In the beginning there were the ancient Egyptians, who created their gods as anthropomorphic beings representing local creatures. Thousands of years later a group of funny animal enthusiasts from the sci-fi fandom would unite to split off into their own faction, know widely known as the furries. With their new identity they spread across the internet, bringing much wrath and bile against them.
At the same time as the birth of furries, several historical war gamers in Geneva, Wisconsin played a scenario where an elite team of fantasy heroes must infiltrate a castle through its dungeon. As time went on, they began to become attached to their characters, removing the pretense of tabletop war gaming to form a sort of improvised radio theater around their table, acting out their pewter miniature’s invented personalities and back stories. From this role-playing games (RPGs) were spawned, gaining popularity until and computer RPGs captured the mainstream, leaving old-style hobbyists to their pens and papers and needlessly complicated mathematic equations to determine the area of their wizard’s right foot.
Nerds, the furries and role-players eventually made contact over borders, and as a joint project created Ironclaw by Sanguine Productions.
FLUFF: Art and Fiction
We might as well start with the cover art, and instantly fall into our first warning sign of a possible lack of quality. It consists of two fox/wolf/wolverine/whatever females in poses signifying sorcery and lightheartedness. This is a problem for two reasons. The first is that as a piece it seems very amateur (this will be a repeating theme through most of the art and a point made later), not something you’d really want to use to attract a potential buyer, while telling us nothing thematic or descriptive about the game itself. I’ll bring about some examples. With White Wolf’s World of Darkness books, you instantly get a sense of what the game will provide. The core book is a shot of a mysterious man shambling down a gritty street, explaining that this will probably be a game of horror and mystery, their Vampire: The Requiem cover is a hand waving across falling petals, the entire hardback colored a blood-crimson: you know we’re dealing with blood and vampirism now. Even the old 3.5 Dungeons and Dragons books, while not having any illustrations of action or characters, looks like a dusty tome of something you’d see in a fantasy world. Not so with Ironclaw. While this may be a game of diplomacy and politics in a medieval isle, you’d know assume nothing about that aside from the arcana the two girls are weaving.
The second and far bigger problem is that this entire cover is a massive rip-off of Slayers: The Motion Picture, a decent fantasy anime, at least from the single first episode I once saw.
Ahhh, much better.
However the 2009 edition of the game has a cover is superior in every way, and might be indicative of the artwork inside, though I can’t say for sure myself.
As for the inside art, it’s a very, very mixed bag, and I mean that in the most critical way possible. It ranges from pretty good to absolutely atrocious, by far the worst offender being Brett Foster’s work in the Gifts and Flaws chapter. However, I give a thumbs up (except for the cover) to Tracy Butler’s comic on page 126 (It turns out that she is also the author of Lackadaisy Cats, and can actually draw humans well, so I have no complaints about her). The drawing of architecture are usually better then the art of characters themselves. Overall, while it does have its ups, for the most part the interior artwork is simply mediocre. Also, the style of the pictures themselves range from abstractly cartoonish to hyper-realistic to a balance in-between. In this way, Ironclaw does not have a thematic style or mood, no solid place on the grimdark/noblebright spectrum. It seems like they just got together, tossed it in a blender, and saw what they got (and I don’t mean that in a RIFTS way, we’re you toss in everything and the kitchen sink, and get the greatest campaign setting ever made).
It ranges from this...
...To this.
We now move on to the world and writing. Though you would think the results of the art would apply to the prose, it’s actually pretty decent. I mean it; it’s really not bad in comparison to the pencil and ink. Each chapter is ended or started with a one page vignette comics that are alright as long as you just stare at the speech bubbles and nothing else.
While I don’t have much to say about the setting, since aside from a lack of consistency, it’s hard to say whether a fantasy setting is good or bad. The game takes place in a fantasy world where animal species have evolved to become sentient and humanoid, forming the dominant races. More specifically, the target location is the island of Calabria. A long time ago, there were wizard kings called Autarchs that made cities out of gold, sank continents, raised mountains, kingdoms spread like jewels below a starry mantle, that sort of thing.
Long ago, before the oceans sank Atlantis and the rise of the sons of Aryas...
They then got bored and decided to blow up the earth (there are other theories, but they aren’t nearly as exciting). After the magic apocalypse, everyone decided to start an age of enlightenment. In the wake of this and the creation of gunpowder and science, noble houses started to come to the island Calabria to lay claim to natural resources which, like spice, must flow. Of course, there are also different religions like the Catholic Church proxy, and the remaining shamanic/pagan/hippy faiths that cling on. Gunpowder, cannons, and funny hats are catching on, phasing out armor and knights, so you probably won’t want to buy a crossbow unless you’re cheap or think it makes you a special. With powerful noble houses and flintlocks, it’s like a cross between A Game of Thrones and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, combining the diplomacy and intrigue of the former with the excitement of hoping your gun doesn’t blow up in your face and cause you to slowly die of black powder poisoning, or being stabbed with a rusty pitchfork and catching tetanus.
One minor complaint I might have though concerns the fact with such a huge amount of racial diversity, you’d think there’d be some heavy amounts of racism going on between, say, foxes and wolves. If you’re going to anthropomorphize something, you can’t just take the nice happy things about humans and discard the rest. Chimpanzees are vicious cannibals that rip off people’s faces, and dolphins form gang-rape squads against other dolphins. I also give a final argument against Ironclaw’s continued use of the old Aesopian stereotypes. Foxes are charismatic and good with women; bats live in gothic castles atop Carpathian-ish mountains and may or may not drink blood. Isn’t it time we dispersed of the old myths and had a fox that was a creepy fat stalker, or a raccoon that doesn’t suffer from kleptomania?
CRUNCH: Rules and Rolls
Oh boy, the best part of a role-playing game: numbers!
To create your character, you have a set amount of “points” that you can use to spend on your character’s skills and knacks, starting with his or her species. To balance out the fact that not everybody is equal in the furry kingdom, as a rhino in full plate armor is probably going to win against a coyote, more powerful species cost more points to play as, meaning you get fewer points to spend on other aspects of your character. The amount of different creatures to play as is large, though some consolidating has to be done. Lions and tigers are placed under “big cats”, the same with canines. Of course, you could play an ape, but that’s just a shitty version of a human.
You will soon learn to hate their kind.
Bizarrely, shrews and skunks are quite powerful, though maybe the skunks have evolved so their spray is nerve gas, I’m not too sure. Beyond races you buy skills and gifts (feats) for your brave adventurer. Give’im a name, spend some starting coin on your swords and shooters, and prepare to enter a realm of damsels and- hold on, let’s talk about task resolution.
What separates RPGs from a bunch of nerds having story time and interrupting each other to change the way the plot goes (though this is role-playing at its purist) is some sort of task resolution. The first and simplest type was determining if your knight could hit that annoying, fast-moving goblin on the second floor of the dungeon, though this was expanded to include characters attempting to perform difficult actions under duress or with long-lasting consequences for failure. This is the very reason why we have character sheets and dice, why it matters whether your character was specialized in lock-picking or history. It acts as a way to remove situations where two players start arguing whether Vlag the vampire is dead or not after being stabbed with a stake, or if Jim the mountain climber could make that 10 foot horizontal jump across that rocky gap in front of him.
In most RPGs, you try to succeed at something by rolling one or more dice and trying to hit a target number, or add up a number of successful die rolls out of a pool of dice, these usually given situational modifiers, like not being trained in something, or not having the right equipment for the job, or simply doing something really difficult. In Ironclaw, the better trained you are at something the more dice you roll for something, and the bigger those dice are. A novice at something would roll a d6, though someone more skilled might get a d12 and a d8, rolling and adding those together. Instead of trying get higher or lower than a set target number, the Game Master picks up some dice, more if the character is trying something tough, and rolls off, trying to get a higher number than the character. Beat the GM, you get lucky, otherwise you fail. While this certainly is an interesting way handle conflict, it doesn’t seem any more intuitive than rolling a straight d20, or rolling a percentile dice and hoping for a low number, or trying to beat a 4 on a type of die.
But what would a game about fantasy adventure be without exciting, violent combat? Ironclaw certainly has that, but maybe not the exciting part. I’m usually the most hesitant to look through combat rules since this is usually the most detailed, complex and simulationist part of a rule set. It seems to run a lot like the standard d20 combat, divided into rounds and turns. That said, there it is a little too crunchy for my tastes, and when I see that many charts, I tend to close the book and veer away. There is a bit more focus on the type of weapon a character wields, usually having some sort of modifiers to initiative or how precisely you can wield it, it’s all a bit much.
Your soul, is mine!
Finally is magic, wherein the weird and wonderful can occur. It runs on a power points system, in that you have a set amount of points or mana, and more powerful spells cost more to cast. Like combat, I don’t have much to say on this, it serves its part and if you could understand the combat system, you shouldn’t have a problem with this.
THE VERDICT
Occult power is grrrrrrrreat!
In conclusion, while Ironclaw tries hard to take a stab at being the definitive furry RPG, there is absolutely nothing special about it or inspires one to try and learn the rules of play, the artwork isn’t good, and the mechanics under the system are clunky. You could easily convert the species over to another, better known system like Savage Worlds or D20, and not lose too much in the translation. However, if you are dead-set on playing an anthropomorphic fantasy game, you might want to look into Shard, which, from their site and free PDF, has some quality art and skill behind it.
