About this project

Adventurer Conqueror King is roleplaying across all levels of classic campaign play.

Since 1974, twenty million people have played the original fantasy role playing game, and each has had their own vision of how to perfect it. Adventurer Conqueror King is ours. We need your help to share our vision with you. We hope you'll make it your own. 

Adventurer Conqueror King is a complete tabletop RPG that supports all the goals characters in our campaigns have set for themselves. Whether it's dungeon crawling, guiding a caravan through the wilderness in search of profit, or commanding a nation-state, this system satisfies our needs better than any other game we know (and that's quite a few). 

Because each member of our company, Autarch, wants something different, we think a game that suits all of us might be useful to you too. Are you:

• a world-building gamemaster who needs an economy thoroughly integrated into the rules to make the settings you create feel and function as if they were real? So is Alexander Macris, who's used his role as publisher of the Escapist to make it a home for great articles on tabletop roleplaying, not least his own Check for Traps column.
• an on-the-fly referee who needs tables that harness the oracular power of dice to generate an internally consistent world you discover along with your players? So is Tavis Allison, who's published for 3E as Behemoth3, freelanced for 4E with WotC, and furthered the old-school renaissance as a blogger at The Mule Abides and an assistant designer on the DCCRPG.
• a player who needs fantasy with a consistent grounding so that your real-world intuition can guide your character's wildest schemes? So is Greg Tito, whose move from doing theater in Brooklyn to writing about games in Durham brought our team together. Greg co-designed some of the earliest third-party 4E material with Tavis, wrote about a ton of games (tabletop and otherwise) for Alex, and told each of these guys the stories about the others' campaigns that started this ball rolling.
• an artist inspired by visions derived from the history of the ancient world, surprisingly extrapolated from the first principles of Arneson and Gygax, and outside the well-trodden paths of Eurocentric fantasy? So is Ryan Browning, whose participation in the Dungeons & Dragons in Contemporary Art panel Tavis organized catalyzed a switch away from doing only "fine art" and toward illustrations like the cover of Adventurer Conqueror King.

Here's what we need from you. First, tell us what would make Adventurer Conqueror King your perfect version of the world's most popular role-playing game. What tools can we provide that will make it useful at your table? What problems do you have as a gamer that our system can solve? All of our donor rewards give you the tools and access to take what we've done and help us make it more valuable to gamers like yourself.

Second, help us publish this game with illustration, layout, and production values comparable to the classic RPGs that were our inspirations. Every level of support will help us create beautiful books and PDFs, and we created the Visionary donor reward in the hope that some of you will tell us what the art in the finished product should depict.

Finally, we want you to play Adventurer Conqueror King. Ideally, we'll play it together! To help make that happen, we've booked a penthouse suite in one of the Gen Con convention hotels where we'll be running continuous demos of the game for our backers all throughout the best four days in gaming. Drop in any time, pick up one of the pre-generated characters, and help us discover all the fun our system is capable of generating. 

Bonus Goal #1: *MET 7/27* Enough backers have been inspired by Adventurer Conqueror King system that publication of the core rulebook is now certain! If we get enough funding to reach our $6,500 bonus target, we'll also be able to illustrate and lay out Domains of War: rules for fielding armies and waging massive battles, fully integrated with the core systems for ruling domains and hiring mercenaries. If that happens, all our supporters will get Domains of War in PDF or, for an additional donation, softcover or hardcover. 

Bonus Goal #2: *MET 8/1*  If your support helps us double our original target of $4,000, we'll add the materials developed for the Gen Con demo game to every donor reward. This includes the player and referee maps created by Chris Hagerty, Autarch's cartographer and another Dungeons & Dragons in Contemporary Art panelist, and character sheets and mass-combat counters by Ryan Browning. All backers will get these maps, counters, and character sheets in PDF form so you can print your own! 

Bonus Goal #3: If, with your backing, we manage to triple our original target, we'll set up a session of Adventurer Conqueror King for each and every backer who wants to play! These games will be conducted via Google+ hangout, which we tried and loved  during the Constantcon 2011 Zak S. has been organizing at Playing D&D with Porn Stars, and will use the format developed for our Gen Con demo. We have our fingers crossed for this target!