YMMV / Iron Kingdoms

• 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.
  • Given Privateer's rather tongue-in-cheek attitude, many of these are probably not accidental.
• Complete Monster: Toruk is the God-Emperor of the dragon race, although he considers his progeny the only thing that might pose a threat to him and desires to destroy them all. To accomplish this, he turns a whole set of island nations into a mix of undead and mutants to serve as his army, all with the intent of slaughtering as many of the inhabitants of the mainland as possible to make a bigger army.
• Crazy Is Cool: Don't even get us started on the Crazy Is Cool that goes into warjacks like the Deathjack or the Avatar of Menoth.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: 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, 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.
• Fan Nickname: "Darth Stryker" and "Poledance Haley" for the Epic versions of two Cygnaran warcasters, and "the elf b***" or "soulless elven hooker" for the Iosan mercenary Eiryss. This particular editor refers to the Epic version of Khadoran warcaster Vladimir Tzepesci as "Captain No-Peripheral-Vision."
  • Also, Cryxian bonejacks with two feet and no arms are nicknamed "chickens," while some Dwarven warjacks with two very flat feet, no arms and a gun implanted on their backs are called "gun bunnies."
  • Gorman "Darkwing Duck" Di Wulfe, Rogue Alchemist.
  • Pimp Daddy Thagrosh. His nickname comes from the fact that he is the only male Warlock of the Legion of Everblight.
  • Banelord "Tartarsauce" Tartarus. Banelord Tartarsauce was so widely used among the residents of the Privateer Press Forums that new-comers would be very confused, wondering what this new model was. It became such a problem that the phrase Tartarsauce now word-filters to Tartarus.
  • "Madeleine Corb-ho" for Madelyn Corbeau, Ordic Courtesan. More popularly referred to simply as "The Whore," because she will work for every WARMACHINE faction, even the Protectorate and Cryx and the lore saying she has lovers everywhere. In the game she also has an ability called seduction
  • Lich Lord Asphyxious is charmingly shortened to 'Gaspy'.
  • Lich Lord Terminus, on the other hand, is often nicknamed "the Cryxian Rape-Train" or "Cryxian Rape Engine" due to his ridiculous combat abilities as well as his ability to heal himself by sacrificing his undead minions, and the resurrecting them again to do it again.
  • At least a few people online have taken to calling the Fell Caller career in the 2012 RPG "Trollvahkiin"
  • The cross compatibility of the miniture games has earned then the combined Fan name of 'warmahordes'.
  • The fully equipped Winter Guard unit is better known as the "Winter Guard Deathstar".
  • Kovnik Jozef Grigorovich, is usually shortened to Kovnik Joe.
• Game-Breaker: Lots of things, especially before the Mk. II revamp. To give some examples:
  • Flying models were especially dangerous as they could fly over enemies without fearing free-strikes. Thus you could just send a flyer behind enemy line and screw them over.
  • Legion's Incubi unit caused Fear (in that models that were not immune to Fear must pass a command check (roll low enough on two dice) or forfeit their action and flee), but they didn't start the fight on the field. Whenever one of your mooks got killed, you had the option to immediately replace it with in Incubus model. And that freshly hatched Incubus would immediately call for command check.
  • Epic Asphyxious' feat had to be nerfed twice. Let that sink in.
  • During Mk II. epic Haley's amazing feat and strong spell list made her an extremely difficult opponent. Being effective against almost any other faction, regardless of their warlock or warcaster.
  • The whole Cryx faction could be considered this, as many players bring a "normal" list and an "anti-Cryx" list to tournaments.
  • On release Butcher 3 was possibly the most powerful assassination caster in the game. With a maximum threat range of nearly two feet, and a spell list that allowed him to cleave through screening units and pull his target towards him.
• Gameplay Derailment: While players were encouraged to balance lists between battle groups and infantry, in practice this was rarely the case. The difficulty of running more than a few warjacks effectivly made Warmachine armies 'jack light and infantry heavy. While the relative ease of running warbeasts made the opposite true for Hordes. In some cases warmachine lists would have only one warjack, while hordes lists would have no infantry besides support models.
  • This became so prevalent that the designers went out of their way to make sure it wouldn't happen again in Mk. III Making warjacks easier to support, and tripling the allowance of free points to buy warjacks and warbeasts with.
• Goddamned Bats: Whelps; they pop out of warbeasts when they take damage, blocking charge lanes and providing negatives to enemy melee attacks.
• High-Tier Scrappy:
  • Cryx was despised and hands down the most broken faction in Mk II. With cheap, nasty horde units, hard to counter abilities, and a "weakness" largely compensated by the design philosophy of the game, Cryx dominated competitive play. Their tournament presence was so insane that players had to bring secondary "anti-Cryx" lists geared entirely towards fighting them to even have a chance of competing.
  • The Legion of Everblight, their Hordes counterpart, which also benefits disproportionately from the game's aggression-friendly design philosophy. You know a faction's got problems when it's got some of the best infantry in the game, but no one bothers taking them because their warbeasts are just that good. Between Eyeless Sight allowing them to ignore half the rules, a profusion of Flight or Pathfinder letting them ignore most of the other half, an incredibly-strong ranged toolbox, and some of the most powerful feats in either gameline, the only reason the Legion isn't more hated than Cryx is that it's not quite as popular. It got nerfed in Mk. III, though.
• Low-Tier Letdown: The initial changes to Skorne in Mk. III were panned by a large part of the player base, some of whom considered the faction unplayable at the time. The designers even admitted that this needed to be corrected and would give them an overhaul a little while after.
• Memetic Badass: Some Retribution of Scyrah players refer to Garryth, Blade of Retribution as The Most Interesting Elf in the World.
• Memetic Mutation: Bordering on Never Live It Down; "Play like you got a pair!" has led to people referring to over-masculine, somewhat misogynist gameplay as "the Page 5 Attitude".
• 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.
  • 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...
  • Turok, well, most anything involve Cryx has SOMEBODY crossing it, so even if it's not him, he's usually in part responsible for it.
  • Orsus crossed it when he slaughtered a surrendering garrison along with his own men when they tried to talk him out of it. Pretty much the only reason he's still in the army is because the Empress keeps him there.
• 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!
• Scrappy Mechanic: In the lead-up to Mk. III game designers mentioned that the entire "psychology" section of the rules was basically a relic of previous wargames that doesn't really add a great deal to the game, and its attendant rulesets were to be entirely removed or reworked.
  • Deep Water terrain was near universally hated by players in Mk II, serving no purpose other than to screw over models or units without the Amphibious trait. Damaging anything that ended its activation in it, while removing any warjacks that did so from play. Because of this Deep Water was rarely seen on boards and completely removed from the game in Mk. III.
• 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.