Creating a Character - Adventurer, Conqueror, King System

With my Swords & Wizardry Eberron game still a ways off, I've decided to run a game of ACKS on the RPG.net forums. I haven't GMed or played ACKS yet, but I figured I'd just jump in the deep end and go for it. From what I've read, it isn't incredibly different than other OSR systems, at least at low levels. I did enact a couple basic house rules that I use for just about any Play-by-Post game I run: the biggest one is that I'll allow 1st level casters to select their first spell rather than selecting it for them as the rules suggest. Anything other than that gets rolled. But enough of that, it's time to get on with character creation.

Step One: Roll ability scores in order. For PbP I use Invisible Castle, but for this I'll just use my regular dice. I'm also only going to roll one set, as opposed to the five sets I roll and let my players choose from.

STR 12
INT 16
WIS 12
DEX 13
CON 9
CHA 12

...Huh. I think these dice might be loaded. Good thing this is just a test character. After a quick glance through the Player's Companion, I'm going to go with Warlock for a class. I like the idea of a caster aligned with hellish powers (of course, I've also been reading Erin M. Evans's Brimstone Angels, so that might be influencing my choice).

Hit Points: 4

I'm rolling awesome tonight, apparently. Next up, Proficiencies. All characters start with Adventuring, then they get one General and one Class, and extra General Proficiencies according to INT. This character has a +2 bonus from INT, so that's three General. I'm going to go with Loremastery, Knowledge (Occult), Survival, and Leadership. Loremastery and Knowledge (Occult) to explain the Warlock powers, Survival to make sure he can survive in the wilderness for a while, and Leadership because any decent Warlock is going to need minions to serve him.

Spells: He can cast one per day, but with his INT score, he can have three in his repertoire. I'm going with Sleep, Spider Climb, and Burning Hands. Sleep is, as with most OSR games, easily one of the most powerful low-level spells, as it apparently allows no save against it. Spider Climb is pretty thematic and creepy, and Burning Hands is both damaging and thematically appropriate.

It looks like alignment and gear are all that's left to choose, and I'm going to choose the easy way and just snag the gear from the Corrupt Scholar template for the Warlock. Oh, and I need to choose a name: Malevoc Infernis is a good Warlock-y name, I think.

With no further adieu, here's the final character sheet:

I also like that the whole character sheet fits on one piece of
notebook paper.

Overall, not a bad character, I think. Plus, even with having to look up the rules and flip between the PDFs of ACKS and the Player's Companion, it only took me about half an hour or so to make a character. I'm sure that time could be cut significantly with A) more familiarity with the system, and B) only using a core book rather than both.

I'll get a more comprehensive review up once I've run the game a bit and given it a more thorough read-through, but for the moment, I think that picking up the ACKS core book and Player's Companion was money well-spent.