About
Strangers are converging on Ceredigion. Her need is magnetic, and the Heart of the Forest will not brook usurpation of its flesh silently. A woodsman wielding the axe that will someday take his life follows urgent streams and signs of beasts yet unimagined. A wolf-woman scents the issuance of the moon and rouses her lupine siblings to the hunt. An ancient child reared between worlds flows with the tides to the intersection of space and time that calls them. A roaming hermit’s ecstatic dreams turn to bleak visions of a cold hearth choked with ash. Sometimes the moon sends blessings, and sometimes it wounds us. It is their business to mend those wounds. It is their business to make human welfare a fae priority. And when diplomacy fails, it is their business to wield cold iron.
The setting draws inspiration from a number of sources, but it's most meant to evoke the backwoods arcane feel of pre-Tolkien, folk-tale fantasy. Think Rumpelstiltskin, white harts, and Jack's beanstalk rather than orcs, elves, and red dragons.
The game takes place in the Meadows, a vast cleared land bounded by an endless forest called the Wood. Along the irregular frontier between these two landscapes, the countryside is speckled with villages and towns of various size in uneasy symbiosis with the wild magics that lurk in the forest and arcane fae courts descended from the moon.
To live in such a community is to band together with your neighbors — be they human, fae, or something else entirely — and find beauty and peace in a harsh world. But illness, privation or predation can throw such communities into chaos. When such things become problems beyond the capacity of local actors to repair, the Watchful Folk intervene.
The Watchful Folk — among whose ranks you number as a player in Cold Iron — are an anarchic volunteer collective of nomadic mediators and community peacekeepers who possess the special skills needed to settle disputes, check exploitation, and avert disasters in the Meadows and the Wood beyond. As a member of the Watchful Folk, you will travel the countryside, bringing wits and empathy to bear as much as sword and shield. The problems you will face are as various as the skills you will have to employ to solve them.
Sit down, Watchfellow, and tell me your story.
This is our first time publishing a tabletop game, but we've also been involved in immersive theater writing here in Houston, and we've written an abundance of material that only ever saw the light of day in our home tabletop gaming group.
What is this?
Cold Iron is a complete tabletop role-playing game, including rules, a setting, a handful of classes, and two short sample adventures, all contained in a single, 44 to 48-page zine. The rules are simple enough to grasp even if you aren't familiar with other TTRPGs. They are designed to encourage a variety of problem-solving approaches — from diplomacy, to physical acumen, to outright violence — under a unified rule set that requires very few "special case" rules, while still allowing specific player actions to have granular effect.The setting draws inspiration from a number of sources, but it's most meant to evoke the backwoods arcane feel of pre-Tolkien, folk-tale fantasy. Think Rumpelstiltskin, white harts, and Jack's beanstalk rather than orcs, elves, and red dragons.
The game takes place in the Meadows, a vast cleared land bounded by an endless forest called the Wood. Along the irregular frontier between these two landscapes, the countryside is speckled with villages and towns of various size in uneasy symbiosis with the wild magics that lurk in the forest and arcane fae courts descended from the moon.
To live in such a community is to band together with your neighbors — be they human, fae, or something else entirely — and find beauty and peace in a harsh world. But illness, privation or predation can throw such communities into chaos. When such things become problems beyond the capacity of local actors to repair, the Watchful Folk intervene.
The Watchful Folk — among whose ranks you number as a player in Cold Iron — are an anarchic volunteer collective of nomadic mediators and community peacekeepers who possess the special skills needed to settle disputes, check exploitation, and avert disasters in the Meadows and the Wood beyond. As a member of the Watchful Folk, you will travel the countryside, bringing wits and empathy to bear as much as sword and shield. The problems you will face are as various as the skills you will have to employ to solve them.
Sit down, Watchfellow, and tell me your story.
Who are you?
We're two guys from Houston, Texas, who have been playing tabletop games together for something close to 10 years now. We've played a lot of different systems, and we wanted to make something of our own that infuses the various elements we like from everything we've tried. We also wanted to build a fantasy game that looks nothing like the more standard fantasy settings you might have played before and that, hopefully, can provide a fun and novel tone.This is our first time publishing a tabletop game, but we've also been involved in immersive theater writing here in Houston, and we've written an abundance of material that only ever saw the light of day in our home tabletop gaming group.
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