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Hi folks! My friends and I started playing the IKRPG about a month ago and we have been having a lot of fun with it. I was just wondering about other people's experience and opinions on the game and what kind of characters they are playing and what is going on in their adventure.

I had made a field mechanic/war caster originally but ended up being the GM. After seeing the difficulty in actually owning and operating a warjack from our party's other war caster, I decided to make a rifleman/spy for when we rotate GMs. He will be using an explorer for his fake identity which granted access to medicine. He is a spy for the nation of Rhul operating around llael and Ord to keep an eye on Rhulic trade interests and masquerading as a "big game hunter". Think Hammerlock from borderlands 2 but less flamboyant and gentleman like and somewhat more boisterous. I am going to try and "hide him in plain sight" basically making him appear so full of himself with trophies and stories of fantastics hunts in the wild places of the world that no one would ever suspect him to be a spy.

He carries a scoped heavy rifle with a bipod, a cane sword, sword cannon, and repeating rifle for numerous foes.

I haven't actually played the iron Kingdoms RPG, but I'm hoping you could answer a couple questions for me.

1. Is it actually based on the Warmachine/Hordes ruleset (in other words, could a guy who knows Warmachine pretty well pick it up without needing to spend a lot of time with it)?

2. Can warmachine tabletop figures be transferred into the RPG stats? I heard a horror story about someone who thought scrap thralls would be good low level opponents, but ended up wiping the party since the warmachine game is a lot higher powered than the RPG.

If both of those end up favorably then I might just have to add this book to my collection (I collect RPG systems, even if I never play them).

Go with Skilled, take Virtuoso and the other additional/boosted dice abilities from Skilled, and laugh at the Mighty characters who thought they could contribute in this game.

Unless Gods and Kings has changed it dramatically, that's really your best plan. I played a mighty character, biggest regret of any RPG I've played. It was just no fun, unless the rest of the party on purposely didn't take shots to let me get some feat points back, and even then they were gone as soon as I got into another combat to revitalise/back swing, while the Skilled players didn't have to spend feat points for things like virtuoso and their other abilities. Good fun. Not.

Interesting assessment motyak. I did build my rifleman as skilled. He already has dual shot so if I aim and shoot, I dont have enough free actions to keep reloading the heavy rifle as it is a single shot. I have fast reload so I can make the dual shot attack. I took skilled so I can still get the second shot if I have to move. I also took Virtuoso and Disarm thus far, we are only at 21xp so I have a long way to go.

Mighty characters gain an additional die on damage rolls do they not? Our Mighty char is a knight/aristocrat and he has been able to dish out a ton of damage due to cleave and defender. He almost always kills his target and gains a second attack with cleave especially since our gun mage pushes enemies into clusters for him and our sorcerer to AOE down. He really does a great job as our tank. I think he has custom fitted battle armor(?) and a shield and wields a caspian battle blade. Hits with P+S 11 or 12 and has 17 ARM. He fits the role perfectly with his abilities and I even through a Cryx bonejack at the party and he one shotted it on a charge which I was not expecting. Weapon master is just as lethal in the RPG as it is on the tabletop, although having numerous attacks seems to be a little more important in the RPG.

Wombat - 1: Yes, it is entirely based on the same 2d6 system and many abilities and stats are shared. However, there are many many abilities and stats that were added to the RPG to make it more...RPG like. For instance, there are 9 total "stats" that combine to give you the stats we see in warma/hordes (RAT/MAT/ARM/DEF etc etc). It really is cool since you will look at the tabletop characters a little differently as you try and imagine what their stats and abilities would be to get the stats that they have. Example: To get your character's MAT, you combine your character's Prowess stat with their Weapon Skill for the weapon you are using. My rifleman has Prowess of 5, and a hand weapon skill of 1, so his MAT with most 1 handed weapons would be a 6. RAT is determined with the Poise stat and the weapon skill, my rifleman's is 5 Poise (5 is my race's cap for our current level) and his rifle skill is 2 so he would have an RAT of 7. His heavy rifle is range 14 POW 12, but he gains +3" when aiming, +2 to attack rolls with his bipod deployed, +1d6 to damage with the first shot while aiming from Marksman, +1d6 on ATK and DMG and discard lowest due to virtuoso. Assuming he is aiming, he will shoot at 17" range, effective RAT of 11 +4d6 drop the lowest, and POW 12+4d6 drop the lowest, and he can always shoot twice each turn. Quite lethal I think.

2: you could convert the tabletop units over to the RPG as they basically have the same stats, you could determine the additional stats in the RPG using a little simple math. You have to be careful as the RPG is generally very unforgiving. It is not like in DnD where you have classes that can heal tons of health each turn, everything is generally very fragile and healing can be very difficult since there is no dedicated healer. Every player can heal small bits of vitality using feat points that they gain as they defeat enemies and complete quests and what not but a single decent strike against a soft player could drop them in a single shot. My rifleman has DEF 15/ARM 10 and 13 hit boxes so a bile thrall purging could inflict some extreme damage on him while bypassing his DEF.

Its not that the tabletop game is "higher powered", its just that the units we use on the tabletop would not be lvl1 characters, they would be trained soldiers which would place them many experience points above starting players.


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I sent our party against a cephalyx mind slaver and a pair of drudges. By adjusting their stats, it turned out to be a pretty decent battle. For the most part, you really just have to calculate the amount of health boxes they should have. I had the cephalyx have 10 hit boxes while the drudges had 8 each, this worked fairly well but you have to be careful because one of the drudges landed a charge on our gun mage when our Knight wasnt near him and did a HUGE amount of damage to him. Even at 8 health, most of our characters were able to one shot them.

 motyak wrote:
Go with Skilled, take Virtuoso and the other additional/boosted dice abilities from Skilled, and laugh at the Mighty characters who thought they could contribute in this game.

Unless Gods and Kings has changed it dramatically, that's really your best plan. I played a mighty character, biggest regret of any RPG I've played. It was just no fun, unless the rest of the party on purposely didn't take shots to let me get some feat points back, and even then they were gone as soon as I got into another combat to revitalise/back swing, while the Skilled players didn't have to spend feat points for things like virtuoso and their other abilities. Good fun. Not.

This. The old group I used to play Rogue Trader with also picked this up for another night of the week and one of them is a troll pugilist / melee monster. Whenever a fight breaks out the gunmages and a min-maxed assassin of sorts manage to blow everything away in rapid succession by the time the troll has a chance to fight.

I think this is something PP needs to fix or at least address, because well..

Wow, our group's experience has been completely opposite of that. Our mighty character cuts everything down so easily that I have to skew encounters against him a little bit so that the other players get to contribute. Mighty characters seem to hit so much harder than everyone else since they are basically weapon masters with any melee weapon.

So why is it that you guys feel that mighty characters are bad? They hit much harder than skilled characters and have ways of gaining extra attacks. Much of this us done without feat points which seem very easy to come by since they hit so hard.

Skilled characters don't have anything that adds to their damage, instead they have ways to gain extra attacks and to be more accurate when dual wielding but mighty characters should still out damage them pretty easily. Plus a lot of fighting can be done within city streets and buildings so its relatively close quarters which should benefit mighty characters.

On a side mote - Extreme range is rediclous in this game. My rifleman can cover an entire battlefield when aiming and still has an effective RAT of 6 so long as his bypod is setup.