Ironclaw

Ironclaw is the flagship roleplaying game developed and published by Sanguine Productions, tagged as "Anthropomorphic Fantasy Role-play". Players take on the roles of anthropomorphic animals in the low-magic fantasy kingdom of Calabria.

And this is the thread to talk about it.

So, to start off here are two questions. Does anyone else here play Ironclaw? If so, do you find the career lists presented in the rules to be as limiting as I do?

I've actually been playing it and G Ming for a few months now with a few dudes I know. Short of one of our players who was also G Ming at the time basically quitting, it's gone rather well. Thankfully, though, I managed to come up with a few ideas once I took over again.

What we've got in terms of party make up at the moment is a grey fox count, his guard captain, an otter who's also an ex-pirate hunter, an armadillo priest, and a water shrew who's a bit of a... puckish rogue, to put it kindly?

What the last GM had done was set up an adventure about taking down Lord Dante, a lion who has a high ranking member of the winemaker's guild who also turned out to be really, really creepy. As it turns out, he's also in the slave trade. So, from where he left off, I'm going to try an idea I had: Recruit the party into a secret service dedicating to dealing with potential problems through the use of stealth, charm, and 18th century technology. Laser monocles and cane guns will be involved.

It's a really good system, but as you can tell by my... rather huge divergence from the usual setting, I tend to feel a little restrained by what you can do with the setting, sometimes. I really wish they'd publish more books about other places in the setting, or give us books on other time periods. Something like Ironclaw set in the Wild West, the 1920's, or even the future would be really, really, fun but I can't see it happening...

edited 11th Jun '14 11:52:59 AM by Bobinator

It's quite well-designed system for what I heard, even though it's remembered mainly for the whole furies things which some people have an issue with.

Amusingly they give the option to replace the animals with standard Fantasy races, but really what is the point if you do that? It would be playing Dark Heresy and changing the imperium of man with the federation from Star Trek.

edited 12th Jun '14 6:25:23 AM by joeyjojo

I remember this system vaguely... the mechanics looked interesting, and I thought about doing conversions of the races for OGL, but I remember looking at the cover and thinking that the game would be lucky to last a year because of lawsuit potential. It's hard to want to get into a system when you think they're going to be sued into oblivion.

What lawsuit potential? It's open game license.

If you talk about the Alleged similarity to slayers I really don't see it myself. It seems incidental at worst.

"Alleged"? The original first edition cover was very blatantly a furry version of the American boxart for Slayers The Motion Picture, with Lina redone as a fox and Naga redone as a wolf. And I'm not the only one who noticed - my whole college gaming group discussed it, and lawyers did get involved.

Now, I'm not casting aspersions on the Ironclaw developers (from what I heard, they were unfamiliar with The Slayers, so they thought they were buying the rights to use original characters when they got the rights to that piece). For that matter, it did eventually get resolved without actually going before a judge, so cooler heads prevailed. This still did not change the fact that I skipped the system because I wasn't sure just how ugly things were going to get legally (and by the time things did get settled, I was extremely broke and not about to pick up any new system without guarantee that I could have gotten to run it for someone).

All of that said, I think I'd be interested to see the OGL components of the latest edition; it might make for an interesting comparison by blending in some of the Ironclaw races with 3.5 or Pathfinder races (what if the difference between IC and PF catfolk was similar to the differences between elves and dwarves?).

The problem is that the different species are more like cultures, more than anything. See, the Rinaldi, the grey foxes, are basically Italians. You've got the horses, the Bisclaverrete, who are the French. The otter I mentioned is basically a Scotsman, and so on. It's much closer to 18th century Europe than most other D&D settings, so I don't think you'd be able to transfer races straight over without losing something.

There's no OGL, but I think the basic mechanics would probably be simple enough you could add on to it to do what you want. Actually, if you're really interested in adapting it, you might want to look into Myriad Song, which takes the Ironclaw rules, streamlines them a little more, and puts it into a very different sci-fi setting. Also, space raptors.

That said, I've always figured the best way to handle anthro races in something like D&D or something else would be to take a standard race, claim it's an animal, and just use the base stats and features of the original race you chose. The skills you pick at character creation determine what your species is good at. Lot of swimming ranks? Probably a lizard. Climbing? Raccoon. And so on.

edited 12th Jun '14 12:43:33 PM by Bobinator

Have you read how settings usually treat other sophonts in them? They frequently are treated as merely other cultures - it's probably due to the fact that we don't actually have other sophont species (that we know of) around, so we can only guess just how they'd interact based on what we are familiar with.

I know I could just reskin some of the fluff for existing races... that said, I'm the kind of person who'd enjoy spending an afternoon doing a total conversion. So while I'm suggesting an amount of effort on my part, I am most certainly not suggesting work. I'm suggesting time-intensive fun.

I really don't see the connection with this covers personally. But its not important .

I am interested to see how your D&D conversion will go considering ironclaw uses a totally different 'Dice type as ability system, simply to Savage Worlds or Witch Girls Adventures. That makes it very different from the normal D20 add modifier System.

edited 13th Jun '14 6:45:06 AM by joeyjojo

Well, I'd probably do a restat block for Pathfinder, actually, for a few reasons. Perhaps the most important is that PF has done much more work with integrating early guns into the system; that fits the tech level of Ironclaw more. Beyond that, because PF assumes a higher power level, I'd be able to incorporate more abilities into the base abilities for the races. I could turn around and do the same thing for D&D, but then we bring up the two words which are almost guaranteed player repellent - "Level Adjustment."

I might have to jury rig a couple of minor side abilities to round out some of them (like maybe giving an extra +2 to a skill or two where IC didn't have them), and then the process of coming up with appropriate Alternate Favored Class Bonuses (though I'd take some of those wholesale from others already in the system). But I imagine the process wouldn't be that arduous.

That said, it'd help if I had the rules to look at what the base racial abilities are.

According to the trope page, the only playable animals are mammals? Pass. If I have to play a furry RPG, its gotta be a beetle assassin, man.

Well, to point out the obvious, if you were an anthropomorphic beetle, you wouldn't have fur. You'd have a carapace.

Well, most anthro characters I see are stuff like dragons, snakes, lizards, and other non-furred animals.

Jadeclaw, a game with the same rules that takes place in what's basically 18th-century Asia, might be more to your liking. In that one, you get centipedes, dragons, scorpions, spiders, snakes, toads, vipers, and vipers. And a lot of fluffier things like red pandas, but that's probably not your bag, I assume.

The problem with lizards is that since horses are such a major part of the setting, they made a lot of the non-sentient animals lizards, so you can see the issue there.

edited 13th Jun '14 10:03:34 AM by Bobinator

There are also sparrows and ravens in the core book, so technically not ALL mammals.

The devs seem to have had a very specific goal in mind when they designed the system, which they were nice enough to include on the cover: Anthropomorphic Fantasy. That, and they obviously put a lot of effort into designing the Calabria setting. That's just the game they wanted to make.

Not saying that I wouldn't like to see more sourcebooks with rules for sci-fi or steampunk and other settings. Those would be awesome. Just noting that Sanguine Games was probably not interested in making a universal system and churning out splats for it. Considering the company's size they may not have been able to do that if they wanted to.