D&D 5E Iron Kingdoms 5e

I am interested into the classes and the PC species. Is the second class the "blood witch"? If I am allowed, I would like to know a review.

Does the lore tell anything about other continents?
 

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I am interested into the classes and the PC species. Is the second class the "blood witch"? If I am allowed, I would like to know a review.

Does the lore tell anything about other continents?

The five new PC species are bogrin, farrow, pygmy trolls, Idrian marchfolk (humans, basically), and soulless. The three new classes are the bone grinder (sort of an alchemist/hunter/spellcaster who collects bits of monsters to gather power), shaman, and warlock (this is the Iron Kingdoms warlock, focused on driving and controlling warbeasts, not the conventional D&D warlock)

Borderlands and Beyond is mostly concerned with adding the Rhulic Dwarves and Ios elves to the setting and detailing their homelands, plus introducing warlocks and warbeasts to the setting, although it only really supports trollkin, Devourer, and farrowkin warlocks. Gatormen warlocks are coming in an upcoming book, blackclad druids are available (in English) as a cheap download from the Privateer Press site. There's no support for Skorne or Everblight yet. The book contains a bunch of subclasses for regular D&D classes, and for the classes from Iron Kingdoms Requiem. Ios in particular has undergone massive changes, if you're a follower of the Iron Kingdoms lore. After
a cabal of Goreshade's Eldritch killed Scyrah and Nyssor, the last two remaining elven gods, elves are now either born soulless, or are turning into undead Eldritch themselves. Ios is a literally dying nation and elves are a literally dying species.

The blood witch class is in the later supplement, Nightmare Empire. This book is almost entirely concerned with Cryx and surrounds, and is the standard PP mix of lore, background, game mechanics, new classes and races and subclasses. There's a sub-supplement to this one dealing with the Scharde Islands too, for a less-evil Cryx-related campaign.

There's been no coverage in the line of Skorne, or Zu (although we're told most of the Protectorate of Menoth have relocated here), or Alchiere, or of the Orgoth homelands (or, for that matter, of that part of the Iron Kingdoms that has recently been re-invaded by the Orgoth). Neither has there been any coverage of the new Khymaera.

From a review point of view, I mostly like the lore. The books aren't as big and comprehensive as the old IKRPG books were, but they're solid. They're a bit hamstrung by having to deal with the post-Claiming Iron Kingdoms where a whole bunch of really dumb writing happened, but it's a perfectly gameable setting if you don't dig too far into that. It's a bit like the 5e Forgotten Realms, where a whole lot of dumb writing happened in the recent past but the 5e books largely try to ignore the implications of all that because even trying to make sense of it all is doomed to failure.

I'm not a massive fan of Privateer Press's overuse of entirely new core classes. I understand that the Warcaster etc are worthy of new class mechanics since none of the existing D&D classes can really emulate them, but i think they overdo it with things like the Raider from Nightmare Empire, or even the Gunslinger from Requiem which both could have been Fighter subclasses. And of course since it's based on a wargames setting, you have the factionalism problem - as DM you'd need to set some expectations about what sort of game you're running, otherwise you could have your players roll up a ruthlessly patriotic Khadorian Man-o-war, a Wurm warlock devoted to the destruction of civilisation, an iron lich, an undead elf who wants to murder all human spellcasters, and a benevolent Cygnarian gobber priest of Morrow, and good luck trying to find any group coherence or common goals with that lot. I haven't been a fan of the adventures. They're expensive for what you get, very railroady, and they artificially have very low-level PCs getting involved in events that should be far outside their power level and ability.

Mechanically, it's varied. Some good, some bad. I don't think they're always as well playtested as they could be, but that's true for almost all 3pps. I'm not going to write a complete page-by-page review here, but if there's any specific classes etc that you'd like me to take a look over, I'm more than happy to give you my impressions.
 

Thanks. I feel curiosity about the balance of power level of the new classes in the game. Is anyone OP? And the impact of the firearms. Maybe somebody wanted to create a barbarian ogrun, but his rage isn't so useful against the bullets.

I wonder what possible new factions could appear in the future. Maybe in the continent of Zu there was an empire who used transgenic magic an apes to create a "race" of supersoldiers, but these rebelled against their creators. And now they enjoy "biopunk" magitek.

Or some infernal faction had got the controll of the souls of a complete continent from other world, but the surprise is when these souls suffered enough "penance" then they became too "pure" to be hurt by the infernal powers. The shortest version of the story is the infernal powers lost the controll of that world, and this can launch raids of penitents against their previous invaders. These souls aren't undead either feys but "elementals", and not only the classic four ones, but also others as wood, shadow or ice. Let's imagine something like the freemen from the planet Arrakis with elemental powers.
 

Maybe in the continent of Zu
I read somewhere that PP have done some preliminary design work for the people of Zu, and that they have a Persian-influenced culture and aesthetic. There's almost no detail, I don't even know whether they use warjacks or warbeasts, though the Protectorate colonists on the continent would be jack users of course. PP ran a survey about what the next IK RPG product was going to be, and Zu was one of the options, so they must be at least thinking about it. I believe the Strangelight Workshop won though, which sadly was my least preferred option!

Thanks. I feel curiosity about the balance of power level of the new classes in the game. Is anyone OP? And the impact of the firearms.

It's a bit hard to say without having actually used it all in play, but I can give some impressions.

Firearms appear to be deliberately made more powerful than standard D&D ranged weapons, because the setting is about gunpowder combat more than melee. There's almost certainly scope for abuse by character optimisers using Sharpshooter and so on. Cover would be more important than in a standard D&D game I think, you'd want to be more careful about getting hit in a prolonged ranged fight.

The balance of classes like the Warcaster and Warlock will depend a lot on your game and your GM, of course. Their class features depend a lot on their 'pets', whether that be warjacks or warbeasts. It's not like a 5e paladin where if your steed gets killed you can summon it again with a 10 minute casting time - if you're at sea and your warcaster loses their jack overboard, or your warlock gets his warbeast killed, then you're going to be without a major class feature for an extended period of time until you can derail the campaign and go and find a new one. Warlocks have limits to the warbeast CR they can control, but as far as i can tell there's nothing stopping your level 1 warcaster bonding with a devastating top-of-the-line military grade heavy warjack and stomping all over the campaign if the DM is reckless enough to allow that to happen. He won't be able to get as much out of it as a 20th level warcaster, but it'd still be messy. I'm not sure how Warlocks would work in play. Each subclass/resonance only gets access to a relatively small array of compatible warbeasts, and depending on your level, the power level of your available warbeasts might not be up to the challenges you're facing. And there's no mechanic for levelling up your warbeasts as you go, so if your PC has a favourite 'pet' at low level, they're going to get replaced or die at higher level, which is sad.

Power-wise, Bone Grinders look to me like they're maybe a little bit underpowered. They remind me of Alchemist Artificers - versatile half caster with lots of options, but in combat they seem to lack that one big punch that you need when you're in a tough fight. Still, in this setting that's compensated somewhat by the ability to buy them a really big gun i suppose.

Shaman looks solid without being overpowered. Druidlike spellcaster with some additional quasi-spell options instead of Wild Shape. I'd be happy to allow them in a regular game.

Gun Mage and Gunfighter look kinda hamstrung by the design choice to only allow you to use the signature magic/trick shot ability twice per rest. Same problem as the Arcane Archer. They'd still be viable I think, though personally I'd have given the gunfighter d10 hit dice.

Blood Witch i find very hard to evaluate from a power level point of view. It's a hybrid warrior/caster that doesn't use spell slots, instead you can fuel spells by expending 5 hp per spell level - and damage you caused to enemies in the previous round with a sacral blade (that counts as your arcane focus) can be counted towards that expenditure. There's a spell level cap like the regular 5e Warlock, maxing out at 5th level. So you can potentially cast 5th level spells every second round forever, so long as you can continue to slaughter enemies with your sacral blade on the off rounds. I think this could be a very very powerful class if optimised.

Raider is a sort of a light fighter, with only light armour proficiency and simple weapons (which does admittedly include a lot of powerful firearms in IK) and d8 hit points, but ASI/feats every 2nd level and a bunch of movement abilities. Maybe slightly underpowered, but probably not too much worse than a Dex-based regular D&D fighter.

There's also lots of subclasses, I'm not going to go through them one by one. The upcoming Into The Deep Wild supplement also contains the Monster Hunter class (a spell-less ranger) and the Warlord, but that's still all beta material so I'm not going to grade it at this stage.

Edit: there's also the Blackclad class, which is available as a low-cost download from the PP site. Druidlike Wisdom caster. This one looks VERY flexible and powerful, to be honest. A couple of additional proficiencies, a bonus action 10ft range frighten effect with infinite uses, and some very powerful subclass abilities, like bludgeoning resistance at level 6, 60ft tremorsense at level 10, no-concentration flight for a minute per short rest at level 6, a reaction teleport when you get attacked at level 2, etc etc.
 
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so, anyone playing with these rules? I am either doing this, Eberron, or some hybrid of them?

How well do the classes work (also, I have beginner players, so maybe not?).....how are the gun rules?

I'll 100% use some of the monsters, I like new monsters.
 

I haven't played, but i've done a lot of reading of them and put together some sample characters.

For beginner players, I'd steer clear of Warcaster and Warlock classes. The Iron Kingdoms Warlock in particular is possibly the most complicated class I've seen in any 5e book. Lots of bookkeeping, lots of resources to juggle, multiple pets, etc etc etc. And Warcasters are tied to their warjack, which requires a continual supply of hundreds of pounds of coal to keep it running, which limits your party's freedom of action a LOT (you could just give them an Iosian warjack to bypass that problem, I suppose).

Gun rules seem relatively fine, but I'm not much of an optimiser and I'm sure there's exploits I've missed. They do make guns more powerful compared to most vanilla D&D weapons, but that's a deliberate design choice and fits with the setting, and I'm ok with it.

There are some definite balance issues. The big problem with PP is they pump out far too much game mechanical material, especially entire new classes, and don't sufficiently playtest. I'd never allow the Ogrun race, for instance. Gun Mage class seems very weak after the first couple of levels, Bonegrinder and mekanik seem fairly feeble and suffer from the Alchemist Artificer disease of being a support character who often doesn't have much of a combat button to press when you need one, which can be frustrating. It's too easy to stack too many mekanikal boosts on a single item and make it broken as heck.

There's some good stuff here, and I love the world (although for some ridiculous reason PP are continuing with their RPG line immediately post the Claiming war, but have advanced the timeline a decade or two and made a lot of changes in the miniatures game timeline that obsoletes a lot of the RPG material...) but it'd be a challenge for first-timers, and the DM would need to be willing to step in at any time to house-rule broken stuff, and players would have to be ok with that.
 

I haven't played, but i've done a lot of reading of them and put together some sample characters.

For beginner players, I'd steer clear of Warcaster and Warlock classes. The Iron Kingdoms Warlock in particular is possibly the most complicated class I've seen in any 5e book. Lots of bookkeeping, lots of resources to juggle, multiple pets, etc etc etc. And Warcasters are tied to their warjack, which requires a continual supply of hundreds of pounds of coal to keep it running, which limits your party's freedom of action a LOT (you could just give them an Iosian warjack to bypass that problem, I suppose).

Gun rules seem relatively fine, but I'm not much of an optimiser and I'm sure there's exploits I've missed. They do make guns more powerful compared to most vanilla D&D weapons, but that's a deliberate design choice and fits with the setting, and I'm ok with it.

There are some definite balance issues. The big problem with PP is they pump out far too much game mechanical material, especially entire new classes, and don't sufficiently playtest. I'd never allow the Ogrun race, for instance. Gun Mage class seems very weak after the first couple of levels, Bonegrinder and mekanik seem fairly feeble and suffer from the Alchemist Artificer disease of being a support character who often doesn't have much of a combat button to press when you need one, which can be frustrating. It's too easy to stack too many mekanikal boosts on a single item and make it broken as heck.

There's some good stuff here, and I love the world (although for some ridiculous reason PP are continuing with their RPG line immediately post the Claiming war, but have advanced the timeline a decade or two and made a lot of changes in the miniatures game timeline that obsoletes a lot of the RPG material...) but it'd be a challenge for first-timers, and the DM would need to be willing to step in at any time to house-rule broken stuff, and players would have to be ok with that.
thank you!
 

How well do the classes work

Gun Mage class seems very weak after the first couple of levels, Bonegrinder and mekanik seem fairly feeble and suffer from the Alchemist Artificer disease of being a support character who often doesn't have much of a combat button to press when you need one, which can be frustrating. It's too easy to stack too many mekanikal boosts on a single item and make it broken as heck.
Supposedly, the "fix" or reasoning why is due to the fact that it's expected that Iron Requiem pcs have Mechkanical equipment to "shore up" any glaring weaknesses.

I love the Gun Mage but hate the fact that it apparently seems weak. Having more uses of the Rune Shot feature would probably help, but then I guess the idea is to have a kited out Mechkanical item on hand to basically burn/feed charges to the class to keep up Rune Shot damage output.

I'd never allow the Ogrun race, for instance.
Is it because they can use Two-Handed weapons in one hand?
 

Supposedly, the "fix" or reasoning why is due to the fact that it's expected that Iron Requiem pcs have Mechkanical equipment to "shore up" any glaring weaknesses.
I hadn't read that anywhere, but if that's the intent, it's dumb intent, because every other non-underpowered class can stock up on mekanical items too. Also, it's actually harder for gun mages to buff themselves with items, because one of their attunement slots is automatically tied up by their runelock.

I love the Gun Mage but hate the fact that it apparently seems weak. Having more uses of the Rune Shot feature would probably help, but then I guess the idea is to have a kited out Mechkanical item on hand to basically burn/feed charges to the class to keep up Rune Shot damage output.

They really need just a flat-out damage output buff somewhere. The Arcane Tempest order in particular, because at least the other two subclasses get something in that department (even if it's inadequate), while Arcane Tempest get a bonus to bonded warjacks which just doesn't sync with any of their other class abilities and is difficult to use productively in combat. More runeshot uses would be my preference, because that's their trademark ability and they should get to play with it, but even just give them all Extra Attack maybe.
Is it because they can use Two-Handed weapons in one hand?
Yeah. The ability to use greatsword/shield just puts them too far ahead of any other class when it comes to being a melee warrior, in my opinion.
 

The warjacks not only spend a lot of coal, but these create a lot of smoke, and this may be dangerous in closed spaces, for example within a train-wagon.
 

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