Is Iron Heroes Dead

[AnthonyRoberson]

Fiery Dragon seems to be letting Iron Heroes drift into obscurity. Does anyone know if a 2nd Edition is in the works?

 

[ValhallaGH]

More or less. You can check out the official IH forum here and talk to the owner when he pokes his head in (Adam Windsor, a.k.a. CrowroadAW). Adam has said a couple of times that there is currently no incentive to do a second edition.

As Hydromaster said,

"Dead" is as in "Dead in the water". As in it isn't going anywhere right now. But it's still there, it still kicks ass, and you can still play it.

 

[Celebrim]

Was it ever alive?

After looking over the rules, I basically said to myself, "That has some cute ideas, but I wouldn't want to play it past the 'E6 gritty' tier, and if you are just going to do that, you don't need Iron Heroes because the base 3.X D&D game works just fine."

Seriously, IH was a huge disappointment for me because it didn't look like it worked as advertised. I'd be quite surprised if there were ever more than 100 or so Iron Heroes campaigns in the whole world. I bet many people bought the books, but much like most GURPS source books, I bet mostly they became reading material.

 

[Aus_Snow]

Pretty much, yeah. As well as 'reading material' though (if that's so,) it has proved useful to a number of GMs for various hacking and splicing, in particular with 3e, most likely. What number, no idea. But I was (am? I lose track - of where some of my house rules originally came from, I mean) one of them, for instance.

So many gamers seem to move onto whatever's currently being printed and sold in shops, as in this very week, kinda thing. Or, perhaps more to the point, whatever's being hyped, right now. And it never ends. . . But you might have a point too, Celebrim, about how many people ever used this system, whole cloth.

It really didn't help that Mike Mearls got some way through making this RPG, then went over to WotC, for [you know what]. It shows. Plus, it's extremely crunchy, and kind of awkward (well, IMO.)

 

[Voadam]

It was a dissapointment for me because though the idea of powerful high fantasy warriors not dependent on items is super appealing to me, the mechanics were far more fiddly than I like or want. Accumulating token pools are too much resource tracking and management for my tastes.

I allowed a player to play one of the classes in my 3.5 game with suitable adjustments though and it went fine (most combats did not last long enough for tokens to matter). I really like the concepts for villain classes in 3e I think a lot of powers are neat and can easily be adapted as feats in normal 3e, etc. It works fine for me as a sourcebook for my OGL games.

I also like the settings and modules designed for a heroic low spell high fantasy setting.

 

[Azgulor]

Even if it is no longer actively supported, nothing is preventing you from running an effective IH campaign.

While ultimately, IH was more "wahoo" than I was hoping for, it has been a goldmine of ideas that I've imported into my OGL games.

Skill Groups - I like the concept but didn't steal this one. One of the better systems for skill challenges

Armor as DR

Combat Maneuvers/Stunts - dropped whole cloth into every d20/OGL game I run.

Combat Zones - same thing

Racial/cultural mechanics


IH for many never seemed like a finished game -- fair enough. However, I've found it to be a great quasi-toolkit to borrow from.

 

[1Mac]

I'd be quite surprised if there were ever more than 100 or so Iron Heroes campaigns in the whole world.

I ran one IH game and PBP'd in another, so either I was aberrantly over-represented or there were more IH games than you think.

I agree that the game never "felt finished," but that didn't stop people from running patched, houseruled versions of the game. My impression was that the typical approach to IH was somewhere between rules-as-written and the toolkit approach Azgulor uses.

 

[ValhallaGH]

I ran one IH game and PBP'd in another, so either I was aberrantly over-represented or there were more IH games than you think.

I agree that the game never "felt finished," but that didn't stop people from running patched, houseruled versions of the game. My impression was that the typical approach to IH was somewhere between rules-as-written and the toolkit approach Azgulor uses.

Having run four different IH campaigns, and knowing of at least three others that got run, I'm agreeing with 1Mac.

It wasn't truly finished, it was really fiddly, and it was difficult to integrate any sort of magic system that didn't make things stupidly over-the-top. It was a wealth of ideas to mine, tweak, play with, and discard.
And it was a heck of a lot of fun.

You are not your magic weapon and armor. You are not your spell buffs. You are not how much gold you have, or how many times you've been raised from the dead. When a Big Bad Demon snaps your sword in two, you do not cry because that was your holy avenger. You leap onto its back, climb up to its head, and punch it in the eye, then get a new damn sword off of the next humanoid you headbutt to death.

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I ran an IH campaign for 6 or 8 levels or so. It was not perfect, but it had some very good concepts and ideas in it.

Maybe tokens where to fiddly, but they were one way to keep resource management in the game and "tactics" without requiring spells or making the game boring.

Also, villain classes where a great win and should have come way earlier to my games, because they sure made things easier for me to run. (No wonder 4E D&D adopted a similar concept).

 

[SSquirrel]

One of the biggest problems with IH was the fact that Mearls admitted the book was really incomplete. The magic section was especially lacking. When the author eevn says it isn't done and apologizes, but it gets released anyway, I really don't have any interest in buying it. If IH got revamped a bit, fleshed out in the places it needs it, I would consider picking it up. I'm not going to knowingly pay for an incomplete game though.