The Book of the Enhanced Ironsworn and Its Metanarrative

Three years ago, when I started creating content for Ironsworn, back in January 2019 with the Ironcrunch supplement, there was a lot of criticism I received from the more purists of the Ironsworn system.

Criticism is something I've dealt with for much longer when I was dedicated to reviewing video games in Spanish under the Mentor Píxel brand. However, in the role-playing games industry, the community is different; different because the products they consume are much more malleable than video games. This conditions the way in which they consume and observe each other's consumption.

The development of Ironcrunch was suspended last year when the focus of this Patreon changed, not because of the criticism I received, but because of my acknowledgment of my own inexperience in designing ludic subsystems. However, Ironcrunch did not die, it diversified into different products: the Motivations, Demeanors, Ancestries card sets, and I could even argue that in spirit, the Deck of Many Fortunes.

But there is much I wish to rescue from Ironcrunch to take it to vanilla Ironsworn, before continuing to develop the supplement into a standalone game. To that end, I would like to make my own version of a modular supplement that offers numerous optional rules to enjoy Shawn Tomkin's system, much like Eric Bright did with Ironsmith. I will call this supplement The Book of the Enhanced Ironsworn (TBOTEI or Enhanced Ironsworn for short).

One of the ways to present such a product will be through making a metafictional object, something similar to what I did with the Deck of Many Fortunes. The book itself will be a diegetic item (within the fiction). And the content of the lore will be a representation of the real world. On the basis that this modular supplement would be the closest thing to Ironcrunch, the lore with which Enhanced Ironsworn is presented takes direct inspiration from the reviews I have received from members of the Ironsworn and PbtA communities in my "heretic practice" of hacking Tomkin's game.

Below, I will present two lore excerpts from the book, in letter forms. They represent the two extremes of the discussions that took place during my time of hacking such a beautiful roleplaying system as this one. Below each letter, are the sources of inspiration.

The story starts with Zivothy, a Lectus priestess, and the author of the book. She is a representation of my persona, in an attempt to, well, have fun being an Ironsworn. This letter would in the Introduction chapter of the modular supplement.

It follows the letter of a detractor, another religious worshipper. He represents the voice of the destructive criticism I have received since I started creating deconstructive content for the game.

I followed the propositions exposed by the critics.

"This effort is futile" proposition serves as the equivalent to "So IMO this effort makes no sense". And the rest of the comment is followed by the same speech style and syntax construction presented in the letter.

On another hand, "Why not just live another life?" is the equivalent to "Why no play something else" by the following Discord user.

There are other comments that took place in these debates that I wish to represent in the lore of the supplement, but I will save them for later, specially Zyvothy response. You can clearly see in my Discord comments what would be Zivothy stand on the matter of such opposition.

So what are my motivations for taking this sort of representational approach to this narrative? Any creator receives a fair share of detractors, so while I maybe didn't take on their suggestions on quitting my creative endeavors, I wanted to take something positive from their criticism, to make something positive: make a parody of them and myself, of this whole theater. Because notice: I'm not shying away from the fact that Zivothy, the creator of the Book of the Enhanced Ironsworn, is the mask I'm using to parody myself and express my ideas within the fiction, and she is indeed a fanatic as I am a fanatic in my endeavors to hack the system, to blend it and mend it; and have fun doing so.

I will start posting the optional rules for this supplement on Patreon. And more bits of the lore, if you are actually into it, now knowing where the inspiration comes from.