Through Monday, September 1 we present the Ironsworn-Starforged Bundle featuring Shawn Tomkin’s popular Ironsworn, Starforged, and Sundered Isles from Tomkin Press. Ironsworn and Starforged both adapt Powered by the Apocalypse mechanics to support several modes of no-prep pickup play: solo, co-op without a gamemaster, and GM-guided. Ironsworn and Starforged have become mainstays for solitaire actual-play streamers such as Trevor Devall (Me, Myself, and Die!) and Matt Risby’s The Bad Spot.
In these games you take iron vows (oaths) that drive you to face challenges and accumulate new quests and obligations. Ironsworn characters are defined mainly by assets, including paths (backgrounds, special knowledge, training), companions, combat talents, and rituals. Starforged adds assets like spaceships, modular upgrades, and support vehicles. Each asset has a base effect and two additional options. When you advance, you can upgrade an asset or select a new one. This offer includes print-and-cut asset cards for all three titles.
The flow of play relies on oracles, random tables that establish names, themes, twists, and troubles. You resolve an oracle’s challenges using Apocalypse Engine-style Moves, but with a twist: You roll a single D6, the Action Die, and add relevant bonuses. Compare the total against a 2D10 Challenge Dice roll. If your Action roll beats both Challenge dice, that’s a strong hit; if Action is greater than only one Challenge die, a weak hit; if both Challenge Dice exceed your Action roll, you miss. A momentum system constantly shifts your situation. You measure progress by fulfilling oaths, building connections, and pursuing mysteries.
Ironsworn is set in the Ironlands, a gritty medieval fantasy realm with a Viking/Northern European vibe. By default it is a northern peninsula surrounded by a cold ocean. Relatively recently, the peoples of the Ironlands fled to this dark, harsh land to escape a catastrophe elsewhere. Using the Ironsworn tables, you establish your own 14 truths about the setting: where the people came from, the disaster they fled, what iron vows mean, what horrors live here, and so on. The book outlines different regions of the Ironlands, and you can easily refine any of them to make this world your own. Ironsworn Delve expands the core game with new rules for dungeon crawls, expeditions, and journeys, as well as site oracles, monsters, and anomalies.
Starforged launches Ironsworn to the stars, keeping the basic tools but augmenting the mechanics and adding resources for sector generation, space creatures, scheming factions, precursor sites, and more. You venture across The Forge, a stretch of space you develop by choosing 14 truths about religion, laws, artificial intelligence, precursors, and more. Like the Ironlands, The Forge represents a refuge from a cataclysm. The nature of the catastrophe is one of the truths you choose. Like Ironsworn, Starforged lets you launch into the sky with little prep, and its system-neutral resources work well with any starfaring RPG.
The Sundered Isles toolkit adapts the Starforged system to let you build your chosen ocean and set sail for swashbuckling adventure. With tables in 14 categories, you populate the seas with islands, settlements, and strangeness, and establish truths that define the nature of magic, beasts, horror, and piracy. Sundered Isles includes new rules for supply, wealth, and seaborne engagement, sample factions, nautical oracles (with the added twist of a Cursed die), and system-neutral resources for historical play, fantastical stories, or anything in between.
Ironsworn‘s free core rulebook and permissive Creative Commons license have fostered an active community of fans and designers. The skeleton of the system makes it easy to reskin the setting with new cultural templates and different genre elements. Want high magic? Nonhuman folk? Non-European mythologies? With new resources and online tools, the community has forged Ironsworn into something greater.
The ideas in all of Shawn Tomkin’s games work well for a gamemaster leading players through a story or a solo player working through their inspirations. These games make a promise to support all kinds of play, and they fulfill that iron vow.
Pay just US$14.95 to get all four titles in our Ironsworn Collection (retail value $50.50) as DRM-free .PDF ebooks, including the complete Ironsworn core rulebook, its Delve expansion (previously in the November 2021 Cornucopia 9), and the pay-what-you-want Ironsworn Lodestar Reference Guide; the standalone companion SFRPG Ironsworn: Starforged; and the seafaring expansion for Starforged, Sundered Isles.
Each purchaser of this offer also receives a discount code, good through September 30, for 25% off Ironsworn: Starforged and Sundered Isles print products at the Modiphius North America or Modiphius UK web stores.
This Ironsworn-Starforged offer goes missing in (46-48) mysterious wreckage on a (91-92) shattered world that is (36-50) infested with (61-90) large (63-67) octopoid/tentacled creatures that (1-9) attack without warning Monday, September 1.
