I've been playing in a IK group for a while now, currently just about to hit level 4. PCs are a Khadorian paladin of the Order of the Wall, an Iosian elf Cyrissist warcaster, a Khadorian mechanik, and a Cygnarian gun mage. Some impressions:
- Gun mage is actually a VERY powerful low-level character. Being able to blat out 20 points of damage reliably (using a rune shot) at range basically from level 1 is a big deal. You only get to do i a few times, and it HURTS when you miss, but that sort of damage simply deletes most low level enemies. On the other hand, the lack of known spells (half that of a warlock, which is the chassis the class is built on) makes you a pretty inflexible and one-note character (even the cantrips are boring). I still have doubts about how it'll keep up at higher level once everyone else has Extra Attack etc, and am strongly considering forgoing my Dex increase at level 4 in favour of Sharphooter just to give me the option of pumping out an extra 10 damage if i have to. Or even dipping into rogue for the sneak attack damage and extra skills.
Mechanik has a serious dose of the Alchemist Artificer disease. Lots of cool support options but not much to do in combat. Our DM is already talking to the mechanik's player about a re-spec or some house rules to make him more useful in a fight Taking the subclass which gives you steam armour is an obvious solution, but as written the fuel rules (for both jacks and steam armour) are so onerous as to make this stuff unusable in most campaigns.
Paladin is a paladin, but in a setting where everyone has guns, the melee guys suffer. That's partly due to the sort of enemies/environments we've been facing though - quick agile enemies with ranged weapons in open environments. In a tight-quarters dungeon crawl, obviously he'd be very handy. And i do like the Order of the Wall subclass.
The warcaster - I can't really have an opinion about yet. As mentioned, a warcaster (and warlock) is very reliant on the DM making warjacks/warbeasts available in order to do their thing, and we just haven't had that chance to any great extent yet. But this (and the 'oopsie my follower died, now I have to leave the adventure and go miles off-track before i can replace them or else I'll be stuck without a major class feature' issue) have been part and parcel of 'pet' classes in D&D since forever, were the genesis of the 'pokemon' model of conveniently appearing/disappearing steeds/failiars/animal companions in recent D&D editions, and have never satisfactorily been solved.
Guns work better than i expected, to be honest. The combination of the way the Magazine property works (not the same as the D&D loading property) and the limited magazine size on most weapons makes combat work pretty well, if significantly differently to most D&D games (we'll see if this holds up once Extra Attack comes along, of course). I do wish there was more ranged-combat options though, comparable to the shove, flank, grapple etc options that melee fighters have, or the plethora of feats like Shield Expert that also open up new possibilities. Things can get samey. I move to the edge of the cover, I shoot, I move back into cover, i use my bonus action to reload. There are some things in the weapons list a wise DM should probably ban though, like Ogrun Battle Cannons, or some of the more specialised Iosian firearms, and I'd think twice about the Shield Cannon too, while at the other end, some iconic weapons (hi blasting pike!) are just underpowered or hamstrung to the point of awfulness.
You will inevitably have someone who wants to play a sniper, and the rules positively encourage this by offering several different subclass options around this archetype. Try to discourage them. It's a playstyle that doesn't lead to fun for anyone.
Session zero is IMPORTANT. Not just for all the usual reasons, but because unlike most D&D characters, many IK characters need more than just what can fit in a backpack in order to get the most out of themselves. Mostly that's been a problem for our warcaster and mechanik so far. We're a fairly urbanised, industrialised group of mostly Khadorian/Cygnaran PCs, but we're running through the module from the Borderlands and Beyond kickstarter, which has you hanging around in a small logging village and then traipsing through the wilds of Ios. Not a good fit. The mechanik needs a workshop, tools, parts etc to get the most out of himself, and the warcaster has no hope of finding himself a jack(/vector) all the way out here, and of course it's supremely unlikely there'll be much in the way of Cyrissist fanes out this way so even if he found a vector sitting around, he couldn't recharge it. Mind you, my urbanised, socially-climbing gun mage doesn't really do her best work out here either.
The rules are lacking a good proofread and a whole bunch of hardcore playtesting by experienced playtesters. Just little bits of attention to detail are lacking. For instance, a gun mage can burn spell slots to get extra uses of their trademark Rune Shot ability, and regains spell slots after a short rest like a warlock. Fine. But rules as written, any extra spell slots gained this way don't have an expiry time, so you could theoretically take a short rest at every opportunity over downtime or long travel days and build up a titanic stash of rune shot uses. The DM houseruled that these extra rune shots expired at the next short rest (which i don't mind), but this is a trademark ability for a trademark class, and that sort of detail goof shouldn't have slipped through. There's an issue with a warcaster's armour as well, which was informally errataed on the Discord, but which made the thing useless RAW. Again, this shouldn't be happening. As above, the coaling rules for warjacks makes them profoundly impractical for a wide variety of everyday D&D-adventuring situations (if you're heading off into the wilderness for a few days and have a warcaster in the party, you'll need to find a way to transport literal TONS of coal to keep your warjack running), which is a shame because they're iconic to the setting. I don't think you can DM or play this without being willing to house-rule a bunch of stuff, hard.
The Iron Kingdoms setting is sufficiently technologically and socially advanced compared to most D&D settings that many of the rules and assumptions are an uneasy fit, and the game doesn't really grapple with any of these issues. The shift to ranged combat as the dominant mode is one thing, but there's others. For instance, the base D&D crafting rules are ... designed to de-emphasise crafting in the standard gameplay loop, to put it politely? Yeah, more frankly - they're utter pants, it takes you forever to craft anything useful or good or even convenient, and they were deliberately made that way because the 5e design team decided for us what was 'fun' or 'not fun' and put 'crafting' in category B. In the Iron Kingdoms, where it's even odds you'll have at least one and probably more mad scientists in the party whose entire schtick is creating horrifyingly-souped-up guns and/or giant stompy robots, it's a big problem (my gunmage was investigating making a dual hand cannon that could mount a mechanikal runeplate and capacitor - it would have taken her nearly a full year, even though she has all the required proficiencies AND a +1d4 racial bonus with artificers tools And because crafting speed is independent of skill, this won't improve no matter how well she rolls or how high she levels up!). Another thing that's a bit lacking is maybe a few words on stuff like accommodation and housing. It's probably not a huge deal, but the Iron Kingdoms are urbanised, quasi-modern nations. They have tenement housing and bureaucracy and unions and tax and mass transit, and even welfare (well, some of them do, anyway). Parties of wandering adventurers with no fixed address can be made to work in the setting (don't get me wrong), but they're not the standard - ESPECIALLY for highly-valued skillsets like warcasters. You kind of miss out on a lot of the immersion, uniqueness and story potential of the setting by not addressing or covering this stuff.
(Also, it's really hard to find good maps that fit the IK vibe, with steampunk railway stations or robot foundries etc, but anyway)
One thing they have done well is made a wargaming setting into a good roleplaying setting, which isn't always easy to do. By necessity, most wargaming settings have strongly coherent factions, which fight against each other. This doesn't always lead to comfortable party dynamics if you try to roleplay in the setting, as anyone who's talked about running a40k game and have their group come up with a space marine, a lowly hive scum genger with a homemade shank, an imperial psyker being tempted by chaos, and an Eldar harlequin. The IK RPG is set a few years after a major multi-sided war, in a delicate peace after most major factions had to kinda-sorta band together to fight off apocalyptic incursions by infernal fiends and halloween-nightmare fey critters. There's a lot of displaced people, a lot of the old wars and rivalries were (if not actually ended) put on hold, everyone's war-weary and trying to rebuild and cope with the upheavals, and a whole bunch of new bad stuff is creeping up in the background for PCs to deal with. They've even come up with lore twists that give you genuinely flavourful ways to play skorne PCs in mixed parties, and even made a valiant effort at doing the same for all sorts of horrifying Cryxian freaks. It's a nice set of compromises and makes for a very playable setting with lots to do and scope for varied PC groups who won't instantly be hated by all the locals if they go to the wrong country.
On the whole, I'm enjoying it a great deal (helped by the fact that i looove my character), and might genuinely consider it as a setting I run a game in some time in the future. I've always been a fan of the setting, and they've made it genuinely playable. But it's something you've got to go into clear-eyed, and with an understanding between DM and player that the rules are flaky, and that the group will inevitably have to make calls on balancing and on ruleset holes etc on a not-infrequent basis.
Will update this as we advance higher in level. My gunmage is the team heavy hitter for now, but I reckon it's going to be a very different story in a couple of levels.
