Now that you’ve had a chance to check out some of the new content available in Iron Kingdoms Full Metal Fantasy Roleplaying Game: Kings, Nations, and Gods, I’d like to share some of the experiences I’ve had with this new RPG material in playtest games here at Privateer Press.

With the help of playtest coordinator Jack Coleman, each week we’ve run a playtest session based on material from one of the chapters. As I imagine many of you will, we started by picking an adventuring company and building characters that would fit within it. Sometimes we’d go a step further and build whole parties that shared a single career, like the squad of Man-O-War who fought valiantly to defend against a blighted Nyss attack.

One of the first groups we built still really stands out to me: the Unorthodox Engagement Team. With a Stormsmith, Stormblade, and Storm Lance backed up by an Arcane Tempest Gun Mage, the team was ready to electrocute and gun down anything that crossed its path.

Our playtest games aren’t really traditional sessions of the Iron Kingdoms roleplaying game. We rewind the action, talk about what other likely outcomes could have occurred, and often reroll die rolls that fall too far outside a typical result (we don’t need hours and hours of playtesting to realize that rolling snake eyes sucks). Additionally, since the playtest sessions are fairly limited encounters, there isn’t a lot of room to build the big, dramatic stories the Iron Kingdoms RPG tells so well. Still, I do like to give the playtesters a kernel of a story to latch onto… Despite all the peculiarities in how we do it, we’re still testing a roleplaying game!

The story I presented to our Unorthodox Engagement Team was a simple one. They were tasked with a foray into the Thornwood Forest, where a Khadoran scouting party had set up a semi-permanent camp. Once the Cygnarans located the camp, they were instructed to investigate its purpose and deal with any Khadoran aggressors they encountered. All in all, a pretty cut-and-dry setup.

They moved in, ready to smack around the boys in red with a few well-placed lightning bolts. They expected a force of Winter Guard, maybe a ’jack marshal or two, but I wanted the chance to play with some of the new toys in the book, too. What they thought would be a simple engagement turned out to be a small squadron of single-career NPCs with the new Assault Kommando career, led by a Military Officer trained as a Man-O-War.

Witnessing the battle between the player characters and the Khadoran NPCs was incredible. The Assault Kommandos fell forward in pairs, firing volleys from their Vilovski carbines while the Man-O-War acted as the bulwark of their defense. Meanwhile, the Stormsmith called up an incredible storm and started hurling lightning bolts (which his Storm Knight comrades didn’t have to worry about when they charged the oncoming Khadorans!) while the Gun Mage provided arcane support and devastating rune shots.

Despite it being so early in the testing process, I still remember this session vividly. It was great to see how dramatic the effects of the new careers were, particularly when pitted against one another. I had such a great time running the playtest that I had different groups return to the same site in the Thornwood time and again, where they could still see the signs of the battle that was fought there. The tree split by a lightning strike, the hole the Gun Mage had blasted through the wall of one of the encampment’s buildings, even the rusted hulk of the Man-O-War armor. Each time I got to reference them in another game they felt like a little trophy, a testament to how much fun and how memorable that early game was.

Until next time,
—M