This past autumn, I had the pleasure of kicking off a new ongoing feature in the pages of No Quarter: the Iron Kingdoms Gazetteer. The first installment appears in No Quarter #46 and details the Cygnaran mining town of Wexmere.

When I started writing Wexmere, I had just finished the bulk of my contributions to Iron Kingdoms Full Metal Fantasy Roleplaying Game: Kings, Nations, and Gods. My work on that book primarily involved writing descriptions of the major cities of western Immoren, sometimes starting from scratch to more fully realize these locations. However, in all cases, I updated the cities to reflect several years of tumultuous events since they were first described in the original Iron Kingdoms World Guide.

We’ve taken pains to detail the cultures, societies, and cities of the Iron Kingdoms (Cygnar, Khador, Llael Divided, Ord, and the Protectorate of Menoth) beyond anything we’ve ever previously published, as well as describing the broad provinces and duchies of these nations. As we wrote about these large geopolitical regions, we listed the smaller towns that don’t quite merit full treatment in the book but are still important parts of the setting.

With the cities and people of the Iron Kingdoms in mind, I thought it would be interesting to explore some of these smaller locations in depth. Villages and towns make excellent fodder for Game Masters who wish to have detailed environments in which their players can interact without fear the heroes might become involved in the earth-shattering plots of WARMACHINE. As well, these kinds of locations can help players craft rich backstories for their characters, and to this end I helped concept the Iron Kingdoms Gazetteer article series.

In the IK Gazetteer, we’ll be exploring these locations, detailing their inhabitants, and providing plenty of plot hooks for Game Masters to utilize as they please. When I wrote Wexmere, I wanted to provide a look at an aspect of Cygnar that is sometimes under-represented: its frontiers. Cygnar covers an enormous territory across a variety of geographical features, and I chose to locate Wexmere on the edge of the Upper Wyrmwall Mountains.

With a general idea in mind, I started thinking about the themes I wanted to explore in this town and its inhabitants. In Wexmere, I knew I wanted to focus on stories of greed at the edge of civilization, so it was an obvious choice to base the town’s industries around a recent gold rush. An obvious source of inspiration was the real-world history and folktales of the Black Hills town of Deadwood, and its tales of avarice, crime, and the settling of a frontier. But one theme isn’t enough to create a set of compelling plots, so I spent some time thinking about what else might happen in an isolated town on the edge of vast pine forest and a forbidding mountain range.

Being a transplant to Seattle and the Pacific Northwest, I’ve been fascinated by the mysterious, sometimes spooky wilderness that surrounds my new home. It was only natural that while I considered Wexmere’s geography I should draw parallels to the PNW and the other fiction it inspired. The weirdness of this place (and many of its inhabitants) has always impressed me, just as it did the inestimable David Lynch. As I was thinking of a second thematic axis on which to build Wexmere, it was perhaps predictable I should start thinking about the strange mysteries and stranger citizens of a certain classic television series featuring owls that are not what they seem and delicious cherry pie.

In the end, I built Wexmere to be not a simple, brutish gold rush town, but one inhabited by a collection of eccentric locals and threatening newcomers and surrounded by an unsettling wilderness with its own mysteries. All this, of course, viewed through the steam-powered lens of the Iron Kingdoms.

We’ll be covering a number of other small towns throughout the nations of the Iron Kingdoms in future Gazetteers, but we’ll leave the vast majority of these towns and villages for Game Masters to build themselves. I recommend looking to other sources of fact and fiction when developing towns and locations for use in your own games, and then working those ideas into the context of the Iron Kingdoms. I’d love to hear what places, themes, and fictions inspire you in your games!