Category: Character Creation Challenge

If you are looking for my 2025 #CharacterCreationChallenge after action report with completion graphic, it will be posted when I’m caught up from being put behind by real-life events. If you made it to 31 characters, email me or privately contact me on one of the message boards or social media and I’ll make sure you get the graphic. Thank you for participating.

Here is my entry for Day 31 of the 2025 #CharacterCreationChallenge and I’ll be using a game that I picked up at a thrift store. Iron Kingdoms Full Metal Fantasy Roleplaying Game. I had never heard of this game before I had found it. On the surface it appeared to be a store brand version of a steampunk Warhammer 40K RPG, but who ever owned this previously must have loved the rules. The book was so worn from use that I’m afraid that pages were going to start falling out if I’m not careful. There were also stick on tabs on various pages to easily pull up different rules. This was a table copy for this game and very well loved. So let’s see how it looks when I dive in for the first time trying to make a character.

This hardbound book was published by Privateer Press in 2012. It has 359 pages with an ISBN number of 978-1-933362-89-2. Iron Kingdoms was created by Brian Snoddy and Matthew D. Wilson. The fist 100 or so pages covers the history of the world that this game is set in. Basically it contains steam-powered machines, magic, various races, alchemy and lots of dangerous guns. The artwork shows a world filled with dirt, soot and ash.

The character creation chapter starts on page 102. It describes the primary and secondary stats for the character. The primary stat of Physique (PHY) describes the physical aspects of the character with the secondary stats of Speed (SPD) and Strength (STR). The second primary stat of Agility (AGL) covers the reflexes and nimbleness with the secondary stats of Poise (POI) aka hand-eye coordination and dexterity and Prowess (PRW) aka grace and balance. The last primary stat is Intellect (INT) which includes wits, deduction and speed of thought with the secondary skills of Arcane (ARC) aka magical power and Perception (PER). There are also several derived stats of Defense (DEF), Initiative, Armor (ARM), Willpower (WILL). There is also definitions of MAT (Melee Attack) and RAT (Ranged Attack), the Life Spiral (aka health), Abilities (things the character knows how to do which do not increase in level), Connections and Skills (things the character knows how to do that can increase in level).

The Character Creation steps are listed on page 107. They are 1- Pick a race, 2- Pick an archetype, 3-Select two starting careers, 4- Increase the stats and 5- Finishing touches.

The races available for the first step that are listed in the core book include Human, Dwarf, Gobber (aka Goblins), Iosan (they look like gold skinned elves), Nyss (they look like pale elves), Ogrun (aka Ogres) and Trollkin (aka Trolls). As much as I’d love to explore some of the unique races in this book, I’m trying to play catch up with the challenge so I’m going to go with a simple Human to see how a basic race is presented. The race determines the starting stats, which I wrote down. It also details what possible archetypes are available to that race, languages, height and weight and additional characteristics (which bumped up some of the stat values).

The archetypes listed for the second step are Gifted, Intellectual, Mighty and Skilled. Each archetype has a series of benefits that are awarded when selected. One is automatic, the other is selected from a list of available feats and advantages. I picked Mighty and Back Swing. I guess I’m leaning towards a fighter character (obviously I may have picked different if I was creating in a group for a party).

Step three is to pick not just one, but two careers. This would provide the character with a set of skills and abilities. Some careers have prerequisites such as race or archetypes. There are 28 different careers so I’m not going to list them all. They were all very dark steampunkish in nature. Some of these were very close in nature that trying to decide which two to select was a little hard. This is where having other party members might have helped. I knew that I wanted to have this character be some sort of fighter, but which one and what to pair with it? After going through them several times I think I settled on two of them. The Aristocrat (basically a member of high society within the Iron Kingdoms) and a Bounty Hunter. This character is turning out to be someone who was raised with a silver spoon but left that lifestyle (probably upsetting his family in the process) to forge his own path out in the world. Why not. I wrote down what was earned from the two careers on my notes.

Now the book leads us to step four, Increase Stats. On page 150 it states that I have 3 advancement points to the primary or secondary stats. So far I don’t know how the RPG system works, so I just picked three secondary stats and increased them. Now that these numbers are determined, I’m instructed to fill out the life spiral to match the stat numbers by blocking out the excess numbers not used.

Last step is step five, the finishing touches. This deals with party setup (um… OK) and purchasing additional equipment to go with the starting assets from the career choices (only gold crowns for the two I selected). The money is to be used for weapons and armor as there is a basic set of adventurers equipment that each character is assumed to have and doesn’t need to be noted on the character sheet. Even thought it wasn’t listed, I would assume that the character name and background would have been selected here as well. In the Bounty Hunting world he’s known as the Back Adder (yea, I’m being inspired here) those in more polite circles might know him as Sir Edvard Blaccadicus. I still had to do some filling in of the character sheet but there were still a lot of blank spaces. I’m done, here is the scan.

Afterthoughts:

Creation wasn’t too bad, but seemed to be lacking a few steps to make sure that all the “T’s” were crossed and “I’s” were dotted. They could have also used some additional “see page xx for more information” sections. While they did a good job of explaining the stats, I wish that I could have quickly found the “this is how the system works” section. With how the book was starting to come apart I didn’t want to do too many page flips. There were some missing sections on my character sheet. What is social stats? Feat points? I’m sure I could have spent some time digging through the book, but I was done by that point.

While this was an interesting experience, I don’t see myself playing this game. I don’t even know of anyone else who actually owns this game.

Additional Notes:

After I had posted my character for Mazes and Minotaurs on one of the RPG message boards, someone responded. They told me how much they liked the post and wanted to try the game out themselves, but then they asked why I gave a character in a Greek inspired universe a Roman name. I hadn’t even realized that I had done that. The only thing I could chalk this up to is how exhausted I’ve been lately. 2025 has not been a good year so far, so I won’t miss it when it’s gone.

If you’ve stuck with me through these challenging times, thank you. I really appreciate the readers of my blog. Especially those who have contacted me, interacted with me on social media or just joined the conversation on the TardisCaptain dot Com Discord server. I’ll leave my final thoughts for the after-action report, but I wanted to make sure you all heard a thank you from me for being a light in this dark time.

One last note, I was talking with my wife about this while we were driving around. In the future I’m going to try to make the last character of the challenge from a system that is easy to use. This way I’m not looking at a daunting task to wrap up the month.

Coming Up Next:

The real After-Action Report for the 2025 #CharacterCreationChallenge

This article is open for discussion on the TardisCaptain dot Com Discord server. You can also email me at Carl (at) TardisCaptain.com or click on my social media links with any comments.

If you are looking for my 2025 #CharacterCreationChallenge after action report with completion graphic, it will be posted when I’m caught up from being put behind by real-life events. If you made it to 31 characters, email me or privately contact me on one of the message boards or social media and I’ll make sure you get the graphic. Thank you for participating.

Day 26 of the 2025 #CharacterCreationChallenge and I’ll be using a roleplaying game I didn’t know existed until just recently, The Strange. This book was written by Bruce R. Cordell and Monte Cook and published in 2014 by Monte Cook Games. I had picked it up at the 2024 SaltCON-Spring. It wasn’t the first book that I owned from this game, the supplement The Strange In Translation: The Strange Character Options. was sent to me when I was still enrolled in the Random RPG Book Club.

Today I had an opportunity to take the physical book with me while I was on a road trip with my wife. I figured that while I was away from my computer, I could at least get a little bit of information in my head before creating a character for this game. A game with just the title “The Strange” does very little to tell me what it is. The description on the back of the book helped a little. Basically there is another series of universes with different laws of physics connected by a network called “The Strange”. Humans who are “The Quickened” know of this network and how to travel to other Recursions (aka other realities) where allies and enemies can be found. I started reading at the front of the book and I was amazed. There were two pages at the beginning that were written like a new-employee orientation for a global group called “The Estate” and how they protect the Earth from other Recursions. It also details how they use tools called Cyphers that reminded me of a type of Doctor Who Sonic Screwdriver or a Neuralyzer from the Men In Black series. Then the next two pages gave brief descriptions on how to play the game, what Task Difficulties are and how they work. Then the next four pages past that was a brief description of combat, weapons, special rolls, experience points and even more on Cyphers. With the brief descriptions were page numbers where more detailed information could be found. With just 15 minutes of reading I was able to turn to my wife who was driving and summarize what I had just read. She responded that just from my explanation she could see herself playing this game. This is what I’ve been trying to explain to publishers of roleplaying games. Give us a brief description of how the game runs at the very start and leave the heavy in-universe descriptions for later and your readers will bless you. Just from these ten pages I felt confident enough to try to dive into the character creation that started on page 16.

The first thing that is described is the character stats. These are Might (think health and strength), Speed (which also includes agility), and Intellect (knowledge and personality). Each attribute has two components, a Pool and an Edge. The Pool is is the basic measurement of the attribute with the higher the better. The Edge is…. something. The book says “When something requires you to spend points from a stat Pool, your Edge for that stat reduces the cost.” In the example it talks about a mental blast ability and if it has a cost of 0 then you can use it for free. But if there is a cost you have a finite amount of times you can use that ability. The examples didn’t really help here so I’m just going to go on and pray that the book explains things a little bit better in the next few pages. Next is something called Effort and they sounds like luck or fate points. For a beginning character, you have to spend three points (are these from the pool mentioned above?) in order to apply Effort. I really wish I had a GM familiar with the rules to explain this to me as the book is starting to go off the rails here. Keep it simple guys. (flips a page) Come on, tell me what I need in order to generate my stats for this character (flips another page). OK I guess the Tiers are the equivalent of character levels, everyone starts at Tier 1 (makes sense) and that a Tier 1 character is still a hero that can do more than the average Joe (again that makes sense). Oh come on! I’m three pages after the definitions of the stats with no information on how to generate these stats. They’ve given me averages, but nothing that states what my unnamed glob of clay has right now. There’s text on spending experience and increasing capabilities? OK, I take it back what I said at the beginning, this isn’t an example that I’m going to hold up about how to write an RPG book. (Walks away before I declare that this post is over and that I’ve failed to create a character)

After I returned from getting a drink I sat down again. On page 20 there’s another “To create a character” entry. Ugh, fine. To create a character I have to ad lib a statement of “I am a (fill in an adjective here) (fill in a noun here) who (fill in a verb here).” This is the character’s descriptor The noun is the type (aka Class), the verb is the character’s focus (which is what?). There are three types, Paradox, Spinner and Vector. I’ve been flipping pages all over the place already, let me go find the classes and see what the smeg these are. Ah, vectors are the action-oriented types, the Paradox seems to be the mad scientists, super sorcerers gang and the Spinners are facemen, manipulators, something? However in looking at the descriptions each class has a starting pool for the stats. This would have been good to know 15 pages earlier.

And I just looked at how long this blog post is already. If you are still reading this, bless you. I hope you are not as frustrated as I am. Because I don’t want this to turn into a copy of War and Peace, I’m going to kill it now and declare this a character creation fail. As I was shutting things down (I didn’t fill in anything on the character sheet so I didn’t scan anything) I did find a character creation walkthrough on page 412. GAAAAHHHHH!!!!! With all of the other good “see page xx for more information” side notes that you had for everything else you couldn’t have put something about that in there? Yea, I am so done.

Afterthoughts:

When I first purchased this book at a SaltCON game swap, I thought that it would be just a quick use for the challenge then onto the trade pile. After reading how well the first 10 pages were set up in this publication, I was very tempted to keep it to show as an example of good RPG book writing. But after my attempt to make a character, I’m on the edge on keeping this book or putting it in the trade pile. It seemed to be right there (holds thumb and finger close together) but just couldn’t push it over the edge.

The one thing that I wish the publishers had done in this book was provide a checklist or step-by-step guide to the character creation. I think it would have made the process proceed faster. The book started out so well then suddenly went into overly descriptive mode while trying to create a character which bogged things down. The Strange/Cypher System seems like a simple mechanical system, but the book got too bogged down in trying to teach the game in the character creation chapter. (additional: I did find a walkthrough on page 412 after I had given up on making a character for this system, but it was too late since I needed to move on)

I’ve got an opportunity to play a Cypher System one-shot at SaltCON. I think after I’ve had a chance to play that game I’ll decide if I want to keep the book. I don’t think that I’ll homebrew for The Strange. The Cypher System seems to be a generic sandbox like GURPS and others and I doubt that I’ll homebrew for that either.

Additional Notes:

You’re probably reading this on/after February 1st and wondering where my after action report is. Well if you’ve been a regular reader on my blog, you know that various real-life issues had struck in January causing some delays. I’m still playing catch up and when I have my 31 scheduled characters done, I’ll write up an after-action report. I’ve seen a proof of the 31 characters completion graphic and I’ve sent some requests back to the artists. It will be available soon.

Coming Up Next:

For Gold & Glory

This article is open for discussion on the TardisCaptain dot Com Discord server. You can also email me at Carl (at) TardisCaptain.com or click on my social media links with any comments.