# Aura & Iron *Created:* 2026-11-02, *Modified:* 2026-11-02 ![[Aura & Iron (cover).jpg]] The pitch is the hardest version of this idea to land: give **Ironsworn** the powers and the posture of battle shounen and superhero comics *without* inflating it into a different game. **Aura & Iron** does it by fitting the new material onto the Ironlands as they already are — same tone, same power level, same grim little world — and letting the supernatural in through the one door the setting already leaves ajar: the soul. It is an unofficial hack, and open about it, built on Shawn Tomkin's **[[Ironsworn]]** under a Creative Commons licence and fully compatible with the default setting. ## Setting The lore it adds is **animus** — the spiritual energy that dwells in all living things — and **daemons**, powerful wraiths born from the souls of men. Neither is a new cosmology bolted on: the book frames the Forsaken and the Ironlands' existing spirits through them, supplies **new world truths** so a table can dial them in at setup, and gives the continent its own haunted places under *Lands of Animus*. The tone is set by its opening invocation, which is less a rule and more a dare: *"Come, daemon, and see. See that your temper is mild, your power wanting, and your audacity unearned."* Humans stand above the daemons by virtue of having souls at all — which is a good summary of the hack's stance, and of why the powers it grants are borrowed, painful things rather than superheroics. ## Mechanics ### Aura The new character track is **aura**: a pool of supernatural energy spent to fuel the origin, curse, source and technique assets. It sits alongside the existing tracks rather than replacing any of them, which is what keeps the power level where **Ironsworn** already put it — you get dramatic abilities, and you pay for them in a resource you have to manage. ### Assets Over fifty new assets: the expected **path**, **companion** and **combat talent** entries, plus the **origin**, **curse**, **source** and **technique** assets that model where a character's power comes from, what it costs them, and how it is expressed. Origin and curse are the interesting pair — the asset that gives you the power and the asset that measures what it is doing to you. ### Iron talent A combat addition called **iron talent**, which adds a mechanical edge to a fight while leaving **Ironsworn**'s narrative-first combat philosophy intact. It is deliberately a talent rather than a subsystem: an edge a character brings, not a new way to resolve violence. ### Enmity The **enmity** track inverts the bond track — where bonds record the people a character would die for, enmity records the rivals and sworn enemies they are defined against, with the same mechanical weight. For a genre built on rivalries, it is the obvious missing piece, and it is why the book also carries material on **Nemeses** and on what enmity does to a character's allies. ### Endings The book also rewrites the **Write Your Epilogue** move, which in the base game closes a character's story; here it is revised to fit characters whose arcs are about the person they became rather than the vows they kept. ## Editions - **Aura & Iron** — a single 61-page release, unofficial, for **Ironsworn** (not Starforged). *In the library.* ## Related products - **Foes of Iron & Gifts of the Forge** — Chimeric Grove's other **Ironsworn** release: more assets, enemies and mechanics for the base game, in the same house style. The hack also ships its asset cards as machine-readable JSON in the Ironsworn Asset Workbench format — 56 files across curses, origin, path and technique folders — so a table can load the cards into whatever sheet or tool they already use. ## References - [Ironsworn: Aura & Iron — Chimeric Grove (itch.io)](https://chimeric-grove.itch.io/ironsworn-aura-and-iron) - [Aura & Iron: a combat-oriented Ironsworn hack — r/Ironsworn announcement](https://www.reddit.com/r/Ironsworn/comments/1w4v4xg/aura_iron_a_combat_oriented_fantasy_ironsworn_hack) - [Ironsworn: Aura & Iron — Tiny Table](https://tinytable.io/game/ironsworn-aura-iron) - [Ironsworn — the game this hacks](https://www.ironswornrpg.com/)