Today we are jumping into one of the most underrated, unsung, and unbeatable settings for ttrpgs: The Iron Age!
This is a time period that offers boundless opportunities for adventure, and endless avenues for players and game masters.
#historicalgaming #indiegamedev #ttrpg
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Intro 0:00-1:43
Caveats 1:44-3:22
An Age of Upheaval 3:23-15:58
The Iron Age is the Best Fantasy Setting 15:59-28:39
Misconceptions and Tropes 28:40-33:47
The Iron Age in Our Games 33:47-40:38
Q+A 40:39- 1:14:02
source
Bruh we're in the middle of an Ice Age rn
"Youre only a barbarian if youre immigrating" or if you, oh idk, do some barbaric shit? Nothing new.
B.C. and A.D. Only
1:00:46 I play Vintage Story and I can say I make better tools than weapons and armor. Much more immediately useful and I don't need a weapon if I'm careful.
47:00 A fae video would be amazing (assuming it hasn't benn made yet).
Leviathan isn't in Leviticus. It's in Job, Psalms, and Isaiah. It's most famously in Job 41:1, but it's actually in Job 3:8 as well. The original hebrew translates leviathan as "mourning". Leviticus is about the Levites. Both come from a word meaning to join, that's where the confusion comes from.
I have heard a lot of good things about Adventurer Conqueror Kings and ACKS II as a gaming system. I have not played it myself but it sounds like a really cool system in terms of an age for play. Very interesting video sir. I enjoy your videos quite a bit, the History aspect is great!
People are always obsessed with finding "wonder materials" like the mitral or adamantine of fantasy but id argue we already have that in modern steel. I mean i see how strong a good modern knife is against wood and bone, how little high quality steel it takes to hold a person, think about the forces in a car and if something breaks in the distance it takes to travel from one side of america to the other, even 20x over we would consider it to be horribly wrong. Even cast iron contains the explosions, i imagine a steel block could do even better. Aluminum is light and strong but very dependent on application. It has no spring to it and absolutely zero capacity for cyclic loading. If you bend aluminum one milimeter back and forth it will break eventually.
Look at how light we can make firearms. Theres a reason why modern guns dont work in fantasy ttrpgs, if you took a PKM into dnd youd be able to mag dump a dragon and kill it. We have the fucking GAU-8 avenger, if you dropped that in dnd or pathfinder and pointed it at a god youd shred it to its base components in a second.
A semi truck pulls 80k+ lbs using a lot of steel and iron. If the majority of our infrastructure is supported by steel, our vehicles drivetrains are made of steel, the frames for those vehicles are steel, our weapons are steel, our tools are steel, we are certainly still in the steel age as far as physical materials.
Idk maybe im weird but i do have a fascination with steel. There is likely more alloys out there that we havent discovered that will make steel even better than it is.
I think a lot of people have a demystified view of steel because they buy the cheapest knives and tools, anything they hold in their hands, made of the chintziest metal as thin as the company that makes them can get away with making it. Modern steel is a marvel if you are willing to pay what people paid 50 years ago.
For example someone compared hand tools for mechanics to tools made in the 70s. You have these brands that are associate with cheap 12$ wrench sets that also cost like 15$ back in the day. The new 12$ wrench set is way way worse. So people assume that quality has gone down. (And people have the collective memory of a gold fish so to a lot of people these cheap 12$ tool sets are what steel is to them) but if you adjust for inflation and get the 100$ version of the same thing, nowadays we call those the "expensive brands" but they cost the same as those 15$ ones from back in the day and theyre BETTER now. Your money is just worth less now. They still "make em like they uses to" you just dont want to pay like you used to. And i know we dont even make money like we used to, thats why we need to hang politicians and ceos from fucking overpasses.
That got off track. People only want to buy the cheapest, shittiest thing that will work because we dont have any money. And its besmirching the good name of high quality steel.
Hi! I'm late to the party, but this is a great video! Definitely going to try to talk my party into trying some lower-magic, iron age games.
As for the technology required to move from bronze to iron (asked at 46:20), there was: iron melts much hotter than copper, so entirely different forges (bloomeries, I think?) were required to work it; and even then it often wasn't worked fully molten like bronze. The techniques existed during the bronze age, but were not well known or easy to use. While huge empires and trade routes kept tin accessible, iron wasn't worth figuring out beyond a few ornamental pieces; once those systems collapsed, however, the added labor cost to work iron became worth the effort.
Oh, there's plenty going on with my wood…
I’m so mystified by it being pronounced “eye-Ron”
Just found your channel and I'm loving it, you deserve a lot more views for the content and knowledge you share. Some things really made me think in a different way about fantasy.
By the way, you don't have to say "unalive" etc, this self-cersorship comes from tik tok, you can freely say "dead" on youtube without getting demonetized. It just sounds silly.
This is a perfect example of a video that needs to start with its point and then explain it, instead of spending so much time yammering. I got fifteen minutes in and you started saying that by the end of the video I would start to understand why the iron age is the greatest era for roleplaying games. No dude. Start with your thesis and then prove it. I'm not sitting here for another hour to find out what the video even is about.
Late bronze-iron age with a group/nation having secret knowledge of metal working with extremely high class/honor guard having steel plate armor
But I want my 3/4 armored knights with wheellock pistols, to do ride-by shootings on enemy formations … 🙁
I think your point on monsters makes a lot of sense since we hadnt invented eyeglasses yet! Lot of people running around with terrible eyesight
I'm working on a late bronze age/early iron age setting and I don't want bronze to be made too obsolete. My workaround is to make bronze and orichalcum take arcane enchantment better, while iron and mithril are better suited to divine blessings.
What do you think of a "missfire" mechanic for bronze weapons?
On a critical miss or so, the weapon suffers a malus until it is repaired.
My next campaign setting is set in the early bronze age, with raw unbound magic, the elves in their highest power and gods walking the lands. I want to let my party, everytime the entire party dies, get a time jump and have to explore another new age, in which the magic begins to get domesticated, iron is the new stuff and the humans begin to conquer the nature.
Im glad to see people talking about non-medieval settings :>
Love from a Scrit and Vaush fan!