Stuff from Entitas

Magic, “Magic”, and Ironsworn

(Version 1.0 of this article.)

Magic’s a common topic for Ironsworn, usually as a proposal for homebrew, or just a question about a quick hack / how-to-narrate, and I’d like to braindump a bit. This is a mistake, because I’m writing the first draft of this at 7am, which is the hour of the day where I have no brain with which to dump, but here goes:

The big question, though: How do I add magic to my Ironsworn game?

There’s a fair bit to unpack there, and usually some preconceived notions on top of it. Let’s dig deeper.

What’s magic, anyway?

So you want to add magic to Ironsworn. Cool! Question for you back: What’s magic? I mean, you probably have an idea already, but the truth is there’s as many magical systems as there are people who can imagine what magic is. Are you wanting low fantasy sort of magic? High fantasy? Magic with strict and defined rules and properties? Open-ended whimsy? What can magic do and not do?

The point I’m trying to make, is that we should be thinking magic in terms of narrative first, because Ironsworn is a game where the narrative comes first. What is magic in your narrative and setting? Once you know what the narrative is, then we can talk about mechanics, speaking of which…

What does it mean to “add magic to Ironsworn”, anyway?

Ironsworn is a narrative-first game: You narrate a situation, decide how you approach it, then do it. When your approach calls for making a move, you make that move and roll. Strictly speaking, you don’t actually have to do anything to add your magic of choice to the system. Just narrate your character doing magic. You’re done! That was easy.

People only sometimes find that satisfying. We’re used to magic in games being reflected in the game’s mechanics. Even Ironsworn itself agrees, given the Ritual asset type. While I would challenge people to reconsider what magic ‘should’ mean, both as a narrative and mechanical tool, I’ll concede that when people talk about adding magic to something, they want a magic-based game mechanic.

So let me try and tackle this question in a more defined way:

How do I demonstrate my magic system of choice (narrative) through Ironsworn’s mechanics?

To which the answer is: depends.

There’s about as many ways to mechanically reflect magic as there are ideas about what magic is. It turns out when the goal is representing “made up stuff” using “made up game rules”, people can have a lot of different interpretations on how to do that. No exact science here and there’s not really a wrong answer. It’s entirely a preference matter about how to turn a narrative abstract into Numbers ‘N’ Dice.

But, for the sake of giving you something more practical, I’ll spitball at you:

• Write your own set of Moves related to magic. Probably the most involved method and people’s first notion: write homebrew for Magic Rules for Playing Magic Stuff.
• Write assets for different spells or magical aspects. The base game somewhat does this already with Ritual assets.
• Your narrative magical powers open up opportunities for moves, like being able to Face Danger with a more-preferred stat, or make moves like Secure an Advantage or Gather Information when you wouldn’t be able to mundanely.
• Represent your magic through momentum. When you burn momentum to improve the result of the move, use that as a prompt to imagine your character casting a spell to turn things around in their favor.
• Use the die rolls to decide when magic happens. A 6 on the action die could be your character making the move through magic, good or bad. Magic could occur on a match.
• And other concepts I can’t fathom (but if I can, I’ll probably add them to this list, to better demonstrate that there’s not many limits here.)

Closing Thoughts

The base setting and Ritual assets for Ironsworn show it can support magic out-of-the-box and extremely handily at that. The question, I imagine, comes up because the asker feels like this doesn’t satisfy their need for magic. But to really give a useful answer, we need to identify what that need is. What do you want out of magic? Both in the story, and as a game?

And none of this is to try and say “don’t write magic homebrew stuff” - please do! If you want magic to have more weight and focus in the game, that’s absolutely one of the approaches you can for it. I’m just saying, I dunno.

I’m just saying.

You know?

Just saying.