Iron Kingdoms Setting: Cryx?

[Username17]

So I attempted to get this question answered on the Iron Kingdoms Forums, but it turns out that getting any question answered there is a waste of time, so I'm asking here. What's the deal with Cryx?

The Scharde Islands have the most contradictory description I have ever seen in any role playing supplement ever. The World Guide is literally no help to me at all about what's actually going on there.

The Setup
Cryx is an island chain off the mainland that has ghosts and pirates and pirate ghosts who raid the mainland and the people there are considered moustache twirling villains by the rest of the countries. That much is agreed upon everywhere. But then te worldguide repeatedly contradics itself about basically every other detail of that portion of the world.

Skell
The heart of the Cryxian empire, and my confusion, is the city of Skell. First off, Skell has the world's biggest Dragon in it. He lives there in a tower overlooking town and rules the place as a theocracy where he is worshipped as a living god. The Iron Kingdoms setting differs sharply from other D&D settings in that Dragons here are over CRed. It's weird. But one of the things dragons do is put out this stuff called "dragonblight" that poisons the land and extends over the years destroying the lives of everyone it touches in aslow but inexorable fashion. That's fine and all, but the rules leave something to be desired. The rules are that if you are exposed to Toruk's Dragonblight for a total of a year, you have to make a Fort save DC 38 or die, and another Fort save DC 48 or turn into a subhuman monster.

Fine. But Skell also has about 40,000 people iiving in it. Lord Toruk's Dragonblight extends for over 80 kilometers in every direction and there are normal people living across the street. He didn't just move in either, he has been living there for over two thousand years! I grant that the iron liches and the thralls can live there just fine, but there are tens of thousand of normal humans living there right across the street from the father of all dragonblight. What the fvcking fvck is that?

On the other side though, that population is also nowhere near high enough. There are big human sacrifices in the temple there every day. The Roman Coliseum claimed the lives of millions of innocent peple (killing as many as 20,000 people in a day and operating for 500 years), but it was also situated in the heart of a city that had hundreds of thousands of people in it - Skell is still a small town, I'm not sure how they maintain a rigorous blood magic economy without the population base of Watsonville, le alone Rome.

Dreggsmouth
It is described as being an industrial hellhole where zombies beat hammers on metal day and night in a constant din of ringing steel and turning wheels. It is also depicted as a silent place where people whisper to each other.

What the fvck!? If there is a constant ring of hammers that drowns out heartbeat and thought day and night that never stops, people don't fvcking whisper to each other! You can't have "The Halls of the Dead" and "Acheron" at the same time, you have to pick what your evil town does.

Blackwater
OK... this place is at the bottom of a 400 meter shear cliff in a fjord so that the sun only shines a few hours every day. The city extends from the cliff base out over the water where some buildings are floating on pontoons or supported on stilts. Right?

OK, it also has necrotech factories under the town. Under? The city is at 0m elevation. Under the town is under water. I mean, they are necrotechs, I suspect they might be able to do that, but shouldn't it specifiy that that's what they are doing? Furthermore, it also has a lot of people living in slums outside of town. What does that even mean? Are there ghettos on top of the cliff (and how would they get to work, feather fall)? Are there just more boat buildings? If it's the latter, how can the slums be outside the city when the city has no fixed outer limit and isn't even on land at that point?

---

Throughout the descriptions they talk both about how Cryx is a land of bloodletting (a form of evil that requires a really high birth rate so that you can lose so many sons and not lose everything) and that it is a land of death where the young wither and death stalks the land (which actually runs through the entire population in a short time). The place has been like that for thousands of years, so if there was an end point they'd have reached it.

The place is described as Caribean Tortuga and Morder and 28 Days Later. You can't do that! At some point, you have to choose an apocolypse and run with it.

-Username17

[Count Arioch the 28th]

That has to be the absolute greatest written fictional place EVER.

[MrWaeseL]

Could you link me to the thread on the forums? I'm interested to see what the people have to say about this over there.

Also, this does not look like the work of a single person. It's almost as if they tried to make a fantasy world through consensus. "Yeah, Bill wants the Dragonblight and Bob wants the Blood Magic, so we're throwing both in that bad boy."

[Username17]

Sure.

Thread.

But I got a warning on the Iron Kingdoms board, so I don't think I'm going to be participating there. Not a friendly place.

-Username17

[PhoneLobster]

I was fairly active over there on the miniatures side of things for a bit so I sure as hell can tell you it is not a nice or worthwhile place.

I mean you were saying stuff that might be considered criticism, and that means that they hate you.

The best I saw it put was one guy who said that as far as the PP forums are concerned PP made everything perfect first time, and then made it perfect again every time after that with errata.

The PP forum police will overlook their long standing bootlicking scum and warn any critic that falls a foul of them every single time.

I mean I got me warnings for things like trying to explain to people that the Warmachine limited resource of focus is strictly inferior to the essentially unlimited equivalent fury resource in Hordes. They let their pet asshole run rampant on my thread then locked the damn thing, warned me and upped their magical we hate you rating on me.

But anyway as to Cryx the contradictions roll on in the miniatures game. Their faction is supposed to do the following things mechanically.

A) Loose out on armour, hit points and survivability, suffer various custom mechanic disadvantages.
B) In return have the most potent spells, most focus, best spell ranges, really uber offense and highest mobility. And cheap units for horde armies.

The do indeed get A. In vast steaming piles.

But their attack abilities have basically the same numbers as everyone elses.

They have like ONE lame infantry unit that actual costs less than equivalents in other factions, everything else is either standard or over priced compared to other factions.

Their spells are if anything WEAKER and their spell ranges are so cripplingly shortened because of cheap arc nodes that Cygnar does significantly better at arc node and zap things strategies that cryx is supposed to be so uber at. Half their casters barely benefit from arc noding at all to the extent that they are pretty much a match for Khador... And other factions get more focus than them with ease.

On base stats alone cryx has the best mobility in the game (prior to hordes in which almost everyone is at least that fast), and that does actually deliver.

But the best mobility enhancement and reduction effects in the game belong to OTHER factions, in spades, and are good enough and common enough to make cryx effectively the far slower force, negating their only advantage and making their hit points/armour disadvantages hurt REALLY hard.

So anyway, yeah be it fluff or miniatures rules, they say a lot of things about what cryx is supposed to be and yet the actual result of the stats and abilities they give out add up to something very different.

But we all know evil is mechanically inferior, right?

[Lago_AM3P]

You guys should start telling the truth about their product lines and the PP forums and maybe people will start realizing just how long and hard they'll have been deceived.

We're almost due for a revolution and a realization of their stupidity from the WotC boards any day now. Also the moderators will realize that they're conceited, nepotic crybabies and declare themselves frauds. Annnnny day now.

[Catharz]

OK, so the descriptions are logically inconsistant, and there was probably either very little proof-reading or absolutely no toe-stepping in the writing of the book.

Still, having read the thread it sounds like most of the posters thought your questions were regarding how to run a game rather than how stupid the authors were. And most of the answers seemed sincere, even though a few of them were absolutely moronic.

Do you actually intend to run an Iron Kingdoms game?

[RandomCasualty]

1165858473[/unixtime]]
On the other side though, that population is also nowhere near high enough. There are big human sacrifices in the temple there every day. The Roman Coliseum claimed the lives of millions of innocent peple (killing as many as 20,000 people in a day and operating for 500 years), but it was also situated in the heart of a city that had hundreds of thousands of people in it - Skell is still a small town, I'm not sure how they maintain a rigorous blood magic economy without the population base of Watsonville, le alone Rome.

I guess the explanation here could be that they sacrifice prisoners. If they are an island of pirates and stuff, it can be assumed they may take a lot of captives so sacrifices may come from the pool of people they get from looting and pillaging.

It's also possible that they can produce a ton of babies and most of those kids just get killed off in sacrifices. If you kill 3 per day, that's about say 1500 a year. Now you've got 40,000. Say half of those are women, 20,000 women. If half of your women are pregnant every year and produce a child, you'll get 10,000 children each year. That's really more than enough to sustain the population. It just has to be the land where people fuck like rabbits. If we assume that in fantasy worlds there aren't nearly as many miscarraiges and mothers dying during child birth, then it works so long as you're willing to have almost all the women in that city be pregnant all the time.

It is described as being an industrial hellhole where zombies beat hammers on metal day and night in a constant din of ringing steel and turning wheels. It is also depicted as a silent place where people whisper to each other.

What the fvck!? If there is a constant ring of hammers that drowns out heartbeat and thought day and night that never stops, people don't fvcking whisper to each other! You can't have "The Halls of the Dead" and "Acheron" at the same time, you have to pick what your evil town does.

Well, a town can be a pretty big place. There can be an industrial district and a dark quiet district too. Nothing says that a fantasy town has to be entirely uniform.

Blackwater
OK... this place is at the bottom of a 400 meter shear cliff in a fjord so that the sun only shines a few hours every day. The city extends from the cliff base out over the water where some buildings are floating on pontoons or supported on stilts. Right?

OK, it also has necrotech factories under the town. Under? The city is at 0m elevation. Under the town is under water. I mean, they are necrotechs, I suspect they might be able to do that, but shouldn't it specifiy that that's what they are doing?

Yeah, that was probably not well thought out at all. Sounds pretty stupid in general for a coastal town to have an elaborate underground.

[Username17]

I am in fact playing in an Iron Kingdoms game as a Cyriss Cleric (who are completely insane by the way).

Still, having read the thread it sounds like most of the posters thought your questions were regarding how to run a game rather than how stupid the authors were.

I was hoping there was an official resolution of that somewhere, but it was not to be. Mostly, I was offended by the tone over there. When you ask a setting question, you don't expect to get hit with 10 Oberoni Fallacies - that's uncalled for.

"Question: Setting Element A seems incompatible with setting element/rule B, what's going on?"

The following are acceptable answers:

"The two are compatible because setting element/rule C is in place to allow A and B to coexist."

"The two could be made compatible in your personal game by adding setting element/rule C, allowing A and B to coexist."

But the following statement is bullshit and gets no points:

"The two are compatible because you could add setting element/rule C that would allow A and B to coexist."

Holy crap does that make my blood boil. They probably don't even realize that they are doing it.

Anyways,

So anyway, yeah be it fluff or miniatures rules, they say a lot of things about what cryx is supposed to be and yet the actual result of the stats and abilities they give out add up to something very different.

My experience with Cryx is that you have more crap to sift through than any other faction. All your jacks are pretty much on an equal footing as far as resilience goes, but your Bone Rippers are really cheap and your Slayer Jacks are not.

Bile Thralls, Mechanithralls, and Bane Thralls all have a purpose in life as befits their offensive power to cost ratio (which is very high). In a game where most models only have 1 hit point, a 1 point/turn corrosion effect is pretty amazing when it automatically hits everything in a 6.5" radius half circle. 2 attacks on a model that costs less than 10 points is a big deal, and weapon master is a good way to take down enemy jacks.

But seriously, Scrap Thralls? What the hell is that?

I've got a Denegra Assassination list, and it works well enough. But there's very little else that you can do with the faction. Your choices are pretty much restricted to "hordes of eggshells with hammers" or "eggshells with giant hammers". Purchasing the offensively anemic units wins no points because they don't actually cost less or have more survivability.

-Username17

[Crissa]

Yeah, I was thinking of prisoners and captives being brought in by the pirates. That was a sort of pirate trade...

...Maybe the dragon has something in his castle that shields his residents from blight. There has to be a reason he hides in it, as opposed to other dragons. But yeah, not well thought out.

And you can have an underground in a town a sea-level - vaults. They have to remain sealed, pressurized, or dyked, and no one is going to be hammering through the ground willy-nilly to break into the vaults at all, since digging underwater is dangerous, even if you breathe water.

And look, San Diego had slums 'outside the city' but on the water or the water's edge. If it's not directly attached to the city piers, it's outside the city, I suppose. Of course, then getting rid of a slum is a pretty easy yet gruesome thing. San Diego burned its slums out multiple times.

But yeah, confusing. Even if there's a quiet place away from the clanging, no one is going to be whispering 'cause they will have ears that are ringing.

-Crissa

[Desdan_Mervolam]

The one that pissed me off was the guy who said "Go get in a game and find out". What the fuck? For one thing, it presumes that the person asking the questions ISN'T the one running the damned game. Second, it's a flip and condescending answer to an honest question that doesn't actually answer anything. That fuck needed to get a warning, not Frank

-Desdan

[PhoneLobster]

Maybe the crap sifting is the unifying theme.

Sift through all the useless crap for the miniatures game, sift through all the useless crap for the rpg.

Maybe its just a faction designed for wishful thinkers and those capable of blithely ignoring or going into denial over vast contradictions or deficiencies.

Certainly if you ever pop into the Cryx sub forum over at PP thats a lot what it looks like to me. (I mean those guys are actually WORSE than the rest of the PP forums).

Cryx, the faction of cognitive dissonance.

[RandomCasualty]

1165966246[/unixtime]]The one that pissed me off was the guy who said "Go get in a game and find out". What the fvck? For one thing, it presumes that the person asking the questions ISN'T the one running the damned game. Second, it's a flip and condescending answer to an honest question that doesn't actually answer anything. That fvck needed to get a warning, not Frank

Yeah, that guy was a dumbass.