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FUNDING GOAL MET - the project is now at over $100K and growing speed toward more stretchgoals.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/privateerpress/iron-kingdoms-requiem-5e

Yep new year new edition new KS - running for just 16 days. Though it they aim to publish 3 new books in physical and PDF form as well as a bunch of potential extras. The books are:


Setting book - your core reference and game book for the setting as they launch the 5th edition of it!
Monsternomicon - over 80 monsters and beasts from the world setting!
Legend of Witchfire Adventure - a level 1-4 adventure that acts as a great introduction to the setting, world and game.

Earlybird for the first day is $100/£74 which gets you all 3 core books in physical and PDF form as well as a GM screen.

A few sample mages from the Monsternomicon

Oh nice! I thought they might reprint the Witchfire Trilogy but to follow it up with a new adventure based on Alexia as she is now? Damn, I'm in!

I'm conflicted. I do love the Iron Kingdoms but I hate we're back to where we are 20 years ago with the general RPG community of turning everything into D&D and trying to shoehorn rules/spells and other things into settings they don't belong.

Pretty lame SG too. Form fillable PDF? really privateer? Character tokens for roll20/fantasygrounds? Really? Just don't have any if that's what you're going to do.

The stretch goals could be a bit more inspiring i agree, though for now i'll back the project because i enjoy the world setting (and at least 5e characters are a bit better at, well, surviving compared to the system they put out, though it was fun)

That's funny, I've never had a person drop in their homebrew system. It was just too easy to heal up in the game. It's an odd balance of giving enough fodder to generate points vs making an encounter challenging. I really do like it though.

Now that I think about the costs though the SG make sense as I'm pretty sure 100k doesn't even cover their costs for the production, let alone printing of the books. Half a 100 pledge is going towards printing (cheaper if done in china but I really don't know what overseas charges for something like this) and we know they've had people working on this for at least a year. Granted the full time employees are also working on other games so their full salary doesn't count as debt towards this but parts of it does and then they have a lot of contractors I'm sure.

They've fast blown through funding goals as well and are now over $100K. I've updated the first post with a few photos (spoiler) from the monster book.

Man that Archon is pretty weak for a CR18. A party of level 6-7 players could easily take it down in one round if they win init or one level 12 multiclass warlock. Granted that's just basic 5e so I'm not sure if privateer is doing their own class/magic/equipment balance that would make that more of an interesting fight. But it needs a much higher AC (17 is nothing) and double the hitpoints.

I guess that's one of my issues wth 5E, like most D&D editions since 3x, is that there's horrible player balance vs monsters and higher level stuff isn't really play-tested as 80% of a monsters abilities are generally worthless but yet count towards the powerlevel/CR.

Surprised the Menite Archon is Neutral Good, all things considered.

Maybe it takes more after the paladins of the wall version of menites
Seems to be steaming along pretty well so far, so thats nice. Hopefully we'll see some more interesting monsters added to the book

I would have figured it to me Lawful Neutral as Menoth is pretty strict. But then again alignments are kind of dumb and rarely make sense in any game system that have them.

Well, this is a change.

Seeing a Winter Troll in 5e D&D stats has me shaking my head.
They're kind of chumps in Hordes or the IKRPG. But here... 189 HP and Regen 10. That's a long boring fight, though a lot of healing required if that ice breath comes off cooldown too often.

Did PP give any rationale why they're going this route (converting all their RPG stuff back to D&D, and a new edition at that) rather than keeping with their own stuff?

Voss wrote:
Well, this is a change.

Seeing a Winter Troll in 5e D&D stats has me shaking my head.
They're kind of chumps in Hordes or the IKRPG. But here... 189 HP and Regen 10. That's a long boring fight, though a lot of healing required if that ice breath comes off cooldown too often.
Did PP give any rationale why they're going this route (converting all their RPG stuff back to D&D, and a new edition at that) rather than keeping with their own stuff?

Seacat said a few years ago, right before he left PP, in a IKRPG Facebook group that the books just didn't sell well. The core book did fine but everything else had a huge drop off in numbers. Why are they doing 5th edition D&D vs a 2.0 edition of their own setting? Because D&D like like 75% of the market (if not more) and a lot of those players won't play any other system so they're just going where the players/money is.

I suspect they've been working on this for a while as Hungerford said, in the same FB group, 2 years ago that there would be news on IKRP at Locked and Loaded but that never happened in 2019. Maybe that was a 2.0 IKRPG and it wasn't working for them or they decided to wait to make the announcement until the product was further along and decided that 2020 L&L was a better time.

I played the old 3.x IKRPG back in the day and they're good books but it always felt like they were always fighting the core D&D system with their new rules and things played fine but felt out of place. Maybe they'll do a better job with 5E now that they're much more experienced game developers and that 5E is more streamlined. But I doubt they'll make many changes as that will just turn off the market they're going after right now.

Is it just me, or it is weird that PP has to turn to Kickstarter in order to fund a new product?

Now CMON have been abusing the platform for a long time now, that’s their shtick, but PP... well, it’s been in business for a while and it not as small a company as Mierce is.

SnotlingPimpWagon wrote:
Is it just me, or it is weird that PP has to turn to Kickstarter in order to fund a new product?

Now CMON have been abusing the platform for a long time now, that’s their shtick, but PP... well, it’s been in business for a while and it not as small a company as Mierce is.

Kickstarter hasn't been for kickstarting small companies for many, many years now. It's the top marketing/advertisement platform for Boargames and RPGs not make by the top players. If you want to sell something and you're not owned by Asmodee or Hasbro you go to Kickstarter.

 Monkeysloth wrote:
I'm conflicted. I do love the Iron Kingdoms but I hate we're back to where we are 20 years ago with the general RPG community of turning everything into D&D and trying to shoehorn rules/spells and other things into settings they don't belong.

Pretty lame SG too. Form fillable PDF? really privateer? Character tokens for roll20/fantasygrounds? Really? Just don't have any if that's what you're going to do.

While the stretch goals are kinda lame, stuff that should just be baseline inclusions. Its not really a mistake to turn it into Dnd.

I think there are much better systems, but Dnd is the most accessible for most people and there is a plethora of ready made stuff which just makes it convenient. DnD just has the critical mass that anybody trying to do anything unique has an uphill battle trying to get into the market.

The IKRPG system did have some advantages. Using Defense and Armor as separate things is a much better way of doing things compared to AC, which while simple it is boring and leads to silly situations where two very different things thematically are mechanically identical. And 2D6 is much more finnessed than D20 because you have bell-curve mathematics instead of straight randomness of singular D20s. You have more options in terms of minor effects and what you can do to a roll.

But IKRPG was simply too barebones in terms of mechanical tools. Crafting was thematically very important, but lacking in solid mechanics to enable you to actually benefit from it. The social mechanics suffered because no attention was given to them, every class was a combat class which wasted the flexibility of the system giving you multiple classes. Plus Jacks were just... bad. They were 1:1 translations from the tabletop while PCs and NPCs were quite beefy, and your 30k gp Warjack would be turned into scrap metal from even a low level encounter while being unable to contribute to the fight in any meaningful way. And there are tons of materials and supplements for DnD that its not hard to just grab a pregen encounter if you need some filler. IKRPG had basically nothing.

I'll definitely look forward to this material, I can integrate it into my current Ironkingdoms DnD campaign.

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Monkeysloth wrote:
I'm conflicted. I do love the Iron Kingdoms but I hate we're back to where we are 20 years ago with the general RPG community of turning everything into D&D and trying to shoehorn rules/spells and other things into settings they don't belong.

Pretty lame SG too. Form fillable PDF? really privateer? Character tokens for roll20/fantasygrounds? Really? Just don't have any if that's what you're going to do.

While the stretch goals are kinda lame, stuff that should just be baseline inclusions. Its not really a mistake to turn it into Dnd.

While I don't disagree with the flaws if the IKRPG system you listed, as they're all easily addressable in an updated version but very much issues with the game, I disagree with turning into D&D as the right thing (even though I know financially why they are doing this) as it's like saying if a wargame isn't popular enough they should just give up and sell their minis to 40k players. While that's does happen from time to time in the tabletop market it's more players just buying the minis to use as opposed to the company throwing in the towl and doing it themselves but with RPGs the past year it seams like a new company every month is giving up on their games and targeting D&D players instead. And if the trend continues you'll loose so much creativity and talent as the market sterilizes itself chasing a player base that does not want you to add improvements/changes to the system.

As I said this did happen 20 years ago with 3rd edition and when that bubble burst it caused a lot of companies to go out of business and hurt the market enough that it took quite a while to see things get back to normal as a lot of talent was lost I feel. Now granted that with KSer and digital distribution the D&D bubble burst this time around may have little effect -- but as someone who's played mostly RPGS (way more then wargames) over the past 30 years I really don't want to see another semi-collapse of my favorite hobby caused by the same reason as before.

Whew, those stretch goals continue to underwhelm. I hope there is something good once the project has REALLY been funded!

Mind you, thinking back to Widowers Wood etc, I don't recall there being much in the way of free stuff there, either.

SnotlingPimpWagon wrote:
Is it just me, or it is weird that PP has to turn to Kickstarter in order to fund a new product?

Now CMON have been abusing the platform for a long time now, that’s their shtick, but PP... well, it’s been in business for a while and it not as small a company as Mierce is.

PP has been doing kickstarter for everything bar WM/H for a while now. Board games, warcaster 40k, the whole bushel.
It's a way to dump risk and avoid loans or deals with bigger fish.

 Monkeysloth wrote:
[
As I said this did happen 20 years ago with 3rd edition and when that bubble burst it caused a lot of companies to go out of business and hurt the market enough that it took quite a while to see things get back to normal as a lot of talent was lost I feel.

Privateer was one of those third party D20 developers 20 years ago. Like Green Ronin, Paizo etc they spun off from ex WotC staff (Matt Wilson was the Art Director for Magic). Their first products were the Witchfire Trilogy D20 adventures which introduced the IK. This is really just a return to their roots.

D&D 5e is massively more popular than 3e ever was. Sales have been increasing every year since it came out, which is pretty much unheard of for an RPG, and the rise of streaming and liveplays has had a huge impact.

I'm happy if PP can use KS and avoid loans/investors. Those are often things that can be great in the short term ,but can come back to bite hard if the sales take a downturn (which might happen through things not PP's fault like recessions etc...).

Also I do agree that they could be using more exciting stretchgoals to help maximise the hype around their campaigns, but at the same time I think that they run their campaigns short on tight deadlines with the intention that its a short term investment with a fast turn around for the product. The idea being that instead of lumbering themselves with a £2million monster that goes overbudget and over timelines by months to years; they instead keep things modest- giving them the investment they need without overwhelming their own production or that of 3rd parties.



I see it as modest potential growth for them and hopefully they are able to use profits from each one to steadily expand and improve hteir infrastructure and get back up to speed like they were before. I'd rather a slow growth like that which is sustainable and stable than fast sudden growth that might leave them vulnerable

SnotlingPimpWagon wrote:
Is it just me, or it is weird that PP has to turn to Kickstarter in order to fund a new product?

Now CMON have been abusing the platform for a long time now, that’s their shtick, but PP... well, it’s been in business for a while and it not as small a company as Mierce is.

I suspect that even with Warmachine having been a hugely popular wargame, PP is still a rather smaller company than you might expect. Maybe not like "3 people in a basement" small, but I'd be shocked if the overall company had more than 30 full time employees.

 Mr. Grey wrote:

SnotlingPimpWagon wrote:
Is it just me, or it is weird that PP has to turn to Kickstarter in order to fund a new product?

Now CMON have been abusing the platform for a long time now, that’s their shtick, but PP... well, it’s been in business for a while and it not as small a company as Mierce is.

I suspect that even with Warmachine having been a hugely popular wargame, PP is still a rather smaller company than you might expect. Maybe not like "3 people in a basement" small, but I'd be shocked if the overall company had more than 30 full time employees.

Various sites and accounts from former employees indicate that at one point, Privateer Press was around 100 FTE, but recently dropped (January 2020) to around 30. Not sure if they've had more leave since then or filled more positions, but it's safe to say that by all accounts, they're not as strong financially as they once were. Their market penetration is definitely not as deep, either.

Wish them luck, but it's kind of frustrating to me to see yet another iteration of the same old stuff. Yes, PP started as an RPG supplement company with the Witchfire Trilogy (for, back then, 3rd edition D&D), then grew a few supplements for that before sidelining their RPG for a long while. Eventually they did their own RPG engine re-releasing Witchfire updated for that, and some other supplements, then let that go to the sideline too. Now we're back to the start with re-shaping it for D&D 5, and (you guessed it) re-releasing Witchfire with some updates, redoing the Monsternomicon, etc.

I did like the setting. A lot. But I won't be backing this because to me, PP has shown they won't continue to support their RPG line, and I'm pretty much over Alexia at this point. I wish them luck, though.

 Monkeysloth wrote:
That's funny, I've never had a person drop in their homebrew system. It was just too easy to heal up in the game. It's an odd balance of giving enough fodder to generate points vs making an encounter challenging. I really do like it though.

Now that I think about the costs though the SG make sense as I'm pretty sure 100k doesn't even cover their costs for the production, let alone printing of the books. Half a 100 pledge is going towards printing (cheaper if done in china but I really don't know what overseas charges for something like this) and we know they've had people working on this for at least a year. Granted the full time employees are also working on other games so their full salary doesn't count as debt towards this but parts of it does and then they have a lot of contractors I'm sure.

Book printing is incredibly cheap - it probably costs more for them to ship them from China than it does to actually print them (and even that isn't that expensive assuming they are loading up a container), very much doubt $50 out of $100 is being spent on publsihing and transportation costs for them, doubt that the costs even make up a quarter of it.

Surprised the Menite Archon is Neutral Good, all things considered.

I would have expected Lawful rather than Neutral, what seeing as how Menoth is the "Lawgiver"

Is it just me, or it is weird that PP has to turn to Kickstarter in order to fund a new product?

Not weird at all. PP was circling the drain for a while, they seem to have recovered a bit but they are not as big or as financially secure as they were a few years ago. They've also been fairly transparent that the state of the hobby retail and distribution industry is not conducive towards operating the sort of business that would enable them to not need to go to Kickstarter. A lot of distributors got burned by their implosion a few years ago and consider their product too risky to carry, and those that are willing to carry it only want to carry new releases (which isn't unique to PP), and only enough that they can sell out of within the first few days of release - they aren't interested in carrying PPs back catalog of thousands of products and ensuring retailers can maintain a revolving inventory of a large selection of their product. So the only real option PP has is to do direct distribution, and kickstarter is the best platform for that at the moment.

I disagree with turning into D&D as the right thing (even though I know financially why they are doing this) as it's like saying if a wargame isn't popular enough they should just give up and sell their minis to 40k players

You pretty much just described the exact state of the wargaming industry though. Unless you're working a licensed IP, most of the industry exists to produce bits and kits for use in 40k, Age of Sigmar, Warhammer Fantasy/Kings of War (hell thats how Kings of War started), or for "generic" settings (historicals, generic fantasy, generic sci-fi, etc. ala Warlord Games), and a considerable portion of the industry also works in reverse - producing *rules* for use with other companies miniatures. There are very few companies out there that are both doing their own rules and their own miniatures and are actually very successful at it, and most of the companies that do that today started out as doing just rules or just minis and evolved up into both as their business and followig grew. Even companies like Wyrd and Infinity which most tabletop wargamer have an at least passing familiarity with are small-fry companies that are having all sorts of issues maintaining and expanding their product lines - GW probably makes about as much revenue in one-two weeks as either of those companies do in a whole year.

Ah, I stand corrected. Thanks Valander. And yeah, PP definitely seems to have been experiencing a bit of a shift the last few years due to a variety of factors. I wonder if doing this as a 5e version is an attempt to at the same time entice more people into playing Warmachine.

I won't be backing this either, but that's largely because I'm lacking a group to play any rpg's with and I already have enough various roleplaying games gathering dust on my shelves.

Big fan of the setting, for sure. There's always been a certain appeal to the Iron Kingdoms for me.

Anyway, I suspect that part of IKRPGs failings as a standalone game system was probably due to inadequately integrating it into the miniatures range. Its pretty clear that miniatures sell and carry games, and tying the two together is a pretty simple marketing slam dunk when it comes to attracting interest from newcomers to your game and product line. While IKRPG was theoretically compatible with the WMHDs miniatures line, I can't really say I once saw them market the miniatures in relation to the RPG - it always seemed like it was an unspoken assumption that you would use the WMHDs minis to play the game, obviously, but I never really saw PP try to market the game to new blood who might not have been interested in or familiar with the wargame by saying "hey, come check out these awesome miniatures and experience a fantastic role playing experience with your friends." It was always more of a "Hey, Iron Kingdoms RPG, come check it out! Its the RPG version of our other more popular game that you probably still haven't heard of anyway." and if you were familiar with WMHDs already you went "Oh yeah, I can use these minis for that", and if you weren't you went "Huh, looks like an Eberron knockoff, next..."

I get the impression that they didn't want to over-commit on stretch goals as they weren't sure how well it would do.

Given we're on day 2 and it is over 200% of what they were after, maybe there'll be some recalibration. I don't think they'll go nuts on them, though.

The stretch goals are disappointing but PP's always been pretty 'safe' with them. The lack of any exclusive or even new models surprises me though, considering... well, you know. Aren't D&D minis now the third most popular model line behind 40k/AoS now?

 Valander wrote:

Wish them luck, but it's kind of frustrating to me to see yet another iteration of the same old stuff. Yes, PP started as an RPG supplement company with the Witchfire Trilogy (for, back then, 3rd edition D&D), then grew a few supplements for that before sidelining their RPG for a long while. Eventually they did their own RPG engine re-releasing Witchfire updated for that, and some other supplements, then let that go to the sideline too. Now we're back to the start with re-shaping it for D&D 5, and (you guessed it) re-releasing Witchfire with some updates, redoing the Monsternomicon, etc.

I did like the setting. A lot. But I won't be backing this because to me, PP has shown they won't continue to support their RPG line, and I'm pretty much over Alexia at this point. I wish them luck, though.

In fairness it's not a re-release of Witchfire but a new adventure set in the new present. Re-releasing updated monster manuals is something pretty much every single RPG line does, it's just IKRPG has a cool sounding name for theirs. Iron Kingdoms standalone was apparently successful enough to spawn a few splats and the Hordes version, but it was never a massive seller to my knowledge and with RPG margins being so small - particularly when it they were usually pretty high quality publications - is it that much of a surprise IKRPG was left to rot? I really liked the system so it was a shame to see it happen, but it wasn't a surprise.

chaos0xomega wrote:


Book printing is incredibly cheap - it probably costs more for them to ship them from China than it does to actually print them (and even that isn't that expensive assuming they are loading up a container), very much doubt $50 out of $100 is being spent on publishing and transportation costs for them, doubt that the costs even make up a quarter of it.

I was assuming US printing there, thought I had mentioned that but probably didn't, as I don't know where PP prints. I know people that print things in the US and once shipping, warehouse and printing is factored in it's about $20-$25 a book for something as thick as an RPG book (in the order of 10-20k books) but a regular hardback book binding size. I don't know what it costs via china as I have no direct exposure to anyone that prints over seas.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Arbitrator wrote:
The stretch goals are disappointing but PP's always been pretty 'safe' with them. The lack of any exclusive or even new models surprises me though, considering... well, you know. Aren't D&D minis now the third most popular model line behind 40k/AoS now?

This was the most surprising thing too me as well. I figured they'd have a new line of mins for the people on the cover of the new book as the old ones, from 20 years ago, have minis (and are mercs in Warmahords)

 Monkeysloth wrote:

chaos0xomega wrote:


Book printing is incredibly cheap - it probably costs more for them to ship them from China than it does to actually print them (and even that isn't that expensive assuming they are loading up a container), very much doubt $50 out of $100 is being spent on publishing and transportation costs for them, doubt that the costs even make up a quarter of it.

I was assuming US printing there, thought I had mentioned that but probably didn't, as I don't know where PP prints. I know people that print things in the US and once shipping, warehouse and printing is factored in it's about $20-$25 a book for something as thick as an RPG book (in the order of 10-20k books) but a regular hardback book binding size. I don't know what it costs via china as I have no direct exposure to anyone that prints over seas.)

PP books are printed exclusively in China (or they were).

Very few companies print in the US. It isn't worth the extra cost, and the few US publishers that bother still over-rely on outdated printing presses. Most Pacific Asian publishers (China/Korea/Japan) have much more modern and significantly better presses, and a far better cost ratio for printing. Printing in the US, outside of the big fiction publishers with mass market paperbacks, is functionally cutting your own throat when it comes to profit margins.

 Monkeysloth wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:

 Monkeysloth wrote:
I'm conflicted. I do love the Iron Kingdoms but I hate we're back to where we are 20 years ago with the general RPG community of turning everything into D&D and trying to shoehorn rules/spells and other things into settings they don't belong.

Pretty lame SG too. Form fillable PDF? really privateer? Character tokens for roll20/fantasygrounds? Really? Just don't have any if that's what you're going to do.

While the stretch goals are kinda lame, stuff that should just be baseline inclusions. Its not really a mistake to turn it into Dnd.

While I don't disagree with the flaws if the IKRPG system you listed, as they're all easily addressable in an updated version but very much issues with the game, I disagree with turning into D&D as the right thing (even though I know financially why they are doing this) as it's like saying if a wargame isn't popular enough they should just give up and sell their minis to 40k players. While that's does happen from time to time in the tabletop market it's more players just buying the minis to use as opposed to the company throwing in the towl and doing it themselves but with RPGs the past year it seams like a new company every month is giving up on their games and targeting D&D players instead. And if the trend continues you'll loose so much creativity and talent as the market sterilizes itself chasing a player base that does not want you to add improvements/changes to the system.

As I said this did happen 20 years ago with 3rd edition and when that bubble burst it caused a lot of companies to go out of business and hurt the market enough that it took quite a while to see things get back to normal as a lot of talent was lost I feel. Now granted that with KSer and digital distribution the D&D bubble burst this time around may have little effect -- but as someone who's played mostly RPGS (way more then wargames) over the past 30 years I really don't want to see another semi-collapse of my favorite hobby caused by the same reason as before.

Well, the main issue is market saturation. If you think wargaming is oversaturated, RPGs are even moreso. Go into any gaming store that holds a few decades worth of inventory, particularly used inventory, and you'll see the market is littered with the bones of dead RPGs.

It would have taken a good amount of work to make the IKRPG fully functional, more than it is probably worth for PP. Its a tough sell to make people buy new books for a relatively obscure setting and entirely new game system. But as a supplement for an existing game it might be easier to get some traction. With this, maybe someone who has never heard of the Iron Kingdoms buys the book for some new modules and monsters to use in their DnD campaign. Which can be a gateway for getting that person to look at other Iron Kingdoms products.