Initially I am offering a one-shot to give people a chance to try my favorite game from my college years. This game session will be Friday April 23 7:30PM PDT. As an initial one-shot we will either do abbreviated chargen or use pre-gens with the goal of getting a chance to try out some of the system in play. In the long run this may open up as a full campaign, but for now will be pop-up one-shots. Listing: <a href="https://app.roll20.net/lfg/listing/286613/cold-west-iron-marches" rel="nofollow">https://app.roll20.net/lfg/listing/286613/cold-west-iron-marches</a> This campaign will use a game system from my college years referred to as Cold Iron. It was developed by a friend, Mark Christiansen. It is an old school game of the 1980s, very combat focused, very tactical, and rather deadly. It harkens back to the days when many GMs modified D&D to their own tastes, in fact, we originally called it Christiansen D&D, and it clearly grew from Mark’s home D&D campaign, but he added on ideas clearly taken from RuneQuest and The Fantasy Trip. This is one of my favorite RPG systems. A major feature of the game is a unified resolution mechanism that is a clever way to use the standard normal distribution, an open ended bell curve. If that sounds rather mathematical, the truth is that in play the math disappears since what is used in play is a simple look up table, but for those math geeks, know that the table is based on cool math. The open ended resolution means that in theory, the lowly dog can kill the best warrior in the land or conversely the best warrior in the land can embarrass himself and fall flat on his face. These outlier events are extremely rare due to the use of the bell curve. More likely is that occasionally someone will make a really good roll and take out a feared enemy in a single blow. Character development is handled with a simple class and level system with a simple skill system. Of interest is attribute improvement as part of the character development. Character creation is thus relatively quick, a good feature for a game with a deadly combat system. The combat system is a simple system but rich with a logical set of options and modifiers and is reasonably tactical though not completely board game like. This is combined with a combat focused magic system. The magic system is unified between casters and magic items, with magic items all being based on spells from the spell list. Casters memorize a good number of spells and use mana points to cast them and they can usually fire off a reasonable number of spells in a combat though there are some spells that use a lot of mana. The mana system also allows some spells to be maintained for long times, possibly even indefinitely. The most common magic items are non-permanent, either potions (the one magic item commonly seen where the user of the item need not supply the mana) and “charged” items that allow a user to trigger a spell (with the user supplying the mana) with some chance of failure that increases as the item is used to the point where eventually the item is almost useless. There are some readily available permanent magic items in the form of weapons and armor. Permanent magic items and items that supply mana points do exist. Magic items are readily available for purchase which enables a nice flow from treasure with strategic and tactical choices of picking the “right” magic item for the upcoming adventure. Clerics use most of the same spells that magic users get, but each religion or cult gets a subset of the spells based on a set of associations, and usually gets a few spells earlier than magic users and other spells later. Clerics with the White association have the best healing magic and get it at low level (otherwise healing magic is pretty high level). Cold Iron is a very nice fit for the “leveled regions” aspect of West Marches campaigns. With a dangerous, tactical, combat system, giving the players the ability to manage their risk tolerance is very exciting. No longer is the GM responsible for “balancing” encounters. The GM need only make each region have some degree of consistency. Early on, one would expect a modest to high number of PC casualties but as players start to master the system they will be better able to judge risk. Also, with a combat heavy system (with magic useful for reconnaissance), the West Marches idea of “adventure out there in the wilds” is a good fit for a system that doesn’t have a complex social conflict system (we have a Charisma attribute and that’s about it). A link to a Google Doc that shares my current working thoughts on house rules for the system and links to more resources for the system: <a href="https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nyOzdxP8VZV2oSyKnxnS160WBRpC1Cd9fNfn2Va9VAI/edit?usp=sharing" rel="nofollow">https://docs.google.com/document/d/1nyOzdxP8VZV2oSyKnxnS160WBRpC1Cd9fNfn2Va9VAI/edit?usp=sharing</a>