You can find the first part of this critic here.
5. Disassemble Engine
Games have a flow, which, when you hit, the game pretty much runs itself. It is extremely satisfying. After examining the interactions of game elements, we single out the most important - the one that sets the pace of sessions, or even campaigns. We focus on how that engine works, how it makes the game move along, and what to do to make it do what you want to do - and how to keep it running clean.
Ludo
One of the most unique engines of TTRPGs, and yet, feels very familiar to anyone that has played any of them.
On the surface, it looks like a PbtA: things happen, until you don’t know what to do/you have triggered the use of a move. Except, moves don’t exist in the vacuum of the Conversation — this is for cooperative and solo play, after all. Instead, moves and narrative bounce back between the inputs from oracle and from progress tracks.
This produces a neat feedback, powering the game through: things are going on, you get to interpret something as result of dice rolling, moves, oracles and progress tracks, things happen and move on, until there is something new to interpret.
Something like this could easily fail, by making one element too calcified (and thus, unable to react and adapt to the changing narrative needs) and/or dull (as it is the fate of many progress tracks). This is where the brilliance of Ironsworn careful design comes through: you are always receiving new information to interpret and change the context so the game keeps going through. At the same time, none of the signalling and regulatory mechanics overstay their welcome, are invasive or overshadow others, so nothing feels “wasted”.
So the engine is multiple pistons laid across oracles and progress trackers. But how these oracles and progress trackers are allowed to be an engine rather than a database for narrative to consult is their dynamism and ability to deform to variability. The oracle is not a random table you consult; it is a lens you put in different setups, changing how you see the world. The progress track is not a binary clock, it is a living thing, that matters how much you fill not just “did you fill all pizza slices or not, or did you get your HP to zero or not”. This makes everything matter, everything be connected. Ironsworn will keep taking you into unexpected places, and never, ever any of them will be a detour that feels like it is wasting your time.
It is all what the game wants to be doing, and it helps you experience the game-state the game wants you the experience.
Brad
Ironsworn's engine is the act of swearing vows. Is this the basic answer? Absolutely. But there is nothing more definitive than that and nothing that feels better than that glorious moment when you sit with the rest of your group and figure out “This is the challenge of the Vow I'm swearing.”
Y'see, for various cultural reasons Ironsworn characters swear Iron Vows, these sacred promises are common and well known, so if your character doesn't follow through on an Iron Vow it will be known.
Mechanically, you make the Swear an Iron Oath move and then determine the rank (difficulty, you also can ask an Oracle if you are unsure.) And then you roll to resolve the move, which determines how sure you are of the path forward ( granting you a bonus towards finishing), or you fail to see a path forward and must either break the Vow or take a penalty.
This is the meat and potatoes of the game, making interesting promises and letting cool stuff happen until you get sick of it. You get XP for resolving them successfully, but genuinely that's boring compared to seeing what happens when you complete it, seeing the world change at your group’s whims or even the whims of the oracle and then you get to do it again.
6. Essentials For Session One
So, you got this game, you going to play it, but you don’t have the time to read everything. Or even worse, your have read it and now it is all jumbled together. Here we break down the things that you absolutely want to try to get right and/or hit during your first session, so you get the felling of what makes this game stand out from similar art.
Lucrécia
When I say Ironsworn plays itself, it is no exaggeration. That is how elegant the system is, and as I mentioned in Part 1, why it is my go-to for introductory TTRPG with people with zero baggage.
Pick Ironsworn, Starforged or Sundered Isles, shuffle a deck of assets and draft three. Get playing, disregarding attributes assignment until when you have to roll. Go through the world creating questions, make a couple of vows and get out. All of it is play and flows into further play.
If you want to commit a hour to learn the game, the best suggestion is… play one hour of Ironsworn. Go solo, pick three cards and play.
If you want to spend more considerable time, there are two fine points that benefit from refinement:
Enjoying the game long-term relies on understanding the dance of momentum, and the influence of supplies. It is worth spending some time familiarizing with the effects and uses of momentum, and how supplies influence the flow of adventuring.
Ironsworn has a great fulfilling combat system, based around seizing advantage in combat. It allows amazing combat, but it is somewhat unique. Things can turn quite quickly, or they can drag out if not decisive actions are taken. Getting a feel for combat ahead of play can make it much more engaging, once you meet its expectations.
Brad
Lu is absolutely right, pick Sci-Fantasy, Fantasy, or Swashbuckling and do a quick solo run. But for my money? I experienced it as a duo (game for two players) and that was such a fantastic inspiration for what the game could be.
7. Playing The Game Wrong
Games are played wrong. Rules will be misunderstood, interactions will be confused, the importance of certain tech disregarded; etc. This is good, and it is good to acknowledge for: you cannot have the designer at your time, and even if they were, they would be just another player - and entitled to play it wrong. After identifying stress points of the game, things that don’t connect that well, we think of the things that are more likely to be (our have been) “played wrong”. What happens when you forget a line in page 273 clearly saying this is impossible?
Ludo
The most important stress point in any Ironsworn game is to not think of progress tracks as something you need to fill. You will find yourself enjoying the game much more if you let the narrative decide when something is done or not — either the progress bar is at tens or not.
Sundered Isles adds new systems to the game. However, while cursed die feeds into the existing engines of the game and is integrated with much success, some of those mechanical additions are modular in a way that is disconnected from the engine of the game, resulting in their inclusion creating unexpected stress points — that friction that benefits from thinking about.
One such thing are the changes to ships, building upon the starship system of Starforged, expanding your ship options with a series of assets: more support for being a member of a crew, for leading the pirate life, for commanding a mighty fleet, etc. They are all successful, except for the Sailing Ship asset.
In Starforged, you just get ship at creation — genre convention and all. In Sundered Isles, while you may choose to start with no ship of your own and on the crew of someone else, or you can choose to have a Flagship (this game version of Starforged’s Spaceship). But baffling, the default is that you have a Sailing Ship, a strictly worse version of the Flagship, until you get experience and advance to buy the Flagship. I fail to understand how this, as it is implemented, benefits play. It is a very “feels bad” mechanic, and feels like you are on a probation period before you get to play the game. It also does not mesh well with other systems of the game. For example, in one of the games where we picked this default option, we rolled a Colossal ship on the oracle for our starting vessel; Sailing Ships are just light, medium or heavy. Reversing the roll would result in us starting with a fleet. Having to ignore the first oracle we asked the game left some players distrusting of them, closing them off to one of the awesome aspects of Ironsworn.
You should consider if you want to have Sailing Ships at all. Games where we started with Flagships felt much better, clicking immediately in usual Ironsworn fashion. Even games where none of us had ships functioned better, with us having a phantom 5 hold supply representing our mobile “base”.
But by itself, this is just an experimental Asset that is pushed to players and did not work as well as it may have been expected. Those things can be easily adapted to different uses. Treasure, however, as a system, may be the first dud in Ironsworn tight, well-designed systems.
Now, Treasure and Wealth are optional rules, and this is great. But one may think, hey, this is a pirate game, Treasures should be preeminent. So this should be a thing right? Well, so is dungeon crawling all about treasure, but Ironsworn Delve has no Treasure. Instead, going into the dungeons ties to the vows and bonds systems and their progress. As such, it is fully integrated into the engines of the game and desired game-state — and avoiding turning your game of Ironsworn about adventurer-conquistadors.
So even if optional, Treasure and Wealth clash with the systems integral to Ironsworn. The gains of Treasure are meager compared to the Upkeeps, making it expensive to adventure. The result of those is that players either make vows that allow them to get Treasure OR they have to do adventuring aside of their vows. The result is that it shifts games of Ironsworn away from Iron Vows, either my making them subordinate to either being something you can make gold from or having to grind treasure between playing the game. This also does a disservice to the rebel motivation of the game. Where it is baffling is how a 1 Upkeep flagship comparable Sailing Ship has 3 Upkeep, making the default option one that can easily hamper play. You may end up stuck with a worse, more expensive version of a ship, having to “grind” your first asset/treasure to cover upkeep before you get a Flagship and get to play the game. And of course, upkeep and costs being things, changes away from the Ironsworn bonds human economy into capitalist hellscape1.
Optional and modular as these rules are, they drastically change and interact with the game. They should be considered with care, and the way they will change your game of Sundered Isles is not immediately obvious. You may want to redo the Treasures system altogether? Perhaps you can make it things that Factions value/support them materially, so Treasure is how you advance their campaign clocks?
Brad
So my group adored the Flagship and we didn't mess with the Wealth or Treasure rules and had an amazing experience. I went into the game expecting to dislike The Cursed Die, but honestly, it intensely added to the “Cursed Sea-Farers” vibe.
8. What to Steal
Experiencing good art is the most important step in making good art. We look back at the things that worked and did not work about this game, see what we learned for design work, interesting tech and just a general overview of things that we will take from this game and bring into others. Or more honestly: since many of us may not play this game and we have it in our library, this way we can get some use out of it.
Lucrécia
Ironsworn has something to teach everyone.
Above all, it is a lesson in the power of good stewardship and generosity. The game is free for everyone, and has always been. You can make any content for Ironsworn due to its generous attribution creative license, or make your own spins on it. All this, and that it has been extremely successful, should give heart to all of us: we can be better, we can make the art we want to see, we can share it with others, and they will support our endeavors. Yes, there is a place for stewardship in the artform of TTRPGs.
Ironsworn is carried by its great design. It is a lesson in the power of great design, for it has no dead weight, so jiggling keys, no trend-seeking. It is the best it can be, it is unique at what it does, and is a design that rewards you for trusting in it. Ironsworn is good, and deserves to proudly stand out, affirmed by its careful decisions.
Sundered Isles is a masterclass in different approaches to design on something that already exists and the challenges of design. Honestly, learning from Ironsworn to design for Ironsworn has been difficult because everything there so far worked in interwoven signals. Sundered Isles, having to build to something already so polished, has to resort to addition. Addition leads to bloated design, something that has doomed many a lesser game; however, for us, it finally provides us examples and options.
We have mechanics that change the core engine of the game, successfully (cursed dice), to the point that it will be difficult to go back to other Ironsworn games without them. Then we have plenty of truly modular systems, which are easy to adapt and take on and off, but also are not connected to the main loops, so can threaten to either become their own “mini-games” and/or feel like wheel-spinning wastes of time. But alas, they are better to experiment and design on. Sundered Isles is filled with such optional modules that can enrich it (or other Ironsworn games) in different ways; it also has Treasures and Wealth, which shows us how drastically even the most optional of systems can change even the most elegant of designs in TTRPGs.
And of course, it is one of the best heterodox PbtAs ever made, and essential study to anyone designing in that space.
Do not sleep on Ironsworn. If you are interested in this art-form at all, you are neglecting your own growth. Sundered Isles feels like the apex implementation of Ironsworn, the best possible game under the current stewardship; if you already know Ironsworn, you have to get your hands on this.
Brad
Ironsworn is GM-less, and you might remember that I said earlier I don't like GM-less games. I would never play Ironsworn any other way (yeah, theoretically you can, but why) this is such a wondrous art of design it converted a hater into a lover.
The game is totally free and able to be downloaded so if my praise strikes you, go play it, then come back and read the rest.
What should we learn and what dare we steal? We should learn to embrace the idea of retreading old ground with new tools. You can't tell me that you don't have 15 games about low-fantasy adventurers on your shelf, but I can tell you that Ironsworn might be the best of them. This is because the designer sat down and worked his way through exactly how the hell to take old ground and make something new and fantastic.
Ironsworn is the kind of game that makes me think, and wonder what wonders I could find with some bold companions and treacherous Oracles
We really enjoy making these critics, and we hope you enjoy reading them as well. It is through the support of our collective, CyCo. You can find more of our work by backing our Patreon, and support us by sharing these posts with friends. You can also get reminders of new content and further support us by subscribing to our newsletter.
See, I told you it undermines the theme of rebels.