Dreams & Thoughts on Adventurer, Conqueror, King's Secrets of the Nethercity Kickstarter

"For three thousand years, the secrets of the Nethercity have been hidden. Now the delving of man has breached the ruins, and the lore and treasures of the ancients wait in the darkness below for those bold enough to seize them. But an inhuman evil slumbers in that darkness, and the time of the Awakening is at hand...."

So in the earlier part of this year one of the kickstarters that I've been following & promoting has giving regular updates finally lets slip more out on the kilodungeon of the Adventurer, Conqueror, King rpg . I'm speaking about the Secrets of the Nethercity Kickstarter. 

Secrets of the Nethercity is one of those books that at the time I felt were essential to the ACK's line. Why? Because it scratches an itch that I've seen time & again, the middle of the road dungeon crawl/adventure. That is an actual conquerable dungeon & adventure location. "An epic "kilodungeon" with 240 location entries spread across 20 different dungeon sub-regions that can be explored in a nonlinear fashion over the course of your campaign "

Though I love megadungeons & you all know I do there's times when you need an adventure with a radical end goal. This is something that we've seen time & again in classic old school game modules aka T1 The Village of Hommlet or B2 Keep on the Borderlands  both Gygax classics. With Secrets of the Undercity we get; "A home base (the city of Cyfaraun) for use by your adventurers in between dungeon delves.But this is one with secrets also not unlike the above modules; The city is presented in summary format in the adventure itself, and the city and the sewers below it are presented in more detail in a supplement called Capital of the Borderlands (available at $20 and above pledge level). With every bonus goal, we'll expand the city and sewer levels!" And so they have.


The thing with ACK's seems to be this 'late Roman Empire set on the edge of Babylon or antiquity' feel that keeps calling & drawing me back in. As a dungeon master I keep seeing updates in my email but I watch with a very interested eye; "Secrets of the Nethercity is not an homage to anything. The inspiration for the adventure was actually the vast Christian catacombs created below medieval cities." Hmm very interesting so Secrets is following the tradition of other ACK's titles. But it was this update that got to me a bit; "The Autarch family has had a hell of a summer. I've just returned from a second trip to my family's home in Minneapolis, MN. First my mother was hospitalized with two broken arms that now can't bear any weight (I've been calling her Tyrannosaurus Mom and she's not happy with me). Then my brother was hospitalized with a quadruple bypass. Woof! Please keep them in your thoughts.

Meanwhile I've continued progress on both books as best as able. The PDF of SOTN is looking amazing and nearly complete. We had a few empty spaces on the page of the Secrets of the Nethercity PDF so we commissioned uber-artist Michael Syrigos to fill in the blanks with full color glory.  I've shared these below."
Really sorry that the Autarch family is going through this at the moment & keeping you all in our collective prayers. 

The Only Thing Worse than
 Giant Rats is Giant Rats with Bubonic Plague.
 Yuck that looks really nasty. 

Here's the thing Secrets of the Nethercity is really geared for all of the ACK's titles but this book l think really beefs up & backs up the material that we've seen in the The Heroic Fantasy Handbook. There are several reasons for this assumption on my part. One is the fact that we've got specific classes that are oriented in the Secrets of the Nethercity ideally suited as a compliment  to the Heroic Fantasy Handbook. These classes match very closely some of the PC classes in the hand book; 

"4 new character classes, including the elven cultist, hierophant, and warlord"It could be that Secrets of the Nethercity might be used as a bridge gap between ACK's adventure books to boast PC's into the trails to get things really onto the King part of the adventurer's journey. Baring in mind that this is mere speculation on my part and I don't speak for  the Autarch family in any capacity. I'm just a fan of the ACK's system. 

Secrets of the Nethercity looks like its on track for Adventurer, Conqueror, King & I can't wait for it to hit the stands in the wilds of the table top role playing hobby. Now I've got to find the right group of players for an ACK's game. So I can inflict this dungeon on to the unsuspecting players!