Beyond the Iron Kingdoms

Around a year ago now, give or take, I was working on a project for Privateer Press that, at the time, I couldn’t talk about. A few months later, it was revealed to be the new Iron Kingdoms: Requiem roleplaying game, compatible with 5e, which launched on Kickstarter in January of this year and blew away its funding goals.

Since then, I’ve been working on something else. A follow-up product that takes players beyond the walls of the Iron Kingdoms themselves and into the wilderness that surrounds them. For those who played the previous IK RPG, this can be seen as a companion to the Unleashed volume released for that game – I wrote an adventure for that, too, BTW, which was printed in the Wild Adventures supplement.

This isn’t just about the wilderness, though. It also explores – in depths that have never really been delved into before – the dwarven kingdom of Rhul and the elven nation of Ios, a nation which has undergone a stark transformation, making it just as alien and unfamiliar to long-term players of the game as it will be to those who are new to the setting.

Called Borderlands & Beyond, this new expansion also just hit Kickstarter today, and was funded within just a couple of hours. We’re already well into the realm of stretch goals now, and the campaign is less than a day old. Which is good, because one of the stretch goals is a new adventure written by yours truly, set to take place in the eerie wilderness of the Glimmerwood.

As with Iron Kingdoms: Requiem, I worked with an incredible team to help bring this book to life, all organized by Matt Goetz, who was the captain of our little ship. I can’t say what parts I did and what parts were the work of other hands, but I can say that, to an extent that has never been true on any previous tabletop gaming product I’ve worked on, we really did collaborate as a team throughout the project, with each person’s contributions informing the others in unique and dynamic ways.

In all, I contributed even more words to this project than I did to Requiem, and got to build more stuff from the ground up than ever before. And I’m already looking forward to the next project, which the success of this one will all-but ensure.

And I can say one other thing, I think, that will likely come as a surprise to no one. If you check out the Kickstarter for Borderlands & Beyond, you’ll note that they mention “a horde of never-before-seen monsters to test every last ounce of your players’ resolve.” The other thing I think I can say is that more than a few of those never-before-seen monsters are ones I helped cook up. And I hope you’re going to love them.