Iron Kingdoms/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Accidental Innuendo: One female warcaster, Ashlynn D'Elyse, has a spell that makes entire groups of enemies less likely to hit in melee, less capable of self-defense and completely unable to operate firearms for a time. The spell's name? Distraction.
    • Skarre, a Cryx caster that is of the all-female Satyxis race, has an ability called Great Rack, which can knock people down. She has horns, you perv.
    • Of course, given Privateer's rather tongue-in-cheek attitude, many of these are probably not accidental.
  • Character Alignment: In keeping with the setting's D&D origins, each of Immoren's gods personifies one of these.
  • Complete Monster: Toruk, an Omnicidial Maniac who wants to turn the whole world into the undead, and pretty much entire Skorne faction.
  • Crazy Awesome: And don't even get us started on the Crazy Awesome that goes into warjacks like the Deathjack or the Avatar of Menoth.
  • Ensemble Darkhorse: Lich Lord Malathrax. He's only appeared in stories that come with the books, and yet many are the fans who want him to have a model of him, or at the very least a picture of him so they can see what he looks like.
  • Evil Is Cool: One of the major appeals of the evil factions is that they look pretty darned cool.
  • Evil Is Sexy: Satyxis Raiders, Denegrah, Skarre, Fiona the Black, and the Witch Coven.
    • Also, every Legion Warlock besides Pimp Daddy Thagrosh.
  • Game Breaker: Lots of things, especially before the Mk. II revamp.
  • Goddamned Bats: Whelps; they pop out of warbeasts when they take damage, blocking charge lanes and providing negatives to enemy melee attacks.
  • God Mode Sue: Hierarch Voyle becomes one when he invades Caspia. The power goes to his head, and he's defeated by the sword carried by his Crystal Dragon Jesus.
  • Moral Event Horizon: The skorne, who had already been established as cruel and pain-obsessed (if not outright sadistic), were given the Agonizer, an infant pachyderm abused to the point that it's now a sore-covered walking psychic nexus of pain and torment. Opinions were divided on how tasteful this was, and even now some people are still touchy about it.
    • Goreshade smashed his soulless child to goo. His peers had an understandable Heroic BSOD before ordering him arrested.
      • His house still supported him, until they found his labs...
  • Narm: "Lola...", Darth Stryker, Karchev falling down stairs.
  • Narrowed It Down to the Guy I Recognize: A variant. In Longest Night, the first Iron Kingdoms product, the PCs get a description of the villain, and out of the hundreds (if not thousands) of people in the city who fit the description, figure out who the villain is solely because she's the one they happen to have (coincidentally) met.
    • Of course, it helps that out of the hundreds (if not thousands) of people in the city who fit the description, the villain turns out to be the one who has a major connection to every victim in the alleged crime they're investigating.
      • At the moment the players are supposed to start suspecting her, they don't know this. They just know she has black hair. Get her!
  • Tier-Induced Scrappy: Many are, but Sorscha and Epic Vlad probably go through it the most.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks: Warmachine Mk II is a welcome update or a D&D 4th Edition level travesty depending on who you talk to.
    • Negative opinion of Mk. II has gone WAY down since they released the officially finished rules, so you could call this case an aversion of the trope.
  • The Woobie: Subverted, You'd think Nayl would be one, considering he's a purely unemotional killer whose very existence is loathed by his people and who literally lacks a soul. But it seems he may be developing a personality, or at the very least understand the concept of Love, in terms of "Nayl Loves Learning How To Kill. Nayl Loves Killing More. If he does develop a personality, all signs indicate that it's going to enjoy the constant carnage that defines his life soulless existence.