Agreed. I love the simplicity.
I’m a huge star wars fan and my friend keeps trying to get me to play, but there’s something more satisfying to me about running and hiding from aliens. I’m sure star wars is great, but everyone is a gun toting lightsaber super hero. Don’t get me wrong thats the appeal of being in that universe and I would totally play it, but the “grounded reality” of the alien rpg is very appealing. You can’t just shoot your way out of every situation.
I’ve been trying out the solo-able RPG system Ironsworn, and in searching for mentions on this forum, I discovered that the developer, Shawn Tomkin, is Qt3’s very own @BiggerBoat!
Shawn, congrats on the success of your system. I see people raving about it all over.
I put Ironsworn on my tablet and printed out appropriate playsheets. But I can’t seem to get started. And by that I mean this: I created the world by answering The Truths questions, which in turn led to prompts/quest starters. I created a character and he has vows, and thus has goals and motivations. And then… I’m stuck.
Mind you, I have very little tabletop RPG experience. Certainly none as a DM. I do play a lot of tabletop dungeon crawls and adventures, but those are not RPGs – you’re playing a game and any role playing is mostly in my head, separate from the game system.
So, essentially, having created a character and world in Ironsworn, I’m frozen – I’m not sure how launch out into this world. It all seems too open-ended and free, and I’m not used to such freedom. I’m sure if had more RPG experience this would not be an issue.
I have watched some youtubes of folks playing, and I listened to several episodes of your own “Ask the Oracle” podcast, and those were very helpful. I know I should just imagine an immediate or short-term issue and create a quest based on that, but I am too used to having the structure of a game system directing me. What’s the best way to overcome this?
Thanks for trying my goofy game!
In terms of getting started, don’t get too hung up on some grand campaign kick-off. Introduce something interesting but relatively mundane, make it a lower ranked quest, and dive in.
Something that involves a journey is the easiest way to get started, because there’s self-contained mechanisms for resolving a journey. And something with likely go off the rails, which will complicate the quest and introduce some new story stuff.
In the immortal words of a particularly wise wizard: "It’s a dangerous business going out your door . You step onto the road, and if you don’t keep your feet, there’s no knowing where you might be swept off to.”
The nature of the quest will be appropriate to your character, of course. But think about the sort of stuff you’d deal with in a scarcity-driven low-fantasy world.
For example:
If you need a nudge, try generating a settlement and make that your character’s home (or a place you are visiting). Then, springboard off what you roll on the Settlement Trouble oracle. Or generate a character and roll on the Character Goals oracle, interpret the result, and envision them as a leader, mentor, or family member who appoints you with a task.
If you are on Discord, feel free to join the Ironsworn Discord, which is linked from the community page on my website. It’s an active, friendly place.
And I’ll also take the opportunity to plug Ironsworn: Starforged, coming to a Kickstarter near you this year.
Man, that is you who made that?! Awesome - It looks so interesting. I’ve watched a few youtube videos of people playing it twoplayer, and its something often discussed in Reddits solorpg section - Thats really impressive man!
Let us know when that kickstarter is, please!
Wow, I think this has been my problem. Starting out mundane never occurred to me, honestly. Thank you!
All of this is also very helpful. Thanks again, onward!
I’ve been following that as well. Do you have an ETA for the Kickstarter?
Speaking of which, I’ve been thinking of ordering the physical Ironsworn book but DriveThroughRPG only has expensive UPS shipping, or media mail for USPS which has huge delays. Are there other places to pick it up?
Sure! Things will tend to snowball intro complications/trouble. So just be open to revealing new facets of your supposedly mundane task as you go.
Thanks! April-ish is the current target.
Unfortunately no. I’ve heard mixed things on Media Mail lately. Some folks get lucky. Average is probably 20-30 days from order to delivery, but can be as long as 6 weeks. Printing takes a week or two, and then the USPS decides how much to slow roll delivery.
Please let us know when it is live.
Our big city post office announced that they’re focusing now on delivering new packages, and stuff that has been waiting since November or so… will just have to wait.
Wow such strange serendipity. Just last night I was browsing Drive-thru RPG to pick up D100 Dungeon, but was looking at other projects and I spent a lot of time looking at Ironsworn and even added it to my wishlist.
Now today I see it mentioned on QT3 along with the creator! Pretty awesome. Congrats on the release @BiggerBoat and good luck with the upcoming KS. I will be picking up Ironsworn soon. Looks really interesting.
My Group is more sci fi then fantasy so is HYPED for Starforged! The things you show on twitter look fantastic. We all liked Ironsworn and can’t wait to get this.
I’m about to play a virtual one-off D&D 5th edition game with four other players, run by an old friend of mine. We’re at a bit of an impasse, though, because he says I can’t play a space marine. He did suggest a warforged something or other, but I’m pretty sure that’s not the same thing.
Yay! It’s free in PDF so grab yourself a copy with my compliments.
Cool! I do hear that a lot, though I think the audience for SF RPG’s is much smaller than for fantasy. We’ll see if my take on it finds its niche.
Can you give us some clues on your take? The SF world has a pretty broad range. Near future? Post apocalyptic? Space operish? Let us know, we’ll keep it to ourselves ;)
Fairly gritty, human-centric SF. Inspiration comes from the quest-driven adventures of The Mandalorian, the lived-in aesthetic of the original Star Wars trilogy, the workaday exploits of Firefly, the isolated suspense of Alien, the desperation and retro-tech of Battlestar Galactica’s modern reboot, the mysticism of Dune, and the cosmic mysteries of The Expanse.
There’s dials to adjust to your liking. You can ignore supernatural powers or implied cosmic horror, for example. But it’s not a toolkit for any type of SF. It wouldn’t be the right choice for something like transhuman SF. Similarly, you wouldn’t want to use it to play the crew of a federation starship, but you could hack it for playing a band of outcast Klingons searching for their mythical homeworld.
Sounds great, thanks for the taste of what’s to come!
Whoa! I recently grabbed the 5E system and Solo toolkit thingy from DMGuild, but jumped all over Ironsworn as soon as I saw this thread. I grabbed the pdfs, but will want to get at least the main book as a hardcopy. The prices between the hard and soft covers are only about $5. I would probably go with the hardback, but have never ordered stuff from this publisher before and just want to know if going softcover is safer regarding binding and whatnot. And if one or the other gives @BiggerBoat an extra buck or two. And is delivery really an extra 3 weeks on top of the already kinda long delivery times? I don’t want to sound like I’m complaining, I’m more curious about how this sort of thing gets printed since I assume that is the reason for the longer delivery times. Is it in small runs once enough orders come in or just printed when any single order is placed?
I’ll DM ya’ as I don’t want to turn this into the BiggerBoat peddles his game thread.
Would you mind mentioning the specifics what you got here? Sounds like what I am looking for. Do you also need some of the 5E core books?
@Intuitionist I grabbed the base 5E books (dmg/ph/mm) and also a Sword Coast sourcebook. I’d read about Solo Adventurer’s Tookbox somewhere in the last year or so when I first started looking for solo DnD stuff. I’d found my original DMG during my move and remembered the random dungeon generator pages in the back and wondered if there was anything similar that was more current.
I haven’t played around with it much yet. I’ve been going thru the gamebooks and really loving that they felt more 1E and 2E than anything since. I want to get a better handle on DnD again before I jump into the solo stuff. Oh, and there are a bunch of solo modules as well as the Toolbox. In fact, I think the Toolbox was created after the modules due to requests.
Oh, and metal freaking dice! How have I lived my life without metal dice???
I have a couple of sets and while they’re cool, we found ourselves going back to the regular dice because the metal ones tend to mess up the table and any map/mats we rolled them on. We started using a dice tower, but it’s just so much easier to roll the bones.
I noticed that and bought a little dice tray thing with felt lining that seems to work well. I got my son a set first and they were super pointy but then I found ones that I linked to and they had shaved off the points. But I can see games where you’re tossing five or six or more dice at once to be more of a problem. Even with shaved points.
