Im White Wold Quarterly/Insider ist ein Interview mit Mike Mearls dazu:
In 2002, Malhavoc Press made the roleplaying game industry stand up and take notice with the release of Monte Cook’s Arcana Unearthed . This variant player’s handbook presented a whole new venue for fantasy adventure, with new classes, a refreshing new take on the standard spell system, and exciting new races.
Arcana Unearthed took the core of fantasy gaming and tweaked it just enough to make things familiar yet wholly different.
Now, two year later, Malhavoc Press is set to do it again. Imagine a world where a warrior’s skill and training, rather than the potency of an enchanted blade, determines his fortune. A world where magic is a force too powerful for a mere mortal to control it with any confidence. A world at the dawn of a new era, where human-built cities are scarcely more than a century old.
Welcome to Iron Lore, Malhavoc Press’ next variant player’s handbook.
Recently we had a chance to ask Iron Lore designer Mike Mearls a few questions.
Insider: What’s at the heart of Iron Lore?
Mike Mearls: The key design conceit behind Iron Lore is relatively simple. What if you took a standard fantasy world, one with horrid monsters, demons, and other threats, but made magic an unstable, unpredictable resource that humans could barely control?
In other words, spells are no longer a reliable defense against a hydra or a troll incursion. If humanity wants to survive, it must develop its other abilities to new heights. A warrior can’t afford to lean on a shiny suit of enchanted armor and a vorpal blade. Instead, he needs to use smart tactics and a variety of fighting techniques to win.
In Iron Lore , magic is still common in terms of weird monsters, enchanted locations, and other standard tropes of fantasy roleplaying games. Creatures other than humans can and do bend magic to their will. Humanity must create new talents to battle them.
Insider: Monte Cook’s Arcana Unearthed presented new races, new classes, and a new take on the classic magic system. What sort of rules changes can we look forward to in this variant player’s handbook?
Mearls: There are three key changes from the core rules. First, the book radically expands and alters feats. Some of them improve over time, and many focus on specific fighting styles and tactical abilities.
For instance, if you want to focus on fighting with the warhammer, a variety of feats make you different from a warrior who specializes in the greatsword.
Second, Iron Lore creates wholly new options and abilities that open up new layers of customization and player choices. For example, character traits replace races. Rather than play a human, dwarf, or litorian, you can create a tall, rangy wanderer from the frozen north. Your character’s traits—his cultural background and his great height—have mechanical effects similar to the bonuses for a race.
And plenty of feats are designed for mighty characters. A highlevel
thief can talk someone into almost anything with the right skills and feats. A talented executioner can slice an opponent’s arteries with the precision and flair of a master artist. Since your character’s abilities and talents derive from his training and knowledge, you have more development paths to choose from than in standard d20.
Finally, Iron Lore is designed for fast-paced, exciting action.
The skill system is more flexible than ever, allowing you to try a
whole range of new stunts. You can willingly accept a higher Difficulty
Class or a penalty to your skill check to gain an additional benefit from a check. Combat, built with an emphasis on action, draws on the skill rules to form the basis of a stunt system.
Rather than maintain a static position and trade blows with an opponent, a character in Iron Lore might roll beneath a table to evade on ogre’s greataxe, or dive between the ogre’s feet then leap onto the brute’s shoulder to drive his dagger into its neck. The skills are fully integrated into the combat system, making almost any action and its
effects easy to adjudicate.
Even if the basic concept behind Iron Lore doesn’t appeal to you, the book has plenty of new rules material you can add to your existing game with minimal effort.
Iron Lore is designed for seamless integration with other d20 games. The expanded rules for skills and feats work in almost any fantasy campaign, as do the new options for fast-paced combat that focus on stunts, exciting battles, and tactical maneuvers.
Insider: What about magic? You talked about how it’s unreliable,
but what does that mean for players?
Mearls: The magic system in Iron Lore is built on the idea that
magic is tremendously difficult to control. There are no spells such
as fireball or cure light wounds.
Instead, a caster tries to create a general effect such as filling an
area with searing flames. She then tries to summon energy to her, shape it, and unleash the effect she wants. Sometimes it works. Other times it simply fizzles and nothing interesting happens. Most of the
time, the arcanist creates a surge of fire but it doesn’t have exactly the effect she hoped for. The flames may set the area on fire, or they could surge close to her allies. The key is that an arcanist has nothing more than a general idea of her spell’s effects. The exact result depends on her skill and a fair amount of luck.
That’s not to say that arcanists are useless characters.
They draw on other talents to even the gap with other classes. They master a variety of useful lore and knowledge, and having a reputation for consulting with spirits or unleashing the fires of hell can prove useful in social situations.
Much of the time, an arcanist can use the threat of a spell more effectively than an actual incantation.
Insider: When is Iron Lore due out in stores?
Mearls : It’s set to debut at Gen Con Indy this August. If
you want a taste of the game’s direction, check out the previews
at
www.montecook.com.
We post a new preview each month, then flesh it out with Design Diary entries and related features. We’ll also have a preview in the next
issue of Insider!
