The History of
The Iron Fellowship

The origins of the Iron Fellowship name, as told by Chris "sfounder" Marsh:

Sometime between 1996-1998 I started a home game of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons for my friends while I was an undergraduate at UNH. This campaign itself was a sequel of sorts to one I never got off the ground. While not my preferred setting, I started it in the Forgotten Realms. When Wizards of the Coast acquired TSR, they relaunched Greyhawk. It was the setting I REALLY wanted to run. So I did what any teenaged Übernerd would do. I introduced Spelljammer to port my campaign. In game continuity has always been an important part of my enjoyment. It was the first Spelljammer session in Barrington, NH that I first rolled dice with Mike. The campaign hook was a prophesy which predicted the fates of a varied group of adventurers, each carrying "The Spirit of Kings."

Eager to play the new content, I dove into Greyhawk with both feet. Then, without forums for posting, we played a lot over email. Sadly, the address I used then is gone. The website I kept for that campaign is also gone. In my desire to maintain continuity and verisimilitude, I did build and save one file from that site, a "super timeline" that covered the events of both that campaign and the one that followed it. In my typical style, the timeline triangulates the timelines of the Realms, Dragonlance, and Greyhawk.

The first of the Greyhawk modules was "The Star Cairns." The module opens with the party, tasked by Jallarzi Sallavarian of the Circle of Eight, searching the Abbor-Alz mountains for derro activity. The physical description for those mountains has always struck me as similar to the White Mountains of New Hampshire. The module allows the characters to search for the various levels in a sandbox fashion, but they were strictly leveled in an old school AD&D style. This, ultimately, is the source of the name Iron Fellowship - because I rolled by the book for wandering monsters. The adventure is designed for 4 to 8 PCs of levels 5-8. On page 4, on a roll of 96-100 the party encountered an iron golem.

Tremendously outmatched, they had next to no chance. This was before the advent of 3.0 when I switched to strict tactical mapping. In a "theater of the mind" combat the party kited their way through the fight. They overspent their Horn of Blasting, destroying it in the process. Ultimately though, they won by the skin of their teeth.

The name "The Iron Fellowship" was born of a wandering monster encounter