Do you find the IK hard to write adventures for?

[Gundark]

For those that don't know IK is for Iron Kingdoms. I hang around the IK forums a bit and one topic that keep coming up is "need help with adventures" . The Ik has their own monster book and disallow many of the MM monsters to their setting. The IK monster book is well done but limiting as there are few creature in it. I wondering if the hardline stance of "this monster doesn't exist in the IK" (which is a big list) hampers creativity? Agree? Disagree? Tell me what you think.

 

[Tharen the Damned]

I have the IK books but not yed Dmed an Ik adventure or campaign.
I have no problem with adventures or Idead for foes.
The thing is, the whole campaign setting is more humanoid-centric than core D&D so many of the foes will be classed humanoids -mostly from the PC races.
As we have a lot of humanoid races and many classes (allowing 3rd party products that fit) you can come up with almost limitless villains that are ver different.
And last but not least I have both Green Ronins Advanced Monster Handbook and Goodman Games´ Book of Templates whcih give me about 150 Templates to use on our run of the mill Ork and make him a memorable encounter.

 

[cwhs01]

For those that don't know IK is for Iron Kingdoms. I hang around the IK forums a bit and one topic that keep coming up is "need help with adventures" . The Ik has their own monster book and disallow many of the MM monsters to their setting. The IK monster book is well done but limiting as there are few creature in it. I wondering if the hardline stance of "this monster doesn't exist in the IK" (which is a big list) hampers creativity? Agree? Disagree? Tell me what you think.

I think that the "world at war (or nearly so)" theme of IK, its technology level that is different from most other DnD fantasy campaigns, its not very practcal for actual use rules on building mechanika, and the lack of published adventures (apart from the witchfire trilogy, that wasn't very interesting....) are the main reasons for any difficulties in creating adventures for the campaignsetting.

Don't get me wrong, i love IK, but i find it hard to actually create adventures for it that capitalize fully on the wealth of information found in the campaignsetting guidebooks. And also i'm not sure that i find it a big problem limiting the types of critters you can throw at the players. Just means one has to rely on classed standard race npc's instead. Which always increases the possibilities for amusing roleplaying (i mean instead of monsterbashing rollplaying... or is it just me?). But also means a lot more work than just browsing the monstermanuals for adversaries.

 

[Buttercup]

I have always used a limited palate of monsters for any campaign, so the IK limits don't bother me at all. I also like using classed humanoids as antagonists--I have a slew of generic stat blocks I've made up over the years, so this doesn't take much work.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

No, no problems at all.

I decided on a mystery/detective theme, and the party is an agency in Corvis. There are enough plot threads described in the books to keep them quite busy, and I have my own over arcing storyline.

Monsters are kept to the wilds for the most part, and limiting the pallete means keeping the flavor of the setting. And by far the largest number of antagonists are humans. The monsters in the cities are rare, and have greater menace as a result.

The Auld Grump

 

[Stormborn]

I think that IK works best if the PCs have some organization or patron, and there are pleanty of them, or are working as an Irregular Mercenary company. If thats the case then there are no real problems generating adventures. I can see that the more typical generic DnD party that just adventures for gold and XP could be a problem. On the other hand, if you want to downplay the metaplot material, and set the campaign in a more stable era of the IK history then more ordinary adventurers might make more sense.

As far as monsters go, I think that most monsters I use have IK equivalents and so don't see that as a big problem. Like many here I tend to use humanoids as the main opponents.

 

[Michelle Lyons]

I haven't had any problems. I picked a geographical area, read up about it, looked at the local ruins and whatnot, and have assigned creatures and made lists of possibles accordingly. I've developed a couple of adventure seeds based on suggestions in the books, and I'm working on fleshing them out into full adventures.

So, no.

 

[Tewligan]

You could probably get away with using some outside monsters even if IK canon says they don't exist. I promise not to tell PP.

 

[TheAuldGrump]

And some can be handled by converting them to another type of critter. Barghests for example are closer to fey in their origins than they are to outsiders, convert hit dice and skills, and poof! instant grymkin.

The Auld Grump

 

[Waylander the Slayer]

I recently cancelled my IK campaign for exactly this reason- almost everything that can be used, even for locations etc. goes, needed to be heavily converted. There is no easy way to go around this even with all the material from PP recently. To run a well rounded session(incorporating mechanika, creating IK specific NPCs, detailing organizations etc.) was taking me 3- 4 days per session (for example, in a regular campaign i would use the heroforge? spreadsheet to create NPC's in minutes) and i did and do not have the time for this. It is a great setting to run if you have that amount of free time.