Hi! I’m preparing to GM a campaign in the near future for a group that has almost no prior knowledge of the setting. Because I want to give them what I consider would be a closer look at the setting to what the Warmachine game and lore gives, and I can’t seem to take the easier path by using one of the published adventures from the Kickstarter campaigns (Legend of the Witchfire
or Shadow of the Seeker), I’m looking into running a war-themed adventure/campaign where the party is a mercenary company involved in the Cygnar-Khador-Llael war, prior to the Claiming. The initial idea is to have them carry out tactical missions in the frontline (think Band of Brothers kind of missions) while being exposed to the setting’s bigger tropes/themes (trench war, warjacks and warcasters), and later intrude behind enemy lines, where the adventure would shift its focus to highlight other elements (hidden cryxian necrofactoriums, cephalyx hives, orgoth ruins, spawns of Everblight or encounters with tharns) while introducing important characters here and there, and eventually stumbling upon the signals of the upcoming Infernal invasion.
I realize this would be quite an effort to homebrew, so that’s why I’m looking for some published war-themed adventures that could be adapted for the first part of the campaign. My searches so far haven’t been successful, so I’m turning to you, fellow fans of the Iron Kingdoms for help. Any assistance will be appreciated!
Sorry, our group is more into role-playing than roll-playing, no matter the setting, so we’d leave a war-themed campaign to a tabletop game instead.
In order to get to know the setting, I would really suggest not going into a war theme right away. You don’t get to know many people on the battlefield, or at least not for very long, and the topics of conversation tend to be a bit limited.
That being said, many of our group’s adventures have brushed against the edges of the military, though usually not by going to battlefields. We have, for example, been sent to bring back a young priest of Morrow who had been abducted by a warcaster mercenary captain, which required pursuing the troops right to the aftermath of a battle, where we found that not only had the captain sadly been killed, but it had been the priest who had run away with her lover, rather than him abducting her. She had also been awakened to her own warcaster gift in the meantime, and despite her inexperience had stepped up to lead the troops after her lover’s death, including commanding his warjack. Our group was forced to stay with the mercenaries for a while as they were being attacked by particularly nasty undead, which we eventually tracked to a Cryxian outpost in the ruins of a nearby village. Once the thralls had been destroyed, we returned to our employer with his daughter’s handwritten explanation (as well as her offer of further employment, since we were already more experienced warriors than her).
If you could get your hands on all of the Warmachine MK II anthology books (listed below), those would be perfect introductions to the setting! Each one contains roughly 20 pages of fiction with a loose story line for each faction, several of which intersect.
Warmachine: Prime MK II
Warmachine: Wrath
Warmachine: Colossals
Warmachine: Reckoning
Warmachine: Vengeance
Those books are not currently available in PDF form from Privateer, so you might have to hit eBay or similar to find some copies. Good luck!
In addition to what Michael said I’d also recommend the novel Into the Storm (available on DriveThruRPG or Kindle). It’s basically Band of Brothers during the Sul-Caspia war and goes into probably the most detail of any IK fiction on the day-to-day of being a grunt in an IK war.
I would like to second SaltTitan’s comment and would also highly recommend “Into the Wild”, the sequel to “Into the Storm”. As the title suggests, its focus is on wilderness encounters of the same group. I remember it very fondly.