Acheron TTRPG Review – Hell Is Other People

Over the last twenty years or so, there’s been a shift in fantasy to leave the pseudo-medieval realms of Tolkien and his imitators for the more recent environs of the early Modern Era and the Industrial Revolution. Literary works such Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell and the Temeraire series (the Napoleonic Wars fought with dragons) and TV series such as Carnival Row take us away from bucolic landscapes and blighted wastelands for more familiar (if somewhat magically imbued) locales of crowded cities and gas lamps on the corners. They’re not quite a bridge to urban fantasy works like The Dresden Files, but they have a certain transitional feel to them. In the TTRPG space, we’ve had steampunk of various stripes from Deadlands to Girl Genius to Eberron, so mixing magic and machinery isn’t exactly new territory for that audience. Recently, Dark World Studios put out their contribution the genre, Acheron, after a successful Kickstarter.

Acheron puts you as a resident of a highly circumscribed world, a world literally surrounded by a massive Wall. A couple of centuries back, the Wall experienced a cataclysmic event known as The Breach. In addition to killing a large percentage of the population, it also brought non-humans known as Darkleechers into the world. Between wars, famines, and various revolts, large swathes of the population have died in byzantine power struggles between large wealthy families, the pseudo-Orwellian “Government,” and a cavalcade of anarchist movements too numerous to count. It’s a grimdark, crapsack world which only recently began to acknowledge that there were historical events before the Government’s officially recognized Recorded History timeline. So, in theory, there are secrets which are buried, lost treasures to be recovered, and hidden truths waiting to be revealed. Assuming, of course, that you’re not murdered by the Government, the Church, the three “foundational” families, or any number of cults and gangs for digging in places you’re not wanted.

If one had to describe the system underlying Acheron, the simplest answer would be “3rd Edition Dungeons & Dragons, with a lot of asterisks and caveats behind it.” The core resolution mechanics use a single d20 to roll against a given difficulty modifier, trying to shoot high. As far as character creation and advancement, Acheron eschews character classes for a build-it-your-way sort of system vaguely reminiscent of systems such as GURPS or HERO. After establishing your base attributes (either with a “standard array” slightly higher than what you’d find in D&D/Pathfinder, a set of rolled stats, or point-buy), you’re given a small budget of Character Points and an equally small budget of Skill Points. With these, you can purchase Merits and Flaws (the former costing points, the latter giving you more points), as well as Abilities (roughly analogous to 3rd Edition D&D Feats) from a variety of “trees” which call to mind another d20-based game, Spycraft. Instead of typical fantasy races, players pick between Humans, Darkleechers (beings who originated from beyond the Wall), Soulmenders (a mechanoid/android equivalent) and “Half-Leechers” (because why not?). Humans and Darkleechers must further refine their choice with one of six Pedigrees (for Humans) or four Kin types (for Darkleechers). Each Pedigree or Kin type has their own particular limit cap for base attributes, as well as inherent Merits and Flaws they must take at character creation (which thankfully don’t cost any Character Points or grant any Character Points).

Because Acheron is set in a grimdark world, your characters do not feel powerful or competent. They don’t even feel like people who’ve managed to survive the overbearing conditions they’ve ostensibly lived under up to the point where your first adventure starts. As part of character creation, you designate nine skills from the total skill catalog to be Trained skills. Yet the amount of Skill Points you receive at the start (based off values associated with two attributes you designate as Primary and Secondary) basically relegate you to the ranks of “footshuffling menial” because you will never be able to have at least one rank in all of your Trained skills at the start (let alone all the other untrained ones). With the rules as written, your maximum possible number of skill ranks in a Trained skill is equal to the attribute it relates to (Dexterity for Stealth, Intelligence of Knowledges, etc.), so you could theoretically be pretty skilled if you survive long enough. You’re supposed to base your character’s Background (which determines starting funds and recurring income) off of one key skill. But every one of the suggestions for what those skills might cover functionally restricts you to the lowest possible Background tier unless you decide to blow the bulk of your Skill Point budget on one skill and have enough to actually reach the second Background tier, which also leaves most if not all of your other Trained skills as theoretical. In 3rd Edition d20 games like D&D and Pathfinder, you had a larger budget of starting Skill Points which you could spread out across most of your character’s class skills to at least approximate somebody who’d been around a little while and who’d maybe begun to specialize in a certain area of their profession. Here, you’re either barely competent in several skills or a one-trick pony.

If you’re wanting to build a character who meddles with the various arcane and eldritch forces in Acheron, all I can say is “sucks to be you.” You’ll blow half your starting Character Points to gain the appropriate Magic Adept Ability (if you’re shooting for a wizard sort of character), or half your Character Points plus an extra one for a specific Merit to gain access to Mancies (a general sphere of power without any specifically defined spells, essentially a psionic path). From a character progression perspective, going the magical route is going to be slower than a “normal” character. They might be able to create a fireball, but unless they’re also devoting their remaining Character Points to things like being able to use a pistol or drive a car, it’s going to be a special kind of suck being a magic user, particularly at first level. You’re not going to be reaching Doctor Strange levels of power anytime soon. And that assumes that your own spells don’t drive you hopelessly mad or kill you from blood loss. Each of the five magic traditions has their own specific mechanics in terms of economy and cost (shades of Savage Worlds‘ Arcane Background mechanic), and all of them get to be debilitating pretty quickly. It’s an old joke that finding magic grimoires in Call of Cthulhu should lead to them being immediately burned, but Acheron seems like it wants to halfway punish players for dealing with magic.

Speaking of Call of Cthulhu, there’s a Sanity damage mechanic in Acheron. Spells, as mentioned, have a Sanity cost for a certain type of magic tradition. Beyond that, seeing certain events may call for a Sanity check to avoid damage, or may just inflict Sanity damage outright without any check. Seeing a puppy get run over by an orphan might warrant a check. Seeing the State Puppy Mill & Orphanage go up in a Hiroshima-like fireball (possibly because some mad wizard didn’t like Mondays), that would be straight Sanity damage. Taking certain amounts of Sanity damage leads to rolling for a permanent modification of your character in the form of a Fracture (generally equivalent to a Flaw taken at character creation), a Virtue (generally equivalent to a Merit) or an Oddity (minor benefits and drawbacks in the same package). If your dice hate you, your character might be a shambling wreck of a person long before they actually die.

In terms of layout and presentation, Acheron isn’t bad, but there’s definitely room for improvement. It would have made more sense to have the magic-related Abilities in their own subsection alongside the other abilities to help avoid a lot of needless flipping back and forth. There’s also some question about why certain Ability trees are located where they are (filing the Gunslinger tree under Constitution Abilities just makes no damned sense). The art within the book feels oddly light on character and location pieces. There are a number of various pseudo-art deco pattern swatches scattered here and there, but it seems like they come at the expense of character portraits, visuals for various monsters in the Bestiary section, and more detailed “still life” pieces of the different Districts players are supposed to inhabit and investigate. The art that is there definitely has a strong urban horror/steampunk sort of vibe to it. You just kind of wish there was more of it for some reason. Outside of the art, a number of spelling and mechanical errors are present in the text, stuff that a spell check would mark as correct when it wasn’t.

As far as the worldbuilding for Acheron‘s setting, there’s a strong feeling of unearned force to the whole thing. The Orwellian bits don’t seem to feel properly oppressive. The noir components don’t feel suitably grimy. The various factions, both major and minor, don’t feel like they have any actual presence to them, and the use of quotes and mottoes don’t do anything to inject any personality into them. And the different districts don’t feel like locales so much as set dressing. The maps are nicely rendered, but the contents don’t feel cohesive. We’re told “this is the world as it exists,” and it just doesn’t feel like a world. Part of this, I think, comes from the conceit that only the official Recorded History timeline is the truth. Because there is nothing presented prior to Year Zero, we don’t quite have enough to draw us in. The chronology of events of the official history is too limiting for us as readers to feel properly immersed. I can appreciate the desire to cut down on opportunities for metagaming. I can appreciate wanting to let the GM fill what happened before Year Zero with their own notions of history, their own chain of events which somehow lead up to Year Zero. But one element of grimdark fantasy is that things have been terrible for a long time. For Warhammer 40K (and to a lesser extent, Warhammer Fantasy), the grim and the dark have been around for millennia. Fantasy Flight’s Midnight setting, things had slowly been spiraling down for a few thousand years before the world hit rock bottom and the Dark Lord won. A properly grimdark setting feels like you’re fighting entropy itself, not just powerful people in cyclopean structures. Acheron just doesn’t quite hit that zone, hobbled by the ridiculous ludonarrative assertion, “nothing happened before Year Zero.” The fact that there’s a mention of a law saying, “OK, you can go looking for things that happened before Year Zero,” feels more Kafka-esque than Orwellian.

When asked about the similarities Acheron has to 3rd Edition D&D (and why there didn’t appear to be an OGL declaration page), Dark World Studios responded, “Acheron is a custom d20 system, so doesn’t reference any OGL, though it is Pathfinder inspired in some ways.” It may be Dark World Studios is hoping that they’ve kitbashed so many other mechanics into Acheron that they can avoid a lawsuit from Wizards of The Coast (as the official originator of the OGL) or Paizo. They might even be right. But that same kitbashing, and a lot of it from systems and settings which do fall under the OGL, has led to a book which doesn’t seem to accomplish what it claims it set out to do. Acheron can’t quite make up its mind if it wants to go for cosmic horror, psychological horror, or dystopian steampunk. You can tell a lot of effort went into creating it, but a great deal more needs to go into polishing it before one would consider regularly playing it.