Iron Kingdoms makes campaign design a SNAP for the gamemaster. Here’s why:

The career system in the Iron Kingdoms Roleplaying Game has been constructed in such a way that makes campaign design quite easy, albeit requiring a level of discussion and even cooperation with those participating in the game as players. Today, we’ll be examining this concept and its overall effect on the game.

If anything, the IKRPG is flush with career concepts ranging from the comprehensively applicable to the incredibly niche. While the Core Rulebook leans strongly and appropriately towards the former end of the spectrum, expansion material released through Privateer Press’s various publication avenues have introduced a cavalcade of careers and adventuring companies that drive the theme and direction of campaign design in a very assertive manner. With nation-specific careers linked to unique military elements like Stormsmiths, Knights Exemplar, Amethyst Rose Gun Mages, and Assault Kommandos, it would be highly inappropriate to mix many of the available careers save for campaigns most carefully designed with this concept in mind.

Even when national elements are taken into account, many of the careers within the given subset may not be best applied or suitable for a given campaign. For example, a Cygnaran Unorthodox Engagement Team regularly engaged in urban infiltration and subterfuge will most likely not be the best place for a character with the Storm Lance career since their talents won’t be of much use in bar fights or sneaking around in heavy, noisy Storm Knight plate armor. Also, horses don’t make the most stealthy of bedfellows, unless, of course, your name is Connor Davenport.

This may sound prohibitive to many, but I personally feel like this is a strength of the system since party creation in the IKRPG can and often does act as a catalyst for campaign design and vice versa, where with other systems the two are routinely mutually exclusive entities where neither serves the interests of the other. I have too often engaged in campaigns that are fabricated on the notion of five random strangers without any kind of pre-existing fellowship or even common loyalty meeting in a tavern wherein an exciting, yet contrived, journey of fame and fortune is commenced.

This isn’t to say that there isn’t a place for this type of thing, or that games founded on such grounds are without value, just that I feel a more collaborative narrative process can be attained when all parties are involved in more parts of the procedure, and that I find such results to be a more rewarding experience. The Game Master will obviously need to do much of the work behind closed doors, but I have found that the most successful campaigns I have participated in start with communal character creation as opposed to simply showing up to the first game session with a character that was designed in a vacuum without heed for the nature of the campaign or the other members of the party.