Idea Check: The Iron Marches

I stole this idea, and its just an idea from somewhere in reddit- playing ironsworn, coop, in a west marches sandbox come-as/when-you-wish scenario.

In this idea, the participants would establish the world, any scenarios that are run become part of the permanent landscape and others can go in if they wish. If you want to "run the same dungeon" IS: Delve has a move for that too. Ironsworn probably has a move for just about everything.
We can also do this with Starforged and create our own quadrant of space.

Any input?

That sounds fun. I'm quite excited about Starforged, atm, but also a huge fan of original Ironsworn.

Ill be honest. I was never a huge fan of the Ironlands scenario. I always prefer to let an original scenario open itself up to me as I explore. Besides I like high magic in my games. If I want grim and bleak, sure I'll hit the ironlands. But rarely.

Maybe we can have an island or a stretch of land, with a fortress (ala Keep on the Borderlands?) to be the base of operations or something of the sort.

There is a $3 fan-made supplement on drivethrurpg called Arcanum that is supposed to offer high-magic options for Ironsworn. I haven't bought it, so I don't know how good it is. A simple way to add some extra magic would be to port in the space-fantasy Starforged assets (Firebrand, Kinetic, Shade). You could also adapt the Ironsworn "Masked" assets to represent being a non-human species.

I enjoy the creating-your-truths part of Ironsworn. Maybe coming up with different questions or just reinterpreting the existing ones would help create a more high-fantasy setting.

I have the Arcanum- freakin’ excellent! Ars Magica in the iron lands!

Thought I would share a very informative blog about the West Marches.

We could do that and no need for a GM present.

"Awesome" and "$3"? Sold! Just bought it.

I'm totally onboard with this West Marches idea. Sounds like fun.

Let us see if we can get some more iron landers on board. Then I will start it up. I told the Ironsworn subreddit about it so it should bloom.

If not we might have a Louis & Clark thing going!

I'm interested in giving this a shot. "Solo" play in a shared world is an interesting variation of cooperative play that I think I would enjoy. I don't know how much cooperative adventuring I'll be able to participate in, though. That will depend on the expected posting rate. Do you think you'll set a "global" posting rate, or leave it up to the individual groups that may form to work out for themselves?

I'm interested as well. I haven't played Ironsworn before, but I've been reading though the rules, and I'm looking forward to trying it out.

I'll say I'm also in favor of changing up the setting in some way. I'm sure something interesting could be done with the default one, but it's not inspiring me very much. I tend to prefer when fantasy is a bit more weird and fanciful and not so serious all the time.

So say we can co-op without consequences.

Can we kill one another without consequences?

Like invasion mechanics in dark souls. No real consequences.

Say we are level one whatever we happen to be. And I pop into your world. Kill you take your stuff. Except you don't really die and you don't lose anything except what was used trying to kill me back. Heres the twist: this is a persistent feature of the environment. I invade anyone right there every time. Eventually there's a random boss that just drops in on anyone at certain points throughout the game.

It would be pretty cool I think.

We would all keep an eye on the fiction. No one going into god-mode. What is important is the story. Just because we have no gm doesnt mean we are gods In ironsworn the fiction, the story is wht is important. The cooperative will decide the level of consequences.

For me the biggest hurdle is a map, and we would have to decide how big, or long a hex is. I qlso would like ti experiment with uaing hex flowers to randomize our hexes in a logical manner.

One aspect is once a site is discoverd, explored, it becomes a permanent fixture of the scenario.

As to posting rate, I would expect that each party or solo player would decide on their own post rate. So if 3 people decide to co-op adventure, they agree on a target post rate. Another group might have a different post rate in their game thread. And solo folks can post whenever they can/want. That would mean some events pass quicker than others, but in a broad sense, I don't think that's a big deal.

For the map, it seems like we could sketch it in broad strokes, and let the details fill in as we adventure. That's how my solo games go. Seems like that would be fun to watch the map evolve as the different adventures unfold.

Ok, one more post. If you wanted to really invest time into building the map, you could maybe adapt The Quiet Year or The Deep Forest. The Deep Forest is free (https://buriedwithoutceremony.com/the-quiet-year/the-deep-forest) though its focus on monsters as the protagonists would need some changes to work as the basis for an Ironsworn game. This, of course, would take a lot of time (the game has 40 to 52 turns), but might be a fun game in itself.

No, I plan an improv. Let’s see how versatile Ironsworn can be. Now who is in and playing how? I’m for an exploratory coop.

Also how do we decide how much stuff, distance or time is in a hex?

I'm definitely in! :) I'm leaning towards trying out the solo experience at first, but I'm flexible.

And I'm also in favor of mapping things out as we go. I do think there's value in spending some time doing collaborative world-building, but I'd say the goal would be establishing the feel of the setting and some high-level facts about it rather than drawing a map per se.

My understanding is that one common way of doing hexcrawls is that a hex represents (roughly) a day of travel, so 20-ish miles from center to center. So, that might be a reasonable default, though it does mean there can be potentially a lot of stuff in each hex.

I'm in.

I think we give flexibility to players, re: style. When one or more people want to start an "adventure", they make a new thread. In that thread, those players can decide on co-op or guided. And if one person wants to solo, they can make their own solo thread. So when it is up and running, you might have different styles happening in different threads. And players could even be involved in multiple adventures with different characters, on be a guide in one thread and a co-op player in another. And so on.

I'm in, too. I can begin either with a solo thread or if 3 - 4 posts per week is not too slow of a pace I could join in co-op play. Either way, we should probably begin by establishing our 'truths' once the game has been created.

As long as we make each adventure, each thread, a permanent part of the march it should be great.

I found this in my explorations, perhaps we can use it to map out the borderlands?

Hextml

Iron Map does this work?