Welcome back to the Iron Kingdoms. You might notice some changes.

With Iron Kingdoms: Requiem, we are once again returning to roleplaying in the world of western Immoren. Fresh on the heels of kicking infernal invaders out of their home, the people of the Iron Kingdoms have been rewarded with a rare opportunity to take a breath, rebuild, and maybe not be in the midst of a continent-spanning war.

I wonder how long that will last?

As you prepare to delve into the Iron Kingdoms once more, we thought we’d bring you a series of posts offering advice on how to get the most out of your adventuring career… until you stumble into the wrong chamber of an Orgoth ruin, uncover a cabal of infernal cultists, or end up on a dire troll’s buffet cart, that is.

Let’s dive into this relaxed-fit installment of advice for your roleplaying adventures!

Getting the Gang Together

One of the first challenges many RPG groups face is coming up with a framework to explain why their (sometimes wildly different) characters decide to adventure together.

Iron Kingdoms: Requiem offers one possible solution in the form of Adventuring Companies. These are kind of like a background for a group of characters that gives them a shared purpose. When players decide to form an Adventuring Company, they’re also giving the GM a subtle clue as to the kind of game they might want to play. If the players decide to pursue a Pirate Crew Adventuring Company, they probably don’t want to engage in a lot of courtly intrigue.

An Adventuring Company comes with a set of suggestions for Company Accomplishments, the tasks the company can perform that makes other people take notice of them. As the members of the company tick off these accomplishments and gain levels, the prestige of the company grows, and the characters are rewarded with an expanding set of benefits.

Of course, Adventuring Companies are an entirely optional new set of rules, and not every group will want to use them. For groups like that who might be looking for an alternative reason to gang up, consider the following options.

Refugees

The Claiming was a difficult time for people of all the Iron Kingdoms. The infernals destroyed whole towns, and anyone who wasn’t caught in their scything claws had to flee to places that could offer some measure of safety. These displaced refugees wound up in cities across the Iron Kingdoms, often forming their own small communities in their new homes.

A group of refugee characters can come from any background, any culture. The thing that unites them is their shared status as displaced people, and they might band together simply because the only people they can trust are those who have experienced similar trials and tribulations.

Avengers

For reasons similar to the refugees above, there are people in the Iron Kingdoms who have lost something of great personal importance during the Claiming. The loss could be members of a character’s family, a loss of home, or an abstract thing like the loss of trust in someone—traitors like Nicia and Runewood likely have a lot of people who are interested in seeing them pay for their actions.

Some people aren’t willing to let such losses go unpunished. They set out looking for vengeance. A group of characters can be united by a common desire to avenge their own personal loss, with a common foe that they work together to bring down. This foe could be a person like Orrin Midwinter or a particular infernal, or it might be an organization like the Order of the Red Doctrine. Pursuing such elusive foes is sure to bring the characters together across the Iron Kingdoms as the object of their collective vengeance tries to flee the group of dogged pursuers.

Rebuilders

The wounds of the Claiming mark all of the Iron Kingdoms, but not everyone is content to leave such wounds to fester. A group of characters could come together through a shared desire to rebuild that which was destroyed. Helping a modest town pull itself back from the brink of Oblivion by finding new citizens and rebuilding the shattered structures within it, rebuilding a sept of one of the gods that was marked by the infernals for destruction, or even reconstructing a chapter of an organization like the Golden Crucible or Strangelight Workshop could be the common thread that binds a group of disparate characters together.

Those are just a few examples of how a group of new characters could find common ground to begin their journey into the world of Iron Kingdoms: Requiem.

How will you start your journey?