Slain by Elf

A new campaign, and a new system to go with it. We have decided to try out the Iron Heroes system, which includes a lot of advanced rules for combat and mostly eschews magic. It certainly sounded and looks interesting, with greatly expanded skill and feat sections, allowing for far more options to customise a character and much more interesting combat. Most of the session was spent creating characters and deciding what options to take, and then we played a short introductory encounter to get the feel for how the game plays before we take our characters on an adventure proper.

Iron Heroes has an interesting token system, where many character classes and feats offer the player a chance to build up certain tokens, which can then be spent to produce effects or actions that can change actions or introduce new aspects to the encounter. In the end, only one of us picked a class that has tokens from first level, the Berserker, but we got to see them in action during the first encounter.

Investigating some old ruins that have been rumoured to be housing some bestial humanoids, we first come across a rat problem. Mostly the problem is that they see us as breakfast. The Berserker was right at the front of the party, and he was there to take the brunt of the hits, and he gains a token for every hit he takes. It works quite well in that respect. Even though the rats were not terribly threatening, they still managed to nibble on him a bit, and so his token pool started to build up. The player decided to show us the rewards one could reap from cunning use of the tokens.

Apparently, spending tokens on the Berserker allows you to roll really badly on your to-hit rolls. Personally, I can't see the benefit, but the Berserker was getting pretty frustrated. A few more tokens spent and he may have even gone in to a rage.

Still, he managed to kill two rats, out of the eight encountered. Well, one of them was only because I forgot to roll my sneak attack damage, and the rat would have died if I had remembered. And the other one was probably a GM pity kill, as everyone else in the party was busy making rat-tail jewellery whilst the poor Berserker was striking the ground around the rat in a strange, reverse sword dancing way. A good start to the adventure!

This entry was posted on 7th June 2007 at 10.42 pm and is filed under Iron Heroes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.