I mentioned a while ago that I was going to put my regular D&D game on hold to try something different for a bit. I was feeling a bit burned on on that particular story and I needed a break. I still wanted to DM but my group has fallen in love with Warmachine and so I’ve decided to create a sort of hybrid game.
if you haven’t seen it, Warmachine is a table top miniatures battle game set in a steam punk style world. The game can be very fast paced and brutal. In addition to the tabletop miniatures game there is also a D20 setting called Iron Kingdoms which allows you to play adventurers in the same world. What I’ve tried to do is combine both these games into one campaign.
I have converted the Iron Kingdoms stuff over to 4e since that is what my players like. I am using an Iron Kingdoms adventure called the Witchfire Trilogy but I felt like it started a little to abruptly and really doesn’t give the players a chance to bond as a group. The adventure has them starting off as caravan guards on their way to a large city called Corvis. I decided to start the story before that in the small town of Fellig where the caravan originated. They are all hired on here and have a chance to get to know each other before hitting Corvis and starting the adventure proper. You can see the set up I sent out to all my players right here.
This would be a perfectly cool way to start the adventure by itself but I decided to add a second layer to the game. The town of Fellig is a border town sitting on the edge of two waring kingdoms. Now in Warmachine each person in my gaming group has selected one of these kingdoms to play. I decided that the Khador army would attack Fellig and try and take it from the defending Cygnar army. So we made a bunch of buildings and created a scenario where Kiko had to try and take the city from Porkfy. Pork was allowed to set up his army in the city and Kiko had to move in from the edges of the table. This was going to be a cool fight on its own but the result of the Warmachine match would directly effect how the new Iron Kingdoms adventure begins. Can Cygnar hold them off and give the Caravan time to get out? If Khador takes the town how does the party escape?
The battle took place on Monday and Porfry ended up winning which meant Khador got pushed out and Cygnar held the town. I wrote up a quick story about the battle from the point of view of one of major NPC’s in the game. I’ll write one more bit that covers the end of the battle and will lead them right up to the first Iron Kingdoms game which will take place on Monday night. My plan is to alternate between the small scale Iron Kingdoms adventure and large scale Warmachine battles but have both of them intertwined. So the guys will be playing out massive battles between the various kingdoms that will have an effect their characters and the adventures they are having.
I’ll keep you updated and let you know how it works.
-Gabe out
