to actually set out into the unknown to tame and master it. This wilderness exploration-and-settlement focused style of play is something I’ve enjoyed, and hopefully this will help others avoid the mistakes I encountered when I first attempted it.

If people have encountered other problems with this style of play, or found other solutions, leave a comment and let me know. The above has worked well for me, but it’s nonetheless still a work in progress, and I’m sure it’s got a few more tweaks left to go before it’s truly finished. After all, ACKS II is coming, and built on the back of the excellent Ecologies of Aurepos articles with Stocking the Wilderness directly integrated, I’m sure it will suggest new possibilities and make some of the above unnecessary.

Oh, and what about generational play? I’ve yet to figure that out, but I’ve got some thoughts in the works, and maybe that’ll be its own post sometime.