Hey, so uh, long time lurker, first time poster. I’d been messing around with a few different things for #SGAM2017, but nothing really came together until I started reading through Ironsworn. I played this in the last couple of days, and thought I might as well share it as I know a few people (myself included) have been hoping to see it in action. I make no claims to actually having run it completely properly; Shawn Tomkin’s I’m sure will be able to spot a fair few mistakes, but I did my best to keep it to the rules as written. Which proved interesting, as I’d been enjoying some wine while playing; so if anything is off, blame it on that.

The combat wound up potentially a little graphic/gruesome; just skip anything that’s in reddish orange font, and you should be mostly fine if that sort of thing bothers you. I’ve included my thoughts and generally my thought process, alcohol addled though it may have been, in parentheses. Feel free to ignore at your leisure of course. Mechanical rolls and results are in square brackets. Oh, and I apologize for any inconsistency in the notation of mechanics; its there because that’s pretty much how I play, and editing kills a lot of the fun for me.

As far as what I started with, Ludvik had a couple essentially nested quests that seem like they could take a while to get through, and then I just pulled one of the starters from the book and ran with it because it seemed cool and I wanted something more manageably accomplishable before the end of the month. I’ve got some of the basic world assumptions on a note in my phone I can throw up if anyone’s curious, but beyond that playing the game was pretty much what you see in the doc. I was originally planning to post once I’d gotten through the first vow Ludvik swears ‘on camera’, as it were, but got wrapped up in a detour after a miss on the Undertake a Journey move that got a lot more interesting than I’d expected it to. I realize that the last third/fourth with all the vague references to things not in the actual play may not make sense; if it bugs anyone let me know and I’ll throw the character sheet and a brief explanation of the big quest(s) Ludvik’s on up to quell any burning curiosity.

Let me know what you think, and hopefully it’ll give people a chance to see Ironsworn in action. Huge props to Shawn for finding a way to make a PbtA-style game work solo; I’ve been tilting at that particular windmill for a year and haven’t come up with anything near this smooth. If you get a chance folks, please give it a try and post your games; I’d love to see what everyone else does with it. If anyone has any questions I’d be happy to give my own 2 cents about anything (ideally related to the game posted below, but up to and including the meaning of life).

If there’s anything about having the actual play up that is a problem Shawn Tomkin, let me know and I can delete the doc. Thanks for putting the game out; really looking forward to the full version (particularly the chapter on how to run the game and the other assets; shield maidens/battle brothers of some description as Companion Assets? Maybe?).

Apologies to the readers for the writing, see above (ie. alcohol) for why it may be bad/purple/cliché/overdone/etc. I have little excuse for doing conversation and dialogue the way I do; its just more fun to play than figure out good lines for everybody.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cKHJh-5YPxo17LuiEmNk7r_kf9qYGKsCQeSsaRp2blE/edit?usp=sharing

(Also, let me know if the link doesn’t work or something. When I said first time poster, I meant it to the absolute nth degree; I’m not totally sure I understand how this all works)

#SGAM2017 Remember Tomorrow – Tokyo Police Department – Faction Intro Scene

Introduction scenes can be narrated or roleplayed out. It felt more appropriate to narrate an inner monologue for this Faction’s representative NPC. The thing pretty much wrote itself, as the only thing I did was choose the concordances that I felt were speaking to the context, and transforming them into more readable fragments.

As always, my approach to using the generator has kept evolving. This time, I front loaded as many concordances as I could before I began to look for a message. To do this, I used the same method of taking keywords from the Faction’s character sheet, but this time I looked for meaningful concordances before I began actual play in earnest. I still generated some while in play, but mostly I just worked with the ones I front loaded. Maybe that detail will be interesting to someone.