New Game: Iron Kingdoms Full Metal Fantasy

[Dean]

Okay PUSSIES. Privateer Press has a new RPG out and it's probably too INTENSE for your TINY MANBAG! So now it's time to NUT UP and listen to my TOTALLY METAL review of the new IRON KINGDOMS roleplaying game; FULL METAL FANTASY!!! Now get your BALLS out of the purse your woman keeps them in and listen to how a REAL MAN REVIEWS!

CORE MECHANIC
TESTICLES

I'm very sorry.

Let me try again.

CORE MECHANIC
The Core Mechanic of the IKRPG is very similar to the game although slightly obfuscated for the purpose of looking more like an RPG. You still roll 2d6, add a number that's usually some stat and try to beat a DC. Your character is a mixture of his Stats, his Type, and his 2 Careers.

STATS
Every character has 9 stats. Most of the numbers are between 4 and 6 although some could go as high as 8.

*Physique: Adds to HP and your characters Armor
*Agility: Adds to HP and your characters Defense
*Intelligence: Adds to HP and nothing and fuck you you brainy queer why don't you go play Chess or something, fuck you.
*Speed: Is your characters movement speed (in inches) and adds to your Defense
*Strength: Adds to melee damage
*Prowess: Adds to melee attacks
*Poise: (Why?) Adds to ranged attacks
*Arcane: Only magic characters have this stat. It determines how many "Focus" or "Fury" you have to spend on magic spells or whatnot every turn
*Perception: Can blow me, although it does actually add to your Defense so you will put points into it if you have a highly defensive build.

TYPES
Characters then pick one of four "Archetypes" for their character to be. There are Mighty hero's, Skilled hero's, Gifted Hero's, and Intellectual Hero's. This is actually pretty cool. Each Type comes with a big trick they get off the bat and a list of Super-feats they can take that other archetypes can't.
*Mighty: You get Weapon Master (an extra 50% to all your damage basically) and get a bunch of tricks related to melee attacks and being tough because of your huge balls one presumes.
*Skilled: You get 2 attacks a turn instead of 1 and get a mixed bag of tricks both related to being good with weapons and good at various skills in the game.
*Gifted: You get an Arcane stat and can cast spells. Your archetype tricks aren't good but considering it's the only way to access actual magic it's still a pretty strong choice.
*Intellectual: HAHAHAHAHAHA What are you gay? Why did you pick this did you think it would be good!? Ahhhhhh, hey everybody this guy wants to play an Intellectual character! He's probably a queer right!? Yeah as an intellectual you give everybody a +1 to hit and damage if they're near you and a bunch of tricks related to sucking dicks so if you wanted to suck dicks real bad and needed to know the archetype that had the most tricks related to dick sucking then Intellectual is probably what you should go for.

CAREERS
You pick two careers at character creation and can pick up as many as 2 more throughout your characters.......career. Careers are basically talent trees that tell you what feats abilities and spells you can buy with your XP. Plus they all give you starting bonuses and gear based on that career. You can be a Warcaster or a Spellcaster or a Tinkerer or a Soldier or a Spy. You can also be an Aristocrat if your mother drank a lot while she was pregnant. Some careers are shitty and some are great but honestly a lot of the shitty ones make really good third careers after you're already a combat monster and are looking for more obscure abilities to round out a character. All in all I consider this a pretty good part of the system.

ABILITIES AND FINGER QUOTES "SKILLS"
So the game is a mix of two (really three) things. Abilities and Skills. An ability is everything from Arcane Bolt the spell to Two Weapon Fighting the feat. In general this is a good thing. If you got a new spell this session and I got an ability to shoot with my off hand we both got an ability that will add to our characters power directly. Skills are really two things; Military Skills and....other. Military Skills are like "Pistol" or whatever. For every 1 rank in that skill you get +1 to hit with that weapon. So you pick a weapon or at most two and then you max out that weapon. The best choice is Great Weapon which encompasses basically every awesome HTH weapon in the game and having this skill makes you flat out better than non-great weapon combatants. It's so good that I would likely use a great weapon even with no ranks in it and say stuff the to-hit rolls and still use an 8 foot gun-spear like a fucking Boss-man. The other skills are......bad. They are bad. They have things like Seduction and Investigation and Negotiation. Now with the exception of Negotiation (which, side note; does allow you to sell things, Huzzah!) basically all of these things are strictly MTP. There was very little effort put into the non-murdering parts of this book on basically every level.

GEAR AND STEAMJACKS
Okay the basic swords and guns in this book are fine. Great Weapons are better than others but whatever. Also there's this one gun called a "Quad Iron" which can allow you to chain shots to a truly insane degree. Up to like....24 attacks in a turn if everything goes optimally. I pointed this out in a thread over at the IK forums and people were....unreceptive. We can talk about that later if anyone would like.

More importantly the Steamjacks suck. They suck. The Steamjack chapter in this book is probably the worst thing in the book. It mixes fluff and rules so interchangeably that it is virtually impossible to take any real information out of it and when you do it is occasionally contradictory. As a PARTIAL SAVE of this the second book is supposed to cover the nations that use Warjacks and stuff and thus will probably have more rules. This means one of two things
1: If the rules ARE in the second book and they are actually good it means Privateer Press went to print with unfinished and shitty Jack rules but knew people would lose their shit if their was absolutely nothing on Warjacks in the entire book. If this is the case I consider that fine.
2: If the rules are ABSENT or SHITTY then it means that Privateer Press spent too much time admiring their collective huge balls to actually write decent jack rules. This is unacceptable as the Jacks are to Iron Kingdoms was Spaceships are to Star Wars and your game is garbage if it cannot handle it's own big awesome thing.
There really isn't much to say....this chapter is seriously garbage so lets move on.

MAGIC
Ok....well....two things. As combat magic this stuff is pretty good. It has about 90 different fucking flavors of shooting a mind-lazor but there's enough variety of blasting here to make people feel individual. Fireball guy lights people on fire in a blast and electric guy arcs shots to lots of people over the field. However if you aren't a fan of combat magic you can take your VAGINA and BALLS balls balls balls.
There are no non combat based spells. Some do mind control, some heal people, about a thousand shoot brain-lazers, but not one lets you fly. That's fine if that's the setting you want but by writing a thousand spells and then only including a one or two sentence descriptor of how they work you get into 4E territory.
INTERMISSION
Speaking of which. Hey! Who remembers the Disassociated Mechanics stuff? Well there's a new article about that article (articleception) by the Alexandrian so I'll link to that in the hopes of starting a new clusterfuck here: http://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/172 ... ief-primer
NOW WE'RE BACK
And this shit is FIRMLY in dissociated mechanics territory. There's a ton of spells that people don't know how they work or what the repercussions of various interpretations are. "Can I use the X-ray bullet spell that lets me shoot through cover to just see through cover?" "Can I use the mind control spell on mounts or animals or just people" "Can I only use the time slowing spell to dodge bullets or can I use it finish this book fast before the big exam!" etc. There are, and will always be, threads figuring out how all the spells actually work because there's no way to know from what's written.

IM BORED NOW SO LETS FINISH THIS FUCKING THING
Ok so all in all I have to say this RPG is pretty good if you take it for exactly what it is and can do. It honestly is very good as a combat game. It's various combat abilities are well balanced, somewhat interesting, and can be combined in neat ways. Everything that is not directly related to your characters ability to break faces is done poorly. And all in all that's more or less the review. It is obvious that the design crew is too busy discussing whether their balls are or are not "totally metal" to write anything resembling rules for any part of the game they can't envision in a slow motion instant replay. Privateer Press likes their Hats backwards, their Out of combat rules vague, and their broads fingerblasted. As a slightly supernatural combat simulator this succeeds and as literally anything else it fails.
So all in all I recommend it. It's a decent book and it would be fun to play with. Just be well aware that this is basically 4E done well.

[Red_Rob]

Good review. Needs more BALLS. One thing though...

The Core Mechanic of the IKRPG is very similar to the game although slightly obfuscated for the purpose of looking more like an RPG.

Other than "The game. You just lost it." I don't know what game this refers to. Although I would like to see an RPG based on The Game.

[Avoraciopoctules]

Iron Kingdoms is based on a wargame. The name is Warmachine / Hordes or something like that.

[Dean]

Good review. Needs more BALLS. One thing though...

The Core Mechanic of the IKRPG is very similar to the game although slightly obfuscated for the purpose of looking more like an RPG.

Other than "The game. You just lost it." I don't know what game this refers to. Although I would like to see an RPG based on The Game.

Oh my bad. It has very similar mechanics to the Warmachine/Hordes tabletop game. In fact it is almost identical in a lot of ways. If you've never played Warmachine combat goes like this.

Every model has stats like below-

You have a MAT(Melee Attack) and a RAT(Ranged Attack). Your Weapons have a POW (Power). Characters have a Defense and an Armor rating and then they have a certain number of health boxes. Like below->

A Soldier
MAT: 4
RAT: 4
Sword POW: 10
Gun POW: 8
DEF: 11
ARM: 15
HEALTH: 5

So if two of these soldiers fought each other in melee the one that went first would roll 2d6+4(his MAT) and try to get a 11 or higher (his opponents Defense). If he succeeded at hitting he would roll for damage wherein he would roll 2d6+10 (his sword's power) and try to beat 15 (his opponents armor). For every point he got over 15 his opponent would check off one Health box and when he checked off all 5 that guy would be dead. The combat in the RPG is almost exactly the same except you arrive at those stats in a weirder way. Like how your RAT is now your Poise plus your Rifle or Pistol skill.

[Koumei]

I have to say, I wish Anima had done that with their roleplaying system - just expanding their (mostly functional, in Anima's case) wargame rules and adding a "When not punching people in the face" section rather than reinventing the whole thing, complete with percentile charts for parrying and damage multipliers. That could have made something good.

Now Warmahordes isn't a great wargame system, but I'm willing to put that down to the individual things in it (and the "RUSH RUSH RUSH, THROW IT ALL ON THE TABLE AND SHOUT THAT YOU WIN!" approach), not that the core system is unworkable. Presumably the Steamroller Rules aren't in effect for an RPG (actually, if they're Warmahordes players, they probably WILL shout "A quick game's a good game!" every two minutes), and the "Ponies are awesome, Cryx suck balls, lots of men with guns are better than mecha" factors aren't likely to be an issue - if you don't have the choice to play as ten dudes with rifles, then your one dude may as well be a mage with a 'jack.

Would you say it's better or worse than their D&D version?

[Dean]

I would say it is vastly better than the D&D hack for the game. The D&D version was seriously weak and basically didn't allow you to do anything you wanted to. Guns we're terrible unless you bought a dozen blunderbusses and juggled them in which case they were too good, I literally don't even remember it's Jack rules, magic was just specialized spell lists. It basically just told you to play D&D but pretend their are awesome robots around. I really don't know what they were going for but YMMV.

Interestingly I would wager those problems might still arise in the RPG. For instance ponies are still giga-awesome. I might argue that the best 300 gold you could spend in this game (which is about what you make in a session or two) is not a new gun or new armor but is a basic Warhorse with Full Barding. Warhorses in this game are PIMP. If you based a character entirely around having untouchable Armor you can get to Armor 19 I think with about 12 health. Now that's pretty good honestly. But a basic Warhorse with barding has an Armor of 22 and 12 health and just by sitting on one you make everyone who attacks you roll a d6 and on a 1-4 they hit your horse and not you. And there is almost no attack in the game that would even scratch his fucking paint. That horse could stand in the middle of a gunfight and fall asleep. And if an attack DID somehow hurt him than thank GOD it hit him because it would have turned you into a reddish brown stain.

[Koumei]

The Jack rules were basically "So, you chose to be a Cleric? GOOD CHOICE MY FRIEND! Seeing as they weren't pants-shittingly awesome enough, HAVE A MECHA!"

Sure, you needed to take a PrCl for it, but I think it might have been full caster progression and I remind you that you qualify for it by being a Cleric, so it's full steam ahead GO FOR IT!

IIRC the way it plays out is you make a skill check to issue commands, and then it goes and attempts to follow those commands, and is basically a big construct that is better than the party fighter will ever be (spoiler: that isn't hard).

So, the Jacks are currently not really playable but might end up better, worse or the same. Okay, that's fair enough. And I am somewhat pleased by this one being Pony Edition. Friendship is Magic, I guess.

[Silent Wayfarer]

How easy is it to think out? It seems you could just be an Iron Fang and lance people with explosive-tipped lances. Also, I've heard warcasters can pump their attack and damage rolls directly when they're not spamming attacks, and considering the lethality of this system you can probably slaughter shit en masse.

[Dean]

You are correct, Iron Fang Lancers do kill the fuck out of people. And you're right, Warcasters can kill the fuck out of a number of people per turn. But see in the Warmachine miniatures game offense is very easy to come by. It isn't hard to figure out a way to murder the hell out of someone with one model or another. The hard things to get are the ability to survive attacks and the ability to kill many people from considerable range. I remember when I started playing Warmachine I immediately went for Skorne Titan armies because they were the biggest and the strongest and could hit the hardest. But I lost quite a bit because hitting someone for DOUBLE their HP doesn't do any better than just hitting them for half again their HP like most models can. Later my army builds became more and more about defense and charge range until by the end, at my local club at least, I was generally undefeated with my Khadoran Cavalry army (using EVlad if anyone cares) which had a 22" charge range (half the board and about 2 to 3 times any other armies range of effect) and could generally kill half an army in it's initial charge. See the ability to -not be hit- and to kill a -lot of people- is hard to come by in Warmachine which I did in that scenario by being -far away- and fielding -lots of ponies- respectively. The roleplaying game mimics this theme. So yeah you could make an Iron Fang Lancer that could probably kill the fuck out of anything it hit but I think that trick should be the -third- thing an optimal Warmachine character should develop after a knot-cutting method of survivability and high rate of fire.

[Voss]

CORE MECHANIC
The Core Mechanic of the IKRPG is very similar to the game although slightly obfuscated for the purpose of looking more like an RPG. You still roll 2d6, add a number that's usually some stat and try to beat a DC. Your character is a mixture of his Stats, his Type, and his 2 Careers.

STATS
Every character has 9 stats. Most of the numbers are between 4 and 6 although some could go as high as 8.

Am I correct in assuming that 'real characters' (rather than the crappy soldiers you used in the example) are rolling 2d6+ (somewhere between 6 and 8) against defense scores that are somewhere between 12 and 17 (ie, the usual standard deviation for WM/Hordes)?
That was pretty much my biggest concern, because while that is mostly functional for a skirmish wargame, it seems pretty damn limited for an RPG.

Also, given the origins and the system, does this have something similiar to the absurd lethality rates of the Warhammer RPGs? For some reason RPG versions of wargames tend to have characters that just fall over dead really quickly.

Also rather curious how the stealth skills work out, as the double tap sniper who murders the fuck out of people before they know he's there seems an obvious survival strategy.

[Koumei]

Also rather curious how the stealth skills work out, as the double tap sniper who murders the fuck out of people before they know he's there seems an obvious survival strategy.

That sounds like sissy girly stuff, STOP HIDING AND SHOW SOME BALLS!

[Dean]

"Real Characters" are usually rolling 2d6 and adding a number between 5 and 7 most of the time for attacks. Most starting numbers will get you something between 5 and 7 with slight outliers of 4 and 8. Now as for defense scores.....I have no idea. Defense and Armor in this game are totally all over the place. It is POSSIBLE to invest heavily in your defenses and make a character with a starting Defense of 19 (which is fucking unhittable) or a starting armor of 21 or so which is very difficult to damage. You could also split the difference and start with a 16 defense or so and a 15 armor which is very good in both directions. However it is ALSO totally possible to start with a defense of 6 and an armor of 4 which means everything hits you and kills you. Most people who I've seen make characters don't really focus on defensive stats because the appeal of beating someone to death with a giant lightning blade is pretty fucking high.

So yeah things in most games will be very lethal. Offense is very easy to purchase in great quantities and most people want to purchase it. I think if people played "honestly" and didn't fudge encounters much we would eventually see a change in the metagame of builds where characters built people with really good defenses at Char-gen which then bought into their offensive power later on. But as it stands most characters could probably kill most characters in one or two rounds.

Stealth works in two ways. Their is the Stealth "Skill" which is ass. And the Stealth "Condition" which is amazing. The Stealth condition which you can apply to yourself through some abilities and spells makes it so no one can target you if you are more then 5"(30 feet) away from them. So even if they "know" where you are they just can't legally say "I shoot that fucker".
Now the Stealth SKILL is the traditional convoluted mess of having vague guidelines that it works better in the dark and gets bonuses and gets negatives in well lit spaces and all that fuckery. So no, don't be impressed, it's every stealth game ever that pretends vaguely telling you to make Stealth VS Perception rolls at vague times for vague reasons is enough to let you tell your stories.

And yeah. Stealth Sniper is fucking incredible. The best gun can have a range of like 700 feet which is 9 ACTUAL feet on whatever gaming table you use. And if you have actual Stealth then your enemy can't even target you for 8 1/2 of them

[Voss]

Also rather curious how the stealth skills work out, as the double tap sniper who murders the fuck out of people before they know he's there seems an obvious survival strategy.

That sounds like sissy girly stuff, STOP HIDING AND SHOW SOME BALLS!

Balls can come out when teabagging the mangled corpses of enemies. Or possibly with a modified supergun that fires the balls of emasculated warbeasts.