Ironclaw

Slayers: The Motion Picture Ironclaw

Ironclaw is a game made by furries, for furries and about furries. It takes place in a sort of feudal european fantasy setting. Basically Furcadia: The Roleplaying Game.

System

Basics

In order to perform an action the players must roll an an attribute and a skill. In order to see a hidden assailant, for example, players must roll their "Mind" attribute dice with their "Observation" skill dice.

Character Generation

Ironclaw is run using a mix of attribute and skills that are pooled together to determine the dice rolled. There are gifts and flaws involved, but those are handled in a pretty generic way.

All characters have a basic six attributes, including Race, Career, Mind, Body, Speed and Will. The player is given an array of dice (D12, D10, D8, D8, D6, D4) By spending build points (or through the use of experience points) you may increase the amount of attributes a character has. Each attribute is assigned a die (or, in the case of very adept characters, multiple dice) to be rolled when that attribute is used.

Characters also have skills, which are much more specific than attributes. Notable skills include Hold-Out (the ability to hide things on your person), weapons skills, gambling, and observation. These also have an assigned die (or dice) that are to be rolled when performing this action.

Setting

Ironclaw is generally set on the island continent of Calabria, though in expansions there are other continents to visit such as Zhongguo. The continent is on the cusp of a change from the medieval period to the renaissance. Swords and armor are still prevalent, but guns and machines are becoming much more common.

The island is split among four major factions, with a fifth controlling Triskellian (a sort of hub-city that controls trade on the island) that ties them all together. The major factions are the Bisclaveret, Avoirdupois, Doloreaux, Phelan and Rinaldi/free guilds. The first three are noble houses, each headed by bloodline of specific race (Wolf, Horse, and Boar respectively.) The Phelan are a number of atavist (barbarian) wolf tribes. Lastly, the Rinaldi are a noble house of foxes that act as patrons to Triskellian. They ensure that the city and it's various trades guilds stay free.

Magic

The setting for Ironclaw is supposed to be low-to-medium magic, so the wizard-types are pretty gimped. While this is disappointing for most knigh/tg/uys and ca/tg/irls, at least it's not dominating the game like every other system out there.

The fluff describes why sorcerers are so rare: magic used to be even more broken than the Mystic Theurge class in D&D 3.5. There were three or four immortal kings called "Autarchs" roaming around and basically using the world as their playpen. Once the Autarchs finally fell, everyone breathed a sigh of relief and the arts of magic were feared and hated for centuries. Magic knowledge wasn't just lost but exorcised from public knowledge. In recent years magic was picked up again, but it is still mistrusted and in it's infancy. All this is for the sake of realism (stop laughing) in what is supposed to feel like a pre-renaissance Europe.

The magic system comes GURPS flavoured, with each wizard having an inventory of practiced rote-spells, bought in "lists." Spellcasting is like any other skill roll, using Mind dice + (wizard career dice) + skill dice, and must buy a separate skill for each unique spell. Spellcasting uses up a personal resource of "magic points." Once a magician has raised their skill level for casting a spell to match the spell's power level (becoming an "adept" at that spell), the magician no longer needs to roll each time to see if it fizzles. (ie.: Level 1 spells are easy right away, but Level 3 spells you need to go d4->d6->d8 before you stop rolling to see if you fumble it).

The starting book mentions four flavours/careers of magic:

• Elementalism, the easiest, is your typical LIGHTNAN BOLT! LIGHTNAN BOLT! spells. Starts out as generic conjuration & evocation pew pew type, but wizards eventually have to specialize in one of the four classic elements.
• White magic, your typical holy miracle stuff, only available to members of the church. Abjuration and heal spells.
• Green & Purple magic (one flavour, two colours) is your pagan cultist type, with enchantments & charms, little bit of divination.
• Thaumaturgy feels more like a D&D magic-user class, with the heavy academics, metamagic and supernatural stuff.

There's also Atavism, which is when the furries get all tribal and shit and stop pretending to be half-human. It means being a scary fucking beast, but also means being a dumb animal; you always add your own Mind dice to the difficulty dice of any Atavist power you're trying to pull off. Almost all of these powers give you some serious RIP AND TEAR shit. Even the passive advantage makes you a scary customer: any effect that would make give an Atavist the "confused" condition gives them the "berzerk" condition instead.

Ironclaw on /tg/

Mostly used as bait by furry trolls, but it has been praised for being a decent system, and also for having a cover ripped off of Slayers. If you see a 73mb Inquisitors Handbook for Dark Heresy on /rs/, odds are you will end up with this. Don't act surprised.

• 
  Jadeclaw, the weeaboo expansion book.