The Iron Kingdoms Full Metal Fantasy Roleplaying Game provides hobbyists with amazing opportunities to convert models to use as heroes, adversaries, and supporting characters. While these customized models can really help create a unique and immersive combat encounter, there’s so much more to the Iron Kingdoms Full Metal Fantasy Roleplaying Game than just combat. By creating unique props and visuals, you as a Game Master (or even a player) can bring a whole new level of immersion to your roleplaying sessions.

The group I GM for can only get together about once a month, so we do as much as possible between sessions to keep the momentum going. For our most recent campaign (a Greylord adventuring party from Kings, Nations, and Gods), the player who has been designated as the Greylord Magziev sent out weathered, official-looking paperwork to his retinue.

And coming into work one morning to find a wax-sealed summons on their desks ordering them to report for duty in Korsk really got the players excited for the start of the campaign.

Those orders eventually led the party to the outskirts of Moskrad to, shall we say, “interview” members of a Winter Guard platoon at the behest of the Prikaz Chancellery. One of the characters observed that one Privat, when under duress, had the habit of clutching his pocket. When the Privat was ordered to turn out his pockets, I laid a handful of coins on the table for the group to inspect.

I made these coins out of flat washers and Formula P3 Brown Putty. I used a stamp of the Khadoran anvil to mark one side of the coins and sculpted designs into the other side.

After further investigation and observation, the party determined that one of the coins was, in fact, a Thamarite talisman of Scion Stacia. Coming across this information in a visual and tactile way helped spice up the social encounter and gave the players an opportunity to get out from behind their character sheets to interact with each other in a new way.

In another session, the PCs were investigating an Orgoth amulet bearing a mysterious message and a dark purpose. I could have described the amulet and had players make a single Cryptography roll to decipher its message; instead, I created the amulet in Photoshop and distributed the image to the group before the session.

During the adventure, the characters activated the amulet, revealing Orgoth script that the players had to decipher character by character. A failed Cryptography roll or an incorrect guess had painful consequences for the characters.

Using props and visual aids has been a great way for our group to set the scene for our adventures and to enhance social and investigative encounters. Letters, insignia, ciphers, and other clues make easy and effective props for urban campaigns. The Monsternomicon is full of creatures that leave tracks, webs, nests and more gruesome evidence in their wake that you can easily design props for.

Head over to the Iron Kingdoms Roleplaying Game forums to share your props, visual aids, character art, and converted models!