The Ironpenny Poke
[the EYE-un-PEN-ee POHK]
Masters of Industry
The Poke expands industry at any cost, disrupting economies and reshaping cities. This section outlines how they push for dominance and what they do when their expansion is challenged.
How They Push for More Control
- Seizing cities through debt. Lending infrastructure, weapons, and factory equipment to struggling regions, then taking full control when they can't repay.
- Forcing out local industry. Setting up factory hubs that drive independent craftsmen and small-scale workshops into bankruptcy.
- Industrializing agriculture. Replacing traditional farming with factory-owned production to create total reliance on processed food and controlled supply chains.
- Exterminating resistance. Hiring private armies to crush striking workers, rebellious cities, and rogue industrialists who refuse to fall in line.
How They Fight Back When Pressured
- Cutting off industrial supplies. Refusing to sell weapons, tools, or machines to nations or factions that oppose them.
- Turning workers into collateral. Forcing entire populations into indentured servitude under the guise of economic restructuring.
- Shifting production to war industries. Pouring resources into arms manufacturing to escalate conflicts that benefit them.
- Burning cities that won't comply. If they can't have it, no one will; entire districts are reduced to ash rather than left in enemy hands.
The Poke on Other Factions
The Ironpenny Poke seeks partnerships that enhance industrial growth while suppressing those who threaten their control. They retaliate swiftly against disruptions, using their economic power to dominate relationships and showing contempt for rebellion or subterfuge.
Celtumpra. The Poke is unaware of the Celtumpra's existence, consistently misattributing their acts of magical sabotage to rivals or the revolutionary fervor of Zaharmak. This makes them blind to one of the most persistent and inexplicable threats to their industrial operations.
Colderyn. The relationship with Colderyn is a cold war born of dependency, as they are their primary supplier of raw materials. The Poke works to undermine them through corporate espionage, patent theft, and poaching key personnel to gain a long-term advantage.
Mustring. The syndicate is a necessary, if frustrating, business partner used to smuggle raw materials and circumvent Colderyn's price-gouging. Despite benefitting from undercutting Colderyn, The Poke is aware that the syndicate is also stealing from them and selling their goods to the other factions.
Navrow. The Poke hires Navrow smugglers as a means of transporting finished goods and acquiring materials outside of official channels. However, Navrow frequently raids trade ships carrying their goods and either undercuts The Poke or ransoms the goods back to them.
The Navtog. The Poke resents The Navtog's control over maritime trade and the tariffs they are forced to pay on imports and exports. They view the empire as an obstacle, and will use other factions like Navrow to bypass their control whenever possible.
The Osprey. The Poke sees The Osprey as a meddlesome and manipulative nuisance in the financial sphere, resentful of their ability to influence markets and interfere with their strategies. However, they will begrudgingly accept Osprey funding for their larger projects when their own capital is insufficient.
Zaharmak. The Poke's factory-cities and districts are the primary battleground of their war with Zaharmak, whose revolutionary ideology is a direct threat to their system of wage-slavery. They view the revolutionaries as a pestilence to be eradicated, using their own Iron Lords and local authorities to suppress any hint of dissent.
The Poke NPCs
The Poke's Barons dominate with wealth and force, commanding factories and workers like pieces on a board. Overseers drive laborers to exhaustion, balancing ruthless efficiency with fear of failure. Enforcers act without hesitation, breaking strikes and silencing dissent. Propagandists craft lies to pacify the masses, masking the cracks in the system with empty promises.
Major Players in The Poke
Jubal Pritchard. Jubal Pritchard enforces The Poke's control over Bellegrad's workers with the weary righteousness of a man convinced of his own necessity. Raised in the city's industrial sprawl, he sees the factories not as exploitation, but as the only thing holding back squalor and starvation. To him, strikes are tantrums thrown by ungrateful children, and his methods are paternalistic and cruel; he will make an example of one worker's family by cutting their food rations to "teach" the others the price of disobedience.
Iryna Volkov. Iryna Volkov is one of The Poke's most successful Factory Barons, a reputation built on the paranoid fear of returning to the gutters of her Marcian youth. She sees rivals, allies, and workers alike not as tools for advancement, but as threats who could take everything from her. Her factories have private crematoria to efficiently dispose of industrial "accidents," erasing any record that might create liability. Her private militias run a network of informants, and workers who complain about quotas are known to simply disappear overnight.
Kyros Menas. The Cyclops Forgewright Kyros Menas is the engineering genius behind The Poke's industrial might, and his own body is a testament to his work, with several limbs replaced by hissing, steam-powered prosthetics. His brilliance comes from a mind that makes no distinction between flesh and steel. He views workers as biological components of his machines, and his "innovations" in efficiency often involve designing tools that require a worker to have a limb amputated for optimal interface.
The Poke Adventures
The Ironpenny Poke embodies control through industry, with its Factory Barons managing labor and production like pieces on a game board. When you bring The Poke into your campaign, think of them as a faction where wealth and power are tightly bound to their ability to enforce order. Every strike, every rebellious whisper, and every disrupted shipment is a threat to their carefully measured dominance.
If adventurers ally with The Poke, they might find themselves working for a faction that values results above all else. A Baron might hire the party to resolve a labor dispute, transport experimental technology, or suppress industrial sabotage. Success earns them influence in the Poke's circles, but failure, or siding with workers, could burn bridges quickly. Every deal with The Poke is a tradeoff, offering resources and protection at the cost of morality and independence.
As a force in your campaign, The Poke offers tension between efficiency and unrest. Their leaders don't view themselves as villains but as necessary stewards of progress. Foremen enforce quotas while propagandists keep workers complacent, and private militias break resistance with cold precision. Whether the adventurers work against The Poke or navigate the chaos around them, the faction's presence should be felt in every factory, every town square, and every shipment delayed by rebellion.
To make The Poke matter, show the strain between their industrial machine and the cracks forming under pressure. A strike in a key factory might force adventurers into a conflict between Barons and workers, while an experimental weapon shipment could set off rivalries between factions vying for control. The Poke's strength isn't just in their machines, it's in the systems they've built to ensure that thirst for progress never runs dry.
Faction Scenario: The Ironpenny Poke
Primary Operation. To achieve dominance over the world's manufacturing and technological sectors. Their strategy is to control the means of production (the factories, the schematics, and the skilled labor) so completely that the suppliers of raw materials, like the Colderyn, are forced to sell to them on their terms.
Methods
Technological Appropriation. The Poke's Forgewrights are masters at reverse-engineering stolen technology, while their Coal Counsels identify promising innovations from independent guilds. Factory Barons then use the faction's immense legal and financial power to either litigate smaller inventors into bankruptcy and seize their patents, or to simply replicate the technology on a mass scale, crushing the original creator through market dominance.
Predatory Acquisition. Factory Barons, advised by their Coal Counsels, identify and target struggling independent workshops and guilds. They use their capital to manipulate resource prices and undercut their targets, driving them to the brink of collapse before acquiring their assets and absorbing their skilled labor for a fraction of their worth.
Wage-Slavery. The Poke creates a technically "free" but inescapable workforce. They trap thousands of workers in their factory-cities through a cycle of company-owned housing, payment in company scrip instead of real currency, and crushing debt, ensuring a permanent, dependent, and exploitable labor class.
Complications
Syndicate and Sedition. The Poke's operations are under constant threat from Zaharmak agents who find fertile ground for recruitment in the factory-cities, inciting strikes and sabotage. Meanwhile, both Navrow and Mustring will just as easily prey on finished goods in warehouses, trains, shipping lanes and caravans as act as a trading partner. The Osprey manipulates Poke buyers and sellers while also funding their rivals to profit from the chaos.
The Price of Progress. The Poke's primary rival, Colderyn, is a necessary evil, who acts as their primary supplier, but is in constant flux for how "generous" they are with their pricing, forcing The Poke to rely on smuggling networks from Mustring and Navrow. The Navtog control the sea lanes and extort tariffs on The Poke's imports and exports.
A Machine in Revolt. The faction's harsh conditions in the factory-cities are a constant catalyst for riots and illness. The relentless drive for quotas leads to corner-cutting, resulting in industrial disasters that destroy infrastructure and attract unwanted attention. Internally, Factory Barons viciously compete with one another for resources, influence, and labor, often sabotaging each other's operations to gain an advantage.
Adventure Hooks
The Betrayal. A Factory Baron for The Poke hires the party to investigate an independent guild master who is refusing a buyout. The Baron wants the party to "confirm" the rumor that the guild master's most famous innovation was actually stolen from his former partner, whom he killed.
The Orphanage. A Zaharmak Soapboxer is spreading rumors of children being held in an Ironpenny Poke orphanage that tortures them. However, if the party infiltrates the facility they find the children are safe, well-fed, and healthy, despite a curriculum designed to brainwash them into loyal, fanatical Iron Lords.
Quality Control. The Osprey hires the party to sabotage a Colderyn ore shipment destined for an Ironpenny Poke weapons factory by hiding several heavy sacks of a concentrated sulfur compound into the raw ore carts before they are loaded into the smelter. The act will affect the reputations of Colderyn and The Poke while producing weapons that are guaranteed to fail catastrophically in the field.