COMMANDMENT: On the Depredations of Iron

Based off of Coins & Scrolls Iron Gates/Dark Souls project and this spin-off blogpost I did here.

Iron is, perhaps, the greatest poison the world has ever known. When mankind, or adamuh, first crawled out of the mud and grasped it, what flooded their minds was the brilliance of warcraft and the baseless joys of pillaging, of conquest, of new fangs chewing up predators of old.

When mankind touched bronze, however, something different flowed forth. Protection from the elements, from evils, from the gods themselves--mankind no longer needed to be slaves but could now be rulers themselves. Those that touched iron were killed, their tools thrown into the Great Green. Or maybe humanity simply left, content to flee the hell they'd created to reconnect with Earth herself.

Regardless of which history is true, iron has returned to the world. The Sea Peoples march across coasts and sail across the Great Green with naught but ruby-sanguine left behind them. They topple just to topple. They kill just to kill. The Depredations of Iron has overtaken them and brutality foams at the lip.

Mercy not Iron knows.

DEPREDATIONS OF IRON: AN EFFECT

First, there are Commandments to Iron, hidden away in the Denyen Isles. These Commandments state thus:

• All Iron is but blood, and thus Iron is reaping, Iron is slaying, Iron is culling.
• Thou whom holds Iron must deny not Bloods Flow, for to deny is invitation to death & everlasting sin.

So long as these Commandments remain writ in stone, so too will Iron persist, seducing those with secrets of its forging. But it is not malicious. These Commandments are naught if not true. Iron is forged by burning the world and reshaping it into a tool for one's gain. Whilst bronze involves no alchemy, iron does, and in the transformation it is ensured that whatever love the dust of Earth has for living creatures is stripped, leaving behind white-hot hatred that must be used. But it is not malicious; no more than the starving wolf's fangs or the mother bear's claws. All things are weapons. Know this too.

A brutal beauty inherit only to iron.

Iron tools provide a +2 bonus to any roll made with them (so attack rolls for weapons, for example). If it's armor, gain a +4 AC bonus. This is hefty, but Iron is rare. The armies of this Bronze World destroy Iron with alchemy and zodiac-born fires to keep it from seducing them. Battlefields can be seen from vast distances, glittering with silver, violet, emerald, and golden flames.

Iron serves as Experience as well. When a creature dies, the Iron in its blood is freed, lending its hatred to the warrior that freed it. For every HD a creature has, gain that x100 in Experience. Iron items are worth x100 their normal GP cost in Experience as well. Experience can either be used as it is traditionally in OSR games, or instead to buy things piecemeal. Look at the Iron Upgrades section near the bottom of this article.

When holding Iron, be it slivers, bars, weapons, armor, or trinkets, save vs Iron. On a failure, you must kill 1 living creature within the next week. When you do so, save vs Iron again. On a failure, you must kill 2 living creatures within 6 days. This cycle continues (increasing in victims and decreasing in days allowed) until a success is rolled, wherein the cycle resets back to 1 week. These cycles are called Depredations. If luck would have it and you fail 7 saving throws in a row, you become Barbarous.

Note that with each failure, physical characteristics can be seen. Consult the table below:

1. Your teeth turn yellow, your hair thin, your skin sallow.
2. Your muscles shrink but become paradoxically more defined.
3. Your canines elongate, as do your pupils.
4. Your skin takes on a grey tint.
5. Your bones creak loudly whenever you move, as if they were metal themselves.
6. Your eyes turn the color of blood, and glow as if they were alive with fire.

To be Barbarous is a fate the Sea Peoples in their entirety have fallen too. You lose that thing that made humanity strong when all they had was bronze and bone: limitation. Iron paves the way forward to things infinitely more complex. Once its secrets become common knowledge, humanity will leap forward, devouring itself again and again in order to reach whatever heavens lie above. This is not wholly bad; it is either ADVANCE BLOODILY or GO EXTINCT. The question thus becomes: is a Barbarous future worth it, or is death the kinder fate?

There are mechanical effects to being Barbarous. When you've reached this state, mark the following changes to your character sheet:

• Your Athletics (Constitution and Strength) scores become 18.
• You gain 3 HD to roll and add to your hit points.
• When you deal damage with an attack roll, you can make an additional attack roll. This happens once, and can happen at the end of other additional attacks you may have (such as from two weapon wielding).
• When not wearing armor, add +3 to your AC.
• For every day that passes where you don't cause harm to another creature, reduce your Savvy (Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma) by 1d6. At 0 for any of these ability scores, you forfeit your character who becomes a naked, iron-swinging God of Conquest. See the bottom of this article for more info on that.
• For every day that passes where you did cause harm to another creature, save vs Iron. On a failure, reduce your Savvy (Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma) by 1. Same effects as above applies.

A warrior gone Barbarous.

Great power comes with becoming Barbarous, but the price is horrid. But the power is great--an army wielding Iron can decimate any other. But to keep it going, there must be a way of warding off these ill effects. There is.

Bloodletting: Warding Away Barbarousness

Find a battlefield. There are many unattended in the world now. Gather up as many iron weapons that you can, and arrange them in tight, concentric circles around yourself. Then, with a stone or bone edge, slice your wrist. This is the ritual needed to ward away barbarousness.

The first bloodletting ceremony?

Understand this: there is Iron in our bodies. All things are weapons, remember? But this Iron is hateful of its imprisonment and wishes to cut the world. When we wield iron tools, the amount of Iron in our blood increases. Thus, by bloodletting, we free ourselves of the sentence Barbarism and retain our humanity.

When you perform Bloodletting, you reset your Depredations to the original 1 kill per week. Additionally, any points in your Savvy (Intelligence, Wisdom, or Charisma) scores lost are regained in full. In this way, the ritual is a great boon, allowing many of the Sea Peoples to retain enough sense to keep their Great Invasion going without destroying itself. This is compounded by the fact that you can perform Bloodletting at an Iron Circle as many times as you want. 

But there is another secret too: Iron is the secret of immortality. And this secret carries with it a great curse.

Endless Hordes: Death in COMMANDMENT

After you perform Bloodletting, your life is rooted to that spot. Your own iron, your own blood, surrounded by circles of weapons, has formed a cradle. When you die next, your body will turn to basic compounds and a new you will be born in the center of the Bloodletting circle. An iron weapon you gathered rusts and turns to dust at the same time. Thus, a counter: you can be reborn at one of these Iron Circles a number of times equal to the original number of iron weapons you presented at the time of Bloodletting. No more can be added afterwards; if you die and have added more weapons, you simply die.

The Abyss Watchers from Dark Souls 3 are 100% Barbarous now.

When you are reborn, note the following:

• The Depredation cycle is set to 6 failures, so you must kill 7 living creatures within 24 hours or become Barbarous.
• You have all your equipment worn, and anything carried.
• You cannot perform Bloodletting again for 7 days time.
• You are reborn at the last Iron Circle you performed Bloodletting at. You can "reactivate" an Iron Circle by performing Bloodletting at it again.

These restrictions mean that if you try to abuse the death-and-rebirth powers of Iron, you are dancing closely with Barbarism. When reborn through Iron, you must kill 7 creatures that day or become Barbarous. This makes the Sea Peoples quite terrifying in knowing this secret.

Some mechanical comments: these mechanics make Iron into very, very powerful resources in the world of Commandment (or whatever world you could import this idea into). However, its a resource not to be abused--it can be very easy to go Barbarous and just lose your character within a single session of play if you don't treat Iron as something to be used sparingly as a player. But, for some, abusing Iron for a Hail Mary could be a great scene to get some great treasure, or achieve whatever goal your party is trying to achieve.

Iron Upgrades: Using Iron as Experience

Whenever you kill a creature, gain experience = # of HD * 100.

Whenever you destroy an Iron-forged item in a zodiac-born fire, gain experience = GP cost * 100.

You can use this experience to level up normally, or instead do things piecemeal (as is tradition in Dark Souls). Consult the list below for ways how. In order to spend this experience, you must return to one of the 5 cities and find a Sphinx. The Sphinx consumes from you the gathered freed-iron, and in turn uses it to open your mind to pathways it shares. How is this possible? Why do Sphinxes do this? They answer not, and no god knows.

A Sphinx awaiting you.

Iron Upgrades.

1. Increase attribute: Increase one attribute by +1. Costs experience = new Attribute number * 1000.
2. Increase saves: Increase all saves by -1. Costs experience = 400.
3. Gain HD: Gain +1 HD and add to HP. Costs experience = # Rolled on HD * 300.
4. Gain spell: Gain +1 spell of a level of which you can cast. Costs experience = Spell Level * 500.
5. Class improvement: Improve a class ability (such as casting higher level spells, increasing thief skill chances, as per your system). Costs experience = # of Total Iron Upgrades * 1000.

Note: this speeds up how quickly a character "levels up." Keep this in mind!

Gods of Conquest

A God of Conquest is a creature born from a Barbarous warrior who has utterly lost all sanity. Filling the mind's void now is bloodlust, hatred, and a need to conquer all. There are many, many, many Gods of Conquest within the Sea Peoples' army. They are kept chained and unleashed upon a city or army as shock troops.

Some look almost human. And others...maybe they never were.

Any monstrous statblock, from Medusae to Orcs to Hobgoblins to Dragons can be Gods of Conquest. They come in many different shapes and sizes, and never are two exactly the same. In this way, there may be only one Medusa in the world--a woman warrior of the Sea Peoples who fell to barbarism and became the thing she is now. Thus, all monsters in COMMANDMENT are of two types: DIVINITIES (of which there are many) or IRON GODS OF CONQUEST (of which there are also many). 

Gods of Conquest can be found across the world now. With so many wars being fought, and so much Iron being used, it is only natural that many of these Iron Gods escape their shackles and terrorize the world. The Bronze Age Collapse can thus serve as a violent Age of Heroes if desired; there are many Gods to kill.

Note that the appearance of all creatures should be either vaguley humanoid or somehow involve iron. A Medusa's snakes, for example, might be made of liquid metal and petrifying others turns them into iron statues. Or a Troll is just a big, ugly, half-mutated bastard covered in wounds and porcupine'd with iron blades.