Burrowowl

The new Iron Kingdoms Roleplaying Game system has been out for a couple of weeks, so it’s high time we take a look at character creation options.  A striking feature of the process is that each player character has two starting careers, and can pick up more as his adventuring life runs on.  So which careers to pick?  Some appear to compliment each other nicely, but with all your skill and ability choices limited by per-career lists, you run a serious risk of making somebody that’s totally worthless in a scrap or completely helpless outside a fight.

To help mitigate this, the following technique can be applied to each career you are considering.  Plot out your careers on two axes, Urban vs. Wilderness and Combat vs. Skills.  If your GM wants to run a combat-intensive urban campaign, you would be well-served to lean towards a career combination that suits.  Such a character may be a boat-anchor in a wilderness skilled campaign.

The Procedure: Keep two running tallies, one for Urban, one for Combat.  Add five to the Urban tally for every starting ability, connection, or skill that is clearly urban, subtract five for those that are clearly not. Many don’t fit neatly, so don’t apply any number for those.  For abilities, connections, and skills available through advancement, add or subtract four for every ability or connection.  The values are ten for any skill capped at four, five for any skill capped at three, one for any skill capped at two.  Repeat for Combat but add five for each spell the career starts with (spellcasters are for killing stuff in this setting, mostly).

As and example, take the Alchemist’s Combat axis:

• +10 Combat for starting abilities
• +10 Combat for starting military skills.
• -10 Combat for starting occupational skills.
• +16 Combat for advancement abilities.
• -4 Combat for advancement connections.
• +12 Combat for advancement military skills.
• -61 Combat for advancement occupational skills.
• Total of -27 Combat. The Alchemist is mostly a skilled career.

Now for the Urban axis:

• +0 Urban for starting abilities.
• +5 Urban for starting skills.
• +4 Urban for advancement connections.
• +41 Urban for advancement skills
• Total of +50 Urban. There’s nothing inherently outdoorsy about being an Alchemist.

Contrast this with the Ranger:

• +10 Combat for starting abilities
• +10 Combat for starting military skills.
• -20 Combat for starting occupational skills.
• +36 Combat for advancement abilities
• +42 Combat for advancement military skills.
• -61 Combat for advancement occupational skills.
• -10 Urban for starting abilities.
• -10 Urban for starting skills.
• -32 Urban for advancement abilities.
• -39 Urban for advancement skills
• Total of 17 Combat. The Ranger has a lot of skills and a lot of fighting prowess
• Total of -91 Urban. This career is built for the wild places between cities.

Theoretically if you were to make a character that is an Alchemist/Ranger you add these scores together for a -10 Combat / -41 Urban character that is probably better suited for a wilderness campaign with a mix of fighting and skill play than for a combat-heavy urban campaign.

Of course, this is highly-generalized and a great deal of the point totals come from choices available to the character as he gains experience. An Alchemist/Ranger that keeps picking up skills from the Alchemist career has he advances is going to be much more urban, and depending on the abilities selected during advancement there’s a lot of room to become something of a walking calamity in combat.

This past week was the beginning of my oldest son’s post-1st-grade summer vacation, so I figured it was high time to expose the lad to Dungeons & Dragons. I didn’t have my 4th Edition handy, so we busted out the 3.5 Player’s Handbook and whipped up a paladin. His choice. He went off on a grand little adventure, and had just earned enough experience points for third level (I only let people level up when they have some downtime) when a particularly-lucky goblin cut short his adventuring career. Rather than go through all the paperwork of making another D&D character, a task that stretches the limits of a six-year-old’s attention span, we gave a new system a try.

Old School Hack is a free-to-download rules-light system that encourages fairly free-form play, is explicitly geared towards low-preptime scenarios, uses only two types of dice, and weighs in at a whopping 26 pages. Character generation is a breeze. Roll 2d10 six times to get your stats (which don’t have a direct bearing on your ability to whack a mace upside an orc’s head), pick a class ability, select a general type of weapon (my boy’s Thief has a “reach weapon,” which could be any number of things but we say it’s a spear), select a general type of armor (four choices, nothing complicated), decide whether you have a shield, figure out why you’re adventuring to start with, and roll a die or two for starting wealth and off you go. Each character class has a highly-reasonable list of starting equipment, a selection of four class abilities that you can pick up as you advance in levels, everything you need.

Play is simple, with an order of events spelled out cleanly between six types of things you can do, and which takes precedence over which. Attacks are 2d10, with one die being designated the “face die;” if the face die shows a 10 and the total was good enough to hit the target, you hit him right in his stupid face. Take that, bad guy! No need to roll for damage, most things do 1 damage on a hit. Why sweat that stuff? When you make up a bad-guy the hit-points you give him (or whatever metaphor your game uses) are really just there to rough out how many hits from the player-characters the thing can withstand. There isn’t even a big list of monsters’ stats. Just determine if it’s a minion, a guard, a big bad-guy/villain, or a really big monster. No problem.

There’s no getting bogged down in foot-by-foot movement rules, it has an “arena”-based scene setup that reminds me of FATE’s zone system. One of the six things you can do is move from one arena to a neighboring one. Another is to impede somebody from doing just that. This makes for plenty of tactical movement for your actual at-table needs unless you’re seriously itching from from miniatures tactical skirmishing. In which case there are lots of tactical miniatures combat games out there to slake your thirsts.

Player advancement is handled as a side-effect of the “awesome points” game mechanic, by which players reward each other for outstanding play. If you see another player doing something awesome, grab a token and give it to him. These tokens represent awesome points, and you can spent them back into the collective pool to improve your rolls, temporarily get new abilities, and mitigate damage taken. Once you’ve earned and spent twelve awesome points, you can go up a level. There’s only four levels, so this isn’t the game for you if you want to run a multiple-year epic tale. Your characters start out highly competent, and can end up somewhat awesome.

Your character’s main stats (which have cool names like Brawn and Cunning and Daring) aren’t directly used for attack and defense. Instead you use them for the wide variety of non-attacky, non-defendy actions you might take. They even have a convenient diagram to give players and DMs a good idea of what to use for what:

If you find yourself needing to run a pick-up game from time to time, Old School Hack is a great tool to keep at your disposal. The price is right (a free PDF), so you’ve got nothing to lose but a little bandwidth and some time.

“Four wards alone –
Hold onto those, and curse the vulgar.
Ox, plough, fool,
From-roof–there are no others for you.”
– Late Medieval Gangsta Rap