Editing Iron Kingdoms (section)

==Real World History==
The Iron Kingdoms setting began as an adventure path for [[Dungeons & Dragons 3rd Edition]] (that's 3.0, not 3.5) called the Witchfire Trilogy. While Witchfire had its flaws (chiefly that the players all played second fiddle to an official [[DMPC]]), it created a weird and interesting setting which was described in pretty damn fine detail, so it was popular enough to expand. Eventually, the authors had enough cash to found Privateer Press and create the wargames [[Warmachine]] and [[Hordes]], based on stuff from the Iron Kingdoms setting, but with several retcons to fit it more closely to their original ideas of the world (e.g. almost no half-elves, and healing magic was even more restricted). Warmachine and Hordes then got big enough that Privateer Press was able to reverse their original journey; they went back to D&D's [[OGL]] and built an RPG called Iron Kingdoms D20. But that didn't last much longer than a corebook and two "Monsternomicons" (monster manuals) before they declared the D20 system to be "too restrictive". So then they took the system from the Warmachine/Hordes wargame and built an Iron Kingdoms RPG around it. 

The end result was... well, it's a bit niche, because you need to either know your way around the Iron Kingdoms setting or homebrew a functionally identical world; the rules are occasionally flimsy (especially around how to create monsters), and a few homebrews are recommended to keep things running really smoothly.  It was also rather repetitive, as the classes required a lot of duplication to throw magic but in my class's special snowflake way (gunmage fireball, arcanist fireball, runeplate fireball, etc). All in all, though, it works pretty well and is likely to keep players interested if they're bored of standard fantasy settings.

A conversion of the game to [[Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition]], set after the big Infernal Invasion event, was officially due for release in September 2021 but... y'know, that whole mess with the plague and screwed up shipping held it back until November that year. In fact, the Kickstarter backers' physical copies actually spent all of October literally stuck on a dock waiting for somebody to be able to get to them to ship them out. Still, despite that hiccup, the response was positive enough that Privateer Press jumped on the bandwagon for their first [[splatbook]], which is now scheduled for official release in June 2022.