Iron Kingdoms Savage Conversion - Stats

As I said in the my  previous post. I have already started my Iron Campaign with the Savage Worlds system. I made a basic conversion of the Iron Kingdoms RPG to Savage Worlds so that my players can start playing. But now, I realize that there are some things that does not feel as they do in the Iron Kingdoms RPG. So I have to step up my conversion so the flavor of the Iron Kingdoms will be preserved.

In my conversion I have three goals. I have to be able to play soon, I have to be able to convert Iron Kingdoms Stat Blocks from the bestiary easily and if possible I have to be able to convert a full fledged character to Savage Worlds. All of that has to stick to the Savage Worlds creed, Fun, Fast and Furious.

So in my initial approach, I look at the Iron Kingdoms Career system, like a class in d20 RPGs and the like, and found appropriated edges in the Savage Worlds books or create one if it doesn't exit. At that point I didn't red all the core rule book of Iron Kingdoms and some things weren't as good. For example, I created an Arcane Background (Warcaster) that's totally useless compare to other Arcane Backgrounds. But when I created my first draft, I just wanted to be able to play soon, so my conversion was hasty.

Now that my group is actually playing in the Iron Kingdoms, I see as a game master that if I took a more system to system approach, my live would have been easier, because I could just pick up the bestiary and convert the stat block and use these monsters in the game and the flavor would have been preserved.

But, I think it's now to late, so that's why I revisit my conversion. If I change an edge my players are using, I will let them the choice to keep the one they have or to use the new one. I think it's only fair for them to let them play what they intended at first.

So, to take a system to system approach, I think it's wise to start with character traits, in Savage Worlds terms or stats in Iron Kingdoms one. So here I table representing Iron Kingdoms stats and their Savage Worlds counter-parts based on the description in both book. I will not copy past those description, because it's copyrighted materials and I don't want to be sewed.

IK Stat	SW Trait
Physique (PHY)	Vigor
Speed (SPD)	Pace
Strength (STR)	Strength
Agility (AGI)	Agility
Poise (POI)	Shooting / Throwing
Prowess (PRW)	Fighting
Intellect (INT)	Smart
Arcane (ARC)	Arcane Background Skill
Perception (PER)	Notice
Willpower (WIL)	Spirit
Defense (DEF)	Parry
Initiative	n/a
Armor (ARM)	Toughness

In Iron Kingdoms, character statistic can range from 2 to 8, and in Savage Worlds it's from d4 to d12+2. In both case, the last step is only available at Epic/Legendary tier of play. So it's as simple as one to one mapping.

On more interesting point, is that really strong race, like the Ogrun, can go up to 10 in their STR stat. And in Savage Worlds Deluxe edition, in the race creation section, you can give a race a d8 as a starting value and that can go as high as d12+4 so even with our exception it will work.

IK Stat Value	SW Trait Dice
2	d4
3	d6
4	d8
5	d10
6	d12
7	d12 + 1
8	d12 + 2
9	d12 + 3
10	d12 + 4

So, to convert that table in a simple mathematical expression. SW Trait Dice = d(2xIK Stat Value). That way I don't have to remember the whole table by heart and can really quickly convert an enemy stat card.

For Willpower to Spirit I'll have to use a different approach. Since Willpower is the addition of two different statistics I have to evaluate based on the bestary compared to equivalent monsters in Savage Worlds and there is no simple mathematical formula.

IK Willpower Value	SW trait dice
1 - 5	d4
6 - 7	d6
8 - 9	d8
10 - 11	d10
12 +	d12

And for Defence and Armor, I'll use that simple formula for quick convertion (because normally I calculate the parry and toughness based on Abilities, traits, edges and equipements).

Defense(DEF)	Parry = ( DEF + 1 ) / 2
Armor (ARM)	Toughness = ( ARM + 1 ) / 2

In my next post, I'll talk about skills from Iron Kingdoms to Savage Worlds.

Iron Kingdoms

On of my player brought to my attention a new RPG that came out last year and that was looking very interesting. The RPG was Iron Kingdom from Privateer Press. This RPG is a new system derived from Privateer Press' Warmachine and Hordes miniature games that lives in the same settig. Privateer Press published some years ago a d20 compatible version of their Iron Kingdoms campaign setting.

Personally, when my player shows me the core rule book cover I was hooked even if I never heard of that game world before. Here's the cover :

And then when you read the back of the book, it get's even better :

Embark upon a journey of adventure and intrigue in a steam-powered world fueled by magic and contested with gunfire and steel. Armed with mechanika and accompanied by mighty steamjacks, explore the soot-covered cities of the Iron Kingdoms and the fell ruins of ancient powers.

That kind of world really appeals to me, as a game master I see so much potential. From classic fantasy adventure to full fledged politic game or urban criminal campaign or may be "shadowrunner" like game, working for big manufacturing company.

So I grabbed a coy of the book and start to read about the Iron Kingdoms. The book is really well made, the first chapters are all about the basic lore of the world and are really well written. Then it's about character creation and the rules to play the game.When I came to the rules I start reading than realized that I didn't want to learn a knew RPG system, I just started to game master Savage Worlds and I was loving it.

At that time, I had only ran four sessions of Savage Worlds, but already felt confident enough to think that I could convert the whole system of Iron Kingdoms to Savage World with out much efforts.

Since I'm a lazy guy, I did look around a bit to see if others done it before me. The answer was yes, but it was from the old d20 version and there were differences in the flavor with the new version from Privateer Press. So, I decided that I'll base my conversion from these resources and create my own.

Since nobody published their conversions of the new system, I will do that here. Principally to keep that somewhere out "there" ans secondly to may be help some one who want that conversion like I did, even if it's just to get inspired from.

By the time I wrote this article, we already played three session and my basic conversion is almost done. But now I start to see flaws in my conversion, so what I'll post will be my revised edition.

Going Savage - Part 1

After being a DnD 4th enthusiast for a long time, as in the day it was released, I got bored of it and my players too at some times in 2011. Some of them was nostalgic of good old DnD 3.5. Some of them was not combat players, so wasn't very interested in Dnd 4th character options. Some of them, who recently joined the campaign, was overwhelmed by all the powers they had and never knew witch one does what.

Just to be clear, it's not a Dnd 4th hater article, it's just recollection of the events that brought me and my group to where we are and I do that to help other that may feel the same way as we did to find an alternative.

So by the end 2011 summer I start looking for alternative. I tried in the past Mutants and Masterminds and felled in love with Green Ronin's product. So I figured that I could give a go with their's True20 product line.

True20, as is name implies, use only a d20. You don't need any other dice to play the game and you'll need only a single d20 per player. It's based on the d20 system, with skills, feats and tree classes (Warrior, Expert, Adept) that servers more as a template than actual classes. Every class abilities you are used to see in a d20 system are feats in True20, as racial abilities. So in fact your thief can, as he go up levels take a feat that grant him dark vision. One other major difference with True20 is that it does not uses HP, but Damage vs Toughness rolls that determines if you were barely hit or mortally wounded. And it comes with a Hero Point, something like Action Points of DnD 4th, but with more options to it.

Since it's based on d20 I knew it will be much more interesting for my players that where nostalgic of Dnd 3.5 and the fact that there was no predefined classes just generic ones appealed to me and some of my players because it give them the power to create the character they want and where not limited to predefined stuff.

I know you can do that with any RPG system (even DnD 4th), but a system that is classless will force the player to approach the character creation process with the concept first and the rules set after. How many times did we saw a players about to create a new character look at the core rule book and pick a class from it as the first step and not ask them self what the character will do than look at the rule book to see how to make it happens ? If the answer is always like me you'll understand my point.

One more point that got me interested in True20 was the setting free approach. In place of giving you rule sets that fit a specific setting and becomes hard to steer away from it (imagine playing DnD 4th edition in a home brew campaign world that as low magic in it, it will require massive rethinking and tinkering from the DM's part). True20 offers basic rule set, and gives out optional rules that you can include in your world to flesh it out. A whole chapter is there to help you put together your own world and help you think about all the rules and thing you should use. I also loved the prices of the products and the fact that they offered a pocket format book aimed for the players that is sold for less than 10$ and is only missing the Game mastering chapter.

The campaign went well, but the player got confuse with the toughness saves of the True20 system,  One almost died at the first encounter because he didn't understand well enough how the game worked and put not enough toughness for his fighter. Also they never get over the idea that they didn't need any other dice than a d20. In retrospective I should have run a test run with pre-generated characters so the player cold understand how the system worked and it would have helped them with making there actual characters.

We put that campaign on hold, seeing that the players weren't very enthusiast with the system when the DnD Next play test started. We switch to the play test with the options of changing the campaign to that system if the players loved it. They do loved it, but I moved out of town, going to the suburbs and some player founded that to far and so we stopped both campaign (DnD Next play test and the True20 one).

DnD Next was promising, but had very limited options back then and I'm not the kind of GM that like to create a whole lot of home brew rules. So I continued to look out for alternative RPG system. I was searching something that was setting free like True20, if possible with wounds systems like True20 since I really enjoyed using it. And if possible, isn't based on d20. After playing with only d20 in True20, I realized are "swingy" they can be, and you end up most of the time having great success or great failure and not very much of medium rolls.

That's how I came to discover Savage Worlds, by Pinnacle Entertainment Group (PEG). Since this post is long enough, Savage Worlds will be explain in the next part.

Going Savage - Part 2

In the first part, I talked why I was looking out for a new system and my trials with DnD Next and True20. Has I said, I'm doing that to help those of you out there, that are not happy with the current RPG system they are currently using, and want to see other stuff.

Let's recapitulate what I wanted in my new system and let's sees if Savage Worlds is up for it:

• Setting Free or easy to adapt
• Suggested optional rules to adapt to given type of settings
• Not d20 based
• Possibility to roll multiple dices and have a better bell curve
• No hit points
• Some kinds of Action/Hero/Fate/Destiny point that allows player to re-roll, alter a scene or other uses
• Easy math

Savage Worlds (SW) is a system based on the old Deadland system. A system I played once and enjoyed, even if it was for a single evening. When I stumbled on it, the Deluxe Edition just came out, so I was able to play with the most up-to-date version of the system.

The Savage Worlds system sounded promising, since it was setting free, but there's setting rules that are suggested at the end of the book. And Pinnacle Entertainment Group provides a whole bunch of settings and they are twice as much from third parties over the internet, so there's a lot option available to get inspire by.

SW introduces the bennies, that pretty much does the same as the Hero Point in True20, it also uses wound system that are much, much simpler that True20. It does not uses d20 at all, and uses all other dice, in fact the dice type define your rank in a trait. The biggest the dice the better you are.

SW also brings something really nice to the table compare to good old d20. In d20 systems you always have different difficulty classes (DC) to the rolls with some circumstantial modifiers, and that have to scale with levels (you have whole table just for that in your DnD 4th DM's screen). In SW, it's always a target number (equivalent of DC) of 4 and only applies circumstantial modifiers.

That way, if you have a d4 on a trait, your not likely to succeed but if you have a d12 you'll probably succeed in normal circumstances. In addition, for every 4 points you overcome the target number you get a raise. Raises are use to define degree of success. If you got a raise on an attack roll, you just hit a sensible part and add extra damage for example.

Each dice, except damages one, are exploding and if they end up on their biggest side get to be re-rolled and added together. So that way even with your d4 you can , and will, get crazy shots (Ex : We saw a 21 on a d4 roll). That coupled with the dice types that get bigger the more advance you are creates a nice felling. The more experienced you get, the less likely you'll end up with surprise big success, creating some kind of beginners luck feeling.

In SW the player's character are Wild Cards, basically heroic figure of some sort that are one step over the common men. That allows them to roll a d6, named wild die, in addition to their dice trait and take the best of those two. That gives a good chance to succeed with critical failure and critical successes becoming less predominant than in d20 based systems.

One more thing that Savage Worlds has that I was interested in, is the lack of classes. Character have traits (strength and the like), skills, edges (like feats) and hindrances. So just like True20 the character is more of a conceptual choice than playing a predefined option.

So did Savage Worlds meet every thing I was looking for :

• Setting Free or easy to adapt - Yup.
• Suggested optional rules to adapt to given type of settings - Yup
• Not d20 based - Yup.
• Possibility to roll multiple dices and have a better bell curve - Yup, with the Wild die 
• No hit points - Yup
• Some kinds of Action/Hero/Fate/Destiny point that allows player to re-roll, alter a scene or other uses - Yup (with the bennies)
• Easy math - Yup (with the fixed target number)

In addition, Savage World offer the Explorer Edition, that is basically a poket format of the rules, that is sold for 10$. So that way I can encourage my player to get each a copy of it. In addition, Savage Worlds also have a bunch of really nice rules, like the Interlude, or the Chase one, that deserve to be look up on.

So I decided to go with Savage Worlds and I'll never go back on that decision. And we, me and my group, have been playing with it for the past year and every one loves it. As the game master I was able to easily create a new campaign setting with very little time invested in customizing the rules since most of them are perfect out of the box.

The thing that got me the more surprised was how easy it was to game master Savage Worlds. No need for all the tables and every thing since most of the task are resolve with a Target Number of 4 and the appropriate trait. The combat rules are easy enough that I was able to control an encounter with more than 40 npcs at our first session and within an hour total, not bad for the first fight we ever played in SW. It's really easy to create enemies on the fly, and with only two sessions I was confident that I could handle what ever the groups wanted to do.

In fact, I never got that confident in 3 years of game mastering DnD 4th .. and let alone creating balanced encounter on the spot ... Changing to Savage Worlds I also saw a incredible change in the time needed to prep for the game. In DnD 4th I could easily took 2 hours before every session to balance out my encounters. And most of the times, the encounter was taking most of the session to be handled and wasn't very much of a challenge.

So in conclusion, Savage Worlds is now my go to system and I'm really enjoying it and so are my players. I hope that reading this post, if you are in the same position than I was, it will help you in your big decision of what RPG should you try.

Groumy's out.