Iron Sleet - TTRPG

The art for the book is lovely, and has a great feel toward the intended aesthetic. 

Giving the book a read, I wanted to see about a couple of potential clarifications since the rules seem to leave a lot of things that can be confusing. 

1. Animal companions share the same stamina pool as their player, this part makes sense. Is Animal Trainer a required positive attribute for the animal companion to take actions period? 

2. Do your equipped weapons affect bulk? So like, if I have the min strength stat of -5, my bulk is thus 0, can I then by that logic not equip any weapon, or carry anything except armor? Is having reduced weight on items meant to affect bulk in any way? 

3. Can stamina be reduced to 0? Characters who receive injuries reduce their Max stamina, so if that reduction would make them hit 0, are they effectively unable to take actions for the rest of the mission? Same with stunning, can  you deal enough stun damage to reduce a character's stamina to 0?

Iron Sleet is a military science fantasy ttrpg that invites immediate comparisons to Arknights, but very much charts its own course. It's also simple, meaty, and incredibly tightly made.

The PDF is 66 pages and dense with high quality black and white art. Information in it is well organized, the layout is evocative but unobtrusive, and the overall vibe is massively professional. Purely on visual, this is an extremely good book.

Also in terms of clarity, this is an extremely good book. Everything is explained in dead simple terms, and in a way that teaches you the system bit by bit without you really noticing that you're learning. Font sizes are big, important paragraphs are spaced out from each other, and despite there being some real mechanical bite here Iron Sleet might be one of the easiest to teach rpgs I've read in a few years.

Mechanics-wise, Iron Sleet is a d20+d6 system. The d20 is rolled for every check, and a number of d6s are added or removed from it based on difficulty. This is *very* easy to intuit, and not as swingy as something like 5e's advantage.

Onto this framework Iron Sleet adds a pretty robust lite combat system. Movement, equipment, armor and evasion, plus multiple rollable stats are all tracked. Actions are on a stamina system, with stamina only half recovering after each round of combat, so if you go loud one turn you have to shepherd your resources during the next. There's also a universal reroll stat called luck, and some simple stealth and status effect mechanics to keep things fresh. There's vehicles, and they're dead simple but satisfying.

HP is handled through wounds, and wounds are divided into minor, regular, and critical injuries. If you get hit but it doesn't pierce armor, you take a minor. If it does pierce, you take a regular. If you take too many regulars and then get hit again, you take an injury. Injuries can kill you outright---but you have luck to mitigate that. Essentially, characters have some serious staying power, but you can take them down if you really light them up.

Character creation is detailed, with a big pool of build points to spend, but the ways in which you can spend it are simple, easily explained, and well organized. Your rollable stats start at -5, which is weird and wild, but not actually a problem. There's a good variety of feats and abilities and they all have a measured impact on play.

There's a full equipment chapter, including the ability to take animal companions, and you can kit your weapons the heck out with tacticool mods, custom ammo, and runic enchantments. There are vehicles, but they're priced outside of really being affordable by a group and I suspect need to be given by the GM via the mission budget system.

Character progression is simple, with a stat point being handed out after each mission. Each stat point has a noticeable impact on gameplay, and there's a *lot* of room for players to go, so you could get a long campaign out of Iron Sleet without the mechanics starting to distend.

For GMs, there's a bestiary and a mission generator. The bestiary in particular does a lot of worldbuilding in the margins, and its ideas are evocative, gameable, and fun. The setting rules, honestly. It blazes its own trail and---while still very Arknights-y---is referencing Arknights primarily in tone. Its ideas are its own, and it feels more feral and divinepunk with how it centers its gods in its world.

Overall, would I recommend Iron Sleet? Yeah. It's firing on all cylinders pretty much continuously. If you like tactical rpgs with a pulpy worldfeel and mechanics that walk a razor line between simple and deep, you should really give this a look.

Minor issues:

-Page 1, "player's characters" players' characters

-Page 4, Luck, "or when they rest" or when you rest

Will there be a Discord for this game like Planet Shark?

Nice. The arts are fantastic (as in the other game I saw time before). Just some art piece (IMHO) are very good, but thematically disconnected (for example, p.29 or p.35).

Minor typos, (mostly are wrong "its" "it's", for example Echowolf p.35 "it's mouth" "it's prey").

Anyway, this is strongly inspired by miniature games, more than RpGs, and this isn't a bad thing. The problem I see here is that it seems to don't have a specific "soul". As RpG is too weak (it gives no nice guidance, no nuanced results for the tests, no consequences apart eventually suffering wounds), while as miniature game it misses important GM tools (a tool to build interesting and balanced missions, a sort of "point value" for the various enemies etc.)

Still, you made a nice thing. Surely it could evolve in a great thing.