What is Strangelight Workshop? | Iron Kingdoms Roleplaying Game

Strangelight Workshop, a roleplaying game set in the award-winning Iron Kingdoms universe, is coming to Kickstarter on July 25th!

Are you intrigued by the occult and otherworldly? Then sign up today to join the Strangelight team!

Now, it’s time to begin your orientation. Lucky for you, Strangelight writer, Matt Goetz, is here to walk you through it. Keep your wits about you…

The Workshop

Welcome to Blackwell Hall. 

To the west you’ll find the departments of Research and Development, where our prototypes are designed, the paraphysics lab—don’t stick around there too long, or they may ask you to help test a theory on spontaneous human combustion—and the gymnasium. 

If you ask politely, our librarian might let you look through some of our most famous case files. Interested in the Haunting of Castle Raelthorne, or the Murder in the Majestic Theater?

Just don’t ask to see the Black Archive, if you want to stay on Halebran’s good side.

Anywhere you look in Blackwell Hall, you’ll find members and agents of the Strangelight Workshop hard at work, deep in study, developing new equipment and alchemical recipes, honing their skills—

What’s that? What is the Strangelight Workshop?

Allow me to explain.

The Strangelight Workshop—we just call it the Workshop, most of the time—is the foremost independent organization dedicated to the study and solution to all matters of the occult, otherworldly, and anomalous in the Iron Kingdoms.

We study, capture, contain, and sometimes eliminate the things that lurk in the shadows of the world. We’ve developed tools and techniques to wrangle hostile specters, be they common shades or full-blown woe eaters.

(If you aren’t familiar, suffice to say they’re some of the nastier spirits you might run across.)

We’ve got anti-grymkin tech that can flush a whole swarm of gremlins out of your warehouse, if you need it, and ways of getting the murder crows off your back.

Maybe you heard about the part we played in the Infernal War a few years ago? When the infernals were cropping up everywhere, our field teams stood on the line with the armies, lending our experience to every nation in the Iron Kingdoms.

We’re the Strangelight Workshop, and we’re here to help.

Where It Began…

The Strangelight Workshop has been a part of the Iron Kingdoms since the setting’s inception, showing up as a brief blurb in the original Iron Kingdoms World Guide.

That tantalizing blurb would come to occupy a special place in the hearts of the creative team behind the Iron Kingdoms for years. It was the X-Files of the Iron Kingdoms, Cygnar’s BPRD, its Men in Black, its Ghostbusters.

The idea of an organization of amateur ghost hunters using strange technology to clear a haunted house of its spectral inhabitants was everything great about the Iron Kingdoms, distilled down into a very special brew.

Over the years, the Workshop has even shown up several times, from the Wicked Ways anthology to issues of the No Quarter Prime magazine.

Now, the Strangelight Workshop roleplaying game finally allows us to fully explore every darkened corner of the setting, every complicated aspect of a secret society/business devoted to explaining the unexplainable, and offer you an RPG experience in the Iron Kingdoms unlike any other.

New and Existing Players

The Strangelight Workshop is an extension of the setting and rules developed for Iron Kingdoms: Requiem. Like Requiem, Strangelight Workshop is built on a foundation of the 5th Edition SRD, but with rules unique to the Iron Kingdoms.

The Workshop is also a starting point for people new to the Iron Kingdoms. With the free System Reference Document and Strangelight Workshop core book, you’ll be out there battling ghosts, helping people, and making the world a better place in no time.

You don’t need Requiem or any other Iron Kingdoms books to get started with the Strangelight Workshop.

If you’re a long-time supporter of the setting, though, we have you covered too. Strangelight Workshop introduces several new things to the Iron Kingdoms.

First, there are several all-new classes to play based on the iconic roles of a field team of agents: the bouncer, caller, investigator, jammer, and Strangelight mechanik, which we will discuss in an upcoming article.

Also introduced in the Strangelight Workshop is a kind of tool library that the characters can call on during an investigation.

Prototypes are the items unique to the Workshop. Constructed in secret in the foundries and workrooms of Blackwell Hall or one of the various branch offices, teams can requisition these powerful, unusual devices to help them during the course of an investigation.

Need some extra firepower to close a case? Ask your quartermaster for a pyrethrower or a case of antispectral ammunition.

Will your investigation take you into the territory of the Buckets o’ Blood Bunch? Maybe consider arming your Bouncer with a galvanic subduer.

Looking to better protect the team against a horde of grymkin? Maybe the Jammer should arm up with an emergency multi-spectral plasma field generator (EM-SPFG if you’re nasty).

Just remember to fill out your requisition forms and return any prototypes at the close of an investigation, if you want to stay on your quartermaster’s good side. Oh, and remember to report any malfunctions you experience while using the prototypes no matter how small or how… extreme.

The Strangelight Workshop is accompanied by the Specternomicon, a monster book jam-packed with all manner of threats undead, infernal, unusual, and sometimes inexplicable, many never seen before.

Adding a bit of spice to the mix, the Specternomicon includes Haunting rules that allow the Game Master to add additional abilities, complexity, and weirdness to any encounter. What’s worse than confronting an infernal horror from beyond the boundaries of both the physical and spirit realms? Being trapped with one who can alter the fundamental forces of physics, space, and time at a whim.

Hopefully this first tease of what’s to come in the Strangelight Workshop has piqued your interest.

Watch this space for more in-depth articles about what we have in store for you, and be sure to follow the Kickstarter to get notified on launch.

We’ll leave a lantern on for you.