Ironsworn - Deshi the Healer: Session 1, Sickness strikes Nabuma villiage

It's the middle of Spring, and the snows have mostly melted away in the lowlands though there are signs that the cold still has a hold on some of the distant hills. Winter is now behind us, but in its place the unpredictable spring weather brings morning frosts and sudden storms.

Deshi is interrupted by an urgent summons to the home of the Village overseer. She didn't leave her shack this morning, and when someone went to check on her they found her still in bed, feverish and rambling. Something is very wrong.

I envisioned my own Inciting Incident as I wanted something that would be relevant for a Healer, so we're dealing with a mysterious sickness. You can roll yours on the Settlement Trouble or Major Plot Twist oracles if you prefer to let the dice gods have their fun.

First dice roll of the game. Let's create ourselves an overseer.

• Name: Shekhar
• Disposition: Suspicious
• Descriptor: Active
• Goal: Defend a place

A fitting set of attributes for a leader, but that suspicous disposition makes me wonder...

Deshi rushes over to Shekhar's home with a grab-bag of herbs and prepared medicines. He orders boiled water to be bought to the shack, crouches down by her bedside and starts to investigate. First glance suggests that this isn't an ordinary fever, and not an illness he has encountered before.

Gather Information: Miss. 'Your investigation unearths a dire threat or an unwelcome truth that undermines your quest.' 

 

I don't know what that might be, so I'm going to roll on the Action / Theme oracles for a seed.

 

Action / Theme: Affect / Survival

 

I'm going to interpret this as a dire threat that might affect the survival of the whole villiage. This steers me away from the ideas I had (triggered by that 'suspicious' disposition) about this being a poisoning attempt by an enemy.

Apart from the fever Shekhar's skin is clammy and, while her forhead is burning up, her hands are freezing. Her eyes are focusing on a point somewhere up in the rafters of her home, and her rambling is agitated. The water arrives and Deshi crushes in some herbs that he knows will bring down a temperature and asks another of the villager's to hold the Overseer's head while he slowly pours the concoction into her mouth.

While they sit by her bedside and wait for the medicine to have an effect Deshi asks the others in the room if they know what she has been eating and drinking over the last few days. He hasn't seen any strangers pass through the village but asks if anyone has noticed anything unusual.

Diagnosis will need to be a process of elimination. If the village water was bad he'd expect others to have fallen ill, but maybe Shekhar is just the first. Disease would concievably affect one person but if it's not the food, and no strangers have passed through, where did it come from? At the back of his mind an unwelcome thought lurks. Every healer in the Ironlands holds a secret fear that the plague that drove humanity from the Old World is just biding its time and will one day return.

He keeps this forboding to himself, but advises the other villiagers to boil all water before drinking and make sure food is well cooked before consumption. If the water has gone bad it could be the end of the villiage, but at least they could outrun it. Hope for the best, but prepare for the worst.

This fever hasn't moved. Deshi reaches into his satchel and lays his supplies out on a cloth next to him. He'll have to work through his remedies one by one.

Heal: Weak Hit. -1 Supply (-4)

 

The Herbalist path lets me add +2 to this roll and a good thing too. I'm using the degree of success to determine whether this has no effect, limited effect or allieviates the symptoms completely. The weak hit is the most interesting result in terms of narrative, so I'm not too sad.

 

I started the game with the vow 'Heal the Village Overseer' (dangerous) since this was my inciting incident, so I also mark progress on that quest track for finding a working medicine.

It takes all night and Deshi burns through a lot of his supply of the more unusual remedies, but he finally finds something that seems to sooth Shekhar and help her rest more easily. Unfortunately there is barely enough of it to keep her dosed for the next few days, and definitely not enough to treat anyone else that might fall sick.

Checking his labels he sees that the herb he needs is Moonwort. He casts his mind back to his teachings. Moonwort... an unusual plant of heathlands and unforested highlands. Usually used in a poultice to close wounds, but sometimes boiled in red wine to reduce vomiting and the expulsion of fluids (not that the Ironlands have ever seen Old World wine, but the berries of the Elder bush make a close enough approximation). He vaguely remembers gathering this years ago. Checking his notes he sees that yes, he gathered this from a patch on a heathland a few days travel from the villiage. It's the nearest high ground, and the best bet for getting more of the herb.

A quick stop to plug the excellent Herbalists Primer which I picked up from Dungeonland and completely fell in love with. An amazing resource for the role player who wants something based in real-world herb-lore from which to supplement their fantasy adventures. Painstakingly researched, beautifully illustrated and written with you,the role player, in mind. Very much my cup of tea.

 

Deshi heads back to his own shack and gets a few hours sleep as the sun rises. Then he prepares the rest of his stock of the herb and leaves dosing instructions with his apprentice. He also asks one of the village hunters to head to the coastal village of Brackwater, a day's journey to the west but mostly along well-trodden roads, with a small sample of the precious Moonwort to see if they have any supply. It's a long-shot, but Brackwater is a regular stop for the trading vessels that ply the Ragged Coast and there's a possibility that they'll have a chest of the stuff in a forgotten corner of a warehouse somewhere.

Finally he pulls on his travel cloak, checks his pockets to make sure there are enough stones for a decent volley from his sling, and takes his staff in hand. No one else has ever seen this herb in the ground, let alone harvested it. And the harvesting process is delicate. It has to be him.

He casts an eye up at the brooding skies and mutters a small prayer to Eir to have mercy on his friend and Overseer, and to protect him on the road as he goes in search of the cure. With a final backward glance he sets out for the distant heath.

Ironsworn - Deshi the Healer: Session 0, World and Character creation

The World

Since this is my first session we start by establishing the truths of this world.

Bear in mind the 'Truths' in an Ironsworn playthrough arn't necessarily absolute truths, rather the things everyone believes to be true. There is scope to adapt or replace a 'truth', and discovering evidence that those commonly held 'truths' might not tell the whole story might make a nice story hook.

The Ironlands

Credit to Kiero_PL on the Ironsworn subreddit for the below map image.

In my Ironlands the first landings were in the northern stretches of the Ragged Coast, so those are reasonably populated with village communities which become gradually more scarce as you travel south. The Ragged Coast is the 'centre' of human population in the Ironlands at this time.

There are few settlements but a number of hunting camps on the Hinterlands, fading into the southern reaches of the Tempest Hills. 

The Havens are just starting to be populated from the north, but while the land is flat and with potential for half-decent farmlands it is currently untamed and dangerous, and progress is necessarily slow.

There is some exploratory mining in the upper reaches of the Tempest Hills but miners are forced to return to the lower regions come winter or be trapped without the resources to survive. The Veiled Mountains are the territory of the giants. There have been expeditions but no one has attempted to settle or mine in the area.

The Deep Wilds are unexplored. Those who have ventured further than half a day's travel into the forest do not return. Wise Ironlanders go around.

The Old World

The old world was swept by a terrible plague which killed all in its path. Our best medicines and most effective rituals barely slowed it down. What was left of civilisation was forced to flee onto ships and cross the ocean, not knowing whether there was another land within reach or if we would die adrift upon the seas.

It is two generations since this migration, so the plague is no longer fresh in the minds of the inhabitants but some of those who fled the old world still survive, and their warnings are still passed on. Those who survived the journey passed the Barrier Islands and landed on the Ragged Coast near the borders with the Hinterlands and Deep Wilds. All humans on the Ironlands have spread from this landing point.

Iron

Unknown Iron pillars are found throughout the land. They have gained a certain ritual significance with the settlers but none know their real purpose. They are often found at the centre of communities, which tend to grow up around them.

They are often used by those called to the path of the Ironsworn in the swearing or affirmation of Iron vows.

Legacies

As far as we can tell, we are the first humans to walk these lands. There is no sign of human civilisation discovering the Ironlands before the great flight over the ocean to escape the plague.

Communities

We live in communities called Circles. Some of these are as small as a single steading, others can consist of several villages and outlying settlements connected by well-trodden roads. The largest circles are concentrated in the northern end of the Ragged Coast.

Leaders

Leadership model varies by community, especially once you're off of the main trade routes.

The largest settlements on the coastline or at the estuaries of major rivers tend to be big enough to self-govern.

Circles that encompass multiple villages tend to have a local overseer in each settlement who meets with their peers in other settlements as a kind of council. Other high profile citizens may also be part of these councils.

There are settlements, particularly in more remote areas, where leadership is more military in nature. There are also communities based around worship of a particular god or spirit that follow a theocratic model and are governed by a high priest or religious council. One you're off the beaten path all things are possible.

Defense

Larger centres of population, chiefly the coastal settlements, have Wardens who stand sentry and patrol the surrounding lands. Free Wardens and mercenaries sometimes sign-on to protect caravans and expeditions.

The further you get from there, the less likely you are to find uniformed protectors and more likely to find local militia who are activated when needed.

The same applies to law and order. The justice of the Wardens is recognised throughout the Ironlands, but most places outside the main trade routes will only see the occasional Free Warden and local overseers are accustomed to dealing with local criminal behaviour using whatever resources are at hand.

Mysticism

Magic is rare and dangerous, but there are some gifted among the humans.

Stories say that those gifted in magic in the old world felt the change in magics as they entered the Ironlands. The old world magics flowed from life and growth, while the magics of the Ironlands are altogether darker as though a different set of spirits are responding to the summons of magic users in this land. A lot of the old rituals no longer work, and much hard-won knowledge seems to have become useless.

In the old world magic users tended to be the community Healers and Herbalists as their magics allowed them to supplement their herbal remedies with healing rituals, and their connection to nature spirits helped them find and cultivate healing herbs.

In the Ironlands those sensitive to magic are often apprenticed to the community healer out of lingering tradition. However this practice is starting to disappear as healers are realising they are better off selecting among those with a drive to help others and an affinity for herbalism.

The loss of the old rituals means many of those who feel a magical connection don't have a way of utilising it.

Religion

The people honour old gods and new. In this harsh land a prayer is a simple but powerful comfort.

Firstborn

The firstborn effectively control the regions they inhabit - the Elves the Deep Wilds and the Giants the Veiled Mountains. They have tolerated humans as long as they don't infringe on those areas. Small communities are starting to spring up on the borders and cause tension, particularly along the Deep Wilds where the Elves are feeling distinctly more threatened by human proliferation than the Giants in their mountain homes.

Beasts

Beasts stalk the wild areas of the Ironlands. They are occasionally seen in the settled areas but the Wardens and nearby communities respond quickly to any threat, either by organising a militia or posting a bounty and sending word that they have need of assistance.

There is a market for monster slayers, often mercenaries who have chosen to specialise, who make a living traveling the outer communities and collecting bounties on troublesome beasts.

Horrors

The darkest forests, wildest mountain areas and the dangerous Flooded Lands region are known to harbour supernatural beasts and horrors. They sometimes seem to spawn at the site of particularly violent or horrific acts as though drawn to the echoes of the event. Most Ironlanders can go their whole lives without encountering one, but the odds are greater in some areas than others.

On certain nights of the year the scattered communities of the Ironlands variously light huge fires, perform warding rituals or just stay indoors and bar their dwellings. On these nights the reach of the supernatual seems to extend across the whole land, regardless of how civilised it has become.

 

Getting into solo RP with Ironsworn

Since my last blogpost I've started doing some RP. Some of it with a group and some of it on my own. I didn't know you could RP on your own, it sounded a bit weird if I'm honest. But I'm hooked. And it all started with Ironsworn.

Ironsworn

If you don't know, Ironsworn is an RPG designed to be played in solo, co-operative or guided modes. Solo and Co-Op have no GM, you use Oracle tables and dice rolls to give ideas for where the action will go. Guided mode is a bit more traditional, with a GM to make decisions and push forward the story. By default, all action takes place in The Ironlands.

The Ironland

The Ironlands setting is a bit like what you'd get if you implemented Skyrim the way the characters talk about it

• the weather is harsh and deathly cold
• food is scarce and hard to grow
• dangerous wild animals and worse roam the forests and hidden places

rather than how it's actually implemented 

• a stranger fresh off the boat can run around in all weathers wearing skimpy leather armour without a care in the world
• you can steal so much food from town that you literally cannot move
• you can kill three wolves single-handed on the way to your first villiage

One of the first things I loved is that there's a workbook that encourages you to flesh out your own verison of the Ironlands by choosing your 'truths' across a range of categories - how did your people come to live in this land? how did it get the name 'The Ironlands'? how well tamed has it been in the years since it was settled? Is magic common or non-existent? How do communities work in this environment? etc

Each truth has a few options to get you started, and the player is encouraged to add flavour and make it their own. Each truth also comes with an inspirational prompt for an inciting incident, which is where you'll begin your story.

Iron Vows

Your story is driven by the Iron Vows you swear. Your characters gets an epic 'background vow' which gives a bit of flavour to their motivations, and you may or may not make progress against that vow in your campaign. Your inciting incident will drop you into the middle of the action as you either Swear an Iron Vow to see something done, or tackle the first obstacle in a vow already sworn. Again the Skyrim comparison is apt, with a main story quest that you can choose to chase or ignore as you talk to people, pick up random sidequests and generally decide what your character sees as their priority.

The Move System

Actions are framed as 'moves', and your dice rolls against those moves encompass both your actions and those of the people around you. Hits mean progress, while Misses typically introduce complicatons. So if you roll a Gather Information move on a hit you discover something helpful and specific, and the way forward is clear. If you roll a miss you still get information, but you discover a new threat or something that undermines your quest. An example.

The family sword of the villiage overseer has been stolen from above the great hearth in the villiage hall. You have sworn a vow to get it back and Gather Information to work out whether you can find any clues about what happened.

1. You roll a strong hit! You roll the Action and Theme oracle and get A: Demand T: Solution. You decide that this means the Overseer tells you that a warrior from a nearby community came to the villiage and demanded that the overseer provide men and resources to help fight off a threat. When the overseer refused he took matters into his own hands and stole the heirloom blade, and you need to track him in order to retrieve it. Your next steps are clear, you know who has the sword and you know where he was going with it.
2. You roll a miss! You roll the Action and Theme oracle and get A: Demand T: Solution. You decide that this means the head of a powerful family, a rival to the overseer, is demanding that the question of villiage leadership is resolved. He claims that without the family sword the overseer cannot fulfil his duty to protect the villiage and should hand over the leadership role to someone who can. Maybe the sword was stolen by this rival family, maybe they paid someone to take it, maybe it really was stolen by an outsider and the family is just jumping on the opportunity to weaken the overseer's position. Your next steps are unclear, you have several possiblities to contend with and the political situation will make progress difficult unless you do something to resolve it.

The Dice

The dice mechanic is streamlined and easy to use. You roll two D10 and those set your target number. You roll a D6 and add your modifiers. If your D6 plus modifier roll is higher than one of the the D10 you score a weak hit. If it's higher than both D10 you score a strong hit. There's enough swing that you're never really confident, but enough influence from the modifiers that your character still feels like they have strengths and weaknesses. 

The rulebook suggests getting a different set of dice for your Oracle rolls which are percentile based. You can do it with D10 if you nominate one for ones and one for tens, but the books says having separate dice makes those rolls feel a bit special and I did enjoy the excuse to do some dice shopping.

The Narrative

The big change from other games I've played is that dice rolls are to be embraced. All RP is storytelling, but solo RP is more so. We all love rolling hits, but a miss is a chance for the story to get interesting. The thing that really hooked me was having the game take my cliched, on-rails story ideas, yank them off-course with a poor dice roll and a weird Action/Theme, and force me to be a more interesting and creative storyteller as I weaved the narrative back together from these disperate ends. The words 'trust your instincts' appear throughout the rulebook and it's absolutely true - you are not a bad storyteller, you just have well-worn patterns of thought that need the occasional kick up the backside to get them out of their rut and onto more exciting, unfamiliar territory.

The rules often ask you to 'envision' what your character is doing. When you swear an Iron vow, how do you swear that vow? Do you swear on your blade? On a pendant you wear around your nec? On the Iron pillars that may dot the land? Is it a vow of quiet determination, or a full-on cut-my-hand-and-swear-on-the-blood-of-my-ancestors type of deal? However your charcter does things, envisioning is about stopping for a moment and really picturing the scene, letting the fiction and the setting lead you story. Otherwise it feels less like a narrative and more like like you're just chaining together a bunch of moves and dice rolls. Personally I like to journal as I go with pencil and paper, and I've really enjoyed reading blog posts from other people running games who alternate blocks of narrative with fourth-wall-breaking inserts describing the moves and dice results that drive those story beats. I have every intention of posting some here.

Helpful resources

If all this sounds interesting I'll recommend two resources that really helped me start. The first is this video playlist from voice actor Trevor Devall, who runs a short Ironsworn campaign and gives a really neat flavour of what the narrative flow of the game is like.

The second is the Ironsworn rulebook, available free as a PDF from DriveThruRPG. The rulebook is tidy and professional - phenomenal quality for a free product. You'll need to be able to see the asset cards, but you don't necessarily need to print them. Being free, there is absolutely no risk and nothing to lose from giving the system a try, other than a little time investment learning the rules (and really, if you're interested in tabletop RPGs then reading through rulebooks and settings probably isn't your idea of a chore).

A big thanks to Shawn Tomkin for his extreme generosity in giving this away. It's definitely paid off with me, as I've put my money straight down for the second print run of his Ironsworn-in-space follow up Starforged.