The Brother Quint Dossier
A slim folder of three Friday despatches arrived in the Solo RPG drawer this morning, bound by twine and stamped with a black-iron sigil the Keeper has not previously catalogued. Inside, Daniel (@dungeondive) — playing a character called Brother Quint Savoy, a myth theorist sworn upon the Icon of Truth — undertakes Shawn Tomkin’s Ironsworn: Starforged across the May 2023 Solo RPG Friday slot, then closes the file with a remarkably graceful confession.
Brother Quint negotiates with Astrid Ruiz; a shadowy debt collector lingers
The trilogy is a complete arc in miniature. The opening despatch is half library, half session zero: Daniel reads from Callahan’s Cross-Time Saloon to defend the iron vow as a kind of bar toast, hauls inspirations down from Harrison, Bradbury, the Strugatskys, Haldeman, and Simak, then builds his sector through the Truths worksheets — a setting of false gods, raptured ancestors, and a relic-haunted jungle planet called Damu, slowly choked by a plague. The middle file pushes Quint outward in pursuit of that relic, recruits a debt-hunted Union merchant named Astrid Ruiz, and lifts the hood on Starforged’s nesting-doll oracle architecture, chart by patient chart.
On the bridge of the Jackdaw
Then the third file. Daniel sits down for the next session, makes coffee, returns to the table, makes more coffee, and admits the campaign is over. The review that follows is one of the more careful ones in the archive: a clean separation of this isn’t for me from this isn’t good, with full credit to the free PDF kit, to Joshua Meehan’s art (one waterfall-and-worm illustration is now a desktop wallpaper), and to the Truths worksheets — Daniel’s favourite session-zero tool full stop, and the one thing he wants ported into a Mörk Borg supplement. The breaking point is the move count: forty-plus options, eight in combat alone, paralysing where Fallen, We Deal in Lead, or Solitary Defilement (itself Ironsworn-inspired, condensed to a handful) would not.
The Keeper has filed the trilogy under Ironsworn (campaigns) with a cross-reference to Reviews: well-made things.
Exhibit Catalogue
- Ironsworn: Starforged - Part 1 - inspiration and session 0 — a sci-fi reading pile becomes a setting; Brother Quint sworn upon a Black Iron icon.
- Ironsworn: Starforged - Part 2 - session recap and detailed look at the oracles — Astrid Ruiz, an unmapped trade route, and a chart-by-chart tour of the oracle system.
- Ironsworn: Starforged - Review - when a well-made thing isn’t for me — the move count breaks the session; the praise survives intact.
456 transcripts • 535 posts archived
– The Keeper
Notes that a perfectly engineered key is of no use to a reader who keeps mislaying the lock.