A Shadow on the Table - Cultural Considerations for the Iron Kingdoms RPG

Let me just start this by saying that the Iron Kingdoms RPG is brilliant - I've been planning to do a video on it for a while, I just need enough background images and some appropriate background music.  It's an amazing setting and I love that the basis of it is the fusion of magic and technology (as opposed to them being distinct or even at-odds with each other, like in Arcanum), but because of the nature of the different cultures in the setting as well as the very recent history of it, a player-character's homeland can cause some serious friction among players that can lead to disaster before the campaign's even gotten underway (not exaggerating there; that exact thing is what killed a forum-based game of it I was in a while back).

See; while in most RPG settings you can handwave away most national, cultural or racial disputes unless you’re intentionally playing either a bigoted character or one who’s had bad experiences with certain peoples, that’s not really an option in the Iron Kingdoms since there are relatively few nations and they've all been fighting each other for, at least, the last couple of decades.

For instance; if you play someone from Cygnar who are sort-of the poster boys of Warmachine (one of the wargames of the setting), you’re going to be wary around both Khadorans and Menites (whether the latter are from the Protectorate of Menoth or not).  Cygnar and Khador have been enemies and rivals, fighting over the Thornwood for centuries or longer.  Most recently; just five years before the setting’s present day, Khador invaded Cygnar’s ally, Llael, and committed to a very massive and costly war that Llael (and Cygnar, which had intervened on the Llaelese side of the conflict) ultimately lost.  As for the Protectorate; Cygnar got into a big war with them just a year or so after the Llaelese War that caused some serious damage and devastation to a sizeable portion of Cygnar’s capital city, Caspia (and doing the same to the Protectorate's capital of Sul).  So any ex-military character or a character from Caspia has lived through at least one of those wars (unless they happened to be out of town when it broke out and kept their distance until the dust settled).

True; you could get away with saying your character never actually got posted to the front lines in either one, but look at real-life history.  How long after World War 2 were people in the Allied nations still wary of Germans?  How long after the Cold War were Americans still wary about Russians?  You didn’t have to actually fight in those wars to be uneasy around people from the other side, it’s the same with the nations in the Iron Kingdoms.  Honestly; the only human nation where you could get away with being un-biased about any nation would be if your character is from Ord.  They’re a neutral nation, kinda like Switzerland.  The closest they’ve had to a war was when a Khadoran village near the border with Ord wanted to defect and ended up getting horrifically slaughtered by a certain Khadoran warcaster.  So that was just an all-Khadoran matter that just happened to occur near the border.

Species-wise you’ve got some of the same but in a more limited respect.  There’s tensions between the trollkin kriels and the Cygnaran government after King Leto went back on promises he made to respecting the territory of the kriels.  There’s some distrust of the Nyss among certain groups because most Nyss are blighted, corrupted and controlled by the dragon Everblight.  Not all of them, but enough that that impression filters down among those who have heard of the Legion of Everblight.

Probably the easiest way to play an Iron Kingdoms character when you know nothing about the setting is probably to play an Iosan.  The elves of Ios are a very insular people.  Even the ones who aren’t part of the Retribution of Scyrah don’t like to talk to non-Iosans about their culture and beliefs.  You can get away with knowing bugger-all about Iosan culture because your character would never talk about it to anyone unless they’re talking to another Iosan, who they don’t need to talk to about it because it’s a shared culture - you don’t go talking to someone living in your city to talk about your city’s culture because there’s not really any need.  And an Iosan character can get away with ignorance of the human nations because they probably only know about the nations in the most peripheral sense.  And if you don’t like the idea of playing an elf; don’t worry - Iosans are probably the most un-elfy elves I have ever seen.  An Iosan Knight/Man-at-Arms is probably one of the tankiest characters you can make without resorting to making a trollkin or ogrun - neither of whom have access to the Knight career so probably won’t have the starting assets to begin with full-plate armour.  You can make Gimli as an Iosan; a big guy with a huge sword and a rocking beard and that wouldn’t look out-of-place.  Well a beard that long might look out of place, but - look at this guy.

That’s probably the biggest beard an Iosan can get away with.  I could be wrong on that; for all I know, there’s some hard-drinking Iosan with a huge axe somewhere in Immoren who has a beard so big you could lose wildlife in it.  But Thalen Malvyss here is probably a good upper limit to work with regarding elven beards.

About the only typically-elven stereotypes that Iosans share are an air of mystery among non-elves (just because they’re tight-lipped about themselves), that they try and preserve nature but not in the environmental conservationist angle, more that they don’t see the point of mucking with nature when they can get the same result with a little extra work and that the overall design aesthetic they have for their buildings, weapons, armour and so on all have this smooth, natural flow to them but it has less of an actual ‘fantasy elf’ feel and more alien.  So you can get away with just about any sort of character and not have to feel like you’re playing a full-on elf if that’s not your sort of thing.

The GM, though, needs to consider this stuff and how where the campaign is set can interact with the characters everyone’s intending to play.  For instance; if you’re setting a campaign in Llael where the players are helping the Llaelese Resistance, it’s probably a good idea to ban the overtly-Khadoran careers like the Iron Fang, Man-o-War and the Doom Reaver.  That last one in particular because Doom Reavers are practically an icon of the horrors Khador inflicted in their invasion - violent criminals chained to ancient magical swords that turn them into raging berserkers.  And Khador unleashed hordes of these guys into various cities in Llael, like Riversmet.  Doesn’t matter how in-control a Doom Reaver is; one of those guys walks into a Resistance base he’s going to have every single gun in the whole damn place levelled right at his head while they get every warjack on the base up and running.  They are not going to screw around.  If you’re the GM, have a hand in character creation; make sure the characters they’re making will fit with the campaign.  Whether it’s as simple as keeping someone from making a cavalry character for an urban campaign or as big as trying to prevent cultural issues from coming up as potential PvP, it’s still a part of being a GM.

I can attest to this; as I mentioned back at the start of this post, I was in an Iron Kingdoms campaign on a forum called Myth Weavers and the first meeting of our characters in our new offices consisted almost entirely of the party Doom Reaver staring down the barrels from our two Gun Mages - the Llaelese Gun Mage/Spy and her Gun Mage/Bounty Hunter partner from Ord (who was mainly doing it because she was nearly freaking out).  Now; the Doom Reaver’s player and the GM had apparently discussed a lot about the character privately and the Doom Reaver’s character sheet was also private so I had no idea what, if any, safeguards the GM had worked out for this character and, from how the campaign’s started, I was genuinely worried that the character wouldn’t fit in at all.  We were supposed to be a team of freelance troubleshooters working in Corvis - think a cross between Burn Notice and Leverage.  We’d be doing subtle work and nothing about the Doom Reaver career is subtle.  Needless to say; the campaign imploded.  Not only did the Llaelese Gun Mage shoot the Doom Reaver, but she did so right after our first client and two of our sponsors arrived.  Despite the campaign’s total failure, it served as a good example of why these cultural differences should be considered and how they could easily derail a campaign when not properly taken into account.

For this next section, I'll try and elaborate on the more problematic cultural relations.  Not to say you should avoid these, just to take great care with them and realise that they can very easily cause the campaign to implode unless the players are on the same page and are aware of this.

Khador, Llael & the Protectorate

I covered this one a bit earlier but, well, let's just say that most Llaelese have a rather dim view of Khadorans.  There are of course those who just don't care and even one group who have grown to like being part of Khador (a region known as Umbrey who have taken quite well to their new leader).  Needless to say, there is a resistance to the Khador occupation but they're having to fight a semi-guerrilla war on two fronts - the Khadorans and the Protectorate of Menoth's Northern Crusade, which has resulted in the nation being split into three regions; the part Khador controls, the part the Northern Crusade has taken, and the part that's free of both and led by the Resistance (... and having to deal with both Khador, the Protectorate and are catching the brunt of Cryx's activities in the region... so they're having a fun time).

The Llael-Protectorate relations aren't exactly great, but at least the Protectorate didn't level whole cities with artillery or flood the ones full of civilians with hordes of berserk, rampaging madmen.  Needless to say, there are plenty of people traumatised by the horrors Khador inflicted on the Llaelese.

Iron Kingdoms & Ios

This is probably the one Warmachine veterans are most likely to fall into, particularly if they’ve made a character based on a tabletop unit (such as a Stormblade or a member of the Steelheads).  Despite the Retribution of Scyrah being a full-blown Iosan faction in the wargame, in the actual setting fluff they haven’t had a whole lot of full-scale warfare with any of the human nations apart from Khador.  Oh; I don’t doubt that they’ve had skirmishes with the other nations and I wouldn’t be surprised if the Cygnaran Reconnaissance Service has a few files on them.  The fact that Gavyn Kyle, the greatest spymaster in all of Western Immoren, has no idea who the Retribution are beyond “a political faction of Ios” should give you a good idea of just how much your average footslogging soldier would know - somewhere in the region of “bugger” and “all”.

I’m mentioning this one because I recall something from not long after the game’s release where the party ran into a team of Retribution mage hunters and the party’s Stormblade blurted out exactly who they were and what they sought.  Now if Gavyn Kyle - a man so well connected and so good at gathering information he could probably find out the colour of Empress Vanar’s underthings in his sleep - doesn’t know what the smeg the Retribution are after, how the hell would a rank-and-file Stormblade know?  He and the GM were the only ones familiar with that bit of the setting and the Stormblade’s player metagamed and killed all mystery that the encounter (and its subsequent connections to the rest of the campaign) would have added.  I’m sure it was a genuine accident by the Stormblade’s player, assuming that such information was well-known among the Cygnaran army simply due to the Retribution being a full-blown tabletop faction, but it was still metagaming - using knowledge he had but that his character would have no way of knowing.

Iron Kingdoms & Convergence of Cyriss

This is a bit of a finnicky one.  While the Convergence has kept its true capabilities hidden very well for centuries and only very recently engaging in military actions (possibly even several months after the ‘default’ starting date assumed by the RPG’s core book), Cyriss herself and cults dedicated to worshipping her through scientific advancement have been a part of normal society for even longer.  It’s not uncommon to hear even a devout Morrowan mutter a quick prayer to Cyriss while trying to start up a cantankerous ‘jack or some other piece of machinery that they aren’t sure is going to work.  It’s not seen as blasphemy either, no more than a devout Christian invoking the name of a saint - probably a poor analogy, but you get my point; nobody would bat an eye at a Morrowan priest invoking Cyriss’ name.

These opinions could change now that the Convergence is active, but it’s too early to get a real sense.  We’ll probably have to wait a couple more expansions to the wargame to find out.  Either that or someone jumps onto the Privateer Press forums and sends up the Seacat Signal on the matter (Doug Seacat's the head writer and he's reasonably active on the forums).


So those are the more problematic ones I can think of off the top of my head, if I think of any more I'll edit them into here.

Again, this isn't saying you shouldn't use them, only that you keep the risks in mind and make sure the conflicts serve to better the plot, not destroy it.

A Shadow on the Table - Dreadball

I was originally going to talk about this game in a video, but I ditched that idea because I just wasn't satisfied with what sort of video it could end up as (no background music and with how I tend to ramble on god-knows how many images I'd have needed).  So, in light of that, I figured I'd start a new series of posts here looking at various tabletop games I play.  I'll still talk about tabletop games on the channel, this blog series is just a backup for the ones I can't do a good video for.  In any case; let's get onto the game.

Dreadball is a sci-fi sports board game from Mantic Games.  It was one of the first companies, alongside Reaper Miniatures, to use Kickstarter not to fund the game itself, but to expand and accelerate its development and release.  Dreadball was always going to come out, but it would've happened over a much longer schedule without Kickstarter and would have been missing a lot of stuff that it ended up with.

So; full disclosure before I go on - I did back this on Kickstarter for a fair amount.  I've tried to stay as impartial as I can, but I am very happy with how the game turned out and I encourage you to do your own research into the game after reading this before you go spending money on it.

Now, there was a concern when it was on Kickstarter a few years ago that it would just end up like a sci-fi copy of Blood Bowl, not an unwaranted concern I'll admit.  A fair few former Games Workshop employees are currently working at Mantic these days, but I figured that fact also meant it was less likely to be a copy of Blood Bowl - they'd already done a game based on American Football, why do another?  A fact that was confirmed in a making-of book the backers got a while after launch.  Perhaps the best summary of the game I've ever read came from a surprising place - the 1d4chan wiki.  The summary I read there (which you can find on the site's page for Warpath, Mantic's sci-fi wargame and the setting Dreadball occurs in) described it as "like Blood Bowl, but is set in space, uses aliens, is played on a hex grid, isn't based on American Football and has completely different game mechanics."  Gets the point across quite well, I think.

The game seems to draw elements from a lot of sports - basketball feels like the big one, but there's elements of hockey, lacrosse and probably a fair few others I'm not recognising (not a big sports guy myself).

That's the pitch there.  At the start of the game, you randomly decide which team is the Home team and which is the Away team.  Home team goes first, Away team goes second, pretty straight-forward.  They even colour-coded the turn counter along the bottom of the board for you.  There's no fancy restrictions on where players need to be; just place six of your players anywhere in your half of the pitch.  Can't be on the centre-line, though (the bit between the yellow lines), because that's where the ball's launched at the start of the match.  Gets launched on from the active team's left (so if it's launched on a Home team's turn, it would come from the top of the image) and you roll a d6 to see which of the hexes with the Dreadball logo it lands on - if you get a six you have to roll another die to see which of the two end-hexes it lands in after hitting the opposite wall.


The objective is simple; carry the ball into one of the highlighted areas in the opposing team's half and then throw it into that area's Strike Hex (the ones marked with a dot in the middle).  The two zones closer to the centre are each worth one point while the rear one is worth three.  The extra hex projecting from the front end of a Strike Zone is called the Bonus Hex, a throw from there is harder but will earn you an extra point ontop of whatever that zone is worth (so the bonus hex for the rear Strike Zones will net you four points).  You don't track score totals, just the difference, by sitting a token on the score tracker at the top of the pitch and sliding it back and forth as the score changes.  So if the home team has a 2-point lead and the away team gets a 3-pointer, the score becomes a 1-point lead for the away team.


Player stats and dice mechanics are pretty straight-forward - each dice test starts with three dice, modifiers that make the action easier or harder add and remove dice to this pool.  You're trying to get as many dice as you can to roll equal to or above the player's relevant stat.  So a Human Striker trying to pick up the ball would make a Skill test to do so - he'd get three dice as the starting point, a fourth because Strikers get a bonus to Skill tests and as his Skill stat is 4+, he needs at least one of the dice to come up a four or higher.  Most tests just need one success, most of the ones that don't are opposed tests you make against another player who has to make a dice test as well (ie; Slamming someone, you make a Strength Test to hit them, they get to make a Strength Test to slamback, whoever rolls the most successes wins).  There's plenty of quick-reference sheets out there; Board Game Geek have one I grabbed a while back, there'll be a link in the addendum at the bottom of the post.

Another clever side to this is that doubling the number of successes you needed (ie; getting two or more successes on an action that only needed one) will give that player extra actions.  So if a player doubles on picking up the ball, they get a free run or throw action.  Succeed on a slam and you push the target back a hex, double the number of successes they got when opposing it and you knock them down and force them to make an armour check which can take them out of the game for up to 3 turns or kill them outright.  The reason these actions are big are because a player cannot act unless you play an Action Token on them and you start each turn with 5 tokens (always the same number, no point hoarding them).  So there's always going to be at least one of your players on the pitch who won't be acting that turn (unless that sixth player is catching a pass and gets two or more successes on the catch, giving them a free run or throw action).

Combine all of that, plus that each coach (the game's term for the actual people playing the game, just to avoid confusion with the players on the pitch) only has seven turns over the course of the game and that the pitch never resets and you get a very fast, very fluid game.  If both players have a handle on the rules or have access to a reference sheet, you can bash out a game of Dreadball in about 40 minutes or so.

It also feels more forgiving than Blood Bowl; where GW's entry in the genre will end your turn with a single bad dice roll, Dreadball will only prematurely end your turn if you lose control of the ball (ie; the ball carrier failing to evade away from an opposing player).  Dodges and passes feel far more reliable unless you're playing a team who are purposefully bad in those areas (ie; Forge Fathers have a Speed stat of only 5+ thanks to their stunty, dwarven legs, so they'll have a harder time dodging away from anyone) and most of my games have come down to the wire, where one team was only one throw away from taking the lead on their last turn.  It's rare that you'll ever be truly out of the running in Dreadball.

Dreadball does have mechanics for league play, where you have a persistent team you try to improve over the course of several matches, and some of those mechanics I find quite interesting.  For one; the MVPs - these are named, freelance players, big stars in the Dreadball scene who you can hire for a round in a league.  Unlike Blood Bowl, where you simply pay their asking price and get them for that match, the MVPs are auctioned off at the start of each round of the league, after calculating the Underdog Bonuses (a balancing factor - if your team has the lower value than your opponent's for that round, you get extra money).  Even if a player won't play for your team, you can still bid on them to drive the price up or, if you win, are basically paying them to not play for that round.  It adds an extra layer of strategy to a league that I rather like.  There's also how Free Agents are handled - after the MVP auction, if you have at least 10 megacredits (the currency used for the game) left of your Underdog Bonus, you get to roll on a table in the book to see which Free Agent you get for that round.  You get one roll on the table for each whole 10mc of the bonus you have unspent.  But with how the table's designed, you could end up with a player from a totally different species - a slow Forge Father team, for example, could end up with a speedy and nimble Veer-myn Striker for a round.  This can make a Free Agent more valuable than just another player as it can give your team enough of an edge in one aspect that throws a wrench in your opponent's strategy.  Later seasons' expansion books have their own Free Agent tables and you get to pick which table you roll on.

I honestly don't have too many gripes about the game.  It's easy to learn without sacrificing strategic depth, it's fast, it's fluid, the teams feel and play very distinctly from each other.  The actual models are very good-quality and extensive use of L-shaped plugs and other irregular shapes for them mean you'll never end up gluing an arm on the wrong body or the wrong way around.  Actually that's it; the one complaint I can see people having with this game is it being harder to convert the models and give them a distinct pose of your own.  That and certain teams (I'm looking at you, Veer-myn) can sometimes project out beyond the edge of their hex base, making it difficult when they run adjacent to another model.  Personally, for those situations I'd suggest just holding the models to the base with a bit of blu-tac or the like and have a mark on the base showing which direction they're facing - if the model interferes with others, just pull it off the base until there's room for the model to go back.  In any case; as long as you take your time and dry-fit the pieces of a model before gluing them, you shouldn't have any issues.

Pricing-wise it's not too bad either, the basic set (pictured above) has everything you need, including ten models each for the Corporation and Marauder teams and a decent-sized pad of team rosters for league use (and you can always photocopy them to make more pages if you need to), and it will only run you £50 plus shipping if you buy direct off Mantic's website.  Expansion books are another £10 each while teams will cost you about £18 for a set of ten-to-fourteen models (most have a full roster of 12-14 models, but the newer teams from Seasons 4-6 are only in packs of ten).  MVPs are £5 each while you can get a pack of 3 or 4 for about £15-£18 depending on the pack.  If you want a higher-quality pitch than the one in the base set, I'd recommend the Gruba-tek VII Coliseum.  It's reasonably affordable and, if the Dreadball Ultimate pitch (which is used for 3-6 team games and that I'll talk about in a future post) is any indication, it'll be good-quality.  Don't have one myself because I bought the much-more-expensive acrylic plastic one before the Gruba-tek VII was released (and by a pretty small margin, too; been kicking myself about it, believe me).

Either way; if you like the idea of a fast-paced board game about a fictional sport involving a titanium ball launched at a couple hundred kilometres-per-hour (so, yes, you can throw the ball as a weapon) that you can learn to play in no time, check it out.  And if I had to compare it directly to Blood Bowl; I have no problems claiming that this is the superior game.  Your tastes may vary on that, of course, but in my personal opinion, Dreadball blows Blood Bowl out of the water without even trying.


Addendum

I've got a few links at the bottom of this article, one is a gameplay demonstration from Mantic Games, another is the first episode in a series on the game from Beasts of War called Dreadball Academy that goes into more detail on the game, though I do have to warn you that that one's about an hour and a half long (and Warren had a bad habit of interrupting guests back then which probably accounts for a chunk of the runtime).  I've also linked a post from another blog showing how to get a way to play the game online for free.  You will still need the rulebook for it, the program doesn't automate anything, but you can get a free copy of that from the Mantic Digital service (which I'll have a link to under the blog post's link).  It'll only have the rules for the Corporation and Marauder teams (so Humans and Orx) but it should be enough for you to get a feel for the game and see if it's worth picking up.  If I ever do any videos on Dreadball in the future, I'll have those linked down below as well.  I'm tempted to do a series of team summaries, but they'd be hitting the same issues as the ones that made this a blog post and not a video of its own.

Mantic Gameplay Demonstration: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjlVrXSbEIE
Dreadball Academy Episode One: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvTicCOehLw
Reference Sheet: https://boardgamegeek.com/filepage/100639/dreadball-seasons-1-3-quick-reference-sheet
-Small Error in Sheet - Judwan Strikers are Speed 4+ as of rules adjustments made in Season 3.  They were kinda OP with Speed 3+.
How to play Dreadball online through VASSAL: http://boardgamesminisandmore.blogspot.ca/2014/01/how-to-play-dreadball-online.html
Mantic Digital: https://www.manticdigital.com/