Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="JoeGKushner" data-source="post: 2010025" data-attributes="member: 1129">The Iron Kingdoms continues its slow march forward with Lock & Load, an Iron Kingdoms Character Primer.  Done in the same vein as the gazetteers for the Scarred Lands setting, the book provides brief snippets about the land with some character modifications thrown in for good measure.  This makes it more akin to the new SL gazetteer with self-contained information on the races, rather than the first, which relied on the GM to have the Scarred Lands Screen.The book starts off with the races of the Iron Kingdoms and breaks up things by the different Kingdoms.  You get racial traits based on where you come from so you have a list of popular stating feats, an automatic class skill and skill bonuses.  There are optional modifiers for racial traits with notes on important individuals, and the languages known by the race in question.  For example, the people of Morridane prefer to be rangers, gain wilderness lore as a class skill, +2 to climb and hide, +2 to Dex, -2 to Charisma, -2 to several charisma related skills when dealing with non-Morridanes, and have details on the important people like Caine Talbot, Captain Leland Northcliffe, and an old favorite, Julian Helstrom.The details are provided in the context of the kingdom with additional information found in sidebars.  The text starts under an up close map that shows which lands the text is referring to.  This makes it easy to see which lands are included when it talks about, for example, Southern Kingdoms, you see the various lands it includes.In addition to the humans, there are goblins, common gobbers and larger bogrin or boggers, as well as some of the more exotic creatures like the Winter Elves, or ‘Nyss’, and the powerful Ogrun and Trollkin. It’s a nice mix of human and non-human but follows the fairly standard pattern of the humans being the dominant race and some of the standard races, like gnomes, are missing.  Those who own the Monsternomicon and have read the web site bonus material, know that not all standard races are present and that basic information should be here as well.Those not satisfied with racial information also get new weapons.  Several are racial weapons like the Nyss Claymore and the Ogrun Warcleaver with some standard weapons like Collapsing Baton and Gaff Spear thrown in for good measure.  Those more interested in the Steam side of things get the Firearms of the Iron Kingdoms with near CAD like precision illustrations for the Breech Loader and its variants and more traditional illustrations of the different style pistols and rifles.  Art is fantastic.  Once again the Iron Kingdoms proves to have some of, if not the best, internal art in the RPG community.  No secondary pieces, no lesser pieces to detract from it.  All top notch.  The map is a full color four-page fold up map that doesn’t provide a lot of in detail depth but enough information on the landscape to get a game going. The map quality however seems a little thin and I’m a little worried about continued use. Those who enjoyed the character sheet from the online site now have a hardcopy of it. Layout and formatting is generally good as is the editing.One of the things I have mixed feelings about is the inclusion of the various racial stats, like the Trollkin’s.  They’ve already appeared in the Monsternomicon.  Now Lock & Load is a player resource and Monsternomicon is a GM resource with player goods in it so I can see why they did it, but I hate repeated material as it lessens the amount of fresh and new information a book can bring you. In the case of the Iron Kingdoms where releases are few and far between, I’m not the only person looking for all new information.  About the only other thing I would’ve liked to see here is the use of the internal covers, perhaps a close up map of one of the cities?Those who didn’t like the repeated racial stats also aren’t going to want the character sheet hardcopy.  Nor are they likely to want the firearm rules.  Still, these are minor issues, especially for those without internet connection or the Monsternomicon.  As a stand alone book, Lock and Load is a solid starting resource for the Iron Kingdoms.</blockquote>

Verification