Dead Men Tell No Tales

All the way back in 2013 – nearly ten years ago now – I wrote my first story for Privateer Press. It was a novelette called “Under the Shadow,” a retelling of the Demeter portion of Dracula, centered on the Cryxian general Gerlak Slaughterborn.

By then, I had already been a fan of the setting for… many years, and getting to play in that sandbox was a dream come true. A dream that I got to relive many times in the years that followed, writing additional short stories, novellas, and even a novel set in the Iron Kingdoms world, not to mention contributing plenty of content to the previous iteration of the Iron Kingdoms tabletop roleplaying game.

Then, back in November of 2020, I was asked to work on something new. Iron Kingdoms: Requiem would be the newest attempt to bring my favorite fantasy setting to the TTRPG sphere, this time powered by the popular 5th edition of the world’s oldest roleplaying game.

For that first installment, I wrote more than 50,000 words of mostly setting text, detailing the world and the ways in which it had changed since the last time such a book had been put out. I got a surprising amount of control over some of those changes, and the relationship I had with the material went from adapting it to, in many cases, inventing many aspects whole cloth.

About a year later, and the first expansion for Requiem hit Kickstarter, in the form of Borderlands & Beyond. This time I had written just as much, maybe more, but I also got even more freedom to add to the setting that I loved so much. Perhaps most notably, given that this is me, I got to design a bunch of weird fucking monsters from scratch. If you got the book, see if you can guess which ones I did.

We haven’t been sitting idle in the months since, either. Almost as soon as we had finished Borderlands & Beyond, the same team that had been working on Requiem all this time had already started work on the next installment, which just hit Kickstarter today.

In many ways, this is the most exciting one that I’ve worked on so far. For those who don’t know the Iron Kingdoms setting very well, it has primarily existed in the form of the tabletop wargames Warmachine and Hordes. And one of the four core factions of the former, since the game first launched back in 2003, has been the Nightmare Empire of Cryx.

Ruled by a dragon, Cryx is primarily occupied by the undead, which their necrotechs experiment on to create cyborg undead war machines. Despite its prominent position in the narrative of the game, however, there has never been a sourcebook released to bring Cryx to the table in roleplaying game form. Not in all the years that Privateer Press has been releasing books and games set in the Iron Kingdoms.

Certainly, Cryxians were available as antagonists in previous editions of the game, but there were precious few resources available to play as them, or to explore, in detail, their haunted and haunting empire. With the new Nightmare Empire expansion for Requiem, though, all that changes.

With each new iteration, I have gotten to leave more and more of my stamp on the Requiem roleplaying game and the world of the Iron Kingdoms – along with a talented and dedicated team of writers, artists, designers, and more, all headed up by Matt Goetz, who is as much the captain of this vessel as anyone.

This time around, I got to introduce new places and organizations, flesh out things that had been throwaway mentions in the past, and, most exciting for me, work on developing some of the new subclasses that are presented in the book. I’m very proud of my work there, and I can’t wait for fans of the setting to see it – not to mention newcomers to the world of the Iron Kingdoms, who I hope grow to love it just as much as I always have.