Play Report - IRON on IRON on IRON
This post will go in length on the creative process of writing IRON on IRON on IRON, a sword and mud TTRPG, as well as a playtest session using an adventure poem for it. If that sounds rad to you, click those links (it's all free!).
A Enhanced Edition of the game - full with layout, new updated rules, a starter adventure and cover art by Jonas-Merlin Schumacher - is also ready to go and it will be out as soon as Minimalist Jam ends.
I have finally played IRON on IRON on IRON, and it was unique.
Not even in Mythic Bastionland have we played something quite so, well, medieval.
Fantasy is all shiny. Shiny swords, shiny spells, gold coins, chests, dungeons and ruins. Be it high fantasy with flying cities or low fantasy, with games defined as Sword and Sorcery with a more mundane but still larger than life elements: a character carrying a bag of gold coins around - or even a spellscroll - distances itself from historical precedence.
Closer was Mythic Bastionland, but not quite. As arthurian legends, our short campaign was dominated by mystic and the supernatural to a greater proportion than the mundane and banality of the historical dark ages. Characters had instant reality bending abilities, boneless horses, or the skin made of mud and bones made of bronze.
But then, we have IRON on IRON. There are no rules for spells, and barely any scaffold for anything else but fighting. You don't have attributes such as Charisma, or Wisdom, or Intelligence, but you have Title (your social status), Tongue (can you even read?) and Trade (a job!) which help the game reach that tone of a grounded, mundane starting point.
The curious thing is that I am not really that much of a dark ages nerd.
Conceptually, it was born from a singular thought: "what would Violence look like if it was medieval?"
I had read a handful of well praised Violence adventures and, truth be told, I didn't quite get it fully. This was a game which the entire rules are about a crunchy, slow, methodical combat with immense lethality. There was no rules for trying to pick a lock, jump a gap, persuade someone. Just the exact lethality of a broken bottle compared to a baseball bat.
Discussing the rules in discords, a particular explanation finally made it make sense: Violence was about avoiding violence, because everything about getting hurt sucked. And I really mean everything; an enthusiast of the game claimed the point of avoiding combat was avoiding the rules themselves! So not only your Character would suffer, but so would the Players for engaging in acts of violence. Some multilevel meta game design here.
I then read the excellent post on Boot Hill as a great system for intrigue, and it all clicked. Nonetheless the questionable branding indicating a game that was about and expected of Violence (and most of the scenarios I have seen also being pretty interested in violent situations), the game was about complex rules for combat, and freedom of abstracting everything else, which was elevated by the danger of the known effects of a fight.
It's combat as failstate! And that made total sense to me.
Granted, in the process of becoming my own thing, IRON changed a lot from its inspiration. I gave some meat to the abstracted side with the aforementioned Soft Qualities. I made some slightly more robust rules for non violent situations. And I made Gloomhaven rules with dice, a unique dice mechanic for Stamina and HP all fit together.
But by essence, IRON on IRON on IRON is a medieval sword and mud TTRPG about how swords and other weapons will fuck you up with a single cut.
But also it's a game with a brutally novel rolling system attached to its combat (possibly too fun to be contained to just this game).
Gladly, I also had a great opportunity to put these floating ideas easily on virtual paper with the Minimalist Jam, a fantastic idea for helping creators get out of their own heads and just type words out. Spoilers: it works.
With all that said, I finally had the chance to try out the game in a session with my usual suspects. We played Saint George's Monastery, a adventure poem written for the system.
The adventure could be a post on its own, but the goal was a novel attempt at writing an adventure and, at the same time, doing the most basic of quests: to slay a dragon.
This creates a direct point of comparison to any and all other fantasy swordy dragony games, and quickly establishes the direction here1.
In IRON, the dragon is a food hoarding satanic beast deformed from the human flesh of a pederast priest, and the party sent to slay him is a bunch of hungry folk. This is what slaying a dragon is in this game.
Speaking of Party, the group consisted of 5 characters: the Princess and her entourage, the Goon, and the Jester. With them came the Monk, stuck outside her own monastery, and the Shoemaker, secretly a smuggler living as a peasant.
I can't praise these Players enough on finding these ideas from the simple premise established from the Adventure; we quickly fit the story as the Princess grouping some interested folk from the land in her good faith to release the food from the monastery and check on the monks.
The group of 5 agrees only 3 of them carry weapons: the Goon has a sword and shield to defend the Princess, the Monk has a staff, and the Shoemaker has a dagger 2.
Immediately the Monk makes use of her Trade (clergy!) to communicate with the Coward guarding the gate, convincing him to open the entrance for the group.
In normal circunstances, I would probably leave that to pure abstraction and allow entry, but it was a good opportunity to explain the game! So the Monk rolls, successfully, as they find themselves inside.
The Shoemaker, as the local criminal, quickly questioned if his job position would mean anything to him here; an inspired decision, considering the priest's secret passage for town boys. The Shoemaker has to be the one helping the Priest!
He narrates himself moving away discreetly - for which I intervened and told him: you are all inside a gate in a circle discussing in the mud and rain. There is no way you sneak away without a distraction or commotion.
Luckily for him, the Goon does not hesitate to enter the church, immediately finding the profaned statue of St. George.
The Coward closes the door behind the Goon and runs away to hide. With this, the Shoemaker successfully sneaks away - but not before being noticed by the Jester.
The Shoemaker makes quick work of the Priest's chambers, and in a moment of explicit cinematography framing, I narrated the Shoemaker discovering the leather book, interposed by the Priest emerging from the crypt, both information revealed and enhancing each other simultaneously.
The Goon hauls ass away, leaving the Priest talking behind him, but a chase starts.
In the room with the book, the Jester now arrives. Previously established as a germanic living in a foreign land, he had a better shot of knowing the language of the book - but rolls a failure, causing him to start chanting in a stranger's voice.
The Goon finds the door open by the Monk, but the creature giving chase leads to all 3 Characters running for the most secure location: the Priest's tower.
The Shoemaker, of course, knows of the secret passage. The Monk blocks the door with her staff, but not before a stunning strike from the Beast on the wood, knocking her heavily with a concussion (dropping her focus to a (-) on a severe injury).
Things were not better on the other side of the tunnel, unfortunately: this was the Priest's secret passage, and he knew where it lead.
Grabbing the first one out the door - the good hearted Princess - he dragged her back inside by the leg.
Here, the Goon started exchanging blows.
A first attack of 18 by the Priest was met with a defense of 16+shield from the Goon. An insane stroke of luck.
The Shoemaker and the Jester were desperate: did the book hold any information on the creature? At last they found it: a weak spot in its "voice".
Now, on a second exchange, the secrer smuggler moved to strike, as did the Princess.
The Shoemaker hit true in his throat, even with penalties, injuring the Beast gravely.
Any major damage was twarted by a 19 rolled by the Princess on the D20 defense, even if she was not the one attacked, per Multiple Adversaries rules (one that no doubt will face revision to a previous version that only affected attacks).
Now it was the Shoemaker and the Beast, entangled in a hug of death, as the creature short rested for his D20 back to try and crush this fool's head clean.
His blood fizzled burning hot on the hand arm and face of the smuggler. Behind them, the Goon stabbed true, dealing a killing blow, but not before the Beast exploding the Shoemaker's head and falling forward over him.
The dragon was slayed with a minimal loss of life. The Princess was safe.
No one knows the Jester has the book.
The Monk spent the entire final stretch describing herself praying and fucked up by the concussion.
The Goon fulfilled his mission of protection, and the Princess her own goal of recovering the food.
The Shoemaker illegal activities were never found, and a fountain was raised in his honor and bravery for his sacrifice, as he now certainly occupies a chair by the Lord's side in great Heaven.
Allow me to talk about the lessons learned instead of going over what went right, for it is the most interesting discussion.
Mostly because truth be told, everything went right. We barely had 2 hours to play with character creation, plus we are not medieval nerds at all, but everyone still found a great point of engagement. The combat was electrifying and using the exchange blows mechanic of hiding dice was pure fun. The Stamina Dice was a imediate hit, and they had no questions on how it worked. Each of them enhanced the story marvelously, allowing my own adventure poem idea to flourish exactly like I imagined it: a strong vibe but no clear and concrete elements of a conforming adventure let the moment to moment go in all directions easily (see if you can identify what elements of the poem you can find here and what was emergent at the table!).
The lessons, though, were two:
- this is a game that requires everyone to know the rules of combating.
- this is a game that thrives in long term play.
The first point became clear the moment I realized I forgot a lot of crunchy details: I didn't account for length, I could have rerolled once or twice, the Players had to understand what Hard Qualities did. There was no blackboxing possible here as I usually do. Welp!
The second point came to us all in the end: a quick game doesn't explore the issues of Stamina Dice. Of injuries over time and of violence beyond its action and into its long consequences.
We even knew after the session; we could absolutely continue that story beyond a single oneshot. What was happening in the crypt? What is the Jester doing with the necrobook? Has the Princess changed her own stand by getting her hands dirty and helping the commonfolk? Was the Goon getting knighted? How was the Monk to rebuild from scratch, the majority of her monastery killed?
Those questions, of course, are not probable to be answered, as I now face a long playing hiatus for the foreseable future.
But I have no doubt the table will be quickly on board to continue that tale.