# Winsome tags: #game/rpg/winsome ![[Winsome (cover).jpg|400]] **Winsome** is what happens when a solo-game cult hits the minimalist reset button. el Stiko's single-sheet micro-hack strips **[[Ironsworn]]** down to a folded A6 booklet's worth of gears — thinning Shawn Tomkin's thirty-four moves to **two**, deleting conditions, swapping ticks for boxes, and renaming the stats until the whole thing nearly got called "Tinsworn." Released as a name-your-price PDF on itch.io under a Creative Commons BY 4.0 license, it keeps the genuine, ardent heart of Ironsworn while shedding the setting, the oracles, and most of the furniture. If Ironsworn is the full orchestra, Winsome is the folk duo busking its hits. ## Setting Winsome has no default setting, on purpose. It's a *genericised* hack — the Ironlands and the themed oracles are gone, leaving a skeleton you can dress in any world you please, solo or alongside friends. What it does carry is a particular posture toward heroes. You begin with a **title** after your name — "Anika, Huntress of the Briar," "Tenzar, Space Marine of the Chaosphere" — and that title is load-bearing, because the skills *inferred* by your titles add bonuses to your rolls. Your story opens with two **promises**: one made to yourself, rated *Tough* or *Impressive*, and one made to someone else, rated *Tricky* or *Difficult*. You envision the moment you made the second promise and play from there, exploring the places you encounter and treating your fluctuating resources as the literal equipment, state of mind, and health of the journey. It's heroically generic in the best way — a universal adapter for the **Ironsworn** engine. ## Core Mechanics Everything resolves through a character sheet of five **methods** — *Agile, Open, Forceful, Sneaky, Aware* — and four **resources**: **Luck** (starts at 2, max 10), plus **Wealth, Happiness, and Health** (each max 5). You assign the numbers 3, 2, 2, 1, and 1 across the methods; the higher the number, the more reliably the character depends on that approach. ### Risk When an action carries a risk of failure, you envision your chosen method and the outcomes you hope and fear, then roll 1d6 for your **chance**, adding your method — and +1 for every relevant *title* on your sheet. Roll 2d10 for your **fates**. If your chance exceeds at least one fate, your action succeeds and your hope manifests; each fate you lose sends some of your fears home. For each fate beaten you gain +1 to a relevant resource (or luck), then **resolve** the outcome and lose −1 for any fate that matched or beat you — beating only one fate complicates the success rather than denying it. Your **luck** is the great equalizer: if it's higher than one or both fates, you can wipe it out to beat them, resetting to its starting value and upgrading the result. ### Resolve & Progress Resolution is a spectrum, not a pass/fail. Beat both fates and envision a positive outcome; beat one and complicate the success; beat neither and envision a negative outcome — and if an obvious outcome presents itself, that's probably what happens. For surprises, the sheet offers a small likelihood table (roll 1d6 against probable-to-improbable) and a theme table (1d10 for trust, safety, unity, wealth, surprise, scale, duration, complexity, happiness, health). Anything that can't be finished in one action runs on a ten-space **progress track**, marked per success by its difficulty — *Tricky, Difficult, Tough, Impressive* — and completing it grants XP, which can be cashed in for a new *title*. Friendships mark progress of their own; a full friendship track means too many fond memories to keep risking your neck, and it's time for a new story. ## Editions & Versions Winsome is a single, evolving release by **el Stiko**, first downloaded around 2021 and still updated by hand at the author's discretion. It's distributed in several layouts of the same sheet, all in the library: an upright portrait PDF, a widescreen (landscape) PDF, a print-friendly PDF, and the raw *readable* markdown file. A French translation by Angela Quidam exists as its own print release. It's a CC BY 4.0 derivative of **Ironsworn**, so its license — and its debt — are on the sheet itself. ## References - [Winsome - el Stiko (itch.io)](https://elstiko.itch.io/winsome) - [Ironsworn - Shawn Tomkin (Tomkin Press)](https://tomkinpress.com/pages/ironsworn) - [Ironsworn SRD - Shawn Tomkin (itch.io)](https://shawn-tomkin.itch.io/ironsworn)