# Ironsworn: Starforged tags: #game/rpg/starforged ![[Starforged (cover).jpg|400]] ![[Starforged Reference Guide (cover).jpg|400]] **Ironsworn: Starforged** is Shawn Tomkin's sci-fi follow-up to **[[Ironsworn]]** — the same sworn-vow, quest-driven engine, pointed at uncharted space because the first one had already staked a claim on medieval fantasy. You're an oath-sworn, spaceborne wanderer with a ship and a crew, sworn to see perilous quests through to the end, whether that means exploring the unknown, unmaking a tyrant, or just getting people home alive. It famously runs **solo, co-op, or guided** — hobby-speak for "no referee required" — which is exactly why a generation of players made it the default engine, and why every would-be solo game since feels like it owes the thing a royalty. It was funded on Kickstarter by 6,700 backers and, like its predecessor, released under a **Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0)** license with a free SRD — which is how it seeded a whole family of derivatives and hacks, from the mech-focused **[[Starsmith - Mecha Mercs]]** to the **[[Revenant]]** zombie hack. Its own line runs both ways: it inherits from **Ironsworn**, and it spawned the seafaring expansion **[[Starforged - Sundered Isles|Sundered Isles]]**, because of course it did. ## Setting The default playground is **the Forge** — a vast, barely-charted region of space, once threaded with civilization and now scattered with the ruins of a lost people and with far-flung outposts of humans and others who made it back. You decide the real shape of it at campaign start through **truths** — the Forge's history, its technology, its mysteries, its peoples and factions. It's the game's way of selling you infinite settings for the price of one: your canon is whatever you say it is, which of course means no two tables will ever agree on what Starforged *is*. That's not a bug, it's the pitch. You're the odd piece in that world: a **sworn hero**, an oath-bearer who stakes their reputation and soul on vows. That's the whole point — and honestly the design's best move. You're not a hired gun drifting job to job; you're someone who *Swears an Iron Vow* and then has to mean it, exploring, forging bonds, chasing down the truth, and carrying the cost when a vow goes sideways. Your starship and crew are as much the character as your stats are — which is how a personality ends up roughly 60% unbreakable promises and 40% ship you keep meaning to fix. ## Mechanics The engine is the same sworn-vow chassis **Ironsworn** made famous, just pointed at a galaxy-sized canvas with a few more ways to roll up a weird planet you'll visit and immediately leave. And it runs itself — the oracle tables do the refereeing for free, which is the hobby's favourite trick and the reason everyone else started copying the homework. ### The action roll The heart is the shared **Ironsworn** action roll: roll an **action die (1d6)**, add your stat and any bonuses, and roll **two challenge dice (2d10)**. Compare your action score to each challenge die individually — beat **both** for a **strong hit**, beat **one** for a **weak hit**, beat **neither** for a **miss**. It's the same elegant risk-resolution as **Ironsworn**, retuned for ships, sectors, and strange encounters — and it needs no referee, just the oracle tables, which is the whole trick of the thing. ### Stats, resources, and momentum You have five **stats** — **Edge, Heart, Iron, Shadow, Wits** — and a set of meter tracks: **Health, Spirit, and Supply** (0 to +5, where Supply abstracts food, water, fuel, ammo, equipment, cargo, and general upkeep into a single number, which is either elegant or quietly terrifying), plus **Momentum** (0 to 10), the resource that builds when things go your way and can be **burned** to turn fortunes around — i.e. the game rewards you for already winning, then lets you spend that winning to win harder. ### Vows, progress, and oracles Questing runs on **vows** — your goals converted into progress tracks ranked from *Troublesome* up to *Epic* — which you fill as you chip away at an objective and resolve when you've genuinely seen it through. It's the game's gentle way of making sure you actually finish a thing instead of abandoning it mid-sentence for a shinier idea. Around all that spins a vast web of **oracle tables** for generating planets, settlements, people, creatures, starships, derelicts, and alien vaults on the fly, so you never have to write an adventure yourself — the tables just produce them, endlessly. It's a toolkit for emergent, improvisational play, which is exactly why it's the engine everyone keeps hacking. ## Editions - **_Ironsworn: Starforged_** (2022) — the base game, shipped as the Core Rulebook, the Reference Guide, and the Asset deck. *In the library.* - **[[Starforged - Sundered Isles|Starforged: Sundered Isles]]** (2024) — the official seafaring expansion, played with the **Starforged** Core rules. *In the library.* - **[[Starsmith - Mecha Mercs|Starsmith: Mecha Mercs]]** — a fan supplement retuning the engine for mech play. - **[Starswoosh](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/443900/starswoosh-an-ironsworn-starforged-quick-reference-for-your-ereader)** — a fan-made quick-reference sheet for **Starforged** (revised through v2.1); a condensed rules summary to keep on the table rather than a full supplement. ## The Starforged Line **Ironsworn: Starforged** is the sci-fi member of the **[[Ironsworn]]** family — the full tree lives on that page — and it has since grown a sub-family of its own, because the fan-supplement economy has a short attention span and a long memory for open licenses. In brief: ### Official - **[[Starforged - Sundered Isles|Starforged: Sundered Isles]]** (2024) — the official seafaring expansion. *In the library.* ### Starforged fan material - **[[Starsmith]]** — Eric Bright's "Play Every Role" line: *Expanded Oracles* triples the Starforged oracle tables, *Cultures* builds coherent societies on Hofstede's six axes. - **[[Starsmith - Mecha Mercs|Starsmith: Mecha Mercs]]** — the mech setting-definer: chassis, corporate warfare, and merc jobs that never quite pay for the repairs. - **[[Ancient Wonders]]** and **[[Legacy Iron]]** — Ludic Pen's planet-and-megastructure generators, and a print-and-play asset pack. - **[[Revenant]]** — the zombie-survival hack, a four-epoch apocalypse built on **Starforged**. - **[[Galactic Oracles]]** — a free, uncredited Star Wars table supplement. - **[[Witchery for Starforged - World Truths Edition|Witchery for Starforged]]** — a properly-licensed witch port: covens, hearths, essence, and spellcraft. - **[[Operation Void Shell]]** — Marcin Zawadzki's two-page quest starter, a corporate-thicket hook. - **[[Steelforged]]** — a sprawling high-fantasy oracle collection that grafts knights-and-dragons onto the science-fiction chassis. - **[[Knight Frame]]** — a slim mech supplement with a prototype high-speed "frame joust" dogfight engine. ### Tools & references - **[[Travelers]]** — Colin Kloecker's pocket reference cards (there's a **Traveler's Ironsworn** sheet too, since nobody can remember their own rules) - **Starswoosh** — the quick-reference sheet above - **[[Pocketforge]]** — an unofficial companion app for the whole family The hobby, as ever, cannot keep from hacking this engine. ## References - [Ironsworn: Starforged - Official Website](https://www.ironswornrpg.com/product-ironsworn-starforged) - [Ironsworn: Starforged - DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/product/322729/Ironsworn-Starforged) - [Iron Vow / Rules Reference - Iron Journal](https://jrskalski.github.io/)