TTRPG Babble - Ironsworn

So imagine my surprise when I realised that I have not actually used this medium to babble about TTRPG games besides my homebrew and some references to D&D. I mean, what an opportunity missed!

Needless to say, I'm going to being amending that today.

Ironsworn's default setting sees you as an oath-keeping Ironsworn within the cold, harsh Ironlands. You're of the third generation of Ironlanders to live here and you journey from settlement to settlement completing quests/vows.

I'm not really doing the game justice. So let's start with the things that appealed to me.

This is a game you can play guided (with a GM), co-op (2-4 people without a GM), or Solo (that means you. Yes, you! All by your onesy!). I found this a very novel idea.

Another rather remarkable feature is that this game's pdfs are absolutely FREE. Yup, you read that right. This is a game that can bring hours upon hours of joy without you having to fork out an enormous amount of money for it. Naturally, I did because I wanted to support the dude, because he's really cool. But nevertheless, you can play Ironsworn for absolutely nothing.

So how does the game work? 

Well it runs on an engine that's inspired by the Powered by the Apocalypse gaming engine in that your character's narrative actions trigger mechanical moves. Let me give you an example:

Eshan is following the trail of what might be a big beastie. She examines the footprints looking for more information on it.

For this, she triggers a Gather Information move which states:

Wits is one of your character's core stats and represents their intelligence (Or rather their expertise, knowledge, and observation.)

To make a roll, you roll one six-sided and two ten-sided dice. The d6 is your action die and will be what you use to tally your action score - meaning its total + wits in this case. The 2d10s are your challenge dice. You want to have your action score be higher than both of them, which would then result in a strong hit. 

So if I was playing Eshan in a guided game, the GM would tell me to roll Gather Information and will then tell me everything that is 'envisioned'. With co-op, it's more of a team brainstorm as to what it can mean. And solo, gameplay is all me. 

Let's say I rolled a strong hit, maybe my d6 landed on a 5 and I added 2 for my Wits score giving me a 7 action score. My 2d10 rolls were both lower than 7 and I pat myself on the back for rolling such a nice roll. Now I discover something about this beastie. Hm. Maybe the beastie is wounded. I deduce this by the drops of blood that I notice along its trail. Mechanically this might mean that when I encounter this beastie, I'd assign it a lower difficulty rank than initially envisioned. I add two points to my Momentum track (which is another nifty mechanic which you can use to strengthen the outcome of your rolls in certain situations) and continue my narrative.

Let's say I rolled a miss. It says I must roll a move called Pay the Price.

So I would go with the most obvious negative outcome in this case. Now there are two things that immediately come to my mind that could happen. I lose the trail or the beastie surprises me.

But which option do you choose? Well, whichever fits the story best in your mind is one option. Like I would have gone with the beastie attacking me out of the brush and thus catching me off guard. But there is also an Oracle role you can do make to determine which. It's really up to you. The thing with Ironsworn, especially playing solo, is that it's all up to you. It's about your ideas and making it work.

How you record Ironsworn is also your preference. Whether you make a few brief notes, write essays on your character, or try and cram all the information in your head. How you do it is entirely up to you.

So what else is cool about this game?

Reader, I haven't even scratched the surface. 

Imagine this: a game that helps you decide on all the major aspects of the world and make it your own. Ironsworn has that. It has an entire section on building the world. Magic, religion, horrors, beasts, governance, etc.

Don't like the setting? Change it and get help from the book to do it! Ironsworn has a section on how you can hack the setting and change it to your whim. I've seen people set it in Middle Earth, in Westerns, etc. 

The only limitation you have is yourself and, when you start playing, you might realise that you're not as limited as you had thought initially.

But what if a medieval setting isn't for me and I would rather want it in space?

I present to you... Starforged.

Which I'll babble about in a separate post. :)

DM-ing Ramble: The Little Homebrew that could?

Hundreds of hours of prep. Over fifty hours of play. Over ninety maps. One-hundred-and-thirty NPCs stretched over several towns and cities. And all of this with the knowledge that this is but the first or second leg on a long journey should my players (who are now at 7th level) end up with an epic 20-level campaign.

It's been over a year that we've been running this game once every couple of weeks. And it has been quite a challenge for me who thought that this would only last maybe five or six sessions before the story fell apart. There was a risk of that at one time. I didn't have everyone completely roped into the tale and then we had one player depart, which shook me a bit more than it should have. I've been working on regaining my balance and fighting a bit of burnout, though not nearly as bad as what it was this time last year.

I've also enjoyed some of the process. There are a lot of things I'm still learning to do that I'm not good at. I can't improv very well, my descriptions are lacking and I struggle to set the scene if I don't have a visual cue like a map or something. But my players know me well enough to know that prompting me for more information will yield a bit more than the standard fare I would have otherwise given them. Sometimes in their questions, they'd make suggestions as to what they were looking at and then I, as many DMs do, steal mercilessly from those suggestions. It is the way, after all, no?

I love making maps - be it battle maps or geographical maps. I never took geography, I have no grasp of tectonics or what the weather would be like on either side of a mountain, but I can make maps that serves the purpose I had in mind for them. There my Inkarnate subscription helps a lot. For general interior and exterior maps, I am so, so happy with my Dungeondraft programme. I like the styles of Forgotten Adventures and Tom Cartos' assets, so I've subscribed to their Patreons for a time. I admit my budget for patreon isn't really big enough to follow everyone whose assets I enjoy, but those two seem to have the widest variety of things that I want to use.

One thing I think I'm doing okay at is being a 'Yes, and' DM. I'm kind of a stickler for the rules but so is the majority of my players who will look up things and self-govern. But if someone comes with an idea, I try my best to incorporate it into the story and make it part of the game to such a degree that it seems as if it was always there. 

I do realise that my I am very fortunate with the group of people that I'm playing with. The players' alignment tend to lean towards lawful so I don't have a chaotic bunch of murder hobos who burn through every town they encounter. I don't have to worry and feel like I'm feeding my world into a shredder. Being experienced DMs themselves, they know that the amount of effort I've put into this thing is immense and a little expensive and so they deal rather respectfully with my 'toys'. But that also means I can trust their wild ideas. Sometimes it means making a whole story arc in the Shadowfell. Sometimes it means creating a map of a bordello and hoping that I won't need to use it very often. 😆

So the question remains: will this campaign actually have enough material and coherence to make it to level 20? I have no idea, but I hope it'll come to a satisfying conclusion... eventually. That's the most anyone can ask for in a story, isn't it?