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Iron Lore |  |
So, who’s heard of Iron Lore? If you haven’t, you should head over to Monte Cook’s Website and check it out, as it’s one of Malhavoc’s upcoming products. Basically, it sounds awesome. Anyway, it got my juices flowing somewhat, so I figured I’d post some thoughts.
Iron Lore is an alternate Player’s Handbook for D&D, and it makes some interesting changes to the core rules (at least, as far as I can tell from the limited amount of information currently available). At any rate, while it isn’t necessarily a ‘low magic’ setting, it does make magic a lot less reliable as a source of easy power. There’s one magic casting class, the arcanist, and as I understand it, casting spells in Iron Lore isn’t as simple as simply saying, “I cast fireball”. Further, magic items are few and far between. I’ve heard them likened to artifacts in d20 Call of Cthulhu, in that they’re largely unique items that have unpredictable and often dangerous effects.
At any rate, this all got me thinking how great these rules would fit into a steampunk-style setting. In rules terms, it would be as simple as adding some more modern weapons to the mix (firearms, for one), and a new, gadgeteer-type class.
Now, Iron Lore has a mechanic where different character classes can do things to earn ‘tokens’, and can then spend their tokens to access class abilities. For example, an archer could spend a round aiming, earn a token, and use it the next round to ignore a target’s armor. This mechanic fits very well with my vision of a gadgeteer. In my head, the gadgeteer spends a round rummaging through his pack and constructing a doodad, and he earns a token. He can then cash tokens in to create effects, like dealing area-effect damage, blinding someone, or filling an area with smoke. More complex and powerful effects require more tokens to activate; thus, they take longer to ‘build’. If the gadgeteer already has a few tokens, he’s basically got part of the item constructed already.
This brings up the question, “If the gadgeteer can create all sorts of effects by simply cashing in tokens, wouldn’t that sort of step on the arcansit’s toes a little”. Not really. The gadgeteer and the arcanist should be able to do a lot of the same things; magic and technology are basically two different routes to the same power. The difference is that magic tends to be more dramatic and powerful, but far more unpredictable and dangerous, while technology tends to be more reliable but less powerful and somewhat slower. Both classes might be able to fill a twenty-foot radius with fire, but they’d go about it in different ways. The arcanist would make a check and do it in a single round, but the result might not be exactly what he wants. The gadgeteer, on the other hand, will get the exact result he wants without a check, but it’ll take a couple of rounds of doing nothing but earning tokens in order to accomplish it.
Anyway, that’s what Iron Lore got me thinking about.
