# Character Creation Challenge 2025: Day 23 - Ironsworn: Bronzebound - Ekon Pthoro, Dioneysian Adventurer tags: #articles/CharacterCreationChallenge/2025 #game/rpg/ironsworn-bronzebound > [!quote] [[Character Creation Challenge 2025]] > > ![[Character Creation Challenge Image.png]] ## Game of Choice One of the great things about the modern role-playing game scene is the shockingly wide acceptance of open licenses for making supplements for games and being able to sell them for your own profit. It opens the door to so many experimental ideas, not all of them complete. We've already talked about several examples of games which are early access, incomplete, or otherwise bolted on to the side of an extant system and even setting. Every single one of them provides an opportunity for experimentation by someone else, particularly in the field of indie RPGs. That spirit of experimentation often leads to doing things that haven't been done nearly enough, even when the example is still lacking some essential elements. They can kick off ideas in your head that make the experience more than worthwhile. You know what we don't see nearly enough of these days? Proper sword and sandals. Let's do something about that. ![[Bronzebound (cover).jpg|400]] After going through so many other systems, it's actually a bit of a relief to come back to an **[[Ironsworn]]** variant. **[[Ironsworn - Bronzebound|Bronzebound]]** is very much an incomplete text. It acknowledges that in the foreword on the first page. Not only does it require that you own **Ironsworn** itself in order to play (which isn't that big a problem since you can have it for free), but it doesn't contain all of the oracles or area descriptions that come up. What it *does* have is a tight interlocking of a really interesting exploration of one of the core mechanisms and setting setups within **Ironsworn**. Before we get there, let's talk about where we're at. **Bronzebound** takes us back to the Old World that those who left 250 years ago abandoned to go to the Ironlands. Things have not been kind for those who stayed behind. Civilization collapsed and the world has entered a new dark age. The area around the Middle Sea has hot, dry summers and seasonal winds. Winter storms make sea travel dangerous, and erosion is a constant problem for farming. This is the land of the Sea Peoples, north of the Horse Lands, east of the Great River, north of the Ruined Coast. It is very distinctly inspired by the Mediterranean Bronze Age between 1500 and 750 BCE, the Minoan Crete and the Mycenaean Greece, Homer's epic poems, and Bronze Age archaeology. When I say Mycenaean Greece, I'm not kidding. Think about the **Odyssey**, the **Iliad**, even the **300**. Hardcore sword and sandals action. Like **Ironsworn**, the world is generally assumed to be relatively low magic - but the gods have a clear and present voice. We'll get to that, you'll like it ## Acts of Creation The text refers us to chapter 2 of Ironsworn (page 31) for beginning to generate our character. We will have a departure soon enough, but for the moment, let's go through the basics. You've seen me do so before in Badlands, and that turned out pretty well. Let's go straight in here. ### Stats are Moneyball As always, we start with something straightforward: our name. I envision this character to be a fairly important elder son in an aristocratic family. It's time to go hit some name generators and figure out what he should be called **Ekon Pthoro** is really working it for me. As for stats, we'll go for the basic distribution: - **Edge:** +2 - **Heart:** +3 - **Iron:** +1 - **Shadow:** +1 - **Wits:** +2 > Ekon is a man who is driven by a deep-seated empathy for his fellow man and loyalty beyond belief, as opposed to the reputation of his father, who was seen as a cruel and twisted despot before his infirmity. > > He is known to be quick with a bow and fleet of foot. He is a keen study with a wide knowledge of not just the lands of the sea people but everything he could learn. > > Some think his lean and slender build is easy to overlook, and that he should be easy to bully. Feats of strength are not how he chooses to go through life. > > Some also suggest that when it comes to having a silver tongue and turning an easy lie, he has been cursed by the gods at being revealed all too often, and perhaps this is true. There we go, stats are done, but this is where things start to get a little different because in **Bronzebound** your stats are *directly connected* to your patron deity and those deities who oppose you. In the case of Ekon, because the stat with a +3 in it is heart, we get to choose between Dionysus and Aphrodite for our patron. It is **Dionysus** who strengthens our heart and gives us the love of our fellow man, or at least pretends to. Ekon fears that the influence of Dionysus has come to him through the line of his father, who famously was debauched and eventually descended into madness and detachment. It's one thing to have the blessing of the gods but quite another to have excess and ecstasy follow you against your will. For another twist in the game, the two stats set as +1 are our deific *antagonists* represented by the two d10 rolled in moves. (If you know how things are handled with the moons in **[[Ironsworn - Starforged|Sundered Isles]]**, there seems to be direct inspiration.) In our case, we get to choose between Ares and Athena because of our +1 in iron. As well as Hermes and Demeter because of our shadow. I think I'm going to go with **Ares** and **Demeter** > Ares continues to meddle in Ekon's life not because of hatred but out of jealousy. He wants Ekon to deliberately choose to follow Ares in the hopes of channeling that madness that is his legacy into the art of war. As such, his followers often get involved and escalate things beyond all reason, drawing him into violent long-term conflicts. > > Demeter was already prone to oppose Ekon due to his legacy of a lack of control and the potential for madness. She considers the potentially heroic young man to be a very powerful potential threat even though he himself has neither inclination nor interest. Ares' attention doesn't improve her opinion. ### Promises Made, Promises Kept We'll skip over setting basic traits to their default values. You've seen me do it many times at this point. No need to trace over that again. Let's talk about *vows*. In traditional **Ironsworn**, the literal defining trait of the protagonists is that they swear on iron and those vows become a mechanical material thing in the fabric of the game. **Bronzeborn** takes that and goes a little bit further with it. The background vow is one made on bronze to your patron deity. It represents something that your character has chosen to offer or what your patron demands of you in return for their protection. In our case, it's probably a good thing that Greek myth is full of the gods demanding things of people that they don't want to deliver on. As suggested here, we are going to go to the Character Goal Oracle and roll up something and see if we can make something of it. > [84] *Gain Knowledge.* Hmmm. I need a little more. I'm going to roll on the Action and Theme oracles for a bit more juice. > [29, 4] *Hold. Ally.* > The Maenads are violent, obsessive women who have been consumed by the ecstasy of Dionysus. Some suggest that they have consumed too much of Dionysus' Blessing, a rare mushroom that grows in the forests inland within the lands of the Sea People. > > Regardless, they tend to run in packs and live in the forests, sometimes dancing in the moonlight and sometimes ripping the unwary apart. They truly are blessed by Dionysus, though, and he is occasionally a jealous god. So when such a pack goes missing, he takes a personal and vested interest, Ekon taking his turn watching over his father in the aftermath of one of his manic states, spent and tied to the bed, was confronted by a small bronze statue of Dionysus his father kept by his bedside. > > It spoke to him, telling him the words of the God and instructing him to go find and render assistance to the Maenads far to the south along the Ruined Coast. > > When the gods speak to you directly, there isn't much you can do about it, and so Ekon is preparing to make the long journey first to find even a general idea of where they were and then to figure out what can be done about the situation. That's just our background vow. It's obviously long-term, but we're going to start by doing some research, finding out some things, and then figuring out what we can do about it. That leaves our inciting incident. And here, **Bronzebound** throws us a curve and goes back to one of the central themes of the game setup. The *inciting event* isn't *just* something that happens to your character that kicks them off and gets them started. It is specifically an event that sets us on the path toward rejecting the influence of the gods in our destiny, which sounds a little strange, but it fits with Greek myth, of which an appreciable portion involves individuals rebelling against the dictates of the gods and kicking them out of their lives to mixed results. Usually tragic, but that's the kind of story we like to watch. **Bronzebound** even introduces a special move further on, which is *Forswear the Gods*. In order to do it, you need to increase one of your progress tracks, which we will talk about in a little bit, destroy a bronze artifact that you specifically acquired for this purpose, and then roll against that track. If you manage a strong hit, you become an Ironsworn free of the influence of the gods in a direct sense. You can leave the Old World and pass beyond the Iron Pillars to go find your fortune in the Ironlands or stay where you are and seek out other Ironsworn *to help you end the reign of the gods*. If that doesn't strike you as badass, I'm not sure that we can be friends. Oh yes, the progress track in question: **Hybris**. It represents your character getting more confident in their own ability to defeat their antagonists and independence from the support of their patron deity. It's triggered when you make a move in the game other than a progress move and you roll a natural 6 on the action die and also get a strong hit. The more often you have what is effectively a critical success, the more hubris you build up. (Yes, that's how we normal people who aren't scholars of Mycenaean Greek would say that.) That gives you one tick on Hybris and gives you a higher chance of forswearing the gods successfully. Now that we know why we are looking for an inciting event, let's see what we can come up with. As suggested in the text, I'm going to use the Settlement Trouble Oracle and see if it can give me a little bit of inspiration. > [1] *Outsiders rejected.* > Later, before Ekon can start his preparations for such a long journey, a wandering priest comes to the city, preaching devotion to the Rites of Ares. > > The cries of soldiers, the screams of women, the pursuit of war against one's enemies to show your righteousness before the gods. While the worship of Ares is not central to the elite of the city, Ekon's father's violent past is not forgotten. > > There is more than a little pressure to march against their neighbor for a minor slight that has been blown up into a casus belli. > > Ekon needs to do something about this, whether it be a political solution or pursuit of a more direct answer. The influence of the gods seems to lead to only more misery and death. If we're going to have a Greek story, I'm going for the pathos. Ekos' background vow has a rank of Epic, as befits such a trip, and dealing with incipient war is Formidable. ### On the Bondage of Gods Typically, when I get to this point in creating an Ironsworn character, I have some problems. Empathy is not one of my personal strong points. It comes out in my writing. It can be a challenge to figure out ways for a character to be connected to people, places, and things, which create for compelling stories. I recognize this fact and work really hard at doubling down on those things. After a few decades of work, it's largely turned out all right. This one, however, is really easy. I blame Greek myth and making it very obvious what my character should really care about. Plus the text of Bronze Bound is fairly explicit, which doesn't hurt. - **Dionysus:** It's our patron deity, he's in there. - **Nekysia:** Ekon's home, a dissolute walled city, home of corruption, strong drink, and whores. - **The family of Alkmaion**: One of the elite families of Nekysia, the house of Alkmaion has been on the decline for years, in part because of their reputation for moral rectitude; Ekon has found solace with them as a second family. ### Move Your Asset We are just about done with the character but there is one final step for Ekon personally and that's choosing his assets. Everything is on the table considering the situation, but let's see what we can put together that is perfectly appropriate. ![[Ironsworn - Asset - Improviser.webp]] ![[Ironsworn - Asset - Pretender.webp]] ![[Ironsworn - Assets - Archer.png]] > Like many of his predecessors in Mycenaean myth, Ekon is someone who makes do with the situation as he finds it. On the road he is perfectly willing to throw himself into putting together whatever he doesn't have at hand, though the world often likes to complicate his path when it comes down to such situations. > > He has learned well how to mask his intentions and his intents, even in his own city. He has been known to walk unknown and unseen, pretending to be one or another - anyone but himself. > > While slight of build he is certainly keen of eye and a bow has been one of the companions he has kept close as befits a Prince of the city. That should pretty much do us for character creation. ### Tell the Truth, Shame the Devil As usual in **Ironsworn**, you are directed to come up with your Truths and there isn't much different here in **Bronzebound**. You've seen me go through building truths several times; I'm not going to repeat it again, except when it comes to the three new ones here in this text. It almost seems redundant to do given that we've done so much world building just through what we have already touched, but you're getting the whole treatment today. #### The Old World Effectively, this is the kicker for the entire region — what is a sort of omnipresent pressure driving people to action across the area of the old world that we are in. Three choices as usual, but I think I'm going to go with the third, which is that **the gods are at war and the priests tell us that the failing of crops and the sickening of herbs is because the gods are fighting among themselves or even with some greater foe.** This fits in neatly with Ekon's background vow in a way that I hadn't actually thought about before this very moment. This works out well. #### Iron In a world which very clearly is directly connected to **Ironsworn**, the issue of what iron really is here in the context of *our* story is pretty important. I don't really like any of the three answers here, so I'm going to go with a slight variation of the third one: **Iron and bronze are representations of the will of humanity and inherently both respond to and have the capability of *resisting* the power of the gods. Thus, it is both treasured and feared by man and god alike.** #### Mysticism How common is magic? That's the question in front of us. I really do like the second answer in the text, so that's what we're going with: **The gods wield magical powers and are jealous of any mortal who attempts to learn of them. There are stories of mortals transformed into animals or artifacts with magical powers that will be given by the gods and goddesses to their favorites.** Look, I loved **[Clash of the Titans](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082186/)**^[But not that garbage 2010 version. You kids don't know what you missed!], and you can't have that without individuals who have had the hubris to reach for the powers of the gods, usually with tragic results. It's Greek.  ## Exunt There we go, ready to rock and roll. I'm not putting together a particular character sheet for this because it doesn't come with one, and I'm never thrilled with the PDFs for **Ironsworn** character sheets anyway. There are stats in the text for foes and encounters, including local deities, harpies, as well as oracles for natural features, water, living things, settled places, etc. Clearly this is something that can be built out in time and deeply deserves to be. 14 pages total, but it drips with actual inspiration. I've really enjoyed my time with it, and it's a take on the sword and sandal genre that really doesn't get approached very often. Conan we see quite a lot, but very little Greek myth. I could use more of it. Tomorrow is going to feel very oddly familiar. That's all I can say for now.