A bat'leth under the aviator jacket is the new katana in the trenchcoat.

See the guy in the background of that cover, the one with the aviator gear, the double-barreled pistol, and the weird blade? I played that dude on Sunday. It was Stuart's turn to GM at our local Run Club, and he chose as his game The Secret of Zir'An. Kathleen was a mysterious Runecaster and gambler, complete with derringer up the sleeve. Dave played an ogre in a tuxedo wielding the world's largest meat cleaver. And Doug's PC was a stripper ninja who, contrary to all sanity, was not a lesbian. We fought shadowy menaces threatening a gigantic magical airplane/cruise ship. The Hounds of Tindalos made a guest appearance. It was a pretty rockin' time.

There's a lot of good things to be said about Zir'An. The setting is a magical neo-pulp sort of affair, kinda like Eberron with all the D&D-isms removed. The combat system was a crunchy yet fairly intuitive exercise in tactical resource management, but done in a way totally different from most such games I've encountered. Iron Gauntlets has a similar approach, but Zir'An's method is much more polished. I'd love it if publisher Paragon Games took the combat section of their so-called Finesse System and used it to power a setting with a shallower learning curve, something straightforward like action spies or dracula punchers.

Because one of the downer things to Zir'An is what I sometimes call the Double Whammy. In order to get your money's worth out of this game you need to understand a fairly heavy (albeit cool-looking) Setting as well as learning a new, idiosyncratic, medium-to-heavy System. I just don't have much time for that sort of thing anymore. Also counting against Zir'An is an unecessarily convoluted chargen section and an overly long skill list. Doug commented "This is the kind of game that probably deserves a second edition, but nowadays it probably won't get it." I tend to agree. A lot of the game could use some streamlining and the setting information (noting that I haven't read it all, just flipped through) looks like it could use the services of an editor who isn't already enamored of the world of Zir'An.

Still, nothing in the game text prevented us from having a good time. We laughed. We rolled some dice. We blew some shit up. That's my idea of a good Sunday afternoon.

Run Club: a mixed beginning

Yesterday was the first run of our local Run Club, where everyone takes turns GMing a system of their choice. It was the first time this particular collection of players had been at the same table and I was pleasantly surprised at how quickly it felt like we were all part of a coherent gaming group. I suppose it helped that everyone present had game more than once with at least two other participants.

The selected game was a bit of a bust. Dave Hoover kindly volunteered to take the first turn GMing and he settled on Iron Gauntlets. I trust Dave. He's a veteran GM who has ran a bunch of great games for 3 decades. But Iron Gauntlets did not seem to be helping him at all. Eventually he requested that we abandon the adventure early.

I was really looking forward to IG. All sorts of cool people seem to have taken a shine to it besides Dave, such as Don McKinney (chairman of Winter War and my own personal Traveller guru), Doc Rotwang, and a buncha other folks at theRPGsite. The good Doctor has recently changed his mind about IG, and maybe now I know why. Keep in mind that what I'm about to tell you is based upon playing half a session and never seeing the inside of the rulebook. If someone wants to tell me I'm wrong about the mechanical details, I will gladly concede the point. I can only report my impressions of a couple hours of actual play.

IG's core mechanic for task resolution is rock solid. You figure out what stat and skill apply to the task. Stat and skill are uncoupled, so Fitness and Stealth might be approapriate for one task while Awareness and Stealth might work for another. Roll a number of ten-siders equal to the stat. You're trying to get your skill rating or lower on each die. Count successes. It's easy to grok and one of the few dice pool mechanics that look fun to me.

Combat is an intriguing resource management system where your stats are resources you spend from round-to-round on multiple thingies. You spend Fitness and Awareness and sometimes other stats to buy mechanical goodies: a better chance at going first in the round, extra actions, movement, and attacks. I really like the concept.

The main problems we encountered weren't mechanical so much as organizational. To make that combat system work I would really want some sort of control sheet where I can pile dice and move then around. I think I'd maybe even use a couple different colors of dice. The other main organizational issue was the rulebook itself. Dave did a lot of flipping around trying to find stuff, both rules-wise and in the intro adventure. At one point he growled "Argh! Why is this crucial clue hidden in the text?" And when we fought a monster the statblock seemed tough for Dave to interpret.

Do any of these issues mean Iron Gauntlets is a bad game? No, not at all. IG may be a very good game. But a fantasy adventure minnow swimming in D&D's sharktank has to be darn near perfect for me to bother investing my time and money. Unless the game is solid gold I don't want to spend a dozen sessions working through the combat system or leanring the layout of the book when I could be doing the exact same kinds of adventures with D&D.

Despite issues with the selected game, we still had a rockin' good time yesterday. The laughs were fast and frequent, we swapped some old game stories, chitchatted about the upcoming convention, and generally enjoyed the company of the people at the table. I look forward to our February meeting, where Doug will use the d20 Modern/d20 Future rules to power an old fashioned Star Frontiers outing. I think I'll be playing a vrusk. What's not to love about that?