Sneak Peek: Shawn Tomkin is reimagining Ironsworn for a new “alternate edition”

While playing tabletop RPGs solo has existed more or less since the beginning of the hobby, the launch of Shawn Tomkin’s Ironsworn in 2018 felt like a breakthrough. It rendered solo play accessible to a whole, new cohort — the rules were polished, the handbook was approachable and clear-eyed, and it was distributed for free. It also tapped into multiple different kinds of fun — the game mechanics were challenging, the oracles sparked creativity. Even as it has other modes, getting it to the table solo was like being both a player and a GM, both roles jostling together like two souls in the same body. Ironsworn made that feel more natural than it might seem. It’s hard to imagine a more successful debut.

Of course, it didn’t come out of nowhere. Tomkin has been a lifelong solo player, starting as a child in the ‘70s and ‘80s by pouring over D&D manuals and puzzling out the game by trying to play it alone. Even when he found groups later, they tended to fizzle out. Solo and one-on-one play was his main channel into the tabletop RPG hobby. After discovering Mythic, a “GM emulator” by Tana Pidgeon, and Apocalypse World, he began working on his own system. In 2016, he started the project by first creating its cover and naming it Ironcall, and then began years of noodling away in Microsoft OneNote. He attracted a small but passionate group of people following the development and giving feedback on Google+. 

Today, Ironsworn is seen as the game that opened the floodgates. It boosted the popularity of solo RPGs and spawned multiple popular solo actual play shows. Tomkin has become a recurring collaborator with Free League, designing the solo Strider Mode for The One Ring alongside various other contributions. Ironsworn is an Adamantine best-seller on DriveThru, which is the highest tier the site has, and the player base for the game has only grown with time;  the official Discord server currently hosts around 11,000 members. Building on such success, Tomkin has released expansions and sequels like Ironsworn: Starforged (with artist Joshua Meehan), iterating on the original game in small but impactful ways, all of which have been popular and well-received.

But now he’s thinking about changing the formula entirely. 

Tomkin is working on something that’s tentatively titled Ironsworn: Legacies. He has two main goals: one, make an even better rulebook; and two, overhaul the mechanical underpinnings of the system entirely. From a rulebook design and layout point of view, Tomkin wants to implement what he’s learned while working on Starforged and Sundered Isles. He wants to rearrange content from the often overlooked final chapter of the game, tie concepts down to single spreads, and add much more support for people who have trouble getting started. He also just wants it to have a new look.

“Ironsworn was a one-person effort,” said Tomkin to Rascal over email. “I think the manipulated stock photography of the original Ironsworn is perfectly acceptable. But, particularly in this age of generative AI, I want to embrace illustration. I want the art to be bolder, messier, more dynamic, more human.”

The mechanical overhaul is more drastic. “The core Ironsworn mechanisms of action rolls, progress tracks, and progress rolls are solid,” he said. “I am, however, taking a fresh look at the procedures of the game — previously presented as a fairly large number of moves.” For context, Starforged has more than 50 moves, mainly because every mechanic in the game including referring to oracles, beginning sessions, and earning XP are all framed as one. Tomkin feels that the large number of moves has become a barrier for players as they spend more and more time wrestling with deciding which move is the right one to trigger. It's a mental overhead that he never intended and doesn’t see as being valuable for the play experience.

“My current work in progress has stripped things back to a core action,” he said. “[E]verything ultimately collapses back to the action roll. This action roll works as it always did, but with a meatier resolution process that lets you select misfortunes and advantages based on your position and level of success. As some in the community have noted, this shifts what was previously front-loaded crunch (selecting and interpreting the right move) into a meatier outcome as you choose how to spend whatever advantages and misfortunes you acquired in the action.” He hopes this stripped down core mechanic will make play feel more streamlined, as players aren’t in any doubt how they resolve any given action. 

But simplicity can also be boring, and lack of detail can be overwhelming. To support players in incorporating fictional details, Tomkin’s main facilitation tool is something called codexes: “The codexes are information dashboards for various situations such as interactions, journeys, investigations, and fights. Basically, all the verbs of Ironsworn — the common actions and situations you engage with—get a codex.” These codexes could be seen as a procedure combined with an oracle but importantly, you interact with each piece only as much as you want. “Each codex offers a mix of procedures, prompts, and inspirational tables to help guide and interpret what otherwise might be a somewhat dry resolution mechanic,” said Tomkin. “They are additive, and can be used and ignored as folks like, but I think they are a solid tool to help motivate and inform play.”

Tomkin’s ultimate goal is “simpler input, meatier output”, but of course, he isn’t sure that any of this will work. For now, it feels like a fruitful direction. “I'd say that reactions so far mostly range from somewhat negative to cautiously positive,” he said. “It's possible it's a development dead end, but I hope not. I'm trying not to get too far out over my skis or too attached to these ideas, but I'll admit that throwing it all is a possibility I view with dread.” 

Regardless of whether it works out or not, it’s clear that the original Ironsworn isn’t going anywhere. Tomkin is calling it an “alternate edition” instead, with the original game staying available due to the conveniences of PDFs and print-on-demand. He also doesn’t intend to immediately sit down and convert Starforged and other titles into this new engine. “We just restocked Starforged with the fourth printing, and it has plenty of life left,” he said. “I'm planning a supplement for megacity adventures sometime in the next year or so, and I have some other ideas beyond that.” Instead, Legacies might get its own line of “world supplements” — alternate codexes that easily bring new genres and situations into the game. Though this remains firmly in the land of speculation.

Tomkin currently finds himself at a familiar spot — just like with the original game, there’s a long read ahead of him to reach this new version. “A project like that seems insurmountable as you're working on it,” he said. “There's so much to write, so many false starts and dead ends, so many hours spent trying to hone a single paragraph, so many frustrating realizations that some aspect of the game is not working. Days of frustration powered by little moments of joy. And when it's done, you look back and wonder how the heck it all came together. And then you do it all again.”