Iron Kingdoms Roleplaying

Over the past weekend, one of my roleplaying groups decided to pick up the Iron Kingdoms roleplaying game and give it a try.  Several of us managed to play over Gencon and enjoyed it, but since then we’ve been playing a few other games instead.  Dan volunteered to run a quick one-shot session and made up some characters for us to use.

We had four different players and decided we wanted to make sure we had a few specific character types, just to try out the system.  We needed to have someone with a Steamjack, someone who was good with magic spells, and someone who was melee-oriented.  If possible, we wanted to try both spell-caster types (wilders and focusers), and maybe get some gunwork in there too.

Our characters came out like this:

Brian played a Field Mechanic / Arcane Mechanic with a steamjack at his disposal.  He was a Gifted Wilder.

Ellen played a Warcaster / Duelist with warcaster armor and an extra armor-boosting spell.  She was a Gifted Focuser.

Mary played a Pirate / Thief with a bit of sneaking and a lot of skills.  She was the type of character that could attack twice in a round, though we forgot to use her second attack the entire game.

I was a Stormblade / Knight with the Intellect character type, so I would give a +1 to hit and +1 to damage to everyone near me.

We used models for our fights, and rather than using a blank canvas and measuring in inches with our tape measures, we went ahead and used a square grid from our Dungeons and Dragons days.

The game was pretty straight forward.  We started with investigating a jailbreak by a notorious thief.  We were not the only bounty hunters on his trail, and as we tracked him, another group came by and instigated aggression against us (by nudging one of our horses off the shared trail).  We responded with appropriate force (by killing them all).

Soon we tracked down the bad guy and his group of merry men, talked our way into getting an opportunity to sneak up on him, and then had a huge fight.  At the end of the day, when his men were all defeated and he was at sword-point, he offered us money to let him go and we negotiated a nice settlement in exchange for giving him a one-day head start.  We ended the session there, having had the opportunity to see what we wanted to see from the system.

My thoughts were as follows:

1.       I remember enjoying the system at Gencon.  I really enjoyed it now too.  We had to do a little bit of digging through the book to make sure we were doing certain things right, having never really played before, but it was grounded enough in the Warmachine system that we didn’t have to work too hard at it.

2.       It’s a lethal system.  Despite the fact that it started out feeling like a DnD game, my character got hit twice and had one hit point left.  Where in DnD your HP increase every level.  Your character is constantly going to be a hit or two away from dying.  I like that.  In Legend of the Five Rings, a lot of interaction between players is facilitated by knowing that if you do not try to talk your way through a problem, you could very easily end up dead.

3.       Fate Points are really good and should be used often.  I think I used them the most of everyone in the group, yet I never had a lack of them.  They come back to you when you defeat an enemy or when you roll a critical success on your skill checks, so you’re going to be getting them back often.  And the things they can do are strong.  Prevent damage, heal wounds, reroll attacks, help skill checks, etc.  They are the thing that set PCs apart from NPCs, and you shouldn’t sit on them waiting for the “right time”.  I think you should always make sure you are down by at least one, because you never know when you’re going to get one back.

4.       Stormblade / Knights are awesome.  Even without taking the extra attack, my character was getting 2-3 attacks in a round.  I would attack.  If I killed that person (with a two-handed Storm Glaive it wasn’t that uncommon to do), I would attack again.  If someone near me was hit, I would attack again (once per turn).  There are ways to get unreal amounts of damage out there early on.

5.       Armor is king.  The only reason I was able to survive as well as I was is because I had a high armor, and Ellen’s Warcaster would keep up an armor-boosting spell.  The POW of most weapons was not incredibly high – usually in the 8-10 range.  My character’s ARM 17 made him a tank.  Add in the fact that Fate Points could heal me and I was sitting pretty.

6.       Charging is key.  There are no ways to boost damage that I could find in my character other than charging an enemy.  And once you charged, you would put out a third die of damage, which would usually wreck enemies.

The game has an obvious focus on the combat system, much like Dungeons and Dragons.  There are social skills available, but their system is generally just a skill check.  One thing I appreciate about the way that Iron Kingdoms does it, though, is that they use the 2d6 rather than the 1d20 to determine a roll.  In 1d20, you have equal chances to roll a 1 as you do a 10, 11, or 20.  With 2d6, the progression is not linear.  You’re far more likely to roll a 7 than you are a 2 or 12, which allows for a bit more normalcy in the dice rolls.

Overall, we all had a great time with the test run.  Next time we test it out, we might try to get some different characters on the slab.  I’m still looking forward to trying out a Rifleman / Gunmage.  He’s been on my mind since we first played at Gencon.