The Menagerie Is Open, And Five More Are Waiting

The Menagerie is open. It is the first of six attractions at the Iron Carnival, and it came with a gryphon fledgling, a lunar fox, a ku’ati kit and a bucking ram that will put you on the ground in front of a crowd. Stay on the ram and you earn bonus tickets for it.

Five more areas are waiting to open, and the players decide the order. The Carnival runs in Achaea, Aetolia, Lusternia and Starmourn until the end of September.

The troupe putting it back together

The Carnival was once a travelling spectacle that played otherworldly lands, with games and fairground amusements and food you probably should not ask too many questions about. Then it fell into disrepair. The troupe has been dragging the wreck between worlds ever since, looking for enough hands to put it back together.

Grimbeard runs the restoration. He is irascible and permanently behind. He also refuses tips, on the grounds that he already pays his performers properly. Percivale, the ringmaster, is foppish and no help at all.

Five more, and you pick the order

Six attractions are marked out on the grounds: The Big Top, The Side Show, The Midway, The Menagerie, The Fortune Teller and The Food Court. The Menagerie went up first because that is where people put their work.

There is a task board on the grounds with jobs on it. Fetch supplies, run deliveries, go and find the workers who wandered off. Ordinary carnival labour, except that where you spend your effort decides where the Carnival’s resources go.

Every five days the unopened area with the most contributions opens for good and stays open for the rest of the event. All four games feed the same total, which means Achaea and Starmourn are voting in the same election whether they like it or not, and an attraction can open because a few hundred people in a world you have never played decided they wanted it first. The next one unlocks in three days.

Once a lot opens

The jobs change. Crowd quests are live on the Menagerie now, so the work there is bringing people in and keeping them there. You will also need to calm the ringmaster down every so often, before he does something the troupe has to apologise for.

Somewhere in the five still to come are fortune telling, pie-eating contests, paint-pelting clowns, face painting, a sideshow, and chain-letter prophecies that travel from one game to the next, each with its own shops and minigames attached. Tickets come off the task board and off high scores, and they spend on the rewards and trinkets list, which we are still adding to while the event runs.

Shared denizens, and ghosts from other games

The denizens share personalities across every Iron Realms world, so the Grimbeard running you ragged in Lusternia is the same one running you ragged in Achaea.

And while you are wandering the grounds you will pass phantasmal spectres of visitors from another game. Those are real players, standing on the same ground in a different world. Greet one and your emote echoes across worlds.

The code is in the newsletter

There is a promotional code that hands you carnival tickets, enough to get at the rewards early, and it goes out by email to newsletter subscribers. If you are on the list, check your inbox. Then log in and type:

PROMOCODE REDEEM (the code from your email)

It works in all five games. Imperian players get 25 bound credits instead, since the Carnival did not travel there this year. The code runs until the end of August.

If you are not on the list, sign up today. Codes go out with the newsletter and nowhere else, so the only way to get the next one is to already be subscribed when it sends. Each game keeps its own list, so you can take the games you play and skip the rest.

Sign up for the newsletter.

Read HELP IRON CARNIVAL once you are in. There is a lot in it.

Pick a world and start playing.

Jeremy Saunders
Iron Realms Entertainment