Friday, April 22, 2016

S is for Steampunk

Last evening, I played my first session of Iron Kingdoms. I like the system, even if chargen is a bit confusing. It appears to have been synchronicity at work; I have never heard of Iron Kingdoms until this point, but not only did I recently finish a small steampunk RPG for one of my friends, it uses an almost identical spread of attributes to Physique, Agility, and Intelligence. Nor is this subconscious inspiration; we first started working on this game at least three years ago, when the only functioning RPG I had ever played or read was Pathfinder. The big difference is that my game is much less fantasy-based, with only humans.

The campaign is set in a universe from a video game, which is essentially the typical high-fantasy setting with some interesting changes. My character is an orcish woman, which led to some unfortunate circumstances at the start; the story began with Gnora in a cage, having tomatoes thrown at her! But this did give me the chance to role-play, and to work on my feminine orc voice; the GM was so impressed that he gave me an extra experience point at the end of the session.

As I started writing this post, it occurred to me that Pathfinder borders on steampunk, depending on which supplemental books are being used. If used sparingly, firearms aren't too big of a clash with the typical "dungeonpunk" motif of most newer iterations of fantasy RPGs. Since my setting is still mostly European in nature, I won't be introducing any gunpowder for some time... but it might appear in the future.

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