An Introduction to Ironsworn – You Can Play Alone! No GM Required! A Free TTRPG!!

This post is also available in: 日本語 (Japanese)

“I really want to play TTRPGs… but where am I supposed to find people to play with???”

If you got into TTRPGs through replay videos and then thought, “Hey, I want to try this myself,”
chances are you’ve run straight into the classic problem:

Not having anyone to play with.

Sure, people will tell you, “Just find an online group.”
But honestly, if it were that easy, you probably wouldn’t be struggling in the first place.

And even if you do find a few people who might be interested, there’s another wall waiting for you:
“Okay, but none of us have ever been a GM. So… how are we supposed to run a session?”
(Yeah. Been there.)

So, coming from someone who’s been playing solo TTRPGs for over twelve years,
after a long road of trial and error, I’d like to introduce a game I finally settled on:

Ironsworn —
a TTRPG designed specifically for solo play,
fully playable without a GM,
and even well-suited for GM-less party play.

Alright—
let’s dive in.

Overview of Ironsworn

Ironsworn is a free indie TTRPG created by Shawn Tomkin.

You travel through a bleak, frozen land, carrying an iron-bound vow in your heart, and leave your mark on the world as a lone hero.

The game is built around a system called Oracles, which enables semi-automatic story generation. Thanks to this, Ironsworn is specifically designed for GM-less play and improvised sessions with no pre-written scenario. It’s so lightweight in that regard that you can genuinely sit down and play a quick solo session while waiting for a train.

That’s basically the kind of TTRPG it is.

Apparently, it won a Gold ENNIE winner for Best Free Game, and on a site called DriveThruRPG it has racked up over 800 five-star ratings.
To be honest, these awards and sites aren’t very well known in Japan, so it’s a bit hard to grasp how big a deal that is—but the short version is: this is a highly regarded free TTRPG.

And yes, I’ll say it again: it’s free.

You can download the rules from the “Ironsworn Digital Edition Rulebook.”

What You Get

• A rules summary
• Character sheets and other play sheets calld Playkit
• Printable card-format lists of Assets (basically, your skills)
• Worksheets for building the game’s world

All of this—the entire core set—is available at no cost.

In this article, I’ll walk you through everything you need to know to get started with Ironsworn.

Once you grasp the overall structure of the game, Ironsworn is something you can play largely by feel.

And when you hit something you don’t quite understand, you can always just read the Rulebook.

The World

The Core Setting

The Ironlands—the world of Ironsworn—looks something like this.

• Two generations ago, your ancestors were driven out of the Old World. They fled to the Ironlands, and there they settled.
• The climate is brutally cold, and winter in particular shows absolutely no mercy.
• People survive in houses made of wood and stone, with thatched roofs to keep the cold at bay.
• Settlements are scattered across harsh mountains, deep forests, and barren wilderness, often completely cut off from the outside world. Many people live their entire lives without ever leaving their village.
• There is no developed monetary economy. Instead, people barter—wheat, timber, wool, livestock, iron.
• The land is simply too unforgiving for populations to concentrate. As a result, there are no great cities, no kingdoms.
• That means no massive wars, either—but bandits and raiders still roam freely, stripping villages of their hard-earned stores.
• Common weapons are spears, axes, shields, and bows. Swords are rare and extremely expensive; simply owning one marks you as someone of note.
• Across the vast, untamed lands live the Firstborn—elves, giants, and varou (werewolf-like beings)—each forming their own communities. Deep in forests, mountains, and the sea, monstrous Beasts such as basilisks and leviathans roam freely. Cursed undead are rare, but you will encounter them from time to time.
• Mystics wield magic to gain blessings and insight, driving back the darkness—but all too often, they are consumed by that power instead.
• Their magic is mostly subtle: divination, illusions, meditation to strengthen the self. The classic “fireballs and lightning bolts” you might expect from fantasy magic are almost entirely absent.

As you can see, this is a hard, unforgiving dark fantasy setting.

Iron Vows

In the Ironlands, Iron Vows are sacred rituals—and at the same time, the core gameplay objective.

When you touch iron and declare your resolve, that vow becomes a promise that must be fulfilled, no matter the cost.

The vow itself can be something simple, like a classic video-game-style quest:
“Defeat the bandits.”
“Rescue the captured hostage.”
“Gather ingredients for a cure.”

Or it can be something far grander—and not necessarily combat-focused at all:
“Establish a trade route between villages.”
“Lift the curse tormenting this land.”
“Found a kingdom in the Ironlands.”

Touching iron can mean anything made of it—a weapon, armor, a ring, a coin, even raw iron ore. In the world of Ironsworn, iron is everywhere; even jewelry is often made from it. So go all in and make the moment as dramatic as you like.

Mechanically speaking, fulfilling Iron Vows is the only way to earn experience. If you want your character to grow, you’ll naturally find yourself chasing down your vows.

One more thing: abandoning a vow deals mental damage.

If it’s a small vow, the consequences are minor. But abandon a major one, and depending on the dice, your character might suffer such a severe psychological shock that they’re effectively broken—resulting in character loss.

So, make your vows with a full understanding of their weight.

The Role of the Player Character

Unlike most villagers—who often never leave their home settlement—the player character travels the vast and dangerous Ironlands, becoming a hero through their adventures.

The system is designed so that no character is ever “good at everything,” and the chance of failure is intentionally quite high. What you get, as a result, is a journey filled with setbacks and hard-earned victories—a road with plenty of ups and downs.

Creating the World

This is one of Ironsworn’s most impressive features.

Alongside character creation, the game asks you to create the world itself.

That doesn’t mean building everything from scratch. For each aspect of the setting, you choose from three options. Even if you’re not overflowing with ideas, you’ll be fine. (Of course, you can also ignore the options and create something entirely original—they’re meant as prompts, not restrictions.)

In solo play, you decide freely. In group play, you talk it out and decide together.

Here’s an example.

When defining HORRORS—basically, the undead—you’re given these three choices:

• They’re nothing more than stories told to scare children.
• Undead roam remote forests and waterways. Only fools would ever go near such places.
• In the Ironlands, the dead do not rest. At night, people light torches, scatter cleansing salt, and post guards. Even that isn’t enough.
  —They’re already right outside.

So—what do you think?

With just a single choice, the entire tone of the world shifts dramatically.

At this point, the idea of “creating the world alongside your character” should make sense.

A character specialized in hunting undead might become a celebrated hero in the third version of the world—but in the first, they’d be dismissed as a liar… or maybe just a quiet, unremarkable odd jobber.

What kind of world do you want your character to shine in?

The choice is yours.

Character Creation

The Five Stats

Under the standard rules, your character has five stats, and you freely assign the values 3, 2, 2, 1, and 1 among them.
(Higher numbers mean you’re better at that thing.)

Edge
Speed, agility, and precision of movement.
Mechanically, it’s mostly used for ranged attack rolls—but it has incredible synergy with one of the very flexible core moves I’ll talk about later. If you lean into Edge, you end up darting around the battlefield and the story alike, pulling off all kinds of flashy plays.

Heart
Mental strength, courage, and social presence.
In gameplay terms, this covers negotiation, resistance to psychological stress, and your chances of recovering while staying in a settlement. There are also a few key moments—rare, but very impactful—where Heart decides whether you can properly perform an Iron Vow ritual. A fair number of magical abilities reference Heart as well, especially summoning and spirit-related magic tied to life and death.

Iron
Physical power, toughness, raw momentum.
Mechanically, this governs melee attacks, intimidation through force, and resistance to physical harm. If this stat is high, your combat strength goes up in a very straightforward, easy-to-understand way.

Shadow
Deception, stealth, and cunning tricks.
Mechanically, it’s mostly used for lying and manipulation. But thanks to Ironsworn’s fiction-first approach (which I’ll explain later), a Shadow-focused character can sometimes dominate entire situations through schemes, ambushes, and staying unseen.

Wits
Awareness, knowledge, and insight.
This isn’t just for “smart-sounding” information gathering. Wits is also used to see whether you can travel safely, treat injuries, and secure food and water in the wilderness. On the magic side, Wits-based abilities range from divination and illusion, to specialized anti-darkness attacks, to things like dancing under the moonlight to gain temporary stat boosts. It’s a broad—and very powerful—stat.

Reading all this, you might be thinking:

“Wait—if I’m guaranteed to be bad at two stats, doesn’t that make adventuring impossible?”

Don’t worry.

As I’ll explain later in the section on the three ultra-versatile core moves, as long as the fiction makes sense, you can use almost any stats in most situations. Even if you heavily specialize in just one or two stats, you can usually make it work.

In fact, Ironsworn pushes you into a mindset that’s pretty rare in other TRPGs:
How do I steer the story so that my strengths matter, and my weaknesses don’t come up?

That way of thinking is a big part of what makes the Ironsworn play experience feel unique.

I’ll get into the details later.

I simulated the probability math to show how much stats you need for results you need.

Assets and Roles

On top of your stats, you choose three Assets—basically, your skills and special abilities.

There are all kinds of distinctive assets: dealing extra damage when wielding an axe, gaining bonuses to stealth, or even creating a salt circle that traps an enemy inside a magical barrier.

If you’re the type who thinks,

“Too many rules are a pain! I just want to start playing quickly!”

the rulebook has you covered.

Instead of individual assets, you can choose a Role—such as Healer, Leader, Scout, or Mystic. This works a lot like a traditional RPG class system and simplifies both character creation and gameplay, making everything faster and more approachable.

Background Vow and Bonds

This is the part that really defines your character’s personality.

Your Background Vow is a long-term promise that represents your character’s life goal—the driving force behind how they live.

It can be something like:

• “Reunite with my missing sister”
• “Master the path of martial skill”
• “Travel across the Ironlands from end to end”
• “Make a hundred friends”
• “Avenge my family”
• “Turn my homeland into fertile, prosperous land”

Pick one goal that truly feels like your character’s reason for living.

Sometimes, this vow becomes the main focus of the campaign. Other times, it stays in the background, popping up now and then as a character-defining detail.

If you’re stuck, you can always roll on an Oracle and decide it randomly—so don’t stress too much about it.

Bonds are exactly what they sound like: connections to other people.

At the start of the game, you have Bonds with three characters. In group play, it’s strongly recommended that you form Bonds with your fellow party members first.

Having Bonds gives you bonuses to persuasion and recovery rolls in settlements. They also matter when you make the “Write Your Epilogue” move—the check that determines whether your adventurer can retire and achieve the future you envisioned, reaching a proper ending.

Rules

The Fiction-First Principle

This is the single most important golden rule in Ironsworn.

You temporarily set aside mechanical precision and efficiency, and instead prioritize these questions:

Does this make sense as a story?
Is this interesting as a story?

That’s the core idea.

It’s a rule that really only exists because Ironsworn is so heavily focused on narrative generation.

Whenever you’re wondering, “What kind of roll should I make here?”—this is where Fiction First comes into play.

Instead of focusing on numerical advantages or disadvantages, Ironsworn asks you to think:
What feels natural in this situation?
What would be more interesting?
What would look cool?

That mindset is the foundation of how the game works.

Core Roll #1: The Action Roll

How It Works

This is one of Ironsworn’s primary resolution mechanics.

You compare:

• Action Score = your chosen stat + 1d6 + modifiers
  with
• Two 1d10s, called the Challenge Dice

The results break down like this:

• If your Action Score is higher than both Challenge Dice → Strong Hit (full success)
• If it’s higher than one but not the other → Weak Hit (partial success)
• If it’s equal to or lower than both → Miss (failure)

This isn’t a very common system, so let’s look at an example.

Say you’re rolling with Edge 3, you roll a 2 on the d6, and you get +1 from an asset.

Your Action Score is:

3 + 2 + 1 = 6

Now let’s say the Challenge Dice come up 3 and 6.

Your Action Score is higher than one die, but not higher than the other.

→ That’s a Weak Hit.

If you’re familiar with TTRPGs, you might be thinking:

“Wait… there’s no target number?”

Exactly.

Ironsworn doesn’t use target numbers at all.

All that matters is whether your Action Score beats the two Challenge Dice for that roll.

What actually happens on a Strong Hit, Weak Hit, or Miss depends on the specific move you’re making. For those details, you’ll want to check the move reference or the rulebook itself.

Matches

If the two Challenge Dice show the same number—for example, 5 and 5—and the result is either a Strong Hit or a Miss, a Match occurs.

If you’re used to other TTRPGs, it’s easiest to think of this as a kind of critical or fumble.

• A Strong Hit with a Match means something unexpectedly amazing happens.
• A Miss with a Match means something goes wrong in a particularly nasty, unexpected way.

At this point, you might be thinking:

“Okay, but what does ‘unexpected’ even mean here?”

Don’t worry.

That’s what the Oracle system is for.
Just keep reading.

Momentum

If I had to force a Japanese-style translation, Momentum is basically “being on a roll.”

It’s a system that bundles all advantages your character has into a single number.

For example:

• You got a map of the enemy’s stronghold
• You poisoned your weapon ahead of time
• You found a shortcut through the dungeon and saved time
• You learned a Beast’s weakness
• You steeled your resolve and got a good night’s sleep

All of these advantages are abstracted into increased Momentum.

On the flip side:

• The enemy figured out your plan
• Your target escaped at the last second
• You wasted time in a dead end
• You slept poorly

Any disadvantage like this causes Momentum to drop.

Think of Momentum as a single value that represents physical, mental, social, and informational advantage all at once.

What you can do with Momentum is something called Burning Momentum.

Now, I know—

“Burning? Really?”

It sounds a little funny to Japanese ears, but the effect is incredibly powerful.

When you Burn Momentum, after making an Action Roll, any Challenge Dice that’s lower than your Momentum is treated as a success.

So if your Momentum is 8, and the Challenge Dice are 6 and 7, both count as beaten—resulting in a Strong Hit.

At Momentum 10, unless both dice come up 10 (a 1% chance), you succeed automatically.

It’s exactly the kind of mechanic you’d expect from a true last-resort trump card.

More importantly, it means this:

Even if the story is heading toward a roll you’re terrible at, if you’ve built up Momentum along the way, you can force your way through once.

Three Ultra-Versatile Moves

In Ironsworn, each type of roll is called a Move. Among them are three moves that are unusually bold—and incredibly flexible—compared to most TTRPGs.

• Secure an Advantage
• Face Danger
• Aid Your Ally

What these three have in common is this:

You roll them using any stat that makes sense in the fiction.

That’s a huge deal.

• Secure an Advantage covers any attempt to create a favorable situation in advance.
• Face Danger covers any attempt to overcome an immediate threat.
• Aid Your Ally covers any way of supporting another character.

Let’s look at an example.

There’s a locked door in front of you, and you want to get past it using either Secure an Advantage or Aid Your Ally.

You could do any of the following:

• Edge + Secure an Advantage
  → Pick the lock using nimble fingers and a bent wire.
• Heart + Aid Your Ally
  → Crack a joke to ease your allies’ nerves while they work on the lock.
• Iron + Secure an Advantage
  → Smash the door down by brute force.
  (Fiction First means enemies might hear the noise.)
• Shadow + Secure an Advantage
  → Lure the guard over and con them with a story about being an urgent courier.
• Wits + Secure an Advantage
  → Discover a hidden, unlocked passage nearby.

As long as the approach makes sense in the story—and plays to your character’s strengths—you can roll it.

For Face Danger, imagine falling rocks.

• Edge + Face Danger
  → Dodge on pure reflex.
• Heart + Face Danger
  → Stay calm and move with composure.
• Iron + Face Danger
  → Catch or block the rocks through sheer strength.
• Shadow + Face Danger
  → Trick the rocks?
  Well, Fiction First. If your world has talking rocks, maybe.
• Wits + Aid Your Ally
  → Read the trajectory and shout safe positions to your allies.

What these moves do is compress evasion, perception, brute force, mental control, deception, and support—all forms of handling danger—into a small set of abstract, flexible mechanics.

As long as you respect Fiction First, you’re free to choose how you roll. That naturally leads you to think:

“If I steer the story this way, my character can handle this.”

And before you know it, you’re guiding the narrative in a direction that favors your strengths.

A rule that says “any stat can be used for general-purpose moves” is something you almost never see in other TTRPGs.

If there’s anything similar, it might be the Saikoro Fiction series—but even then, this level of flexibility is rare.

Core Roll #2: The Progress Roll

The Progress Roll is used to track things like:

• Journey progress
• How close an enemy is to defeat
• How far you’ve advanced toward completing a quest

All of these are represented as abstract progress tracks—basically, progress bars.

If your journey is at 5/10, you’re halfway there.
If an enemy is at 8/10, victory is close.
If a quest is at 10/10, you’ve effectively completed it—you just need to wrap things up.

I’ll skip the details of how progress is filled in (check the rulebook if you’re curious), but remember this term: Progress Score.

As you may have already guessed, Progress Rolls also use the same two d10 Challenge Dice.

• If your Progress Score beats both dice → Strong Hit
• If it beats one → Weak Hit
• If it beats neither → Miss

Simple—but extremely elegant.

The Oracle System

“Oracle” is a word that literally means a divine message or prophecy.

And this—more than anything else—is why Ironsworn functions as a semi-automatic narrative generation engine.

You turn to the Oracle in situations like these:

• When a move result tells you to Ask the Oracle
• When you’re stuck for ideas during character creation
• When you want to decide whether the road is clear under fair skies, or muddy and difficult after heavy rain
• When determining what information an NPC can provide, or how they respond to your negotiation

In moments like these, you consult Oracle tables whose results change based on a d100 roll, and the game supplies story hooks almost automatically.

An Example

Let’s look at a simple example.

You are searching for a bandits’ hideout.

Suddenly, you notice a farmer standing motionless on the road ahead.

You succeed at a move to gather information, and decide to determine what you learn by consulting the Oracle.

I actually rolled on the Oracle table just now, and the words it gave me were:

“Rest” and “Love.”

…What does that mean?

Maybe the farmer knows when the bandits take breaks to spend time bonding with their families.

Maybe this farmer lost their family to the bandits, and now stands here exhausted and unsure what to do next.

Or maybe the bandits have nothing to do with it at all—perhaps this farmer is simply daydreaming about the person they love.

The interpretation is entirely up to the player.

The Oracle only provides fragmentary information.

Taking those fragments, connecting them to the surrounding context, and following your instinct of “this is the kind of story I want to see unfold”—that act itself is the Oracle system.

How Stories Keep Moving

Most move results are paired with an instruction to Ask the Oracle, so play often flows like this:

You take an action
→ the Oracle gives an answer
→ you interpret it
→ the next scene naturally emerges
→ you respond to the situation
→ the Oracle answers again
→ you interpret that
→ another scene is born
→ …and so on.

Simply by following the rules and interpreting the Oracle’s signs, the story keeps chaining itself together, almost effortlessly.

Of course, if you clearly know exactly how you want the story to unfold, you’re free to skip the Oracle entirely and follow your intuition.

Even in the rulebook, the Oracle is described as “a spice to use when you’re unsure how things should develop.”

(That said… an awful lot of move results still tell you to consult it.)

The Flow of a Session

The overall flow of an Ironsworn session is quite simple:

1. Create the world and the characters
2. Introduce an inciting incident (this can also be determined by an Oracle)
3. Perform Swear an Iron Vow to address that incident
4. Begin acting to fulfill the vow
5. Describe the scene (Ask the Oracle if you’re stuck)
6. Take an action that makes narrative sense
7. Make a move and roll
8. Describe the outcome (Ask the Oracle if needed)
9. Return to step 6

You repeat this loop, advancing the story semi-automatically.
Once the progress track for the quest feels sufficiently filled, you make a Progress Roll to see whether the vow is fulfilled.

The result might be a clean success.

Or perhaps the incident you thought was the whole problem turns out to be merely the first sign of a much larger conspiracy.

Or maybe you simply fail the quest outright. Statistically speaking, that’s always possible—and that, too, becomes part of the story.

Iron Vows and Escalation

Despite their heavy narrative weight and harsh penalties on failure, the rulebook actually encourages players to swear Iron Vows quite freely.

You might take on what feels like a casual side quest, only for the Oracle to twist it into an event that shakes the entire Ironlands.

You might break down a larger vow into smaller ones—for example, creating a quest like “Obtain the legendary spear” as a sub-goal of “Slay the Leviathan.”

Or perhaps the sister you’ve been searching for as part of your Background Vow turns out—thanks to a mischievous Oracle—to be the leader of the very bandit clan you already swore to destroy…

At that point, the story truly begins to run on its own, often beyond the player’s original intentions.

This is why solo play in Ironsworn avoids the common problem of “I already know what’s going to happen next, so there’s no surprise.”

The story genuinely escapes your control.

In Closing

There’s really only one thing left for me to say.

Everyone should play Ironsworn.

I’ll repost the relevant links below, so if any of this sparked your interest, jump in with us.

Let’s sink together into the Ironsworn swamp.

If probability math isn’t your thing, I ran the simulations.

You can download the rules from the “Ironsworn Digital Edition Rulebook.”

What You Get

• A rules summary
• Character sheets and other play sheets calld Playkit
• Printable card-format lists of Assets (basically, your skills)
• Worksheets for building the game’s world

This work is based on Ironsworn (found at www.ironswornrpg.com), created by Shawn Tomkin, and licensed for our use under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).