Introduction

Politically Incorrect Games’ Iron Gauntlets reminds me of my start in role-playing.  Here, the excitement of discovery and adventure in “old school” fantasy meets new, highly playable ideas.  While still capturing the classic archetypes from my youth, Iron Gauntlets relies less on combat bookkeeping and more on flexible action resolution and an expansive magic system.  Fully customizable while remaining complete, Iron Gauntlets revisits something old and comes out something new.

The Basics

Iron Gauntlets clocks in at a crisp 93 pages.  The layout gives the book a nice, clean appearance.  The support products look to keep the same design, lending a nice consistency to the product line.  Some neat freebies lie at the end of the book – a sampling of the customizable Disposable Heroes miniatures and a few one-page battle maps provided by 01 Games.  Shy of a fistful of ten-sided dice, the PDF supplies all the material you may need to play right out of the gate.

            A clear writing style helps the material get absorbed quickly.  While I couldn’t find any out-and-out grammar errors, a few wording slip-ups pop up, mostly the kind only copyeditors notice.  No writing in the PDF should embarrass the creators or readers.

            I wish the same held true for Iron Gauntlets’ art.  While most illustrations come from medieval-style clip-art, a few poor-quality line drawings litter some of the pages.  The art quality looks better in the support products, but the selected art here, including the cover, detracts from the heroic fantasy style the game targets.

            I have one cautionary note about printing the PDF.  No decorative or blank page separates the cover and contents.  If you print the PDF double-sided straight through, the pages will face incorrectly, with the page numbers along the inside edge.

            Purchasing Iron Gauntlets from RPGnow or directly from Politically Incorrect Games nets you a free set of Disposable Heroes customizable miniatures.  A soft cover version of the game should appear later this year.

The Guts

            Taking the book chapter by chapter:

Introduction – After a brief introduction to role-playing, the book jumps into world building.  By doing this, Iron Gauntlets highlights customization right out of the gate.  This compact section, essentially a checklist, reminds the GM (called the director here) about all the basics a living fantasy world needs, from big concerns like religions and landmasses to the little details which bring a setting alive, like constellations and holidays.  Should the director prefer to avoid world building, the rest of the book revolves around standard medieval fantasy, with a few Greek touches.

Characters – Abilities, races, backgrounds, skills, gimmicks, and vocations all define characters in Iron Gauntlets.  Except for the special luck ability and some other touches, most ratings get determined by spending points rather than through random rolls.

The basic abilities may take some getting used to for some players.  For example, only one ability, fitness, covers all physical aspects of a character.  Luck acts similar to hero or drama points in other games.  If you want your character to possess magical ability, you need to allocate points towards those specialized abilities.  The remaining abilities define mental attributes, such as influence, reasoning, and creativity.  The races include standard medieval fantasy fare, including the bizarre-to-me addition of centaurs. More text describes the races’ roles in the world than detailing their special abilities in game terms.  Fantasy characters can come from many divergent backgrounds.  Iron Gauntlets’ backgrounds provide certain bonuses, such as a cost break on associated skills.  A lord receives skill breaks on influence-based skills and gains the wealth gimmick, while treefolk start with the sure-footed gimmick.  Gimmicks give advantages and disadvantages to characters.  Your character may believe he’s a “childe of hell”, possess a dark aura, or act as a mentor.  Vocations, a better-fitting term than “classes”, determine a character’s role in society.  Mechanically, vocations list skills purchased at normal cost; all other skills cost double.  The included vocations lean heavily towards medieval fantasy with a few nifty exceptions.  My personal favorite, the architect, sells his talents to the highest builder, while scouting out old, dangerous ruins for inspiration.  Skills appear next.  While skills generally link to one specific ability, skill ratings exist separately from ability ratings; an explanation of how this works in action resolution appears in a bit.  Styles, specific thematic combinations of skills, come up next.  I’ll touch on styles later, since they have more to do with action resolution than character generation.  Instead of hit points, Iron Gauntlets characters use separate word-based fatigue and injury tracks.

            While creating characters, a random number of previous exploits get detailed by the player and awarded some experience on related tasks.  This neat piece of character creation gets you thinking about what previous adventures your character may have had.  That run-in with the bandits in the forest gave your character some experience in tree-top fighting, for example.

            Like in the rest of game, ease of use and customization rules this chapter.  Most standard fantasy archetypes happily reside in the book, but others come easily.  While reading, I knew I’d want a ruin hunter, discovering and exploring old ruins with a charter from the knowledge-hungry king.  Since vocations simply list skills, I wrote a short, appropriate skill list and had my new vocation.  Iron Gauntlets encourages readers to customize and it happens easily without unbalancing the game.

Task Resolution – Iron Gauntlets uses Politically Incorrect Games’ Impresa Modular system, the same system featured in their Rune Stryders game.  Actions get resolved quickly using 10-sided dice.  First, determine the relevant skill and ability for the task.  Theoretically, any skill can link with any ability for action resolution.  Roll a number of dice equal to the ability.  Each result less than or equal to the skill rating counts as a step towards success.  Difficulty determines the number of steps required to succeed, either a set number or an opponent’s steps.  Unskilled attempts use a skill rating of one, meaning the ability dice rolled must come up as ones to count as steps.  Certain gimmicks and spending luck can raise the number of dice rolled.  Combat expands on the basic task resolution without bogging it down in too many details.

Styles, introduced in the character creation section, don’t show their utility until you understand action resolution.  As thematic bundles of skills, styles let you use any of the skills under their banner at the highest skill level for relevant tasks.  For example, the athletics, brawling, and composure skills comprise the Elven Acrobatics style.  Whichever of those three skills ranks highest gets used as the skill rating for any Elven Acrobatics tasks – even if that means using a higher rated unrelated skill like brawling to perform a back flip to reduce damage from a fall.

            Characters automatically gain skill-specific experience whenever they succeed at tasks with a difficulty of four or higher.  Players can either save experience to raise or buy new skills or spend it to roll an additional die during task resolution.  Players may buy new styles with experience as well.  Abilities only change under rare circumstances, such as undergoing intense conditioning to raise fitness by one point.

Equipment –Standard fantasy equipment appears here.  Weapons and armor get nice prose descriptions, as do poisons and magical potions.  Players, way back in character creation, randomly determine starting money and hit this chapter’s shopping lists.  Given the nice, streamlined touch the rest of the game has, the equipment section slightly disappoints.  I would’ve rather seen something like an abstract wealth system for determining necessary equipment on the fly.

Magic – With magic, Iron Gauntlets presents its most flexible system.  Though short, this chapter shows one of the more powerful and useful aspects of the game.  The sample magic systems cover three sources for magic: crafting-, divinity-, and totem-based.  All three receive their unique approaches through different skills and styles.

            Crafting closely resembles standard fantasy gaming magic in effect.  Crafting comprises several different skills, such as range and movement.  Generating effects comes from using a combination of those skills.  Characters can memorize a limited number of effects ahead of time or spend a turn referencing a spell book.  Alchemy, circles, and scrolls provide alternate casting choices.  Styles include necromancy, rune magic, and some nasty witchcraft.

            Divinity-based magic deals more with specific endowments, such as blessings and prophecy.  Faith and proximity determine the difficulty to call on endowments.

            Nature-based and mythology-heavy cultures make use of the spiritual totem-based magic.  The use of spirit guides grants knowledge and power based on a totem.  I haven’t seen this touched on too much in my gaming, so I liked its inclusion.

            Since Iron Gauntlets magic simply exists as a combination of a specific ability, a few skills, and some styles, other traditions seem easy to create.  Rumor has it that the upcoming soft cover edition defines a fourth tradition.

Bestiary – All the basic monsters you expect in a fantasy game show up in Iron Gauntlets.  While each monster has its own specific skills and gimmicks, the director randomly determines each monster’s abilities within a set range.  Though not filled with new concepts, its light touch keeps it quick and playable.  The short paragraph-length description for each monster sets up exactly what directors need to know to use it.  Without dealing with large stat blocks, the director can throw monsters at the characters on the fly without trouble.  My personal favorite enemies, the undead, threaten in four unique and exiting forms.  Have I mentioned customization enough?  Yes, new monsters stat out easily with Iron Gauntlets.

The only improvement to the bestiary I could see would come from the addition of a brief “common knowledge” sentence or two for each monster.  This character knowledge may or may not reflect the truth of the monster.  I remember seeing this in Quest of the Ancients and feel it would fit in nicely here.

Behind the Scenes – A lot of powerful information resides in this GM section.  First, solid and simple advice outlines the director’s roles as storyteller, referee, and guardian angel.  More rules bits come in next, from time and travel to additional enhancements for action resolution.  Then, simple guidelines recommend ways to dole out experience and replenish character luck scores after each session.

            From there, a formal section on customization outlines plain advice on how to make the setting and game your own.  The ease of customization appears plainly while reading the book, but having a devoted section with examples helps.

            Stuck for an adventure?  A dozen or so story ideas and random encounter tables should fire up your imagination.

            From there, some favorite fantasy trappings get touched on.  Your favorite spells from other fantasy games get touched on, showing you how to cast classics such as charm, fireball, and turn undead in Iron Gauntlets.  Then, what’s a fantasy game without treasures, traps, and relics?  All three receive the same light, yet complete and satisfying, touch the rest of the game has.

From there, the game nicely rounds out with a brief list of web resources, rules for diceless play using Politically Incorrect Games’ Active Exploits, reference and character sheets, an index, and the aforementioned sample Disposable Heroes miniatures and battle maps.  While the miniatures and maps make attractive extras, no details regarding their use appear in the rules.

In Theory

            Iron Gauntlets’ encourages flexibility by providing a solid heroic-fantasy foundation.  Don’t get the idea that it lacks completeness, because a fully playable medieval-style fantasy role-playing game exists inside the PDF.  You could happily play for months and months with just the included samples.  This setting, though, just provides a fully fleshed-out example.  Starting with the opening world building advice, Iron Gauntlets sets out to let you tailor your own vision of heroic fantasy.  Each aspect of the game customizes easily without throwing any of the other pieces out of balance.  All the extra details come via exciting prose snippets instead of boring stat-based detail.  This framework should also allow for easy on-the-fly creation of an adventure, which I tested in my first playtest session.

In Practice

            Everything up to this point I wrote prior to playtesting.  True to my earlier plan, I did no setup or planning prior to the game.  I simply wanted to see how easily Iron Gauntlets ran on the fly.

            After a brief overview of the rules, we jumped into character creation.  Backgrounds and vocations got customized to generate the characters we wanted – not because of any flaw in the system, but to end up with exactly what we wanted.  For example, one of the players envisioned nomads as more rugged and less about herding, so we replaced the backgrounds bonus to animal handling with survival.  We also got good use out of that ruin hunter vocation I had made up while reading the book.

            Some questions and observations that hadn’t occurred to me came up during character creation.  For one, do players still get cost breaks on skills provided by background regardless of vocation?  This becomes important since to purchase even base proficiency in a skill outside of your vocation costs four of your starting thirty points.  This cost alone makes the idea of a dabbler character rather unplayable.

            Also, the cursed relic gimmick tells you to select one out of the relic list, except no out and out cursed effects appear there.  For the tomb raider character that had a cursed relic, we ended up selecting a ring of perpetual light – both a boon and a curse in his profession!

            Selecting beginning equipment didn’t turn out as boring as I had feared.  As long as we stuck to the character concepts, we purchased necessary goods quickly.

We loved the whole character exploits option and took the chance to really tell some past stories.  We turned into old braggart adventurers as we recounted the times we once fought undead hordes, scaled cliffs to reach the lost wizard’s tower, escaped servitude as a galley slave to the pirates of the Azure sea, and deciphered the mysterious language of the Northern Kings all came to our minds immediately.  Cool.  One player commented how this reminded him of the Solomon Kane stories – old bits of relevant experience getting mentioned as they help the character out.

Another character creation option I didn’t mention earlier cropped up – veteran characters.  With this option, experience equal to the governing ability gets granted to each skill.  The composure skill caused the only issue here, since it has no governing ability.  We ended up granting experience equal to the average ability score to the character who had it.

After that, I took a few minutes to plot a tale of rival treasure hunters turned uneasy allies, goblin cutthroats, the hidden tomb of a legendary king, a connection to that ring of perpetual light, and animated dragon bones.  The game played out in a few hours.

So how did it go?  Iron Gauntlets plays quick.  The easily remembered task resolution system speeds up play.  Characters performed as expected, a nice touch the first time playing a game.  I do realize one mistake I did make though, which slowed down the game for me.  I didn’t prepare and customize ahead of time.

I found remember specific skill names and what abilities they should link to tough.  Skills as given in the book didn’t always map out like I would’ve expected.  Had the players and I spent time customizing things more, I would’ve run things a tad smoother.  Again I must point out that this didn’t come from an inherent flaw in the game, I simply should have taken the brief time to tailor matters.

We liked experience.  Sometimes spending those few points to boost the number of dice rolled really made the difference.

Damage certain earns its name here.  We actually ran no combats – the players found clever ways around the stickiest of situations – but we did crunch numbers later.  You will find combat lethal.  This may not map to your view of high adventure.

Not only do skills outside of your vocation have prohibitive costs, unskilled attempts sit at a nearly impossible plateau.  Since you only have a 10% chance with each die rolled, you don’t have too much hope for success out of the gate.  Spending luck only allows you an extra die.  In the future, we may alter this to each luck point spent equals one step.  Unless a vocation includes the relevant skill, you probably can’t do it – better to stick with a few skill areas and keep your actions centered on those skills.  Not action remains possible, and again, this may not map to your idea of high fantasy.

The final verdict?  We may play again.  I would definitely customize more first.  Games runs smoother for me when the small details play as I imagine them.  Iron Gauntlets can get me there.

Wrap-Up

Iron Gauntlets presents a solid system.  You can use its medieval fantasy as is, but I would recommend tinkering with the setting and character options to get exactly what you want.  The game remains impossibly easy to tinker with.  I’ve never had it so easy to get exactly the setting I want out of a game.  While I originally missed a sample adventure not coming with the rules, I ended up with exactly what I wanted with a minimum of effort.

In the end, Iron Gauntlets can play out a long campaign in a fantasy world of my choosing or give just a quick jaunt down memory lane.  It has the feel I want and fresh mechanics to keep it exciting.  For the few dollars spent, great value returned.