Ironsworn, Shawn Tomkin’s RPG of dark fantasy with solo, guided, and GMless modes, is one of the most exciting releases to the hobby in recent years. With its sci fi sequel, Starforged, now established it’s beginning to get some decent play on the convention circuit – and it plays really well with a GM (in ‘guided’ mode) as well. So here are some tips if you want to get it to the table.

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Why Play Guided?

First of all I guess I should address – why not go GMless? Well, for a convention game, I’d be sticking to guided. I’ve had one excellent collaborative game of Starforged at a con, where we genuinely told a story together from scratch, but two things struck me. Firstly, all of us were players who play together a lot – we weren’t a slung-togther convention group; we could read each others’ body language and build on one anothers hooks like good plot doggies – we were also all experienced GMs, which probably makes a difference. Secondly, although it was good – I’m not sure if it was as good as it would have been if we’d been guided. 

For a longer-form, solo or campaign, Ironsworn definitely works as a collaborative GMless game. For a pacy, tight one-shot – you need someone in the driving seat. So this advice will be tailored to a guided game, and as usual – we’re assuming that someone is you.

Start With Truths

Ironsworn begins with some worldbuilding questions for your personal Ironlands – whether there’s magic, elves, where you came from, etc – and this is what you should complete as the first step of prep. If you want to, I guess you can ask your players – but I’d rather just pick myself. If you’re running multiple con games, keep these the same and imagine your groups in the same shared world – but I’d recommend you go with what sort of game you want to run.

Pregens, always Pregens

You could start your one-shot session with character generation, as picking assets and allocating stats is fairly painless. But, as I’ve said before, it’s often just not worth it – having a selection of ready-made PCs the players can pick from still gives them options, and gets them into the action straightaway. Ironsworn has an innovative but unusual resolution system, and you don’t want to have to explain that before people prevaricate over whether they want a +2 or +1 in Wits.

By the way, I’d avoid giving any pregens Wits 1 if you can bear to. Two of the most common moves in the game, Gather Information and Undertake a Journey, use it – and the stakes of the game mean you’ll end up punishing players for searching or travelling a lot if they’re rolling with +1. For Undertake a Journey, I’d encourage them to take it in turns to roll, too – so they’ll all end up making the move (and inflicting the consequences of failure on everybody!) sooner or later.

You can also advance the Assets you give them – often having them as complete Assets makes more sense, or you can mix it up to make one more powerful than the others – just do the same to all the pregens. Be mindful of how useful some of them are compared to others, but you can also use them to broaden out the characters. My berserker pregen has a blood ritual he can do to investigate, for instance – all gives the PCs some options.

Use the Book to Prep

The games come loaded with so many options, so use them! Start with a quest starter and fill in the details with some of the oracles, or roll a few dice as a solo player to see where you end up. One thing to have ready for journeys is plenty of waypoint ideas – it’s tricky to tell how many of them you’ll need as it depends on how they roll the dice, so have plenty up your sleeve. I’m personally not a fan of rolling at the table, but you may prefer to do this and make it up as you go along – I find this stress-inducing.

As you’re prepping, you’ll have some choices to make about the rank of challenges. My advice is that most things for a one-shot should be Dangerous, with the occasional easy Troublesome challenge, and a finale that’s probably Formidable. Clump enemies together if you like for fights – a gang of bandits will be Dangerous all together as one unit – this makes for easier-to-manage fights.

Print out Play Aids

I’d never consider running this without at least one copy of the moves sheet for players – and possibly one each. There are a lot of moves in Ironsworn, and you’ll be carrying a lot around in your head unless you can get other players to help. In particular, whoever is your medic will want to own the Healing rules a bit, and so forth. 

In play, I generally do a classic PBTA ‘go round the table’ turn-taking thing, where I tick off (to remind myself) when players get to have a turn so I can keep an eye on spotlight. Like PBTA, your moves as GM are often reactions to move outcomes, so don’t feel you need to take a move yourself unless there’s an obvious tilt or consequence.

So, there you have it – some advice for running Ironsworn, or Starforged, as a one-shot. Have you tried it? What worked or didn’t work? Let me know in the comments.