02 - Your First Campaign

As part of this guide, we'll walk you from initial setup of your campaign through to the end of a short combat scene. This Guide will use Starforged as an example, but you can use any supported Ruleset in Iron Vault to play!

Launching Your Campaign

The process for launching your campaign starts on Chapter 2, page 74, of the Ironsworn: Starforged Rulebook.

As it points out very quickly: Prep is Play. Which means: Congratulations! You're already playing Starforged using Iron Vault!

At the end of 01 - Initial Setup, you should have seen this screen:

Onboarding tab.png

As the welcome message says, Iron Vault organizes vaults into Campaigns/index. Click on "create a campaign" (or choose the Creating a campaign command from the Obsidian command selector). This will show a dialog like the following:

Create a new campaign modal.png

Give your name a campaign, but don't worry-- you can always change it later!

By default, your campaign will be created as a subfolder of your vault's root folder. This is a good option if you want to add multiple campaigns in this vault. If you wish to dedicate this vault to a single campaign, you might want to pick the vault root (type / in the folder input) as the home for your campaign. If you wish to keep multiple campaigns, you can use the default where it creates a folder with the same name as your campaign.

Either way, once you've created your new campaign, you are ready to begin!

Intro to Journaling

Before we start, we have to introduce a core concept to Iron Vault: journals.

Iron Vault has a lot of features to populate and manage your story journals. Many of its commands and actions actually record their results in a journal and render them in a nice way, so you can look back and see exactly what was happening with your mechanics, or tweak things as needed.

Since we're going to start interacting with these mechanics commands now, you should take a moment to create a "Journals" folder in your campaign folder. Inside it, create a "Session 0" note and open it. We'll use this to record all our upcoming Ask the Oracle rolls:

You can write anything you want here! Write about your thoughts so far on what you want out of your campaign, or what ideas you have for your character. Or just leave it blank for now, and we'll just use it as a scratch board for Oracle rolls.

To quickly address the first section on player safety: Iron Vault supports two safety mechanisms related to the safety strategies the Rulebook describes:

Making a move to Set a Flag, and then adding appropriate comments to it.
Using a Spoiler Callout to hide sensitive content behind an expandable box.

The Rest of the Owl

From here on, we'll walk through the four main steps in the Starforged Getting Started section: