The First City: An Ironsworn Actual Play
Introducing the campaign and an extra challenge
The First City is a solo actual play of the fantasy tabletop RPG Ironsworn. ⚔️
If you want to jump right into the campaign, some good starting points are:
Session 0, Part 1 - Campaign setup (truths)
Session 0, Part 2 - Campaign setup (character creation)
Session 1 - The story begins
If you’re already familiar with The First City, here are some handy links:
All Posts - Every entry in the series so far
Reference Guide - An in-depth guide to the story, settings, and characters
What Is Ironsworn?
Ironsworn is a low fantasy tabletop roleplaying game designed by Shawn Tomkin. In contrast to many other popular TTRPGs, it’s optimized for solo and small group play.
The game is set in the Ironlands, a harsh, Iron Age-inspired world where life is a constant struggle to survive. As a player, your objectives are to ensure your character’s survival, fulfill their goals called “iron vows,” and tell a memorable story along the way.
A digital collection of the Ironsworn rulebook and play materials is available for free download on the Tomkin Press website.
An Extra Challenge
To add a bit more difficulty to the game, we’re going to take on an extra challenge. 🔥
Throughout the Ironsworn rulebook, there are prompts called “Quest Starters” whose purpose is to help the player come up with creative story ideas for their campaign. For this challenge, we’re going to try to utilize in our campaign every Quest Starter associated with our truths and starting region—that’s 12 prompts in total.
We’re not required to adhere to the exact text of the prompts, but each of them must inspire some significant part of our story.
To be clear, using Quest Starters is not required when playing Ironsworn, and newcomers to Ironsworn shouldn’t look at this as a mandatory way to approach the game. In solo RPGs, it’s up to you to decide how you want to play, and this just happens to be the way that I find the most fun. 🙂
Coming Up Next
In session 0, we’ll start setting up our Ironsworn campaign by selecting our truths.
Font and Image Credits
The Dicier typeface used throughout this series is by Speak the Sky and licensed under CC BY 4.0.
Credits for all character images used throughout this series can be found in the First City Reference Guide.
Banner background images used throughout this series:
“trees on forest with sun rays” by Sebastian Unrau on Unsplash
“green grass field under cloudy sky during daytime” by Jonathan Ferreira on Unsplash