OPERATION IRONWATCH:

A SHIELD Field Operations RPG

It's April 2008. You're in the mountains outside Gulmira, Afghanistan, watching a safehouse that nobody else knows matters yet.

You've been building this case for months — following the money, mapping the network, waiting for the right moment. Inside that hut is a laptop with financial records that link a major American arms manufacturer to a Ten Rings supply chain. Your partner is in position. Your window is closing.

Raid now and take the evidence. Or hold and see where the thread leads.

That's the first decision. It won't be the last.

What is this?

Operation Ironwatch is a single-player text RPG that runs entirely in your browser, powered by an AI Game Master. You play a senior SHIELD field agent running a financial crimes investigation that begins weeks before the events of Iron Man — and runs parallel to them all the way to the end.

If you've seen the film, you know what's coming. Your agent doesn't. The GM is running a 2008 world: no hindsight, no foreshadowing, no winking at the camera. What your agent learns, they learn through the investigation. Everything else is noise.

The GM adjudicates your actions, portrays the NPCs, and keeps the world honest. You decide what your agent does. There are no right answers and no scripted outcomes — only the mission, your judgment, and whatever you manage to pull off.

The operation

Eight scenes. One investigation. Months of fieldwork across two continents.

You'll make a call at a Ten Rings safehouse in the Afghan mountains that can't be taken back. You'll arrive at a convoy ambush site too late and work fast before the scene is locked down. You'll watch something impossible claw its way out of a cave in the Hindu Kush and have to write a sober report about it. You'll sit across a table from Tony Stark and try to get him to tell you something he has absolutely no intention of telling you.

At the end of it, everything breaks at once, your supervising officer is unreachable, and two figures in armoured suits are tearing through the walls of an industrial facility, and you'll still be a SHIELD agent with a job to do.

The film tells one story. This is the one happening in the background.

Your agent

At the start of the game you define your own SHIELD operative: name, background, and a specialty that shapes how the GM handles your capabilities throughout the campaign.

• Intelligence / Analysis: You read people. You build cases. You see the pattern before anyone else does.
• Tactical / Combat: You close distance and end problems. Your partner Ward handles the immediate threat; you handle the outcome.
• Infiltration / Covert Ops: You go where you shouldn't be and leave no trace you were there.
• Investigation / Financial Crimes: You follow money. You build prosecutable chains. You make cases stick in court, not just in the field.

Your partner for the operation is Grant Ward — junior, capable, loyal, and still learning what the job actually is (fans of Agents of SHELD will know him). Your supervising officer runs the operation from stateside. The NPCs are drawn from MCU canon and portrayed as they were in 2008: no knowledge they don't have yet, no behaviour that only makes sense in retrospect.

Built for the MCU fan who wants to be in it

Operation Ironwatch isn't a retelling of Iron Man. It runs alongside it. The film's events happen whether your agent is watching or not. Your job is the investigation underneath: the financial forensics, the field work, the slow accumulation of evidence that nobody's writing headlines about.

You already know how the big story ends. The question is what your agent does with the part of it they can see.

How it works

The game uses an AI language model as the Game Master — the same technology behind ChatGPT, Claude, and similar tools. You'll need an API key from a provider of your choice (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Mistral, or DeepSeek). See the setup instructions below for details. A full playthrough typically costs under $1.00 USD in API usage.

Your session saves automatically in your browser as you play. You can export it as a file at any time and reload it later, which could be useful if you want to back it up, continue on another device, or run the operation again with a different agent.

No installation. No account on this end. Open it in your browser and begin.

Content

Text only. No images, no audio. The atmosphere is in the writing, in what you and the GM build together. Mature themes handled with restraint: covert operations, violence at a distance, institutional pressure, moral ambiguity in a bureaucratic framework. Nothing gratuitous.

Fan-made and non-commercial. Marvel characters and settings are used for non-profit creative purposes. Not affiliated with Marvel, Disney, or any AI provider.