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.
- 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.
- 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment