I’m Caio, a programmer from Brazil with a passion for tabletop RPGs. I made this blog to share DM advice, the history of my homebrew world, and interesting stuff I create on the intersection between technology and games. Currently, it serves mostly as the home for The Dice Society podcast.

Who knows what it will be in the future…

If you want to get in touch, you can send me an email, at me on Bluesky or open an issue on GitHub.

Hello, everyone!

Today is Draw Steel’s first anniversary and the start of the third edition of Jams of the Timescape, a Draw Steel game jam organized by Jon de Nor and I.

In this video I’m going to answer your most important questions about the event: what’s a game jam, what are the rules, how our new ranking system works, and, obviously, what are the prizes.

But, if you don’t want to hear my voice anymore, you can just head over to TimescapeJams.com to enter the Jam and to join our Discord server where you can chat with other participants.

Ok, for starters, what is a game jam? Well, game jams are events where participants make games or game supplements from scratch with a deadline.

In Jams of the Timescape, jammers make Draw Steel-compatible products and submit them on Itch.io. Our events are all beginner friendly and the main goals are to have fun and develop some game design skills.

To spice it up a little, entries are then ranked and the top three win some nice goodies. But that’s secondary, because just participating is a blast!

Ok, so how does this Jam work? Unlike our previous editions, this time we’re not telling you what to make. You’re free to submit any Draw Steel-compatible product as long as it fits the theme and follows the rules.

Do you want to make a birthday cake ancestry? You got it. Do you want to make complications for each zodiac sign? Sure. Do you want to make a monster for each season? Do it.

Again, your submission just has to loosely fit the theme “One Year of Draw Steel” and follow the rules.

And what are the rules? They’re pretty straightforward: you can only submit one product, it must be a PDF document with two pages at most, it has to be created originally for the jam, and it must remain free or pay-what-you-want on Itch until the voting phase is over.

Besides these rules, your product should, of course, follow the Draw Steel Creators License, not use any AI, and not contain any bigoted content.

You’ll note that the rules don’t stop you from having collaborators, so feel free to join other creators on the Discord if you need some help.

And another great tip for beginners is submitting your entry as soon as possible and then updating your product on Itch as you revise it. This way there’s a smaller risk of something going wrong at the last minute.

For example, if someone notices that your PDF has three pages instead of two, you can still fix that before the deadline! Don’t leave your submission to the last second.

But speaking of deadlines, what are the important dates for this event? The Jam itself has already begun, so you can get started now!

Then, you have until August 21st to make your submission. At that point, voting will start and y’all have until August 28th to rate each other’s entries.

Finally, on September 04th, I’ll post a video announcing the three winners here on my channel.

And how are the winners going to be chosen? Ok, this is one of the major departures from our previous editions, so listen up!

Because last time we had so many entries, the judges simply couldn’t go through all of them. So this time we want the jammers themselves — you — to vote on each other.

Once voting opens, you’ll be assigned five entries at random. After you read each of them, you’ll see four different criteria to grade on a five-star scale: Usability, Creativity, Enjoyment, and Theme.

You can then grade more entries, but these five random ones are the minimum. So you should not have to read more than 10 pages, which I think is pretty doable in a week.

Anyway, the criteria are, of course, deeply personal and that’s totally fine! We’re hoping that the wisdom of the crowds balances stuff out, we’ll see.

You’ll also note that there is no criteria for art and this is on purpose. This time we’re trying to focus on words, not presentation. If your submission is readable, we’re happy with it.

Ok, once voting is done, the grades are averaged out and the three submissions with the best average grades are crowned the winners.

And what do the top-three ranked entries get? Well, thanks to our amazing sponsor, Tabletop Nonsenseverse, we have some great prizes waiting for you.

Third place gets issues 1 through 6 of the Blacksmith’s Guild, while second place gets all currently published issues.

But first place wins all currently published issues of the Blacksmith’s Guild and a 12-month subscription to their Patreon.

Again, thank you so so much to Tabletop Nonsenseverse for sponsoring this edition of the Jams of the Timescape.

And, I think that’s everything I had to say! If you have any more questions, please join our Discord server with the link in the description and ask away.

See you all for the winners’ video, thank you very much, and goodbye.

We’re so back.

Hello, everyone!

The rumors are true! Jon de Nor and I are back for Jams of the Timescape: Volume 3!

If you’re not aware, Jams of the Timescape is a series of game jams that are meant to get you — yes, you — to finally start making your own stuff for Draw Steel.

And before you click away because you think you can’t do it: they are all targeted at beginners, no previous skill necessary. The task is always short and requirements are minimal.

So start warming up your creative muscles because Volume 3 is gonna be a doozy…

Like last time, we’re not gonna spoil the theme nor the rules just yet. For that you’ll have to wait until the Jam officially starts in a week, on July 31st.

But I do have a couple of spoilers to give you right now.

The first one has to do with voting. Previously we had a panel of judges rating the entries but, with the immense success of Volume 2, this time we’ll let you, the jammers, vote on entries.

And the second spoiler is that, once again, we have a cool sponsor for the prizes! This time, Tabletop Nonsenseverse is going to award the top three entries with some sweet loot.

So, if you’re interested in participating in Jams of the Timescape: Volume 3 and want to be notified when it starts, subscribe to my channel and join the official Discord with the link in the description.

Until then, good luck trying to guess the theme…

Roll-Over

Roll-under systems are cool, but they have a bug: your stats go up, yet you’re hoping for low results. In roll-over, you want to roll high because your stats represent bad things that have to be overcome (Weakness, Fear, etc.) As you level up, your stats go down. This system seems to go well with horror games.

Gear 20

In this system you’re usually rolling 1d20 + modifier versus a target number. During combat, as the stakes rise, your modifiers go up and your die size goes down, representing that you’re becoming more focused and more powerful. This system seems to go well with superheroic games with mid-combat transformations (Super Saiyan, Gear 2, etc.)

Karmic Dice

No one likes rolling poorly all night… So why not balance things out? In this system, your target number is always the last number you have rolled — fumbles are almost always followed by easy wins, and vice versa. Can this be abused by players? I’m sure it can’t. This system seems to go well with narrative games.

Two-Hit

Here you roll two dice and count how how many “hit”, i.e., meet or beat the target number. You get a failure on zero hits, a mixed success on one hit, and a full success on two hits. This system seems to go well with games that want both degrees of success and GM-set target numbers.

Lock ’n’ Roll

This system requires dice with half “miss” faces and half “hit” faces (like VtM dice.) Then you just need to roll four dice and count hits: zero or one is a failure, two is a mixed success, and three or four is a full success. When rolling with advantage/disadvantage, lock up to two dice on a hit/miss and roll the rest. This system seems to go well with dice goblins that want maximum legibility.

Nudge

This system also requires dice with half “miss” faces and half “hit” faces, here called “nudge” dice. Now roll a regular 1d20, but include one or more nudge dice when rolling with advantage or disadvantage. On advantage/disadvantage, each hit on the nudge dice increases/decreases the degree of success by one. This system seems to go well with games that have many degrees of success, but want to avoid addition at all costs.

The Ur-System

Flip a coin. You succeed on heads. This system seems to go well with games that could not give less of a f***.

Intro

Hello, everyone!

Welcome to what is probably the last video in the How to Draw Steel series! At this point you already know about the power roll, tests, abilities, character creation, and combat.

So today we’re gonna discuss Draw Steel’s systems for the two other pillars of play. I’m talking, of course, about montage tests and negotiations!

And, if by the end up liking these mechanics, make sure to check out my upcoming Draw Steel supplement: Hooked on Crafting. More about it after the video.

Montages

Given that Draw Steel calls itself a cinematic game, I think ‘montage test’ is the perfect name for its instantiation of skill challenges.

As you can probably imagine, this mechanic is deployed when the heroes want to tackle a large task together, but we don’t want to narrate absolutely everything as we would in a regular scene.

So, like in a movie montage, we’re only gonna see snippets of each hero doing something that takes the party closer to their collective goal, be it crossing a dangerous swamp or prepping a village before a siege.

In practice, a montage test is a sequence of individual tests whose outcomes count towards a global limit.

Before beginning the montage, the director must set its success and failure limits. For five heroes, for example, a montage test of moderate difficulty has a success limit of 6 and a failure limit of 4.

In this case, if the heroes get 6 successes on their tests before they get 4 failures, or if they get 4 failures before 6 successes, the montage test ends!

To start the montage test, the director sets the scene by describing what kinds of challenges the heroes need to overcome in order to achieve their goal.

It’s also a good idea to set the stakes in case they fail because, if there is no pressure at all, then we can just assume that the heroes take their sweet time and succeed.

Next, each hero, one by one, picks a challenge and tries to overcome it with an appropriate test.

The director sets the difficulty for each test individually, so a good idea might be rewarded with an easier test or even an automatic success.

But there are limitations. An individual hero cannot use the same skill twice, and two heroes cannot try to overcome the same challenge! Both of these rules keep the players from cheesing the whole thing.

In case a hero doesn’t have a good idea for how they can overcome one of the challenges without breaking the rules, it’s always possible for them to assist another hero in their test.

But there’s no automatic advantage here, folks! Assisting someone in Draw Steel involves making a test whose outcome can either help or hinder the assisted hero.

If every hero has gone, but neither the success limit nor the failure limit has been reached, it’s time for round two.

This second round is the last chance the heroes have of beating the montage test, otherwise it automatically ends to avoid a slog.

In between the two rounds the director can make an interlude, introducing other challenges, raising the stakes, or just adding some flavor.

Once the montage is over it’s time to determine the final outcome.

If the montage ended because the success limit was reached before the failure limit, the heroes achieve a total success: they do what they wanted and don’t incur any complications.

However, if the failure limit was reached before the success limit or if the time ran out, there are two options.

If the heroes got at least two more successes than failures, they achieve a partial success: they do what they wanted, but incur a complication.

Finally, if the heroes didn’t get at least two more successes than failures, they suffer a total failure: they don’t do what they wanted.

So, to summarize: montage tests are a sequence of regular tests meant to condense a long collaboration between the heroes into a fun mini-game.

The director announces the challenges and the heroes have two rounds to overcome them. If they reach the success limit before the failure limit, they achieve a total success.

Otherwise, the montage ends either when the failure limit is reached or when the time is up.

Then we check if they have two successes or more than they have failures. If so, they achieve a partial success; if not, they suffer a total failure.

Negotiations

Recently another small youtuber covered negotiations in one of her videos, but I’ll cover it again here just to be safe.

Negotiations are Draw Steel’s system for important roleplaying scenes where the heroes are trying to convince an NPC to help them out.

Like, think of those key plot moments when the PCs are arguing with a king, asking him to lend his army to their cause! Stuff like that.

Ultimately, the goal of negotiations is to help the director and the players think about NPCs complexly; people with their own motivations who might be persuaded by the right kind of argument.

In practice negotiations are, like montages, a sequence of tests, but without as much structure on the players’ side.

Before a negotiation begins, the director sets the NPC’s start starting attitude: their interest and their patience.

Both of these numbers go from 0 to 5, but interest usually starts between 1 and 3, while patience starts between 2 and 5. Patience, by the way, can be affected by the the heroes’ languages.

Anyway, the heroes’ objective will be to raise the NPC’s interest as much as possible before their patience runs out.

Next the director must choose the NPC’s motivations and pitfalls from the 12 options listed in the book.

These are the kinds of arguments that will work particularly well (and poorly) if brought up by the heroes. They are things like justice, freedom, or vengeance.

Now it’s time for the heroes to start the negotiation by making an argument that tries to sway the NPC.

To determine how well the argument worked, the PC makes a test using a relevant skill and the outcome will depend on whether they touched on a motivation or pitfall.

If the argument didn’t appeal to a motivation or used a pitfall, then the outcomes look like this.

Notice that only on a tier 3 the NPC’s interest will actually increase.

If the argument touches on a motivation, then the outcomes look like this.

Now it’s much easier for the interest to increase, making it very advantageous for the PCs to think carefully about what this NPC really values.

If the argument touches on a pitfall, then no test is necessary: both the NPC’s interest and patience decrease by 1.

There is also a whole impression score here that relates to the PCs’ renown, but I’m not going to get into that right now.

Check out page 288 of the Heroes book to learn more

Going back to the negotiation, now it’s time for the NPC to make an offer based on their current interest.

Since that ranges from 0 to 5, we have six total options. From worst to best: no and, no, no but, yes but, yes, yes and. Let me clarify.

On interest 0, the NPC refuses the heroes’ offer and will try to obstruct their plans. The negotiation stops immediately.

On interest 1, the NPC flat out refuses the offer.

On interest 2, the NPC refuses the offer, but they might help in some other less impactful way.

On interest 3, the NPC accepts the heroes’ offer, but asks for something extra in return.

On interest 4, the NPC simply accepts the offer.

Finally, on interest 5, the NPC accepts the offer and sweetens the deal with some additional help. They can stop negotiating.

Once this first offer is made, the NPC indicates if they still have patience left. If so, it’s up to the heroes to decide if they want to keep making arguments or if they take the offer.

If the PCs are willing and able to continue making arguments, the NPC’s interest will fluctuate up or down based on the tests, and their patience will steadily decrease.

The heroes can even make tests to uncover the NPC’s motivations if they haven’t done their research before showing up to negotiate.

At some point the negotiation will stop. There are four ways for this to happen: interest drops to 0, interest reaches 5, patience drops to 0, or the heroes choose to stop making arguments.

At that point the NPC makes a final offer based on their current interest. Take it or leave it.

To summarize: negotiations are a system for momentous encounters where the PCs are trying to convince an NPC to do something.

This NPC will have an interest score, a patience score, motivations, and pitfalls.

Then the PCs must make arguments that get resolved as tests. These can have different effects on the NPC’s scores depending on whether the argument used a motivation or pitfall.

Finally, the NPC will make offers based on their interest until the negotiation is done. This can happen on interest 0 or 5, patience 0, or when the heroes are done.

And that’s it for montage tests and negotiations!

If you found them interesting, I’m almost done with the first draft of Hooked on Crafting.

This is my supplement with a quest hook for every single treasure in the Heroes book. And, right now, it has more than 50 montages and 50 negotiations.

Links for Hooked on Crafting, and my Patreon, and my Discord will be in the description.

Until next time! See ya.

Intro

Hello, everyone!

Draw Steel is a pretty cool game, if I can say so myself, but it’s still medieval fantasy… A nice flavor of medieval fantasy, but medieval fantasy nonetheless.

What would happen, though, if you took the Draw Steel engine and put it on a different setting? Say… ’90s Tokyo?

Night Shift: Devil Division

You’ve probably already heard about it, but Night Shift: Devil Division is an upcoming TTRPG by Slightly Reckless Games that’s currently crowdfunding on BackerKit.

This will be, as far as I can tell, the first Powered by Draw Steel system and I couldn’t be more excited about it!

In Devil Division, you play as a “badass shonen anime character kicking the piss out of grotesque Devils and Monsters in 199X Tokyo.”

Let me be clear: this tactical, heroic, cinematic, ANIME! This alone would be enough to get me interested.

But also look. At. This. Art! No, seriously. Look at it! Look at it! This is crazy!

I know it sounds like it, but this video is not an ad. I’m not being payed to talk about Devil Division; I haven’t even gotten a free copy.

I was just really hyped for this new game and Sacha Lightfoot, the lead writer for the project, agreed to talk to me about some of the cool things they’re working on.

And there’s plenty of cool stuff!

The Devil Division system is still Draw Steel at its core, but with some interesting tweaks to make it more streamlined and, at the same time, better suited for a Jujutsu Kaisen-style game.

For example, instead of individually-named heroic resources, all classes gain Momentum. Each one does it in a different way, but the name is the same.

Also, they have consolidated hero tokens and surges, creating a single pool of what they’re calling Adrenaline.

But there are also bigger changes like, instead of a single renown track, Devil Division has two: clearance and signature.

Clearance being your reputation with the eponymous Division, the for sure good people that you’re working for.

While signature is your reward for getting closer to the devils that you’re supposed to be killing and capturing.

And, unlike renown, clearance and signature give you access to different kinds of cool stuff: better loadouts and pay, or access to Under Tokyo black markets and cursed items.

Other major additions are ascendant techniques and vault techniques.

The former being powerful, class-specific abilities that you must unlock before using.

And, when you do unlock one during combat, you can narrate a flashback explaining how you got it.

The latter, though, are probably my favorite thing about this game.

Because vault techniques are abilities that you can acquire by negotiating with the devils that you’ve detained and brought back to the Division.

Which transforms the past villains of your campaign into plot engines that just keep on giving.

At this point this is me just gushing! But there’s still more!

They’re also simplifying negotiations, replacing downtime projects with a less granular “on leave” mechanic, adding banter between rounds, and creating a chase system based on montages that uses a randomized deck of obstacles.

And, like, this is still not set in stone yet, but there could be up to 12 character classes? All with tactical guidance for players?

This is gonna be good, y’all.

Anyway, if you thought this sounds cool, make sure to check out Night Shift: Devil Division on BackerKit right now.

It’s gonna be over 600 pages and you don’t need the Draw Steel books to play it. The link is in the description.

See ya!

Intro

Hello, everyone!

Are you ready for the most important episode of How to Draw Steel? We’ve talked about the Power Roll, we’ve talked about abilities, we’ve talked about character creation… Now it’s finally time to talk about combat!

If you’re used to games like D&D, there’s a lot here that will feel familiar to you, but there’s also a bunch of cool new stuff to learn. Open your books on chapter 10 and let’s get started!

Draw Steel!

When push comes to shove and the monsters need a swift kick in the butt, it’s time to draw steel!

Before combat begins, the Director has got to set up a gridded map that is going to represent the battlefield. Once every mini or virtual token is in place, it’s time to determine which side goes first.

If all the creatures on one side are surprised, the other side acts first. If no side is surprised, one of the players simply rolls a d10: on a 6 or higher, the heroes start; on a 5 or lower, it’s the monsters.

Whichever side won initiative selects a member to take their turn. Once they’re done, the other side selects a member, and so on, back and forth. Weaker monsters might be grouped into squads, all acting in together, but that still counts as only one monster turn.

The only exception to this zipper initiative is when every creature on one side has already acted, but the other side still has creatures to go. In this situation, everybody who hasn’t taken their turn yet just acts until everyone is done.

At this point, the round is over and we can start all over again! The side who won initiative kicks off the round and then the sides alternate turns until the round is over.

Stats & Resources

I know detours suck, but before we discuss what you can do on your turn, let’s take a look at the stats and resources that affect your hero’s ability to fight. I’ve talked about most of these before, so we just need a refresher.

With the character sheet next to me, let’s go one by one. First come your characteristics: the numbers you add to your Power Rolls and use to resist potencies.

Below them, we have four stats: size (how many squares you occupy on the grid), speed (how many squares you can move on your turn), disengage (how many squares you can shift when disengaging), and stability (how many squares you subtract from forced movement). We’ll talk more about these in a sec.

Next comes stamina, your most important resource, your capacity to take damage. When you have fewer than half your maximum stamina, you’re considered winded; this has no special effect on its own, but some abilities might interact with the winded status.

Once you’re at 0 stamina or lower, you’re considered dying. At this point you get the bleeding condition and can’t use the Catch Breath maneuver. Again, more on these in a second.

Finally, if you reach negative half your max, you die. Time to make a new character.

Closely tied to stamina are your recoveries. When you use one of these, you regain one-third of your stamina maximum. Recoveries are spent when you Catch Breath, but also when you are healed by a Conduit, are inspired by a Tactician, etc.

Recoveries are only refreshed on a respite, so use them wisely!

Heroic resources are what fuel your hero’s most powerful abilities. Each class has its own way of gaining and spending their heroic resource, so check out the previous video in the series for more information.

Finally, surges are a universal boost to effectiveness. You can only gain these when an ability tell you to, but then you can spend them to deal extra damage or temporarily increase your potencies.

Turns

With the core concepts out of the way, it’s time for you to take your turn. Like many other RPGs, Draw Steel has four action types: move actions, maneuvers, main actions, and triggered actions.

During your turn, you get one move action, one maneuver, and one main action. At any point in the round, when its trigger is satisfied, you also get to take one triggered action.

Starting with move actions, these are by far the simplest. 90% of the time, you’ll be using it to Advance, which just means that you can move a number of squares up to your speed.

And yes, you can break up this movement to use other actions, but no, diagonals don’t cost additional movement!

The rest of the time, you’ll be using your move to Disengage, which allows you to shift a number of squares equal the disengage value on your character sheet. Shifting, by the way, just means you don’t provoke opportunity attacks.

Now for maneuvers. This is like a bonus action, but every hero in Draw Steel has something cool to do with it: Tacticians get Mark, Censors get Judgement, Elementalists get Practical Magic, and on, and on, and on…

If you don’t have a reason to use your class’ maneuver, there are many backups: aiding an attack, grabbing, hiding, knocking a foe back, standing up, etc. The most important of these is the Catch Breath maneuver, which allows you to use a Recovery on yourself.

The star of the show, though, is your main action. This is for your damage-dealing class abilities, the main course of your turn. Other, safer options include Defend, Heal an ally, or just use a second maneuver.

However, if you’re far from the enemies, you’ll want to use the Charge main action, which lets you advance in a straight line and use a melee free strike at the end of this movement.

The coolest part about main actions, though, is that you can crit on a natural 19 or 20. If this happens, you get a second main action just to spite your enemies.

The final action type is the triggered action. This can be used at any moment during the round, not just on your turn. Mostly you’ll use it to activate your class’ trigger, like the Null’s Inertial Shield or the Shadow’s Hesitation Is Weakness.

Opportunity Attacks, unlike in D&D, are free triggered actions, meaning you can use a melee free strike every single time a creature moves away from you without shifting.

By the way, make sure to check your triggers and maneuvers to see if they are free, because these are super fun to use and can totally change your perception of an ability’s power level.

Victory!

Now that you know how to take your turn, you’re all set to win your first combat. Once the fight is over, there are just a few things you need to know.

Depending on the difficulty of the encounter, you’ll gain one or two victories. These are tracked at the top right corner of you character sheet, and they determine with how many heroic resources you start the next combat.

This means that the more you fight, the more powerful you get! But also, you’ll have fewer recoveries. At some point you’ll feel the need to take a Respite.

Respites take 24 hours in Draw Steel. They reset your Recoveries and convert all your victories into XP. Once you reach 16 XP, you level up; congratulations!

During a Respite, you can also engage in downtime projects: crafting, research, or just fishing. Don’t miss out on these systems! They’re one of the best parts of the game, I promise.

Tactics

Before I leave you for today, let’s talk a little bit about tactics. When you play Draw Steel, you’ll notice that taking your turn almost becomes a collective activity. Many abilities interact with or can set up your allies’ turns.

Discussing tactics in this game is part of the fun! Do not underestimate how much more effective you can become just by aligning your intentions with the other players.

Draw Steel has many mechanics that can affect your strategy during combat. Forced movement, for example, is a big part of this game. Abilities can push or pull creatures, and there are robust rules for colliding with objects and even for breaking through walls!

And conditions are also super important! Remember the dying status? Well, it imposes the bleeding condition, which causes you to take damage equal to 1d6 + your level every time you use a main action or a triggered action!

I simply can’t talk about everything in this book that is relevant to combat. There are damage types, flanking, cover, concealment, falling, difficult terrain, high ground, and the list goes on!

My suggestion is that you look through the glossary index on page 10 (well, actually X) to see everything that might come up during combat. Then, when it comes up, you know where to look for answers.

So, to summarize: combat starts with a d10 roll to determine who goes first, then sides alternate until the round is over; on your turn you get a move action, a maneuver, and a main action; you also get a triggered action to use at any point during the round.

Now, with combat out of the way, the next video will be all about out-of-combat mechanics: Montages and Negotiations. See you then!

Intro

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the twenty-fourth episode of The Dice Society Podcast! My name is Caio and this is a show about Draw Steel, a tactical roleplaying game made by MCDM.

Community & News

• JotT #2: Ancestries of the Timescape, by Jon de Nor and The Dice Society
• Stawl Supplement Index, by Jon de Nor
• Nightmare Scenario, by Mattelonian
• The Kiln, by Gub
• It’s Complicated, by Rise Heroes Rise!
• Weapons of Lore, by Jeff Stevens Games
• The Two-Soul, by speep
• Stormbreakers, by Onkeen
• The Snow Queen’s Fury, by Emi
• The MATTER of an OVERMIND, by DimaJeydar
• Doom of the Dragon Grafter, by Leon Barillaro
• The Scion - A Spellsword Class, by SurfingBird
• The Vessel, by Mattelonian
• Carnophage Booklet, by Shadowhand Gaming
• Ratcatcher Magazine Issue 02, by Tidal Wave Games
• The Blacksmith’s Guild Issue #5, by Max_Falcon_(EST) and many others
• Translated Rule Graphics, by KJTailor
• Player Map of Blackbottom, by Zekatar
• Vintage Cover Template, by Jenny [REDACTED]
• Draw Steel Community+ Glyphs Font, by Jonas Tintenseher
• Gub’s Theory of Mapping, by Gub
• Draw Steel Adventure Tools, by Alphastream
• Party Continuity, by Seamus
• Power Rolls from Stat Blocks, by Seamus

Crows

No transcript here :(

Outro

And that’s it for today, folks. I hope you guys enjoyed the episode!

A special thanks to my current Initiate and Adept-level patrons: Seth Lang, Tomas Rodriguez, TDAWS, Brandon West, and Antan Karmola! Thank you all so so much <3

Make sure to check out this episode’s description for links to all of my socials, The Dice Society’s mailing list, and my Discord server. I’ll also leave some links there to James’, Matt’s, and MCDM’s accounts so you can follow them too.

See you all next time, thank you very much, and goodbye!

Intro

Hello, everyone!

In the previous videos of this series we’ve talked about what Draw Steel is, the Power Roll, tests, combat abilities, and potencies. Now it’s finally time to create our first character!

We’re gonna go through the 10 steps outlined in chapter two of the Heroes Book and, to illustrate the whole process, we’re gonna make a guy-with-a-sword together. Let’s see just how cool this character concept can get in Draw Steel…

Step 1: Think

Yes, the first step is literally called ’think’. The book prompts us with a few questions, and, if you’re already familiar with the system, you can already start getting some ideas.

For the purposes of this video, let’s keep it pretty broad: guy-with-a-sword and this artwork by MCDM’s own Grace Cheung. These are going to be our north star.

Step 2: Ancestry

Step two is choosing our ancestry. Draw Steel gives us some pretty incredible options, from classics like Dwarf and High Elf, to the more innovative like Memonek and Time Raider. Our guy is just a human, but he’s already pretty interesting!

Every ancestry in Draw Steel gets one or more signature traits and ours is called Detect the Supernatural. With it, we can pinpoint nearby supernatural objects and creatures even if we can’t see them.

Ancestries also get some purchaseable traits, so not every human is going to be the same as ours. To save time, let’s just go with the default options: Perseverance and Staying Power.

The former gives us an edge in tests made with Endurance, and causes the slowed condition to reduce our speed to 3 squares per turn instead of the usual 2. Staying Power just gives us two additional Recoveries.

What is a Recovery, you ask? Great question.

A hero’s capacity to keep fighting is measured by their Stamina, and, to recover Stamina, you have a special resource called Recoveries. When spent, a Recovery allows you to heal Stamina equal to one-third of your max.

Your number of Recoveries is determined by your class, so our guy-with-a-sword can heal more times than the average member of that class.

Step 3: Culture

On step three we get to choose our culture, which actually bundles four choices: language, environment, organization, and upbringing. These choices are going to summarize the “community that raised you.”

Language is easy: to start, you know Caelian (Draw Steel’s common) and one additional language. The default for humans is Vaslorian.

For the other three choices, we can stick to one of the suggested build. Since our guy looks like a knight, maybe, we’ll choose the knightly order archetypal culture.

For environment we get secluded, which gives us the Read Person skill by default. For organization we get bureaucratic, with the Persuade skill. And for upbringing we get Martial, with the Intimidate skill.

Step 4: Career

Next up is our hero’s career. This describes what they did before becoming a monster-slaying adventurer, and it provides us with more skills, a perk, and possibly languages, renown, or wealth.

We have loads of options here, from Agent to Watch Officer. Since our dude comes from a knightly order, how about we give him the soldier career?

This one asks us a few relevant questions like ‘what rank did they achieve?’, and gives us the following benefits: two skills (Alertness, and Endurance by default), two languages, an additional renown, and a perk (Teamwork by default).

Before you raise your hand, renown starts at zero for most heroes and it helps in negotiations. Perks are options that might help outside of combat; the Teamwork perk, for instance, gives you a benefit on montages. Both negotiations and montages will be the subject of another video.

The last thing we get from our career is an inciting incident! This is what happened to make your hero leave their career behind to become an adventurer. For our friend, I’m picking sole survivor:

“You were the last surviving member of your unit after an arduous battle or monstrous assault, surviving only through luck. You turned away from the life of a soldier then, seeking to become a hero who could stand against such threats.”

Step 5: Class

Now it’s time for the main course: our class! Draw Steel comes with nine classes, which resemble the classes from other heroic fantasy games, but with their own unique spins.

Matt Colville just did an hour-long class guide in his channel, so I’ll just summarize our options…

Censor is your typical holy warrior, specialized in one-on-one combat. Conduit is a priest that can both heal and destroy. Elementalist is a caster that can control the Timescape’s seven elements.

Fury is a rage machine tied to the Primordial Chaos. Null is an unarmed psionic fighter capable of suppressing magic. Shadow is an assassin that strikes with deadly speed.

Tactician is weapon master that excels in strategy. Talent is a psion that can manifest spells with their mind. And troubadour is a storyteller that can inspire allies and demoralize opponents.

I think it’s pretty clear that our guy-with-a-sword should be a tactician, so let’s see what we get at level 1!

For characteristics we start with a Might of 2 and a Reason of 2. For the other three, we pick one of the default arrays; I’m going to set our Agility to 1, our Intuition to 1, and our Presence to -1 (just because he looks very bored).

Our potencies are based on Reason, our starting Stamina is 21, and we get 10 Recoveries… Plus two from our ancestry, remember? We can also pick three skills, which are Lead, Monsters, and Strategy by default.

Every class is going to look pretty similar up until this point, when we start making some more interesting choices…

The first of those is our subclass. Draw Steel heroes already start level 1 with a subclass, and it determines some pretty important things about their fighting style.

The standard tactician subclass is the Vanguard, a warrior that leads from the front. But before we see what we get from our subclass, let’s take a detour into our heroic resource.

One of the core elements of Draw Steel are heroic resources. Each class has their own resource that they gain during combat and can spend to fuel their most powerful abilities. It all goes away at the end of combat, so use it or loose it!

The tactician’s heroic resource is called focus. We gain two focus at the start of our turn, one focus per round when we or any ally damages a marked creature (more on that in a second), and one focus per round when any ally within 10 squares uses a heroic ability.

As a general rule, every hero also start combat with an amount of heroic resources equal to their victories, which is just the number of challenges they have overcome since their last respite.

If you connect the dots, this means that you start closer to your most powerful abilities the more you fight! You still have to rest because your Recoveries are not infinite, but this isn’t a game of attrition like D&D; heroes keep pushing.

Back to our guy-with-a-sword, it’s time to get our first doctrine feature: Commanding Presence, which gives us a bonus to negotiations.

Next is our doctrine triggered action: Parry, which lets us halve some damage aimed at us or a nearby ally. We can even spend focus to get an additional effect!

After Parry, the feature we get is called Field Arsenal. It basically lets us take two kits, but, since kits are the next step in the character building process, we’ll talk more about it then.

So, skipping Field Arsenal, we have Mark, possibly the most important tactician ability. In short, Mark draws our allies’ attention to a specific foe, granting an edge on Power Rolls made against them.

By the way, this foe is the “marked creature” mentioned on our focus entry! See how it all clicks together nicely?

Anyway, after Mark we get Strike Now, a cool action that lets an ally of ours attack instead of us; very useful to strategically take down a monster that is too far away.

Finally, the last two things that every class grants you hero are their heroic abilities: very powerful abilities that cost heroic resources! Usually you pick each one from a set of four, so it’s not too overwhelming.

The default 3-focus ability for us is Inspiring Strike, which deals damage to a monster and inspires an ally to spend a Recovery. Our default 5-focus ability, called Hammer and Anvil, allows us and an ally to strike simultaneously!

And that’s it for our class! Each class is different, but the choice process is pretty similar… You start with the basics, a subclass, and your heroic resource, then there are a few abilities for you to pick.

The only exception is your kit.

Step 6: Kit

In step number six we’ll choose our kit, that is, a bundle of equipment that defines the way we fight. This is the only step that doesn’t apply to every hero, because casters pick protective wards or prayers from inside their classes.

Kits grant a few static bonuses and one thematic ability. You also get some general information about the type of equipment you carry, like “light weapon” and “heavy armor.” The appearance of these is totally up to you.

Our guy-with-a-sword, for sure, is wearing the Shining Armor kit: heavy armor, a shield, and a medium weapon. Our kit ability is Protective Attack, which taunts the target for a short while.

Because we are tacticians, we also get a second kit. The flavor here is that we’re so good with weapons that we can benefit from two different fighting styles at the same time.

My guess is that our guy would have a ranged weapon as a backup. There are many options to choose from, like Rapid-Fire, Arcane Archer, or Sniper.

I’m going with Sniper because… It’s cool! Again, we get a bunch of bonuses and a kit ability: Patient Shot.

At this point, we would take all of our abilities that have the Weapon keyword and apply the appropriate bonuses, like damage and distance. Kits also give bonuses to our character, like stamina, speed, etc. Once everything is applied, we can move on.

Step 7: Free Strikes

Adding free strikes is a weird step, mostly because these are extra attacks that you get after you pick your class!

There is a melee free strike and a ranged free strike, and they are the same for every single character, except that kit bonuses apply here too.

These free strikes are super simple as they represent a quick attack that you can do when an opportunity opens up. Actually, this is what we’ll be using for opportunity attacks!

Step 8: Complication

Now for the incing on the cake: complication. This is an optional step that give you some interesting quest hooks that can come up during the campaign; additionally, you gain mechanical benefits and drawbacks that can completely change the look and feel of your character.

There are literally 100 options to choose from, but my favorite one is perfect given the art: Sibling’s Shield!

“You were tasked with delivering a ceremonial shield to your older sibling, a celebrated warrior, for their years of service. When you arrived at their homestead, you found them dead on their doorstep with their own sword lodged in their back. To find out who did this to them—and why—you decided to step into their shoes. It will take a while to match up to your sibling’s legacy, though.”

My mind is already fizzing with connections between our character’s career and complication. Maybe we were in the same knightly order! Maybe I was my sibling’s squire! Loads of options here.

The benefit of this complication is simple: I can’t be flanked while wearing my sibling’s shield. The drawback, on the other hand, is a little cooler: because of the haunting visions of my dead sibling, I can’t sleep well at night and run the risk of not gaining all of my recoveries back after a respite. Good thing we got a couple of extra ones from being a human!

Step 9: Details & Step 10: Make Connections

Now we’re basically done. Steps 9 and 10 are all about making your character more three-dimensional: backstory, personality, connections between the characters, all that stuff.

I won’t go through this process here because the video is already pretty long. Let’s just take a moment to admire how far we’ve come…

We set out to create a guy-with-a-sword, the most boring archetype in all of fantasy, and check out our character sheet! We’re loaded with cool abilities, we have a flavorful backstory, and we even got a cool plot point that the director can use to spice up our campaign.

And all of this came from just following the book! No extra work necessary.

Ok, now we know how abilities work and our character really wants to start using them, so next time we’ll about combat in Draw Steel. See you then!

After a couple of years making content about Draw Steel and publishing a well-received adventure for the same system, I decided it was time to be a little more ambitious.

I had this cool idea for a supplement that, unlike my little one-shot, would require art commissions and professional editing. I wrote a draft and shared it with a few people; it seemed like the concept had legs.

The big question at that point was: should I pay for everything or should I crowdfund this?

I ran the numbers and it would cost me around US$ 1500 to bring the project to life. Did you know that making 1.5k a month where I live puts you in the top 10% of earners? It was time to launch my first crowdfunder.

Preparation

Before I could start the campaign, I had to have a preview of the product. Something the backers could look at and know that I had the chops to get this done.

I decided that I needed at least four pages of text, some well-known contributors, an announcement video, and good art. My budged for these art pieces would be US$ 500 and I was ok with not making this money back, so I’d ask for a nice round 1k in the campaign.

First, I reached out to 10 other Draw Steel creators that I admire and asked them if they’d contribute to the project if it was successful. Every single one accepted, which gave me the boost I needed to continue on this journey.

Then I made a video to accompany the campaign and explain what it was all about. Short and to the point. I was mostly happy with it.

Finally, I picked Ricardo “Dojikaan” Rivera and Inge for the art. I wasn’t happy with the results — I was elated.

Numbers

Time to decide the price. Because of the bespoke art, I decided to charge 50%-100% more per word than I was charging for my adventure. The final price was US$ 12.50, which sounded fair.

To entice people to back during the crowdfunder, I was going to give them a 20% discount. This meant I was charging US$ 10 and needed 100 backers to fund. I love round numbers.

More important than being round, 100 backers is a number I considered achievable. The table below lists every third-party Draw Steel crowdfunder to date (including one that’s still ongoing).

Excluding Weapons of Legend, which I consider an outlier¹, the average number of backers per campaign was 121. Me just needing 100 backers put me on the safe side of this equation.

Since I went through the trouble of collecting this data, please indulge me in a little bit more math. The table below includes how many backers each campaign would require if everyone pledged at the lowest possible level.

Three campaigns rise above the rest: Nomas, Vessel, and Scions. Nomas is still not funded, the Vessel did not fund, and Scions funded literally on the last day.

If you’re working on a Draw Steel crowdfunder and want to be safe, it seems like you should aim for less than 200 backers at the lowest pledge level. At least this seems to be true in these early days of the game.

Itch

I wanted to run the campaign on BackerKit, the platform that MCDM and almost all other Draw Steel creators use for their crowdfunders. Kickstarter was a good second option if something went wrong with BackerKit.

Did you know that BackerKit and Kickstarter only accept campaigns from around 30 select countries? Both take money from “more than 200 countries/regions,” but sending money to the other 170 seems to be very low on their priority list.

The alternative I chose was itchfunding. In short, you just set up a sale on Itch for a product that is still in development. Since you can add a goal to the sale, you even get a pretty progress bar like on Kickstarter!

Would choosing Itch have an impact on my sales? On one hand, BackerKit looks much more professional, allows you to set up pledge tiers, and has better name recognition. On the other hand, Itch is where most third-party Draw Steel products are being sold, and allows for tips. It was (and is) impossible to know.

Campaign

With the preview done, the price set, and the video ready, it was time to launch. I clicked all the buttons and… Waited. There was nothing left to do but to see the number slowly go up.

The first bad sign I got was from the video. Not only did it not do well, it was actually one of my worst performing videos of the last year. The second bad sign came from the number, which REFUSED TO GO UP FASTER.

I stopped panicking and went to bed. This wasn’t going to be a campaign like the Cave of Amber Tears that funds in a few hours and just demolishes the funding goal. I had to keep it cool.

And everything worked out in the end. After nine excruciating days I reached the funding goal 🎉 The final days really surprised me, pushing the number of backers over 200!

If you’re into this sort of thing, here’s the number of pledges per day. I added notes to the spikes because they’re very relevant.

• Launch: This is when the campaign started. After a couple of days the campaign had reached US$ 800, which is about a third of the final revenue.

• Funded: The campaign crossed US$ 1000, so I decided to announce this everywhere. I picked up a few new people here, who I assume weren’t sure the campaign was going to fund. My post on Reddit actually got more traction than the original announcement.

• Matt: Colville posted a video highlighting a bunch of creations from the community, including my crowdfunder. It really surprised me that this was not the largest spike in sales, indicating that maybe I had already reached everyone that was going to back?

• Reminder: Nope! With around a day left, I reminded everyone that the campaign was almost over and loads of new people showed up. Note that these spikes are larger than the first couple of days. Incredible.

Since I mentioned posts, you might also be curious about which places generated the most traffic. The table below shows this, but unfortunately I can’t filter for people who actually pledged. I believe (but have no way of proving) that Reddit is the one that generates the most purchases.

Takeaways

I’m not sure how much there is to learn from my experience. Draw Steel has been out for only a few months, I’m quite well-known in the community because of my videos, and this was a crowdfunder on Itch.

However, I still think there are some lessons hiding in there:

• Have a community. Most traffic to the crowdfunder came from my YouTube. I know these visits weren’t from Matt because his link to my page was on Google Sheets.

• Choose the platform that suits you. I thought this campaign was going to fail because I had to do it on Itch. Fortunately I was wrong!

• Don’t aim too high. For now, it seems like you should expect on average 120-140 backers on your Draw Steel crowdfunder. If your project needs more backers, I’d personally wait until the community is larger and more established.

• Don’t underestimate the final days. It really seems like there is a big spike at the end of campaigns. I know many people have said this before, but I wasn’t expecting the volume of pledges that I got.

I hope this post was useful. Now I have to go make Hooked on Crafting! Expect another post once the product is out.

Intro

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the twenty-third episode of The Dice Society Podcast! My name is Caio and this is a show about Draw Steel, a tactical roleplaying game made by MCDM.

Iiiiit’s Draw Steel Christmas, folks! November has come and gone, but it left many gifts for the DS-heads. Steel-heads? Steelers? Anyway, we’ve got a lot news to cover, from playtests to full releases.

But the main event today is MCDM’s new BackerKit campaign: Draw Steel Year One! Or just CRACK THE SUN for short. This is going to be the main segment of the episode, with my impressions and a few tips on how to navigate the pledge tiers.

Before we get to all of that, though, how about we talk a little bit about the creations from the community?

Let’s draw steel and get started!

Community

Today’s community corner comes with a little competition. Someone called Matt Colville made a whole video talking about community creations!

As someone who’s been covering this sort of stuff since the very beginning, it’s really nice to see the amazing stuff y’all are making get a shout out from the man himself.

Ok, let’s get to the new stuff! Starting with crowdfunders.

The first one is my own Hooked on Crafting, a supplement with quest hooks for every single crafting prerequisite in Draw Steel.

I won’t bother you with the whole pitch because I already made a video covering everything you need to know about the campaign. So just head to the product’s Itch page to learn more! But remember that the campaign ends on December 17th, so you don’t have much time left.

The next crowdfunder is A Refugee’s Guide to Nomas, by Sam McGurran and the_f_bard. This supplement brings you a psionic city with factions, districts, and NPCs.

You can even watch a bunch of us Draw Steel folks playing a one-shot in Nomas! Rise Heroes Rise posted the video on his channel so you can check it out.

The last crowdfunder is The Cave of Amber Tears, by Heart of Arcana. This campaign is actually already over, but I still wanna highlight it because it set a new record for Draw Steel crowdfunders: 6003 dollars.

This is just a few dollars more than Triglav Games’ Boggits of Kingsmire with November’s exchange rate. Either way, these campaigns are getting bigger and bigger!

Now for adventures. To Defy the Stars, by Heart of Arcana, is a 7th-level space-faring quest against the herald of XXAXX. From the Ashes, by DimaJeydar, is on the opposite end of the spectrum: this is a 1st-level adventure that works as the start of a new campaign.

The Bale Crossing, by Hill_Dwarf, is a 2nd-level sea adventure that can be used as a follow-up to The Fall of Blackbottom.

And finally, You Meet in an Ambush: Codex Edition, by Haezan, is a port of my own adventure to the Codex VTT! Now, once you download the PDF, MCDM patrons also get a code to download a Codex module with the full adventure, no prep required.

In the zines corner, we got the announcement of Ratcatcher Magazine Issue 2, by Onslaught Six and others. We also saw the release of the Blacksmith’s Guild Issue 4, by Max_Falcon_(EST) and others.

If you’re looking for aids and supplements, we also got a few of those. NPC Generator, by EspressoBeans, is able to quickly generate a random NPC with loads of information right from your browser. Codex Fabuludens, by ghost.of.ezekiel, is more physical; this is a set of 36 cards with rules references for surges, conditions, hero tokens, and taking your turn.

MrMattDollar continues his skill-based supplements with Masterful Smithing, with 32 treasures, perks, followers, and more. Dwarves Art Pack, by Inge, is a set of five dwarf illustrations that you can use on your own Draw Steel products.

Finally, to close off the last community corner of the year, Rise Heroes Rise published an unboxing of his Draw Steel Ajax Edition box. The amount of cool stuff in there is breathtaking!

As always, the link to every single creation is in the description of this episode and on the transcript that I post on my blog.

News

As I said in the intro, November brought some cool news and products. Black Friday was kinda Draw Steel Christmas for a lot of people!

However, since this episode is coming out soon after Goblins Points’ November roundup, I really recommend you just listen to Jon’s summary of the news! I’m not gonna say anything too different than what he’s already covered…

But, if you’re driving or washing the dishes, let me give you the gist of it, starting with playtests.

November saw the public playtest of the Beastheart, Draw Steel’s upcoming pet class. I talked a little bit about the Patreon playtest last time, but now anyone can try out the class!

In the meantime, patrons got a couple of exclusive playtests: the Dark Heart of the Wood and the Codex.

The first one is a quest where you battle a Thorn Dragon after investigating a town besieged by cursed plants. I did end up running this adventure for a few people and I really liked it! Did I also kinda kill someone’s character twice? Yes, but that was the best part.

As for the Codex, patrons finally have official access to the VTT. With the Delian Tomb fully implemented and six activation codes per patron, regular folks can finally start running full games using the tool.

Besides playtests, this Black Friday also brought us a couple of releases: The Summoner and The Fall of Blackbottom.

The Summoner is priced at 15 dollars, but you get a lot of content: 61 pages with the class itself, of course, but also rewards, a retainer, rivals, advice for players and directors, and loads of minions.

The Fall of Blackbottom is going for 20 dollars and it includes: the full 84-page adventure, tons of maps, pregens, and director sheets. This, by the way, is Draw Steel’s hardcore introductory adventure, meant for people who want to begin a campaign with a white-hot start.

Speaking of hot, how about we move on to the main topic of today: MCDM’s new crowdfunder for Crack the Sun?

Year One Crowdfunder

No transcript for this part :(

Outro

And that’s it for today, folks. I hope you guys enjoyed the episode!

A special thanks to my current Initiate and Adept-level patrons: Seth Lang, Tomas Rodriguez, TDAWS, Brandon West, and Antan Karmola! Thank you all so so much <3

Make sure to check out this episode’s description for links to all of my socials, The Dice Society’s mailing list, and my Discord server. I’ll also leave some links there to James’, Matt’s, and MCDM’s accounts so you can follow them too.

See you all next time, for The Dice Society’s two-year anniversary! Thank you all very much, happy holidays, and goodbye!

Hooked on Crafting

Hello, everyone. I’m making a thing! And I need your help to finish it…

Draw Steel has a pretty cool crafting system. Most treasures and projects in the game can be crafted by the heroes themselves during downtime! To get started, they just need an instruction manual and an item prerequisite.

Since these prerequisites are all detailed in the Heroes Book, the players are expected to get curious and ask you stuff like…

‘I really wanna craft a Black Ash Dart, where would one find three vials of black ash?’

Sometimes it’s reasonable for crafting prerequisites like this to just show up in the next adventure! But, other times, you might want to make finding them an adventure onto itself…

This is where my upcoming supplement for Draw Steel comes in: Hooked on Crafting.

This bad boy right here will give you a punchy quest hook and a suggested mechanic for every single crafting prerequisite in Draw Steel! For example, here’s the entry for a vial of black ash:

Stealing from the Imperial University in Capital and from the best thieves in Orden at the same time is out of the question—it is much safer to talk directly to Professor Talia Greco, the person responsible for the University’s supply of black ash. She’s open to negotiating and, luckily, she’s not above being bribed.

You can use this as inspiration for a side quest, weave it into a running campaign, or even share it as a little piece of world-building! The hooks are meant to be light on mechanics, and heavy on flavor.

Then comes a mechanical bit. This can be a negotiation, a montage, a combat, a test, or even a monster! These are meant to be flexible and broadly applicable, so you can deploy them whenever they’re needed.

I have already written a bunch of these, but there are about 200 craftables in total, so this is where I ask for your financial help…

If this product sounds useful to you, I have set up a crowdfunding campaign on itch.io to help me get Hooked on Crafting through the finish line.

The campaign will be running until December 17th and, if you back during this period, you’ll pay only ten bucks and receive the finished PDF around Q3 2026.

If you’re already sold, head to thedicesociety.itch.io/hooked-on-crafting to see a product preview and back the project! But, if you need a little more information, let’s do a quick FAQ.

FAQ

Ok, now I’m gonna try to answer the questions I would be having if I had just heard this pitch. Starting with…

Who the f- are you?

My name is Caio, but most people know me as The Dice Society. I’ve been making Draw Steel content for almost two years now, since the beginning of MCDM’s BackerKit campaign.

I host a podcast covering news, make YouTube videos teaching people how to play, and sometimes also write supplements like this.

My first Draw Steel adventure, You Meet in an Ambush, has been very well received with 700 downloads, so I do know a thing or two about the game. I hope you trust me!

What do you need my money for?

First and foremost, this is not an “all or nothing” campaign. I’ll still make the product if we don’t reach the funding goal, but it will be much more bare-bones.

If we do reach the goal of 1000 dollars, though, you’re helping me afford an editor, more art, and some cool collaborations from other Draw Steel creators.

In case we surpass this goal, then you get more art! More collaborators! Better layout! Original monsters! The sky is the limit.

How does a crowdfunder work on itch.io?

Since Kickstarter and BackerKit don’t work in my country, I decided to crowdfund Hooked on Crafting through itch.io.

In practice, an itchfunder is a sale of a product that’s still in development. If you back the campaign right now, you’ll be paying a discounted price in exchange for waiting a few months until the finished product is available.

Once the PDF is done, I’ll just update the product page and you should get an email with a download link. Super simple!

Will there be a physical version?

Nope.

Do you use or are going to use AI in this project?

Nope.

I have a different question!

If you have any further questions that haven’t made it into this video, please post a comment on the itch.io page. I’ll do my best to help you in a timely fashion.

Is this video over?

Yes!

Intro

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the twenty-second episode of The Dice Society Podcast! My name is Caio and this is a show about Draw Steel, a tactical roleplaying game made by MCDM.

Today we’re going to the sun! A couple of weeks ago, Matt Colville wrote a gigantic post on Patreon outlining their upcoming mega-adventure: Crack the Sun. This is going to be our main topic for the episode, ‘cause I want to tell you everything we know now about this crazy campaign.

But, before we get to that, I’m going to cover creations from the community and general MCDM news, including James Introcaso’s new dungeon crawler RPG.

So let’s draw steel and get started!

Community

As usual, let’s start the community corner by getting my stuff out of the way. In a couple of weeks I’m going to be crowdfunding a product on itch.io. This is my first rodeo in the crowdfunding space, so I’d very much appreciate if y’all were there for it.

Follow me on Bluesky, YouTube, Discord, Mailchimp… Basically anywhere, to receive the announcement as soon as it goes out. See you all at Hooked on Crafting!

And speaking of crafting, the first Jam of the Timescape ended on October 8th with two winners: Memories of the North Wind by Tintenseher, and Solgado’s Master Chef Tools by dillbizzle.

If you want to see the top 15 submissions, I did a livestream on YouTube going through all of them. It was really fun to see all of these amazing products and it seems like the participants enjoyed the jam as well. Thank you all so much for joining!

Next up are the Boggits of Kingsmire, Triglav Games’ new crowdfunding campaign. These are the same people behind the amazing Vampire class and, having moved on from bats, they’re tackling… Frogs.

If you back this already fully-funded campaign, you’re getting an ancestry, the Boggit, as well as new items, titles, class options, downtime activities, monsters, a low-level setting, and a few quests. Many of these quests, by the way, will be written by staples of the Draw Steel community like Cameron, from Rise Heroes Rise, Jon de Nor, from Goblin Points and Stawl, and Paul Ligorski, from Heart of Arcana!

And, please, do check out their BackerKit page even if you don’t intend on backing it. Their art is out of this world, truly. As Ananam usually puts it: second only to MCDM’s.

Ok, switching from tiny frogs to very very big frogs with wings and teeth, Gub released a 2nd level one-shot: Dread Abbey! This short adventure features undead and a gloom dragon, and also includes a new kind of player option that Gub calls archetypes. Definitely worth the five bucks.

While you’re checking out Gub’s adventure, make sure to also take a look at MrMattDollar’s Halloween sale! For 20 bucks you get five products: Alchemical Consumables, Practical Mechanicals, Workable Woodcrafts, Jeweling Gemstones, and Fantastic Fletchery. These are all supplements themed around a Draw Steel crafting skill! Fantastic idea.

Before we move on to the news, here are four more creations that might by of interest to you…

Rexus made a version of the official character sheet that you can fully customize in Photoshop! Some people have already translated it into their own languages.

Erik made Steel Cauldron, a really cool free website that lets you build monsters and run encounters. The monster builder is especially intuitive.

Big Bad Banana designed a hero playmat that you can laminate and turn into a dry erase tracker for your character’s most important resources.

Finally, Finn Warwind created a Draw Steel encounter generator in Perchance, allowing you to randomly create monster encounters that fall into your desired difficulty window.

And that’s all for our community creations this month! The links to every single thing I mentioned here are in the description of this episode and on the transcript that I post on my blog.

News

We’re a little light on news this month because MCDM is gearing up for their big crowdfunder in December. The team is currently hard at work testing the Encounters book, one of the main products that will be featured in the BackerKit campaign.

Also in testing is the Beastheart, but this one is already in the hands of the patrons. I won’t go through the manuscript, especially because the window for feedback has already closed, but let me just share my favorite feature of the class:

“Heart of the Beast. You and your companion share a primordial bond so intense that your hearts literally beat as one. If your partner is lost, you can rip out your beating heart and summon them back to your side.

Effect: You spend a Recovery as your partner rips their way out of your chest or climbs from your unnaturally wide jaws. Your partner teleports to your space over any distance, even if they don’t have line of effect to you. Your partner gains temporary Stamina equal to their recovery value.”

If you want to see the Beastheart in action, I suggest you go watch Rise Heroes Rise!’s video featuring the class. They bring a Summoner into play as well, for maximum shenanigans!

While we’re talking about playtests, also also in testing is James’ first draft of his dungeon crawler RPG: Crows. This is a project he’s spearheading without Matt, but it seems like it will be published by MCDM once it’s done.

Tom Christy, from d20play, made a video going through his experience playtesting the game at Gamehole Con. From what he and James have shared, I was able to piece together a little bit of what the game looks like right now…

Currently, it’s a 2d10 system with three tiers of outcomes, but that’s where the similarities with Draw Steel end. In this game you don’t get a class, just a background! Most of your abilities depend on what weapons and spell books you’re carrying, so you can start as a melee warrior, change your mind, and become a spellcaster after a few combats.

Speaking of combat, it is supposed to be fast and lethal. There are no maneuvers and not that many reactions, so much more like an OSR game than a tactical heroic game. You can even miss in this RPG, but don’t worry; critical misses can have terrible consequences, so, when you miss, you’ll actually be thanking your dice from sparing you from a much worse fate.

But the coolest thing I’ve heard about the game up until now is the settlement mechanic. With time your party will improve the town, attracting merchants, unlocking better quality equipment, and so on. High-level characters retire and become relevant NPCs in the town!

This persistent entity, the settlement, might actually be what sells me on the high-lethality, non-tactical gameplay of this game. I’m really curious to try it out at some point!

Back to Draw Steel, the Codex continues to advance by leaps and bounds. According to the DMHub team, they have now implemented all of echelon 1 and made the first release of the Delian Tomb adventure. Their goal is to have the Delian Tomb fully functional for the Patreon release of the Codex later this year.

And last, but not least, all of Draw Steel’s icons have been released under a creative commons license. Spencer Hibnick, also known as Pesto, wrote a great thread on Bluesky explaining how to use the license properly.

Crack the Sun

Now it’s time to heat things up… As I mentioned a few minutes ago, the Encounters book will be one of the products crowdfunded by MCDM in December. The other big product in the campaign is called Crack the Sun.

This is the first big campaign that they have ever done, and, in true MCDM fashion, it’s a doozy: it goes from level three to level eight, takes place in three different worlds, and has four big villains. According to Matt’s post about the matter on Patreon, Crack the Sun was the most popular adventure pitch from their January survey, so they’re giving the people what they want!

The whole post is ten thousand words long, so my goal here is to summarize it as best as I can so you don’t have to go through the whole thing. But, before we head into the spoiler zone, the article also talked about a few guidelines for adventure design that they kind of uncovered during their outlining process.

So, if you’re interested, here are MCDM’s four “rules” for adventure design…

Number one is ‘Occam’s Razor’. Matt says that “we want to avoid inventing anything new to solve a problem if at all possible.” This principle invites us to brainstorm a lot of ideas at the start, but, when it comes time to connect everything, try as much as possible to use preexisting ideas; less it more.

Number two is ‘conflict arises out of the character’s motivations.’ This principle calls for NPCs with consistent motivations; motivations that put them at odds with the heroes. Drama should arise from from this clash, not because it is necessary to move the plot along.

Number three is ‘sense of urgency.’ This one is pretty self-explanatory; heroes should be moving forward because the story is chasing them up a tree. There shouldn’t be a moment when it’s reasonable for them to just hang around and wait for the bad stuff to catch up to them.

And number four is ’therefore, not meanwhile.’ Here “action follows naturally from consequence.” One story beat causes another, which causes another, etc. It’s not ideal to have a new problem arise out of nowhere just to keep the story moving.

Moving on from game design, how about we dive deep into the plot of Crack the Sun? As usual, all of this can change as they write the adventure, but it’s pretty cool to see what the outline of a mega-adventure from MCDM looks like.

Act one starts, innocently enough, with the heroes going after some missing villagers. Their investigation leads to a tree with red sap pooling around its trunk. There is almost no time to react; the heroes are attacked by hobgoblins wielding dusk arrows, which transports them to Equinox… If all this is reminding you of Dusk, Matt’s 4e campaign, you’re spot on!

When the heroes arrive in Equinox, a dying jungle world ruled by shadow elves, they’re… Alone. Each hero has been teleported to a different location! They must go through individual adventures that the Director can run in a few one-on-one sessions. During these adventures, they might meet gnomes, dragonfly people, nice shadow elves, evil shadow elves, fairies, and even a certain memonek space pirate that will show up again.

When the heroes meet back up, they find the Equinox twin of the bleeding tree with human-sized glistening white pods. If the heroes defeat the shadow elves guarding the tree and destroy it, they can save the villagers and use this area of bilocation to head back to Orden, where the bleeding tree is also dead. It becomes clear that these trees are portals to aid in an invasion…

In act two the hobgoblins, obviously part of the shadow elves’ plan to ’equinoxform’ Orden, have amassed an army. The heroes must travel the land in search of allies to help in the war against Equinox’s forces.

This take the form of a series of negotiations, montages, and combats as they convince wode elves, high elves, dwarves, orcs, gols, an more to become their allies. But there is no time to do everything; at some point the heroes must go back and face the war… Once again, if all of this is reminding you of Red Hand of Doom, bingo!

Act three is the war itself. The heroes participate in a series of encounters during the siege of Castle Dalrath; they must defend strategic points, kill specific enemies, that kind of stuff. And depending on what factions they have recruited, different warfare events will take place during these fights! Stuff like a volley of arrows from the wode elves dealing a bunch of damage to every enemy in the combat.

If everything goes according to plan, at the end of this act, the heroes face the leader of the hobgoblins: Bloodlord Varrox. He’s also accompanied by a few heliox, the people who live in the sun… I’m sure this is not gonna become a problem in act five.

Anyway, in act four, it’s time to end the Equinox threat once and for all! The heroes must head back to the dying world, infiltrate a shadow elf city, and kill the acolyte of an unstable twilight celestial. This was the dude who was giving Bloodlord Varrox all those dusk arrows!

There’s only one problem… Once he dies, the acolyte comes back in his avatar form. This is something MCDM is planning for the actual Acolyte class; at some point you might have to die to assume your final form. Anyway, the heroes have to kill the acolyte again and then push forward to kill the acolyte’s patron, that unstable twilight celestial I mentioned.

However, if the heroes are successful, there’s one final twist: the celestial, ages ago, was the one who imprisoned Cthrion Uroniziir, the Time Ender, inside… The sun!

That’s why Varrox had those heliox with him! He was taking advantage of the shadow elves! Cthrion knew the heroes would kill the celestial who imprisoned her! But… That means… Varrox was Cthrion’s acolyte… And if that’s the case… Killing him was all part of the plan! He’s alive and in avatar form now!

In act five the heroes gotta go to the sun to stop Varrox before he frees the Time Ender. But how? How are gonna get there? Well, good thing they met that memonek space pirate in act one!

They go to the sun and land in a heliox city (one of those black spots we can see in the sun’s surface). The heroes must face many battles in order to get to Varrox and the idea is that they start happening out of order… The Time Ender is waking up!

The players have to determine the correct order of the encounters in before actually reaching Cthrion’s acolyte. Then, finally, they can take Varrox out and save time itself!

… What do you think? Pretty freaking cool, right?! I know the story goes a little wild at the end, but I kinda like it! By level eight you’re pretty close to the end of the game, so I guess it’s about time to start facing some interplanar threats, right?

Anyway, please share you opinions in the comments! I always enjoys reading what y’all have to say.

Outro

And that’s it for today, folks. I hope you guys enjoyed the episode!

A special thanks to my current Initiate and Adept-level patrons: Seth Lang, Tomas Rodriguez, TDAWS, Brandon West, and Antan Karmola! Thank you all so so much <3

Make sure to check out this episode’s description for links to all of my socials, The Dice Society’s mailing list, and my Discord server. I’ll also leave some links there to James’, Matt’s, and MCDM’s accounts so you can follow them too.

See you all next time, thank you very much, and goodbye!

Intro

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the twenty-first episode of The Dice Society Podcast! My name is Caio and this is a show about Draw Steel, a tactical roleplaying game made by MCDM.

It’s been quite a while since the last episode! Part of it is because the MCDM team, deservedly, chilled out a little after the release of the game a couple of months ago. But, it was mostly because I’ve been making a lot of stuff for The Dice Society! We’ll talk about all of that and much more in the community section of the podcast.

Then we’ll tackle the news. We have more information about the upcoming ancestries book, the Summoner beta, and a few updates to the Codex VTT.

Last, but not least, our main topic for the day. Since writing a full script for that section would take time that I don’t have right now, you’ll get my unadulterated, unfiltered, unscripted opinions on Draw Steel vs. Daggerheart. I’m not clickbaiting, by the way, if you want some TTRPG drama, there are better places on the internet for that… I just have some thoughts, that’s all.

Anyway, let’s draw steel and get started!

Community

First, the community corner. Beginning with something quite different than what I usually talk about here… Another RPG! Omios Ures is a weird fantasy, rules-light game written and illustrated by Matheus Graef, one of the amazing artists behind the monsters you see in Draw Steel!

This is not an ad, I just love Matheus’ art and my shelf still has plenty of room for indie, creative games like the one he’s made. Links to Omios Ures and everything else I’m going to feature in this segment can be found in this episode’s description.

Back to Draw Steel land, a quick word about the stuff I have been up to! The first one is Jams of the Timescape, a collaboration between Jon de Nor and I to get more people from the community making stuff for our favorite game.

Unfortunately, it took me too long to make this podcast and the submission window has already closed. But, you can still take a look at all 39 treasure sets that the jammers have made in just a couple of weeks! While you’re there, join our Discord server to be notified when the second Jam of the Timescape begins! Yes, this is going to be a recurring thing.

Besides jamming, I also published two new videos on the YouTube channel: How to Draw Steel parts one and two. In them I talk about the basics of the game, how to roll for tests, and how combat abilities work. If you’re looking for introductory material about the game, this is it.

Finally, I have also written an adventure for the Blacksmith’s Guild issue #3. While I don’t want to spoil the story, I’m gonna give you just the title: The Elf King. This edition of the Draw Steel-focused zine is supposed to come out October 1st, so look forward to a few posts from me in the near future.

And that’s all for my stuff! I did make a bunch more things, but I can’t talk publicly about those yet… So let’s move on to what the rest of the community has been cooking.

The first category of creation is… Cards. Min made a cool ability card PDF generator. Youngy, on the other hand, made a GitHub repo with all abilities already converted into printable ability cards. And Xochilex made retainer cards that mimic the style of the official Draw Steel character sheet.

Next, let’s cover layout tools. Both MrMattDollar and Solace have made fonts that can display Draw Steel icons; that’s all the cool graphic design you see next to potencies, ability types, tier results, etc. But, if you want a full template for InDesign, Affinity, and Google docs, Taylor made one… Sorry… I’m so sorry… Taylor made one tailor-made for you.

In the adventures department, we have two. The first one, by Heart of Arcana, is the Cave of Amber Tears, coming to BackerKit in November. The second one is MacGraw Hideaway, a conversion of 5e’s CragMaw Hideout by Gub.

We also have updates to basically every online tool you can imagine. Stawl, by Jon de Nor, now has all the text of the core rules and can import your characters from Forge Steel. Speaking of which, Forge Steel, by Andy Aiken, now has automatic monster scaling. Again, speaking of which, the Steel Compendium, by Xentis, now includes all of the monster data. Finally, Owlbear Rodeo now has a new extension called Ranges that can help you with bursts and auras during combat.

Our final stop in this segment is player options. The Essentians are an elemental ancestry successfully crowdfunded by 007GoldFish. On the Edge, by Legendlore, is a supplement that offers variant signature abilities to the game’s kits. And last, but not least, Alchemical Consumables, by MrMattDollar, includes over 30 new treasures for your table.

News

Now it’s time for the news! The two most important things here are very quick, so let’s talk about them right now. First, Draw Steel now has an official errata document; it’s mostly minor stuff, but it’s worth it to browse the PDF just to see what’s going to be updated in the next printing. Second, the printed books are about to start shipping, so make sure to update your address on the BackerKit survey to get the rules to your door in a timely manner.

Ok, with those out of the way, let’s quickly talk about classes. First and foremost, the Summoner went through an open beta, so anyone (even non-patrons) could try it out for themselves. Sadly, I only had time to give the document a quick skim, so I don’t have much else to say about this most recent version of the class.

Besides the Summoner, we have learned that the Beastheart is still in development; the Acolyte, MCDM’s sorta Warlock-equivalent, is in concepting; and that the team is already getting ideas for how to get Operator, MCDM’s mecha class, up and running. No word on when these are coming out yet, but the Summoner will be released this year!

What for sure isn’t coming this year is the ancestries book. Last episode I talked a little bit about this, but now we know exactly what ancestries will be featured in this product: gnomes, rat people called radenwights, goblins, shadow elves, faeries, dragonfly people called skarjj, non-homo sapiens humans called gol, and elemental people that live on the Sun called heliox. That’s eight new ancestries in case you weren’t counting!

Before we move on to the main segment, we gotta touch on MCDM’s partnerships. Start Playing Games had an awesome Draw Steel launch event, and you can find loads of open tables on their website right now. TitanCraft is currently running a Kickstarter campaign to fund a Draw Steel expansion for their software, including customizable hero minis, outfits, items, weapons, and monsters. This is the kind of stuff that would completely destroy my savings if I had a 3D printer…

And finally, the Codex. Ah, the Codex… MCDM’s proprietary VTT made by DMHub just got a wiki and the devs have been posting some pretty cool demos on they YouTube channel. The highlight for me was their new document system that lets you make tests, track montages, and control scene settings all in Markdown. This is the stuff folks… Once the Codex is out, I’m never going back.

Draw Steel & Daggerheart

No transcript for this part :(

Outro

And that’s it for today, folks. I hope you guys enjoyed the episode!

A special thanks to my current Initiate and Adept-level patrons: Seth Lang, Tomas Rodriguez, TDAWS, Brandon West, and Antan Karmola! Thank you all so so much <3

Make sure to check out this episode’s description for links to all of my socials, The Dice Society’s mailing list, and my Discord server. I’ll also leave some links there to James’, Matt’s, and MCDM’s accounts so you can follow them too.

See you all next time, thank you very much, and goodbye!

Intro

Hello, everyone!

In my previous video, I explained the Power Roll: you roll 2d10, add bonuses, and lookup the outcome tier. I also talked about tests: when you make a Power Roll to determine if your hero is able to accomplish a task.

Today I’m gonna talk about the second use of Power Rolls: combat abilities. This is in chapter 5 of the Heroes Book. Let’s get going!

Abilities

Wait, wait, wait! Just a second!

Jon de Nor, from Goblin Points, and I are going to be hosting a Draw Steel jam on Itch starting September 8th. Follow the link below to get started making your own Draw Steel treasures and have a chance at winning some pretty dope prizes!

Again: link in the description, let’s make some treasures, dope prizes. See you at Treasure Sets of the Timescape!

That’s it. Back to the video!

What are abilities in Draw Steel? Well, these are your hero’s powers in combat. The stuff you do to deal damage, hinder your foes, or even change the shape of the battlefield.

Before creating a character, it’s good to know the basics of how their combat abilities might work once you start playing, so this is why I’m making this video before getting to character creation.

Anyway, most abilities involve a type of Power Roll called ability roll. In Draw Steel, unlike other games, you’ll be rolling to determine how effective you are, not to see if you hit and get to take your turn… You always do damage, you always make progress.

Instead of me just explaining the theory at you, let’s take a look at actual abilities to understand how they work.

The first example is a Conduit ability which, as you can see from the title, is called Ray of Wrath. Below the title, there’s a line of flavor text that tells you what happens in the fiction when you use the ability.

‘You unleash a blast of holy light upon your foe.’

Next, we have keywords; in this case Magic, Ranged, and Strike. These just tell you if the ability interacts with a particular feature or mechanic. For example, a treasure might give you a damage bonus to Magic abilities.

To the right of the keywords, you can see the “type of activity required to use the ability”. If you’re coming from D&D, this would be the equivalent of telling you if it uses an Action, a Bonus Action, or a Reaction.

Draw Steel ability types are a little more complicated that D&D’s, so I’m gonna cover them when we talk about combat itself. Suffice it to say that, on their turn, a character gets a main action, a maneuver, and a move action; off-turn, they can also user triggered actions.

Below the keywords there’s the distance. This is mostly self-explanatory, telling you how many squares away the target of an ability can be for you to use it. This is also where area abilities are described, but more on that in a second.

To the right of the distance you can see the target. These can be any number of creatures, objects, allies, or enemies. If an ability can target yourself, it says ‘self’.

Now let’s get to the meat of it: the Power Roll. The first line of most damage-dealing abilities is a Power Roll that tells you what characteristic to add; in this case, it’s Intuition. You should also add any Edges and Banes, just like how I explained in the last video.

The outcome tiers tell you what kind of effect your ability has depending on how well you roll. In this prototypical example, you deal a little bit of damage on a tier 1, medium damage on a tier 2, and maximum damage on a tier 3.

Note that some abilities, like this one, add a characteristic to the damage as well as to the Power Roll. Here, the capital I next to the numbers indicates that you should add your Intuition. Likewise, an M stands for Might, A for Agility, R for Reason, and P for Presence.

So say my 1st-level Conduit rolls 2d10 and gets a 14. With his Intuition bonus of +2, that becomes 16 for a tier 2 outcome. The damage he’s going to deal is 4

• 2, also known as 6.

Many abilities also come with an effect. In this case, you can change the type damage that this ability deals.

Now let’s quickly recap what we’ve learned before moving on to some more interesting examples.

Every combat ability starts with a title and a line of flavor text. Below that you’ll find its keywords and activation type. Then come the distance and targets.

The actual body of the ability usually includes a Power Roll followed by what happens when you roll each outcome tier. Lastly, you might also get an effect that’s described in natural language.

Just remember that not every ability involves a Power Roll. The Talent’s Again, for example, is a triggered action that just has an effect! That’s perfectly possible.

Areas and Potencies

Now that you know the basics, let’s pick up the pace. Take a look at Back Blasphemer!, a 1st-level Censor ability.

It starts pretty similar to Ray of Wrath, but, as you can see from the keywords, this is an area ability. In this situation, the distance entry will describe the shape of the area and how far away from you it can be.

Back Blasphemer! creates a cube with 2 squares on each side, with at least one of those within 1 square of you.

The other kinds of areas that an ability can produce are: auras, which move with you and emanate a number of squares in every direction, bursts, which look similar but don’t move with you, lines, which are pretty self-explanatory, and walls, which let you place squares in any shape as long as they share sides.

Coming back to the ability, you can see that it targets each enemy in the area. This is pretty common for Draw Steel, where friendly-fire isn’t something you should worry about.

Also note that, unless the ability says otherwise, you only roll once independently of how many targets you hit. Bonuses and penalties might apply to individual targets, but the same Power Roll applies to all of them.

Next, take a look at the Power Roll outcomes. Here, besides damage, each tier also has an effect, namely, pushing the targets some number of squares. Instead of forced movement, an ability could, for instance, impose a condition, grant a resource, and so on.

Are you following me so far? ‘Cause now we’re gonna talk about potencies. Take a look at Concussive Strike, a 1st-level Tactician ability.

Before we get to those weird mathematical expressions, in the title there’s something interesting: ‘3 Focus’. This means that you must spend 3 of the Tactician’s Heroic Resource (Focus) in order to use this ability.

Once again, I’m gonna leave you without a good explanation for now. Just know that every class accumulates Heroic Resources during combat and can spend them on their most powerful abilities.

Okay, onward to the outcome tiers. From the text, you already know that each outcome is going to deal some damage, but you can also probably tell that it might impose the dazed condition on the target.

These small math expressions are called potencies and they determine whether the target is going to be dazed.

Since I don’t want to run the risk of confusing you with the words just yet, let me start from the conclusion: at level 1, Weak means 0, Average means 1, and Strong means 2.

With the magic of editing, let me get rid of the words, ‘cause that’s what you’re going to write on your character sheet anyway.

Perfect, now I think you’re ready to understand what the hell the potencies mean. It’s actually not that hard. In short, they check if the target is going to be effected by whatever comes after! Here, if the target’s Might is less than the indicated number, they’re dazed.

The thing that usually gets people is that the first M, the one you’re adding to the damage, is your Might, while the second M, the one you’re checking against a number, is the target’s Might.

These don’t even necessarily have to be the same letter… Some abilities add one characteristic to the damage, and impose a condition if another characteristic of the target doesn’t pass the potency.

Okay, back to the top. Say I’m a 1st-level Tactician with Might 2 and I roll a tier 1 on Concussive Strike. This is going to deal 3 + 2 = 5 damage to the target and, if the target’s Might is less than 0, they’re dazed. If you got this, you’re golden.

Before I’m done with this explanation, let’s quickly rewind the editing and see those words again. What the heck to they mean?

In a potency, Strong is always replaced by your highest characteristic score, that’s why I said that at 1st level that’s always 2. Average is simply 1 lower than Strong, and Weak is 1 lower than Average. Therefore, as I said, your potencies at 1st level are 2, 1, and 0. That’s it!

Are we done? With potencies, yes! But there’s still one last thing I want to talk about: how those effects end. As you can see in Concussive Strike, the dazed condition ends on a save, so… What’s that mean?

This is, fortunately, very simple. A save in Draw Steel is a straight d10 roll at the end of your turn; if you roll 6 or higher, the condition ends. That’s it!

Other abilities, such as the Null’s Kinetic Strike, might impose conditions that end EoT, or, at the end of the turn. These conditions don’t require a save and end automatically at the end of the target’s turn. Super easy.

Now let’s recap the whole thing with Method Acting, a 1st-level Troubadour ability. From top to bottom…

First, we can tell that this ability costs 5 Drama, the Troubadour’s Heroic Resource. More on that in another video.

Skipping the flavor text, this is a Melee, Strike, and Weapon ability that costs a main action. Below that, we learn that it can hit one creature within one square.

The Power Roll required to determine your effectiveness is 2d10 + Agility. With the magic of editing helping us, let’s go tier by tier…

On tier 1, you deal 8 damage and, if the target’s Presence is less than 0, they’re weakened until they save. On a tier 2, it’s 12 damage and Presence less than 1. On a tier 3, it’s 16 damage and Presence less than 2.

Finally, there’s an extra effect that applies independently of the outcome tier. In this case, you can be bleeding until you save to deal some bonus damage.

If you understood everything I said right now, you’re more than ready to create your first character… But that’s the topic of the next lesson.

Make sure to like this video and subscribe to the channel if you want more Draw Steel content. Also check the description for links to my Patreon and The Dice Society’s Discord server.

See you all next time, thank you very much, and goodbye!

Intro

Hello, everyone! So you want to play Draw Steel, the new kid on the tactical RPG block.

Your Director might want to run it for you, or you might have seen a cool video online talking about how you should try it. Either way, you’ve got to learn the rules first.

In this video I’m gonna teach you the basics: the core mechanic of the game and how you use it to roll for tests. Cool? Then let’s get started…

Power Roll

Just like in Dungeons & Dragons, in Draw Steel you’re playing the role of a hero in a dangerous fantasy world. When you want to do something risky, like sneak past a royal guard or lie to an ogre, the Director will ask you to roll dice to see if you succeed.

In D&D that’s the d20 roll. In Draw Steel we have the Power Roll.

There are three steps to the Power Roll: roll your dice, add your bonus, and check your tier. Sounds a little complex, but it’s super simple.

For the first step, the dice you’ll be rolling are always two ten-sided dice, or 2d10. You just roll them and add the numbers; easy. Just remember that most RPG d10s show a 0 in place of a 10, so a double zero would actually be a 20.

Next, time to add your bonus. Every character in Draw Steel has five characteristics, only one of which will be added to the roll.

The characteristics are Might (for strength and brawn), Agility (for coordination and nimbleness), Reason (for logic and education), Intuition (for instincts and experience), and Presence (for force of personality).

For example, if you’re playing a first-level character that’s very strong, they’ll probably have a Might score of 2. So, when you roll to see if you can break down a door, your Power Roll will be 2d10 + 2. Starting scores range from -1 to +2 and they’re noted at the top of your character sheet.

Now, the last step: check your tier. Once you have your total for the roll, you’ll need to see what outcome tier you got. If you got an 11 or lower, that’s a Tier 1; the worst. If you got between 12 and 16, that’s a Tier 2; the average. If you got 17 or higher, that’s a Tier 3; the best.

The only exception to this rule is when you roll a natural 19 or 20, that is, a 19 or a 20 on the dice, before adding any bonuses. This is called a critical and it’s an automatic Tier 3 independently of how bad your bonuses are!

What each tier actually means in the fiction depends on the difficulty of the task you’re trying to accomplish, but we’ll talk about this in a second.

So, putting it all together… Your strong but very awkward hero is trying to bribe a guard, so your Director asks for a Presence Power Roll. Since your Presence score is -1, you’ll be rolling 2d10 - 1. But hey! Your total was 17! That means you got a Tier 3.

And that’s almost everything you need to know about Power Rolls! Roll your dice, add your bonus, check your tier.

There are only a couple of additional modifiers that can help or hinder your roll on top of your characteristics. These are edges and banes.

Edges are situational advantages you can get on a Power Roll, for example, when sneaking past a sleepy guard or lying to a drunk ogre. If you have an edge on your roll, you gain a +2 bonus; if you have two or more edges, what’s called a double edge, instead of the numerical bonus you simply bump up the tier.

Banes are the exact opposite: situational disadvantages. If you have a bane, you gain a -2 penalty; if you have two or more banes (a double bane), you just have to downgrade the tier.

So let’s examine a simple example: climbing a wall. That’s usually a Might Power Roll, so your buff hero rolls 2d10 + 2 for a total of 16; a Tier 2. If your hero was wearing special climbing gloves, you’d get an edge, increasing your total to 18 and improving our outcome to a Tier 3.

If instead of gloves you had a bunch of heavy gear on your back, that might incur a bane, decreasing your total to 14. Fortunately that’s still a Tier 2!

But, if you had all the weight on your back and it was raining, you’d have a double bane; in this situation, your total would remain 16, however the outcome would be downgraded to a Tier 1.

And what if you have both banes and edges? This part’s easy: they cancel each other out. A bane and an edge becomes a straight roll, a double bane and an edge becomes a bane, and so on.

I know this part sounds a little difficult, but I promise that you get used to it pretty quickly.

Tests

There are two types of Power Roll: tests and ability rolls. We’re gonna cover abilities in the future because they are mostly for combat, so let’s talk about tests.

Tests are… What I’ve been talking about up until now. Everything I said also applies to abilities, but all of my examples have been tests. Want to sneak past a guard? That’s an Agility test. Want to lie to an ogre? That’s a Presence test. Want to climb a wall? That’s a Might test.

So, what’s specific to tests that doesn’t apply to abilities? Two things: difficulties and skills.

The difficulty of a test is, in short, how high you have to roll to be successful; an easy test can be surmounted with a Tier 1, while a medium test requires a Tier 2, and a hard test can only be overcome with a tier 3.

This is all neatly summarized in a table on page 250 of the book. If you look closely at the table, you’ll notice that there are mentions of rewards and consequences.

These rewards and consequences can be described by the Director or pitched by the players. They are usually narrative so, for example, a success with a consequence when sneaking past the guards means that you did it, but you might have left a trail of evidence.

Also note that a critical is always a success with a reward! You succeed and gain something extra, so pray that luck is on your side.

Now, on to skills. These are out-of-combat specializations that your hero gains during character creation. Long story short, they give you a +2 bonus to tests where they are applicable; this is in addition to the characteristic and any edges or banes.

The list of skills in this game is huuuge, so don’t worry about having only a few, ‘cause everyone’s gonna be on the same boat. For ease of reference, they are divided into five groups…

Crafting skills, for creating and appraising goods; exploration skills, for exploring and overcoming environments; interpersonal skills, for social interactions; intrigue skills, for investigation and thievery; and lore skills, for research and recalling information.

It’s up to the player to pitch the use of a skill for a test. So, when the Director demands a Might test in order to climb a wall, the player can ask to use the Climb skill for that test if they have it on their character sheet.

And that’s it! Now you know basically everything there is to know about the Power Roll and tests!

To recap: a Power Roll involves rolling your dice, adding your bonuses, and checking your tier. Your dice are always 2d10s. Your bonuses include one characteristic and any applicable edges and banes; it also might include a relevant skill if rolling for a test.

As for your tier, it will be a Tier 1 on an 11 or lower, a Tier 2 on a 12 to 16, or a Tier 3 on a 17 or higher. Then, for tests, your Director will see if you are successful or not based on the difficulty.

And that’s all for today’s lesson! Make sure to like this video and subscribe to the channel if you want more Draw Steel content. Also check the description for links to my Patreon and The Dice Society’s Discord server.

See you all next time, thank you very much, and goodbye!

Intro

Hello everyone and welcome to the twentieth episode of The Dice Society Podcast! My name is Caio and this is a show about Draw Steel, a tactical roleplaying game made by MCDM.

As you probably already know, Draw Steel is out. Let me repeat that: Draw Steel is out.

A year and a half after the BackerKit campaign. Thirty months after the first Patreon post. So many livestreams. Uncountable Discord messages. And the game is finally here.

I’m at a loss for words. I guess the only thing I can say is congratulations to the team. They did it, they fucking did it. As you hear this, thousands of backers have already played their first sessions. The game is real.

So let’s draw steel and get started!

Draw Steel release

Ok, sentimental moment over. Let’s begin today’s episode with the big news: everyone who backed Draw Steel has received their PDF copies of both the Heroes and the Monsters books. July 31st will, from now on, be known as Draw Steel Day!

Together with the core books, MCDM has also released two adventures: The Road to Broadhurst and The Delian Tomb. I’ve talked about both before, but I’m guessing at least a few new people are going to be listening to this episode, so let me quickly summarize them…

The Road to Broadhurst is a free one-shot meant for experienced Directors who want to demo the game at conventions and stores. It’s also pretty modular, so you can run it in one, two, three, or four hours, and for three, four, five, or six players.

The packet includes a 12-page PDF, a cheat sheet, two maps, four encounter sheets, and nine pregens (one of each class). Speaking of encounters, the adventure is super simple: the heroes need to escort a medicine wagon to the small town of Broadhurst; along the way, they face two combats, one montage test, and one negotiation.

Finishing the adventure in Broadhurst is useful, because that’s exactly where The Delian Tomb starts. This second adventure is truly Draw Steel’s starter set; for ten bucks, it literally guides beginner Directors through the rules as they become relevant.

The first encounter, for example, has instructions for how to set up minis on a map, read-aloud text that explains the rules of combat to everyone, and even suggestions of what exact actions you might want to take on your first turn.

But don’t assume that this is a short adventure; the main PDF has 70 pages, and this is only the beginning! You also get a 96-page PDF of encounters, a 75-page PDF with starter rules, a bunch of handouts, nine fully-arted simplified pregens, and more encounter sheets and maps than I can count.

As for the story, it is based around the famous Delian Tomb from one of Colville’s first videos. The tomb itself has been greatly expanded, but now the heroes also have plenty of adventuring to do outside of the tomb.

I personally haven’t played all the way to the end, but what I did see was really fun. For ten bucks, this is almost a no-brainer! If you’re at least a little bit interested in Draw Steel, this is definitely where you should start. You can get it right now from MCDM’s website or from DriveThroughRPG. Links in the description.

And that’s all for the adventures! As for the core books, there’s actually not a lot for me to say… If you’ve bought the books, you can look at the PDFs yourself. That’s the news!

If you want my opinions, though, I posted a big review on YouTube, which quickly became my most-viewed video ever! I do suggest watching it and maybe subscribing while you’re there? But I can give you the gist of it; here it goes…

Draw Steel 100% delivers on tactical, heroic, cinematic fantasy. The combat system is dynamic and cooperative, the core gameplay loop incentivizes players to keep pushing forward, and the mechanics help your story flow without weighing it down.

Combat is obviously the highlight of the game, given that even lowly melee fighters get plenty of cool tactical options, but it isn’t the only thing the game excels at. There are some really good social mechanics in the rules, and the flavor and worldbuilding are visible at every corner of the text.

But, it’s not all perfect. As with every creative endeavor, there are things that will not work on even the biggest fans of the system! For me, the layout felt a little too dry, I found first-level characters too complex, and… I prefer my dwarves bearded! There, I said it!

Overall, if you’re excited about the tagline ’tactical, heroic, cinematic fantasy,’ you’ll most likely enjoy Draw Steel. You can already get the PDFs from the MCDM store, but, if you want to wait for the physical books, they’re being printed right now and should start shipping in the near future.

The only downside of this first printing of the books is that it won’t include any bug fixes made after the release. Revised PDFs should be coming very soon, but the books that have already been printed will stay that way forever. From what I’ve seen, though, there are no problems large enough that a short errata won’t fix.

And… that’s it for the release. Twenty episodes later, I’m finally covering the actual, real game instead of drafts and playtests. It was a wild ride that I never thought would be as fun as it was. I found an awesome community, made new friends, and have played so much Draw Steel.

I have to congratulate the MCDM team and all of their contractors for putting out an amazing product that will, for sure, leave a mark in the TTRPG space. I’m super grateful to have been a small part of this journey.

If you want to stay with me for this new chapter of The Dice Society, I recommend joining my Discord server. I have some cool things in the oven that just might be of interest to you… Link in the description.

News

Now let’s talk a little bit about the miscellaneous news from the past month. There’s not a lot, so I’ve organized it into a numbered list:

• Number 1: As you probably expected, the Draw Steel Creator license has been updated to include the core books. Expect a lot of updates to online tools like Stawl and Forge Steel in the coming weeks.

• Number 2: All the way back in July, patrons got the playtest of the Fall of Blackbottom. The adventure changed a bit, but the core remains the same as the version we saw in the last playtest.

• Number 3: Titancraft is going to launch a Kickstarter campaign with assets for Draw Steel! We don’t know much more than this, but I’ll keep you posted when the campaign launches.

• Number 4: I’ve already talked about the new ancestries coming to Draw Steel over the next few months: radenwights, shadow elves, goblins, gnomes, and fairies. But we’re getting another one! Dragonfly people! I’m excited to see the art for this.

• Number 5: During GenCon, MCDM tested a new way to sell physical products that are lighter and smaller than RPG books: dice boxes. At the Chessex booth, they sold Draw Steel dice that came bundled with a QR code for The Delian Tomb; this way, new players could get both dice and a starter adventure in the same packet! It’s a cool idea, but we have to see how well it works.

• Number 6: MCDM posted the first episode of their in-person playthrough of The Delian Tomb. It is run by lead designer James Introcaso and will probably last five or six episodes. I really enjoyed the characters they brought to the table, it was super fun to watch!

• And number 7: We got a little more information on the monetization of the Codex, MCDM’s tailor-made VTT for Draw Steel. Their current plan is for patrons to get access as part of their subscriptions and for non-patrons to get a key when they buy the core rules of the game. Note that everyone at your table needs either a Patreon subscription or an access key to play, not just the Director! To make this easier and cheaper, they plan on offering table packs at a discounted price once the Codex is ready for prime time.

Ok, that’s it for the news segment. Now follow me to the community corner, where I’m gonna talk about the new creations that came out since my previous episode.

Community

Given the release of the game and the sheer amount of time since episode 19, we have quite a few creations from the community to cover.

We’ll start with videos for people just getting into Draw Steel. The first one is by me and it’s called What Is This Game?! It is the pilot of my new How to Draw Steel series that teaches newbies… How to play the game, obviously. The next episode is coming out pretty soon, so keep your eyes peeled!

We also got a video by sterling2063 called Where to Get Started With Draw Steel and one by Sam McGurran called Its Time To Draw Steel | Why YOU Should Run The MCDM RPG.

Besides videos, we also got a bunch of guides for beginners. JesterOC made Draw Steel Crash Course v1.0, a slide deck to show to your players, and Jonas Tintenseher made a one-page Draw Steel cheat sheet which I thought was amazing.

KJTailor made both the Newbie Director Helper, a document with tips for new Directors, and a changelog that lists all mechanical changes implemented since the last playtest packet. Finally, finaljas90 wrote a build recommendations guide to help people select good treasures and imbuements for their characters.

In the world of livestreams, we got an awesome Draw Steel retrospective by Jon de Nor and a PDF giveaway by Rise Heroes Rise! In the latter, Cameron runs a bunch of crazy characters through my very own adventure; it was super funny!

Moving on to VTTs, Seamus wrote an article called Running Draw Steel in Owlbear Rodeo which is actually where I run my games. Also Kasrith made a collection of Roll20 Macros if you prefer that platform.

Speaking of virtual, Jon de Nor updated Stawl with a Montage Test Runner and added a bunch of cool features for patrons that I have already begun using. Xentis also updated their tool, the Steel Compendium; now it features all of the content from the final books, so you can easily access it online.

If you’re a content creator or just looking for some visually interesting stuff, we got new templates too. Dazrin made a gorgeous DS Style Template in Google Docs and Cal designed Blank Class-specific Character Sheets for those who weren’t too hot on the official ones.

Finally, in the products department, I have four new items for you to add to your shopping basket. Pesto is crowdfunding his Kobold Ancestry alongside JeffCStevens’ Weapons of Legend; by the way, if you back both, you get some extra goodies! I had never seen this kind of collaboration before, but I’m glad it’s already happening in the Draw Steel space.

Anyway, Heart of Arcana released the final version of their Tomb of the Crescent Moon and the_f_bard, along with many contributors, launched The Blacksmith’s Guild - Issue 2.

As always, the link to every single community creation mentioned here is in the description of this episode and on the transcript that I post on my blog. Make sure to check’em out!

Outro

And that’s it for today, folks. I hope you guys enjoyed the episode!

A special thanks to my current Initiate and Adept-level patrons: Seth Lang, Tomas Rodriguez, Brandon West, and TDAWS! Thank you all so so much <3

Make sure to check out this episode’s description for links to all of my socials, The Dice Society’s mailing list, and my Discord server. I’ll also leave some links there to James’, Matt’s, and MCDM’s accounts so you can follow them too.

See you all next time, thank you very much, and goodbye!

Intro

Hello, everyone! Welcome to the pilot of what I hope to be a series teaching you how to play Draw Steel. This one is going to be super short just to get your mouth watering with all that’s about to come.

So, without further ado, what is Draw Steel?

What is Draw Steel?

Draw Steel is a heroic fantasy tabletop roleplaying game made by MCDM, the company created by RPG YouTube legend Matt Colville.

If you don’t know what a tabletop RPG is… Hmmm… Well, I can’t help you right now. My suggestion is watching something like Critical Role just to get your bearings, then come back here to learn more about this specific game.

Draw Steel is in the same genre as Dungeons & Dragons, the oldest and most well-known RPG in the world. This means that players embody (usually) heroes who (usually) save the world (usually) by fighting evil monsters. This is the heroic fantasy part of the cover.

When talking about Draw Steel in particular, though, we also include two more keywords there: tactical and cinematic.

Tactical means that every player has a bunch of interesting options to deploy during combat, so the party has to strategize and work together to beat the villains. The game is also played on a grid or battle map to help everyone visualize what’s going on.

Speaking of visualizing, cinematic here means that character abilities have evocative names and flavor text that help paint a mental picture of what is happening in the fiction. Also, the game doesn’t care about stuff that movie heroes usually don’t worry about, like counting coins or tracking inventory.

Ok, so this is Draw Steel: tactical heroic cinematic fantasy. But what makes this particular combination very fun to play?

Why Draw Steel?

Without getting too much into specific mechanics here, I think this game is what the current edition of D&D wished it was.

In Draw Steel, even martial characters have meaningful options in combat. Because of how abilities work, there are no missed turns. And the gameplay loop ensures that heroes don’t need to rest every other fight.

The result is a system where combat is so fun that you won’t be looking up advice online about how you can get it over quicker.

And by the way, “tactical” doesn’t mean the game is only about combat. There is plenty of flavor, awesome rules for negotiations, and a deep character building system that makes your characters way more three-dimensional than what you might be used to.

Look, I’m not saying that the game is perfect or even the right choice for most people. If you want gritty dungeon crawling, this isn’t the game for you; if you want rules-light social intrigue, look elsewhere…

What I’m saying here is that Draw Steel implements pretty well what most current D20 games sell you, but hardly ever deliver: a game where you feel like a big damn hero while facing evil monsters.

Outro

So, if you think Draw Steel might be your cup of tea, make sure to follow my humble channel to be notified when the next chapter drops. Also follow my friends Goblins Points for Draw Steel news and interviews, and Rise Heroes Rise! for all of your actual play needs.

In case you want to introduce your friends to Draw Steel, check out my video on the subject and take a look at my recent adventure: You Meet in an Ambush. Links below.

That’s all for today. Thank you very much and goodbye.

TL;DR

If you’re just looking for a TL;DR, here it is: Draw Steel is so good I started a YouTube channel and a podcast about it. That’s basically it. I didn’t say it’s perfect, but the game does what it set out to do really, really well.

If you want the longer version, though…

Intro

Hello, everyone!

A year and a half ago, Matt Colville’s MCDM crowdfunded a yet-untitled heroic fantasy TTRPG. Now that the game is finally out for backers, it’s time to answer the question: how good is Draw Steel?

First things first, it’s impossible to answer this in any meaningfully objective way; some people like some kinds of games, other people like other kinds of games. Period.

In the end, I can only give you my honest opinion on whether or not the game does what it says on the tin. And that’s exactly where we’re gonna start: the tin.

Book

Draw Steel is made up of two books: Heroes and Monsters. There’s no book for the GM, because all of the rules and advice are in the Heroes book; the goal here was to make it easy for any player to start running the game.

Since the physical books haven’t shipped yet, here’s what I thought of the PDFs: the art is truly breathtaking, the text is very precise but still evocative, and the layout is functional.

Some people might think it’s a little too functional, ending up kinda dry and stiff, but it didn’t bother me that much. According to the devs, the books are meant to be easy to use at the table, so their style resembles that of a game manual… Which is what they are.

What I want you to notice, though, is the little text right above ‘Draw Steel’: ‘Tactical Heroic Cinematic Fantasy’. And that’s how I’m gonna review the actual system: by assessing if they live up to each of these keywords.

System

At the core of Draw Steel is a very familiar setup: the main characters are heroes who have to fight bad guys in order to save the world. This will surprise literally zero people.

These heroes are also built pretty similarly to D20 characters: they have a background, an ancestry, a class, and a subclass. They even have scores and skills, which you add to your rolls; you know the deal, right?

But here’s where the similarities kind of end… The core mechanic of Draw Steel is called the Power Roll: you roll 2d10 and add the relevant modifiers; once you do that, you will not be checking if you meet or beat a DC.

Your result will instead fall into one of three tiers: 11 or lower, 12 to 16, or 17 or higher. Outside of combat, these usually work like Powered by the Apocalypse outcomes; Tier 1 being a failure, Tier 2 being a mixed success, and Tier 3 being a full success.

But in combat, all of your abilities that require a roll have a different effect for each tier. And you’ll notice that missing is never an option…

Controversial, I know, but hear me out! For starters, Draw Steel tracks Stamina instead of Hit Points, so even if you “miss” in the fiction, the enemy still had to spend some energy to avoid your attack.

Additionally, this means that monsters always hit as well! So combat in this game is always moving forward, there are no wasted tuns, there is never a situation where a players misses twice in a roll and has to spend a whole hour without playing the freaking game.

While we’re here, let’s talk about what combat looks like. First of all, it expects a grid; that’s almost non-negotiable because all of the distances are expressed in squares.

What the grid enables is a very dynamic and action-packed combat system. There is a lot of pushing and crashing into walls, no one stays put for more than a turn, and many abilities have cool effects that alter the battlefield.

On top of this grid are larger-than-life heroes who sport plenty of options; level 1 in this game is more like level 3 or even 5 in D20 fantasy. You always have multiple abilities at your disposal to use in different situations or to create cool combos with your party.

But the best thing about Draw Steel combat isn’t that you always hit or that even martial characters have cool options, no… It’s that you get more powerful as you adventure!

Everyone has free combat options that they can start using from turn one, but your strongest abilities spend your class’ Heroic Resource. This is something that you gain at the start of every turn and, more importantly, when you do stuff that agrees with your class.

The Fury, for example, gains more Ferocity when they take damage. The Troubadour, on the other hand, gains more Drama when three or more heroes combo together to use an ability each on the same turn.

What’s even cooler is that, for each combat won and for each challenge overcome, your hero gains a Victory. Each Victory allows you to start the next combat with one extra Heroic Resource, so you’ll be unlocking your most powerful stuff a little sooner.

You still have to rest at some point, of course, because your Stamina in still finite, but when you rest, your Victories go away. So you always want to push yourself as much as possible to take advantage of your Victories while you can.

This shift completely transforms your players, from people who keep whining “can we take a rest”, into actual heroes that keep pushing, keep fighting, keep going!

But enough about combat. Can this game do anything else? Even the book states in the very first line of text: this is a game about fighting monsters. It does not shy away from telling you exactly what its selling point is.

However, this doesn’t mean that the game is only about combat. Can you role play and interact with NPCs? Of course, and there is even a specific system for important negotiations. Can you explore and run skill challenges? Yup, and they give you some nice rules to run montage scenes.

So yes, combat is the centerpiece of Draw Steel. Fights usually run as long as D&D’s, but I promise that you won’t be bending yourself over backwards trying to make it go faster because it is fun as hell!

And when you’re not in combat there are still plenty of mechanics and flavorful stuff that the characters can do. Speaking of which…

Vibe

Ok, moving on from mechanics. Let’s talk at least a little bit about the vibe of Draw Steel; what’s the flavor like, what’s its style?

Well, if you didn’t know, this game calls its GM the Director; and this probably tells you everything you need to know about the vibe.

Every combat ability comes with a nice dash of flavor text, contextualizing what each power is actually doing in the story. Let me just show you a couple of examples from the Tactician…

‘Parry’ says ‘Your quick reflexes cost an enemy the precision they seek.’ But ‘Hammer and Anvil’ has a quote: “Let’s not argue about who’s the hammer and who’s the anvil!”

This flavor-forward approach goes even harder when you consider that they got rid of a bunch of stuff that usually just gets in the way of a cool narrative. The game assumes you have the adventuring gear you need, gold is abstracted into levels of wealth, and equipment comes in kits that work kind of like loadouts.

Another example are the ancestries themselves, which get a teeny tiny text about their biology and morphology, but a huge chunk of fiction, allowing you to see the world of the game through those people’s eyes.

And what a world… Most of it is pretty standard medieval fantasy-land, with small villages that need to be saved from goblin bands and a few cosmopolitan cities where mage guilds can flourish.

But there are a bunch of little twists that keep you completely hooked. Like, even the lowly dwarves now have skins infused with stone and beards made out of crystals.

And check this out: Hakaan, which are like their half-giants, can get a trait called Doomsight. This one I have to read…

“Working with your Director, you can predetermine an encounter in which you will die. When that encounter begins […] you automatically obtain a tier 3 outcome on tests and ability rolls, and you don’t die no matter how low your Stamina falls. You then die immediately at the end of the encounter, and can’t be returned to life by any means.”

Is that dope enough for you?

Meh

Before I leave you with my final thoughts, let me just make it clear that Draw Steel isn’t perfect; there’s plenty of stuff to get annoyed with in these 800 pages.

For starters, I think the game is a little too hard on new players. First-level characters are so complex that the Delian Tomb adventure that they’re putting out comes with simplified pregens to help newcomers get started.

And it even grows a little in complexity as you play! There are systems on systems on systems here… They have crafting, research, titles, perks, complications, leveled magic items, magic trinkets, and the list kinda goes on!

With regards to combat, as much as I absolutely love it, there’s just a tad too much tracking for my little brain to do. Even after so many sessions I still catch myself forgetting about a condition or a trigger that my character has.

Which brings me to one of Matt’s prime directives for Draw Steel: ’no oatmeal’, meaning no bland, generic, mid stuff that no one hates, but no one loves either.

The game is opinionated by design, and this will turn some people off! Is that gonna be you? Well, only you can tell.

Verdict

So, having said all of this, what’s my verdict? Let’s quickly recap…

At the core of Draw Steel is a deep combat system with loads of interesting choices and a gameplay loop that reinforces the heroic nature of the characters.

Around this core is a substancial layer of flavor and mechanics that help your story flow without getting bogged down by gritty realism. And to top it all off, it has a world full of dragons and goblins ready to be slain.

If I did my job well, you’ll realize that what I said is that Draw Steel is a game of tactical, heroic, cinematic fantasy.

Is it a good game? 100%… If you like tactical, heroic, cinematic fantasy. You might not, and that’s totally fine! But it doesn’t mean that the game is bad, just that it’s not for you.

If you think it is for you, though, make sure to follow my humble channel for more Draw Steel content (one of which is coming out tomorrow). Also follow my friends Goblins Points for Draw Steel news and interviews, and Rise Heroes Rise! for all of your actual play needs.

In case you want to introduce your friends to Draw Steel, check out my video on the subject and take a look my recent adventure: You Meet in an Ambush. Links below.

That’s all for today. Thank you very much and goodbye.

Intro

Hello everyone and welcome to the nineteenth episode of The Dice Society Podcast! My name is Caio and this is a show about MCDM’s Draw Steel TTRPG where I talk about its development, my playing experience, and first- and third-party content being made for the game.

It’s time for breaking news, folks! Draw Steel’s PDF is already in the hands of MCDM’s Patreon supporters! And this isn’t by far all the news I have for you today… We also gotta talk about the two adventures and the new class the devs sent out for testing over the past couple of months.

And on top of that, we need to cover a bunch of miscellaneous news and a whole new batch of creations from the community, including not one but two new Draw Steel fanzines.

We have no time to loose today! Let’s draw steel and get started!

Community

As Draw Steel gets closer and closer to a full release, the community has been ramping up content production. There’s so much cool stuff coming out that I’m almost loosing track of how many crowdfunders and how many zines have come out over the past few weeks.

Let’s start with the The Blacksmith’s Guild Issue #1, by Max_Falcon_(EST). This is a fanzine that you can buy for $5 and in it you’ll find some Sidekick Retainers, All or Nothing Kits, Snow Elves, the Lost Crypt of Derelduhr, and an article called So, You Want to Make an Ancestry. Congrats to the whole team for getting this out the door so soon; it’s a really cool product!

The next creation is also a fanzine! Ratcatcher Magazine, by Onslaught Six, is going to be “a lofi, down-and-dirty grab bag of hot content for Draw Steel.” The first issue is already funded on BackerKit and you can get your copy for $8.

Speaking of BackerKit, Raiders of Ivywatch, by Gub, is a 1st-level Draw Steel adventure whose crowdfunder campaign has already reached its goal! It promises 20 to 32 hours of play and up to 18 Victories. If you’re unsure whether you should back this project, Gub has kindly provided a free preview on Itch.

Another adventure you might be interested in is the revamped version of You Meet in an Ambush, by yours truly. This is also a 1st-level adventure, but it’s meant to introduce the basics of Draw Steel to new players in a single session. Its ending can be tied to the beginning of Fall of Blackbottom or be used as the starting point for your own campaign. You can get it for free on Itch for the next seven days, then the price will go up to $3.

Our last highlight of the day is Steel Drawer, an online monster creator by clethrill. In it you can input everything you need for a monster and get a nicely formatted stat block in return. It’s completely free and you don’t even need to create an account to use it! This is probably going to become my go-to monster homebewer for Draw Steel, so make sure to go check it out.

Last, but not least, let’s do a quick round of miscellaneous community creations that caught my eye over the past month.

• The Cave of Amber Tears, by Heart of Arcana, is a Norse myth-inspired adventure that’s out for playtesting.

• Renée’s Pixel Art Token Markers, by Certified Ajax Puncher, is a free set of icons to use on your tokens while playing Draw Steel online.

• Power Cards, by EZKL22, are MTG-sized cards to help you remember rules and conditions during in-person play.

• The Vessel, by Mattelonian, is a Warlock-inspired class for Draw Steel coming to BackerKit in July.

• Class Retainers, by Solace, is a pay-what-you-want collection of retainers of each possible subclass.

• And finaly, the Flockle, by Kurtis Bowling, is an owl-person ancestry that you can get for free.

Make sure to check out this episode’s description for links to every single community creation mentioned here. Now grab a glass of water and come with me to the news segment…

News

Today’s miscellaneous news are a little longer than usual… This is partly due to the fact that I was extra busy for the past five weeks and couldn’t release an episode earlier, but it’s mostly because MCDM has been very busy too.

The first thing we gotta get out of the way is that Draw Steel has a target release date for the PDFs: July 17th. This is not a drill! The books are coming soon. It’s not set in stone, of course, many things could still go wrong, but the team believes that backers will be getting their copies by then.

While the backers anxiously wait for their final copies, the Patreon supporters got a trove of new content. Besides the laid out release candidate (more on that in the next segment), we got the playtest version of an adventure and a class.

Before we get to those, though, let me quickly talk about The Delian Tomb! The playtest for this adventure was released all the way back in April, but I barely talked about it because the last episode was the interview with James Introcaso.

So, in as few words as possible, The Delian Tomb is going to be Draw Steel’s starter adventure. It is meant for people who know absolutely nothing about the game, so the plan it to have it literally guide you through the first few encounters, explaining where to place the minis on the map, what the monsters are able to do, that kind of stuff. It will even come with tutorial pregens that start off with only a few abilities and gain the rest of their features as they progress through the first four encounters.

If the name seems familiar to you, that’s because the adventure is based on the short dungeon from Matt Colville’s now famous Your First Adventure video. But the new Delian Tomb is a much, much more complete adventure than its namesake.

For starters, the tomb is now much larger, featuring two floors besides the original. On top of that, the nearby village of Broadhurst has been flashed out and now contains plenty of quest locations that the heroes can explore while they’re not delving deeper into the dungeon. And finally, in true Draw Steel fashion, the adventure now culminates in an epic face off against Queen Bargnot’s goblins in a ruined castle.

So the goal here seems to be onboarding new players with a familiar setup that you might find in any D20 fantasy adventure, but ramp up the tension and the heroics to showcase the true potential of Draw Steel.

If this seems like a cool premise to you, I’m sad to report that we still have no information as to when and how this starter set is coming out. From my own experience of playing four sessions of the adventure, though, it is going to be worth the wait.

Ok, that’s it for The Delian Tomb, but we still have another adventure to talk about. MCDM is currently working on six adventures to be released and/or crowdfunded over the next six months: The Delian Tomb (which we just talked about), The Fall of Blackbottom (which was the first playtest adventure for backers), The Condemned (which is a Suicide Squad-style mission), The Dark Heart of the Wood (which has the heroes fight a Thorn Dragon), a yet unnamed gnoll adventure (which should involve the heroes facing off against gnolls in a wode), and… Road to Broadhurst.

Dubbed the ‘conventure’ because it’s meant for conventions and other similar events, Road to Broadhurst allows an experienced Draw Steel Director to demo the game in a short amount of time. How much time is actually up to you because it is modular, so you can run it in one, two, three, or four hours.

As for the adventure itself, it’s a pretty simple setup: the heroes are hired to escort a wagon of medicine to the village of Broadhurst, which has been struck by an epidemic of goatpox. On the way, they must face montages, negotiations, and combats. You might have also noticed that the end goal it getting to the starting location for The Delian Tomb and that’s not by accident! The conventure sort of works as a lead in to the much meatier Delian Tomb.

Patreon supporters got a playtest of this adventure at the end of May, and I personally thought it was really fun. It wasn’t too serious, it had plenty of interesting moments, and enough combat shenanigans to pique the interest of new players.

Unfortunately, Road to Broadhurst also doesn’t have a release date yet, but the goal is to make it available for free online so that any Director can introduce new people to Draw Steel wherever they are.

That’s it for the adventures the patrons got, but there’s still that class I mentioned at the beginning of this segment… Well, recently Willy finally posted the prototype of the Summoner! *Thunder roars.*

The Summoner is going to be Draw Steel’s necromancer class. Actually, necromancer is only one of its four subclasses; besides undead, you can be a Summoner of demons, elementals, or fey. The core mechanics of the class, however, are basically the same independently of what type of creature you can summon; you play a character whose main spiel is calling forth minions from different planes of the Timescape to fight for you and protect you with their own lives.

If you’re wondering what exactly this looks like in combat, I haven’t been able to play a Summoner yet, but friend of the show Cameron from Rise Heroes Rise! ran a danger room scenario to try out the class. You can watch it right now on YouTube by clicking the link in this episode’s description, but Cameron also kindly summarized his impressions for us.

“I feel like the necromancer fantasy is very difficult to pull off, and Willy’s done it. The various ways that your minions can be useful (speaking only for the Elemental Portfolio) is astounding. Not only are they effective at breaking up enemy’s line of effect and means of escape, but they also provide really useful after-death effects. It’s truly cradle to grave design that makes sense for what the class is! You don’t have to worry about losing your minions, because even in death, they’re very useful.

The elemental portfolio is a textbook controller class. With a triggered action like “Hold Them Down” I was terrified to mess with the minions! My highly trained kobolds were no match for the sheer number of giant stone dudes that showed up at their doorstep. As the Director, I felt like the summoner was spending my own Malice against me!

That said, at the end of the session, one of my players felt like the summoner kind of took the spotlight away from the other heroes. That could have been because of the nature of the playtest and what video we were making though. He felt that between all the shenanigans that the summoner could do on their turn and through triggered actions, the rest of the party were sidelined. I think his exact words were ‘I felt like the summoner was the main character.’ I can see his point. The summoner did A LOT during combat, mostly because they had two turns when most of the others only had one. But the math ‘mathed’ correctly. They weren’t out-damaging the other heroes, but their control over the battlefield was difficult at times for the rest of the party to work around.

In the middle of combat I kept thinking ‘I really only needed four heroes if there’s a summoner here.’ Which might speak to how I’d build encounters in the future. If I could do it again, I’d design an encounter without so many bottlenecks and have different objectives that spread out the party. But whenever I’m done running an encounter, I always think of ways I should have run it.

Overall, I really enjoyed my limited time with the class. It felt cool to see that necromancer fantasy play out in real time. The opportunities for homebrew are also nearly limitless. I know Renee was already think about an OOZE subclass. Although it might overshadow some heroes, I think the encounter was (unintentionally) tailor made for summoner dominance. A Draw Steel class means being heroic as hell! To me, the designers accomplished that really well!”

So, these were his thoughts. If you’re an MCDM patron who’s tried the Summoner, please leave a comment with your impressions; I’m interested to see if the class steals the spotlight in other combat scenarios as well.

Before we move on to the main segment of today, let’s just quickly go through a few minor news items:

• There will probably be a new dicefunder in August for those who missed the first one.

• According to Matt, the next class they will be working on after the Summoner and the Beastheart will likely be the Operator, their mecha class.

• If everything goes well, the devs are aiming to give patrons a release candidate of the Codex VTT in December.

• And finally, the Encounters book is starting to get worked on. Matt even mentioned that the puzzles section will be replaced by ‘heroic tests’, that is to say, examples of skill tests with specific outcomes and rewards.

Phew! I know I talked a lot already, but we’re not even remotely done, folks. Let’s move on to the next segment and, at last, talk about the Patreon release of Draw Steel!

Draw Steel first impressions

No script for this part :(

Outro

And that’s it for today, folks. I hope you guys enjoyed the episode!

A special thanks to my current Initiate-level patrons: Brandon, Seth, and Shaeomar! Thank you so much <3

Make sure to check out this episode’s description for links to all of my socials, The Dice Society’s mailing list, and a full transcript of this episode. I’ll also leave some links there to James’, Matt’s, and MCDM’s accounts so you can follow them too.

See you all next time, thank you very much, and goodbye!

TL;DR: download at https://thedicesociety.itch.io/you-meet-in-an-ambush

About

You Meet in an Ambush is an introductory adventure for Draw Steel. It can serve as the beginning of any heroic fantasy campaign, but it contains explicit tie-ins to The Fall of Blackbottom to help you transition into that adventure as well.

This one-shot takes about 3 to 4 hours to complete and is optimized for four to six 1st-level heroes. It works as a gentle introduction to new Draw Steel players, demonstrating the main mechanics that make up the game one at a time.

You Meet in an Ambush assumes that the characters don’t know each other and gives them a reason to become a party with a common goal. It also takes place in an environment well-known to any fantasy TTRPG player: a tavern. The hope is that this adventure can ease D20 players into the heroic gameplay from a familiar place.

Thanks for playing!

Get in Touch!

Even though this adventure was playtested multiple times, it is still the first one I’ve ever written. If you have any feedback, please let me know! You can message me on Bluesky or send me an email.

If you want more Draw Steel content, The Dice Society also has a YouTube channel, a podcast, a newsletter, a Patreon, and a blog! I’m always talking about the latest DS news, showcasing creations from the community, and making new stuff to improve your game. Subscribe everywhere!

Previews

Intro

Hello everyone and welcome to the eighteenth episode of The Dice Society Podcast! My name is Caio and this is a show about MCDM’s Draw Steel TTRPG where I talk about its development, my playing experience, and first- and third-party content being made for the game.

Today’s episode is a little different. Instead of the regular Draw Steel news roundup, I’ve got something really special for y’all: an interview with none other than James Introcaso.

If this is your first time listening to this podcast, James is MCDM’s lead designer and an overall very prolific game designer. He’s worked on countless DM’s Guild bestsellers like Xanathar’s Lost Notes to Everything Else, Cellar of Death, and My Dad’s Monster Manual; a few official Wizards of the Coast titles like Descent into Avernus, and Dragon Heist; and multiple third-party hit products like Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount, Kingdoms & Warfare, and Flee, Mortals!.

More to the point of this episode, though, he’s the person in charge of Draw Steel’s game design. He agreed to sit down with me and have a conversation about the process and principles behind the game.

I’m really proud of how this interview turned out, and I hope y’all have as much fun listening to it as I had recording it. I learned as many game design lessons in this hour as I had over my whole life of TTRPGs.

Before we begin, just a couple of things: first, we go into a lot of detail about Draw Steel’s mechanics and features, so, if you need a refresher on those, checkout Aestus’ interview with James, where they go through most of the stuff that makes DS the incredible game that it is.

Second, if you still need your monthly fix of Draw Steel news, I’ll add a short segment after the interview going over the main points of the past month. You can also listen to Goblin Points’ latest episode, in which Jon covers April’s MCDM news, including Draw Steel stuff. Link in the description.

And that’s it for now. Let’s get on with that interview, cool? Cool. Now let’s draw steel and get started!

Interview

Transcript not available :(

News and Community

How did you like the interview? Great, right? James is an awesome guest, it was great talking to him!

But, just so we don’t loose the habit, let me quickly summarize last month’s Draw Steel news and creations from the community in algorithm-friendly numbered lists. In the news department, we have…

• Number 1: MCDM released a playtest of the new Delian Tomb adventure on Patreon. Go check it out, it’s awesome!

• Number 2: The Codex now supports Triggered Abilities. Check out Rise Heroes Rise’s latest danger room video to see how they’re working.

• Number 3: The dice from MCDM’s dicefunder have started to ship. The custom titles that come in the box are public, so you can check them out for free with the link in the description.

• Number 4: The team started working on a demo adventure to be used in conventions and game stores. It should be free and modular, but we still don’t know much about it.

• And number 5: Paul Hughes wrote a big post on Patron going over the design of the Beastheart. It’s an awesome post if you want to know more about MCDM’s pet class.

Now for the creations from the community…

• Number 1: A-a-ron is making custom Draw Steel dice which you can buy right now! I personally commissioned a Dice Society-themed set and ohmygod, they look amazing.

• Number 2: TicTacTactics made some IRL ability cards for Draw Steel. They look super cool and I kinda wanna make some…

• Number 3: Inge and Dig made a Gol ancestry! The art looks really good and the PDF is free on Itch, so you should definitely go get it.

• Number 4: the_f_bard is starting a fanzine for Draw Steel. The first issue should come out in June or July, and submissions are open to everyone! Reach out to them to share your work.

• And number 5: Triglav Game’s vampire class has funded! Ananam made the announcement on BackerKit and invited everyone to their Discord server. Great job, guys!

I’ll try to go over all of this in more detail on the next episode, but this will unfortunately have to suffice for now. I’m moving houses and jobs, so I really can’t write any more than this… Sorry!

Outro

And that’s it for today, folks. I hope you guys enjoyed the episode!

A special thanks to my current Initiate-level patrons: IronMonocle and Shaeomar! Thank you so so much <3

Make sure to check out this episode’s description for links to all of my socials, The Dice Society’s Patreon, and a full transcript of this episode. I’ll also leave some links there to James’, Matt’s, and MCDM’s accounts so you can follow them too.

See you all next time, thank you very much, and goodbye!

Intro

Hello everyone and welcome to the seventeenth episode of The Dice Society Podcast! My name is Caio and this is a show about MCDM’s Draw Steel TTRPG where I talk about its development, my playing experience, and first- and third-party content being made for the game.

Today we’re talking strongholds and warfare! Over the past few weeks, we got some sneak peeks into the politics rules that might be coming later this year to Draw Steel.

Before we get to that, though, I’ll be covering the creations from the community that caught my eye and some miscellaneous news, including Willy’s new April’s Fools ancestry.

Cool? Cool. Now let’s draw steel and get started!

Community

We open today’s community corner with adventures! First is The Great Rebirth, an introductory adventure by Shaeomar (the same one from The Great Thaw crowdfunder, by the way). This 14-page PDF is already available on DriveThruRPG for $4 and promises to be “ideal […] for those wanting to run Draw Steel for the first time or looking to onboard newer players.”

And if you thought I was going to take this opportunity to talk about my own introductory adventure… How dare you? I’m much worse!

‘Cause turns out I recently launched a Patreon, which lets you join my Discord server, gain early access to videos and podcasts, get a digital copy of every Draw Steel product I make, and some other perks.

Last week’s post for members of the Initiate tier and above was the draft of the reworked version of You Meet in an Ambush, the introductory adventure I made way back in backer packet number 1. If you join the Patreon, you can download the PDF of the adventure, and every map and token you need to run it right now! So, head over there and check it out to make this disgusting self-promotion worth it.

By the way, the announcement post of the Patreon is open to everyone. In it, I talk about the history of The Dice Society, and what my goals are for the channel and the podcast, so it’s worth a look even if you don’t end up joining.

Ok, with this shameless plug out of the way, let’s talk about some ancestries. Eli.keytickler made a pack with six cool new ancestries, including Gnolls, Hobgoblins, and Kobolds. Then, Moffles, inspired by a post on the MCDM Patreon, made a Plasmoid ancestry.

From character options to character builders, the Character Sheet Toolkit, by MrMattDollar, now has a couple of automation features. In this updated version, you can simply check some boxes to have their contents added to your character. A great addition for those of us who like Matt’s toolkit.

Next, Stawl, by friend of the show Jon de Nor, also got some new goodies. With this update, you can now create homebrew monsters directly from within the app. Jon continues his great work of making Stawl a flexible, yet capable, all-in-one platform for Draw Steel players and directors.

Moving on to other online tools, Cal made an awesome website called Heroic Resources. Besides a great name, the web page has a collection of tools and resources for your Draw Steel game! Do check it out, it’s definitely worth a look.

Then, we’ve got Condition Labels, an Owlbear Rodeo extension by Seamus. As the name suggests, it provides directors with a quick way to add conditions to tokens in OBR without having to type them manually. I’ve already given this a try, and, oh my god, it is very good!

Leaving the world of online tools behind, we have a new crowdfunder on the horizon! The BackerKit campaign for Weapons of Legend was just announced by Jeff Stevens Games. This seems to be a Draw Steel version of their 5e electrum bestseller product of the same name.

However, we’re still more than 80 days away from the campaign actually going live, so expect me to talk more about it in the upcoming episodes of the podcast.

Ok, now to close off the community corner, let’s take a quick look into a few miscellaneous creations:

• The Codex Marches setting guide, by Drew, is a LegendKeeper page detailing the setting of the West Marches campaign going on in the Codex Discord.

• Treasure materials organized into categories, by Dojikaan, is a Google Sheet that details the material prerequisites for every craftable treasure in the Heroes book.

• Chess subsystem, by Eli.keytickler, is exactly what it sounds like: a way to abstract chess for Draw Steel.

• And Heroic Retainers, by Narrick, is a list of retainers that includes their backgrounds so it’s easier for directors to include them in the party.

As always, you will find links to every single community creation mentioned here in this episode’s description.

Intermission

Hey, quick break before we move on! I just wanna remind you to subscribe to The Dice Society’s mailing list if you don’t want to depend on an algorithm to receive updates from me. Also, don’t forget to rate this episode in your platform of choice, ‘cause it really helps me reach more people.

That’s it! Back to the show…

News

We started the community segment talking about adventures, so let’s do the same for news segment!

In a recent Twitch stream, James told us that he’s finishing the draft of the Delian Tomb adventure, their introduction for people completely new to the game. According to him, it’s clocking in at 50 thousand words and players should take around 20 to 24 hours of play to get through it. MCDM patrons should be getting a playtest packet with the adventure sometime in May.

James also told us that their plans for after the core rules are solidifying around three distinct books. Matt elaborated on what these could be: first, an epic adventure called Crack the Sun; second, a setting book for Omundsland; and third, a book of encounters, containing challenges, montages, negotiations, and delves, which are self-contained short adventures that you can drop into your ongoing campaign.

In addition to these big books, Matt mentioned that there could be a second track of products that isn’t going to crowdfunding. Stuff like adventures and player options could be released as PDFs without the need of a whole BackerKit campaign.

This is all very early days, of course, but we did get the news that Willy has already drafted Radenwight and Goblin ancestries. Apparently, it’s an option for goblin players to run a tribe of three goblins instead of a single individual; if this does get through testing, my girlfriend is already in line to play three chaotic goblins in a trench coat.

Speaking of Willy, we got two posts of his on the Patreon: one with an ooze monster group, and one with… Clounns (spelled C-L-O-U-N-N). This last one was actually an April Fool’s joke that contained the titular Clounn ancestry, a Political Statement kit, and the Fool, a new Troubadour class act. Willy continues being, as always, a national treasure.

Before we head into the main segment of the show, let me quickly talk about Matt’s list of character names by ancestry. He shared it on Patreon and it’s already one of my favorite things about Draw Steel! When you read someone’s name, you can tell which ancestry they are from, it’s not just a random string of vaguely fantasy-sounding letters.

If you’ve ever read an MCDM dragon name, you know Dannorax is a Dragon Knight name. If I tell you someone is called Every Flake Of Snow A Memory, you instantly know that’s a High Elf. Anyway, I’m in love with these names and it seems like they’re already coming to the Codex. These folks can’t stop shipping!

Ok, that’s it for the news segment. Not a lot of stuff, I know, but that’s because the core books are in editing and layout. I expect to have more stuff to talk about once the plans for next year are more concrete.

Strongholds & Warfare

Remember Crack the Sun and the Omundsland setting I mentioned a minute ago? Well, an important piece of these two books seems to be politics. And by politics, I mean war!

Matt wrote a huge post on Patreon detailing their plans for a translation of the strongholds and warfare rules from 5th Edition into Draw Steel. As much as these rulesets were super cool to use in D&D, they can’t just be converted one-to-one for a game where heroes cannot miss.

So, everything I’m going to talk about right now is highly speculative, but I’m a big fan of Strongholds & Followers & Kingdoms & Warfare, and have deployed them to great success in my 5e campaigns! Therefore, I’m super excited to share what the devs are cooking up for us in that regard.

Starting with the least developed of the two: strongholds. Their main premise here is that the stronghold rules should allow parties to create a base for the whole team. You could still make an individual base for each hero like in 5e, of course, but there should be a way for the characters to contribute to a single stronghold that is shared among all of them.

This is a big win in my book, as my players have always wanted to share their bases. In my campaigns, the stronghold is an amalgamation of the party, with stuff like a big garden in the center for the druid, next to a creepy altar for the warlock’s patron. It’s a physical manifestation of their combined personalities.

And how would that work, you ask? With modular strongholds. Let me read straight from the post just to give you an idea of what that could look like:

“Rooms have a size, we think, but it’s like… Size 1, Size 2, etc…. You’re not literally buying square feet and doors and stairs. And different sized rooms have different costs allowing us to gate really powerful benefits behind really big rooms. What exactly a ‘room’ can do for you is something we’ll be discovering as we go but as a rule your stronghold shouldn’t steal functionality from other parts of the system. It can grant skills, or skill bonuses, it can be like a magic item […] but it shouldn’t improve your character’s powers, that’s something for Titles we think.”

If you’re keeping up with D&D 2024, these sound a lot like the bastion rules from the latest Dungeon Master’s Guide. I personally liked their implementation, but the sentiment online towards them seemed to be quite negative; I’ve even seen some people mention Strongholds & Followers as a better implementation of bastions, so I’m eager to see how Draw Steel players will react to this design if it gets past playtesting.

But that’s all we know about strongholds right now: modular buildings where bigger rooms grant better benefits.

That leaves us with warfare. This is my favorite MCDM system, and I’ve used it in the finale of my first big D&D campaign; we were cutting back and forth between the heroes fighting the big bad, and their army battling the big bad’s army. Each unit in the battle was headed by one of the parties’ retainers, so each defeat felt personal and meaningful. One of my favorite RPG experiences ever, for real.

The design, however, felt very… ’70s’, as Matt puts it. First of all, you had to break out a whole other game to run the battle! New rules, new mechanics, new powers… It was a little too much to learn for what, in my case, amounted to a single session of play. And on top of that you still had to deal with misses, which, as anyone who’s played some Draw Steel can tell you, kinda sucks.

So the devs want to keep the 5e gameplay loop where you have to recruit units through politics and adventuring, but avoid having a separate game that everybody has to learn before beginning a battle.

Their current idea for how to implement this is a new type of encounter, one where there’s an objective and a clock; the example of the post is stopping the orc with the bomb before they reach the gates of Helm’s Deep.

In this new warfare system, the heroes are fighting a regular combat set in the middle of the battle, and the arrival of your special units becomes an event! Let me read Matt’s explanation:

“IF you recruit the Thorns… you don’t know exactly when they’ll show up […]. But when they DO show up, they have a MAJOR effect on the battle. Like maybe when the Thorns arrive; all enemies are hit with an attack that does a lot of damage and causes enemies to fall asleep. Elf-shot! That kind of thing. And of course there are special enemy units!”

Matt goes on to talk about army persistence, a possible new maneuver, but I think this is the main point about their current thinking for warfare in Draw Steel: it will be played as a combat, but with events and objectives related to the greater battle that’s happening around the heroes. This is for sure way more cinematic than the 5e rules.

I’ve got to admit I liked the previous system, but I completely understand if they actually pivot away from it. The thing is you gotta support the core principles of the game, so it doesn’t really matter if you develop a cool warfare system if it doesn’t jive well with Draw Steel’s heroic and cinematic components.

I’m sure a few people are gonna complain about someone moving their cheese if these rules do get through playtesting, but I for one am excited to see what the team comes up with.

But that’s all I had to say about what we know of the upcoming strongholds and warfare rules for Draw Steel. Let me know in the comments what you think about them; I’m really curious to see how the community responds to these news.

Outro

And that’s it for today, folks. I hope you guys enjoyed the episode!

A special thanks to my current Initiate-level patrons: grif and IronMonocle! You guys rock <3

Make sure to check out this episode’s description for links to all of my socials, The Dice Society’s mailing list, and a full transcript of this episode. I’ll also leave some links there to James’, Matt’s, and MCDM’s accounts so you can follow them too.

See you all next time, thank you very much, and goodbye!

Intro

Hello everyone and welcome to the sixteenth episode of The Dice Society Podcast! My name is Caio and this is a show about MCDM’s Draw Steel TTRPG where I talk about its development, my playing experience, and first- and third-party content being made for the game.

Today our main topic is one I’ve wanted to cover for a long time: the Codex. With all of the recent news surrounding another famous VTT, I think it’s time to take a deep dive into Draw Steel’s own solution.

Then we’re going to talk about general news, including changes to the rules, new tracking sheets, and some dope art. Finally, to finish off the episode, we’re heading to the community corner, focusing on a new vampire class coming to BackerKit pretty soon!

Cool? Cool. Now let’s draw steel and get started!

Codex

As I mentioned in the last episode, development is now full steam ahead on the Draw Steel VTT, dubbed the Codex. Given the influx of new features, the announcement of some planned releases, and the start of alpha testing in earnest, I thought this was a great opportunity to catch you all up on the goings on of the Codex.

But, first things first: what is the Codex? To answer this question, let me read from Djordi’s Patreon post on the matter:

“The Codex is a custom VTT built in collaboration with the team at DMHub. It’s built on their existing software for d20 fantasy, but is being built out in a bespoke fashion to be a solution specifically for Draw Steel. You can check out their existing d20 fantasy software right now via direct download, but the Codex itself is distributed via Steam.

The current version of the Codex has a lot of cool features. Parallax technology that gives the illusion of height for maps with different elevations, tracking of forced movement, and falling. The Draw Steel rules are partially implemented, letting you track heroic resources, flanking, and a subset of abilities.”

If you can’t take a look at their existing d20 VTT right now, Foundry and Roll20 are great points of comparison. Like them, the Codex is a 2D tabletop where you can open maps and move tokens around; players roll dice from their character sheets, while directors control monsters and the environment. Nothing too out of the ordinary here.

The main difference between DMHub’s offering and other VTTs is the amount of automation it provides. Of couse you can use the Codex without any of its fancy features, but it does understand the rules of the game and can do a lot of stuff for you. Not everything is implemented yet, of course, but I was positively surprised by how much it already knows about the system.

For example, it has a nice interface that shows how much stamina a group of minions has and it knows how many minions should die when an attack does enough damage to the stamina pool. As Djordi said in his post, the VTT also has a pretty parallax effect that denotes a creature’s elevation very effectively. These features really take the load off of the director, allowing them to focus on narrative and tactics, instead of bookkeeping.

Are there bugs? Yes. Is there a lot of stuff left to implement? Of course. But I do think development is moving pretty quickly now that the Draw Steel core rules have settled down.

If you wanna see the Codex at work, I recommend watching a dope one-shot by Rise Heroes Rise called ‘Goblins Take Over The Codex!’. Besides getting to see the whole interface on Cameron’s screen, you can also see one of the devs helping us get acquainted with the VTT and make the most out of the features they had already implemented. Just remember that it’s been a few weeks since we played, so the Codex is actually much further along in development now.

So, say you’re sold and you want to take the Codex for a spin. How would one go about doing that? Well, much like MCDM, the DMHub team is going to do their testing in phases. First they are allowing a small group of testers try out the VTT through their Discord; you can already join the server and add your name to a waiting list to get a Steam key for the latest version of the software.

Then, in a few months, they plan on releasing a more polished version for MCDM patrons; this will only contain Echelon 1 characters and core combat at first. Finally, once the VTT has gone through testers and patrons, it should become available for backers. If you don’t like buggy software, I’d suggest waiting for either the Patron or the BackerKit release.

If you’re one of us crazy people who like testing stuff, though, there is a lot happening in the DMHub Discord already. There is a whole channel dedicated to dev updates, a general chat channel to talk about the VTT, and a form to give feedback after playing. Links to everything in the description.

The coolest thing going on right now on the Discord, in my opinion, is the Codex Marches; this is a West Marches campaign that is meant to stress test the Codex. According to the onboarding document:

“Directors will post ‘missions’ in the #notice-board channel which include a rough adventure outline, how many players, the level of play, etc and offer one or more session times which you can apply for. Players are also welcome to post ‘missions’ and gather a group of players who also want to participate in that mission.”

I’ve already gotten to participate in one of these missions, and it was super cool! There are people working on the setting and players are encouraged to write session reports. It’s a really dope idea and I hope more people get to participate.

To finish off this Codex segment, there’s the looming question of monetization. How much is it going to cost, will it be a monthly subscription, will it give you automatic access to the rules, and so on… We don’t have solid answers to any of those yet, but Djordi has given us a glimpse of some of the stuff they’re planning.

First of all, their intent is to have access to a product on the Codex be tied to the purchase of that product from MCDM; that means you wouldn’t have to buy the product twice to use it inside and outside of the VTT. This is already a huge relief, at least to me.

For the players among us, it seems like access to the Codex will be predicated on either being an MCDM patron or having purchased the Draw Steel rules. Their goal is to also offer ‘party packs’, with cheaper copies of the rules for multiple people.

This does sound a little expensive for players, who are used to… Not having to pay for anything. However, it seems like they will get access to all player options, even the ones they haven’t payed for! Djordi gives the following example: “When we release the Summoner you can get access immediately as a Patron, purchase the product to immediately get access on release, or wait until the next player option update to get it for free.”

The main through line here is that they don’t want the bad incentives that free-to-play stuff creates. If they offer you access to the Codex for free, who is paying for it? An added fee to every other book they make? Microtransactions inside the Codex? If you want a product that costs money to make and maintain, you have to pay for it somehow; I think it’s better to make that cost explicit rather than implicit.

Anyway, that’s all I had to say about the current state of the Codex. I’m super excited to see the VTT become more capable as time goes on because I play mostly online, but even if you don’t intend on using it, I highly suggest joining the DMHub Discord to take a look at what they’ve got going on over there; you might be surprised.

Intermission

Before we move on, you might wanna know that, after a year and change, you can finally become a member of The Dice Society on YouTube. For only a few bucks, you get early access to my videos and are mentioned at the end of every episode! This is a great way to support my work if you enjoy the podcast.

That’s it! Back to the show…

News

Now it’s time for the news! We start with a few updates on last month’s main topic: the two new classes coming after the core rules. The 1st level of the Summoner continues being playtested, with some kinks still needing ironing out. That doesn’t mean, however, that the devs aren’t thinking about the higher levels of the class; Willy even talked about how 6th level Summoners might be able to manifest parts of the environment from which they summon their minions.

As for the Beastheart, James shared that their current design has you choosing your companion independently from your subclass, and that your options will likely feature more basic animals and fewer monstrous creatures when compared to the 5e version of the class. But, speaking of subclasses, we also got a sneak peek of what they have in store for us… Currently they are working on four options, namely the Guardian (which is more tanky), the Prowler (which is more sneaky), the Punisher (which is more DPS-y), and the Skirmisher (which is more mobile-y). As usual, all names are temp.

Next, rules updates. Most are super tiny, just some tweaks here and there. The bigger ones are: hiding has become an opposed roll, hero tokens are now a reroll instead of an automatic success, and AoE damage on minions now gets clamped to the minions in the area only. How this last one’s gonna work at the table, I’m not sure… It sounds kinda hard to calculate on the go, but we’ll have to see once the books are out.

Now, on to quality of life updates. The first one was actually on my wishlist for some time: universal malice features. These are malice abilities that work for any monster, and they emulate surges, increasing potencies or damage. Since keeping track of ancestry-specific malice features can sometimes be a pain, I like knowing that now I have at least a couple of generic options at my fingertips.

The second one has me hyped. On a recent Patreon post, James shared the work-in-progress versions of some tracking sheets. These are form-fillable PDFs to help you keep track of important stuff at the table; we got one for negotiations, one for montage tests, one for regular encounters, and one for large encounters.

Honestly, I’m pretty impressed. I wasn’t the biggest fan of their character sheets, but these four tracking sheets are a ten out of ten in my book. I’m sure they are still gonna tweak something here and there, I just can’t imagine how these could be improved! Good freaking job, guys!

Anyway, last in the QoL department is Willy’s equations for monster scaling. If I understood it correctly, these are linear functions that output the expected damage for each type of monster per level. This can help you homebrew new monsters, or scale up and down an existing creature. If, by any chance, a recent release of a big RPG has left you wanting in terms of monster math, well… Draw Steel might just be the game for you.

Speaking of releases, there are some news about the products on MCDM’s pipeline. According to the devs, they have already had the warfare kickoff meeting, where they discussed how to adapt the 5e warfare for Draw Steel. And according to the production team, the dice they crowdfunded last year should either have already started, or be close to shipping.

Lastly, in what I felt was a little bit of a plot twist, Matt shared on Twitch that they are likely not having a single big crowdfunder at the end of this year. In order to allow each product to be the best version of itself, MCDM now wants to crowdfund them separately. I personally like this strategy because it means I won’t have to go over my credit card limit…

To finish off the news segment, we have some pretty cool art. If you’re a Patreon member, you should have gotten a big post with a bunch of new pieces, including both heroes and monsters. If you’re not a patron, however, Nia Kovalevski, the author of one of those pieces, has posted the 10th level Shadow on their Bluesky account. It’s worth a look, that’s all I’m gonna say. Link, as always, in this episode’s description.

Community

With the news out of the way, we can take a look at the community corner.

Given our main topic today, I suggest we start with Codex-related stuff. The main one is a centralized source for video tutorials, by That Italian Guy; the goal of this Google Sheet is to store links to YouTube tutorials about the Codex. It’s a great place to start if you have never used DMHub’s VTT before.

Also worth mentioning are Vex’s crash course on how to direct a game in the Codex, and thc1967’s Forge Steel Character Importer.

But don’t think the community has forgotten about other VTTs! ChaosOS has recently implemented an unofficial Draw Steel system for Foundry, and AmbyNavy has made a whole video tutorial for how to run Draw Steel in Foundry using a few nifty modules.

Moving on from VTT land into YouTube land, we have a great actual play by Rise Heroes Rise called Death to Ajax! This was a level 10 one-shot against the Iron Saint with plenty of epic moments; the highlight of the battle, though, has got to be the now famous record-holding moment when one of the players pushes Ajax a total of 27 squares. Go watch for yourself, it’s something to behold.

Another video you might want to check out is my tutorial on how to introduce Draw Steel to your friends. It explains my ten suggested steps for running an introductory one-shot for players that haven’t got a clue of how to play Draw Steel. I also introduce my super compact pregen character sheets, which you can also get in this episode’s description.

As usual, we also have some cool interviews to highlight. Jon de Nor had a great chat with one of the authors of The Great Thaw of Gryzmithrak Spire, the crowdfunder I featured in the last episode. It’s super cool to hear them talk about other projects and game systems, definitely worth a listen.

Another interview you should watch is Aestus_RPG’s conversation with James Introcaso about his career. It’s full of great advice and it gave me a lot of perspective into the industry. If you want to get into game design for real, this should be mandatory viewing, I’m serious.

And, if you’re looking for player options, we got those too. Tamwin5 has come out with a banger of an ancestry: the Goblin Band. This is a super cool concept where you play as 5 small goblins that can spread out; really top-notch stuff. We also got a vampire ancestry from Sam McGurran. It works kinda like a revenant, but, you know, who drinks blood; Sam even made some fiction to accompany his creation, just like the ancestries in the Heroes book.

However, if we’re going to talk about vampires, we have to slow down a bit and take a closer look at the new vampire class that Triglav Games will be taking to BackerKit on April 2nd. Ananam, head of Triglav, shared a preview of this class with me and I’m happy to report that it’s pretty dope. And the art they showed me was like, insanely cool.

If you navigate over to their BackerKit landing page, you’ll see that Goblin Points, Heart Of Arcana, Rise Heroes Rise, and yours truly have already said some nice things about what we’ve seen. Here’s my take (ahem):

This class is dripping with flavor. Every feature and ability reinforces the dual nature of the Vampire: a relentless predator who’s nonetheless a slave to their own thirst. Mechanics-wise, the class offers a great push and pull, with plenty of interesting combinations and tactical options. Truly a great addition to the core classes!

I won’t go into design details because these might change before the crowdfunder goes live, but, as you can probably guess from my quote, this class’ heroic resource has both benefits and drawbacks as you accumulate it. At least to me, this represents really well what I called the ‘dual nature of the vampire’.

Since I only got to see the early levels of the class, I made sure to ask Ananam if they had any plans for the higher echelons of the game. Here is their response, with some details removed as to not spoil anything major:

“Our plan right now is to have two flashy things. One of them is, probably around lvl 6, [the] ability to transform into some monstrous huge form. There will be forms unlocked per [subclass], and we are thinking [one of them] should be able to transform into a wolf […] or maybe a viper, [another] maybe into some huge shadow spider, this kind of stuff. Maybe all vampire will be able to transform into [a] monstrous bat too, will see!

Second flashy thing is to expand upon [subclasses]. We are thinking start of tier 3, so lvl 7, you just get access to [a] third subclass option and can grab its earlier features. Kind of an Awakening in their bloodline. And for [the] capstone ability at lvl 10 we were thinking maybe ‘Master of Bloodlines’ […] You are basically master of ALL blood legacies.”

So, if this kind of stuff excites you, make sure to opt in to get notified when the campaign launches. Best of luck to Triglav Games and may your crowdfunder be very successful!

And, to finish off this community segment, let’s just take a quick look into three miscellaneous creations:

• Character Sheets but not for Ants, is a character sheet template by Gub that has a larger font size.

• Next, with its latest update, Forge Steel now includes all monsters from the second backer packet. Go check it out!

• And, last but not least, Certified Ajax Puncher has some nice themed music playlists that you can use in your Draw Steel games.

As usual, you can find links to every single community creation mentioned here in this episode’s description.

Outro

And that’s it for today, folks. I hope you guys enjoyed the episode!

Make sure to check out this episode’s description for links to all of my socials, The Dice Society’s mailing list, and a full transcript of this episode. I’ll also leave some links there to James’, Matt’s, and MCDM’s accounts so you can follow them too.

See you all next time, thank you very much, and goodbye!

Intro

So, I’m sure you’ve heard about Draw Steel, the hot new TTRPG from Matt Colville’s MCDM that is scheduled to release later this year? If you haven’t, don’t worry; stick around ‘cause you might have found your new favorite game.

If you have heard about Draw Steel, though, you’re probably wondering how to introduce it to your friends. You’re already excited about the game, you might have even playtested it on the MCDM Discord; all that’s left is getting your friends to play it with you!

The problem is that it isn’t the simplest RPG out there, you know… If you just dump the unformatted playtest PDF in front of them, you’ll most likely gonna have a bad time.

But don’t sweat, I can help you. Last week I presented Draw Steel to a bunch of strangers in my FLGS to great success, and I’ll tell you the ten easy steps I followed to leave my players wanting a little more DS in their lives.

Of course my method might not be the best for you, but I’m sure you’ll at least learn something from my experience.

The goal here is to have you run a two to three hour session where your friends have fun, that’s all. I even made five pregen character sheets to make your life easier!

My name Caio, and this is The Dice Society. Now let’s draw steel and get started!

Don’t push it

Ok, let’s begin with step number 1, and this is the easiest: don’t push it.

We play TTRPGs to have fun, so don’t force your friends to play Draw Steel. The game is still in playtest, so if they’re not in the mood, just let it go and try again once the core rulebooks are out. With all of the art and proper layout, they might get more interested.

If they do agree to play, don’t shove a whole campaign down their throats. Do a one-shot first and see how they like it! Then you can start thinking about running it again.

And that’s it for step 1! Easy, right? Apparently Matt is gonna make a whole video pretty soon about how it’s not fun to demand that your friends play other games, so go watch that too if it’s out already.

Read the rules

Anyway, on to step number 2: read the rules.

If you don’t have the playtest documents yet, this is the time to go get them. You can preorder the core rulebooks on BackerKit or pay eight bucks to join MCDM’s Patreon; either way you should be able to access the most recent version of the rules.

Make sure to go over the rules before the session, but don’t necessarily try to read everything. You probably only need to read the most important rules, like tests, combat, and how to run monsters.

There are also plenty of resources out there to help you learn Draw Steel. I’m leaving links down below to a crash course by @xentis and @JesterOC, to a cheat sheet by @strattonimbus, and to a video introduction by me!

Just get acquainted with the rules. If it’s your first time running DS, you’re probably gonna make some mistakes anyway. The goal here is to have fun, not actually learn everything about a game that’s not even out yet.

Prep

Now it’s time for step number 3: prep.

Once you’re a little familiar with the rules, you have to prep a simple adventure. I recommend using acts one and two of the Bay of Blackbottom, one of the playtest adventures that came with the first backer packet.

If you want to run your own adventure, my suggestion is having a first scene with a few Tests and a second scene with a no-frills encounter. You might also want a montage test before wrapping up the session, but that’s optional.

Remember that this will be your friends’ first time playing, so don’t hit them too hard; use straightforward monsters like humans or goblins.

Then just get them to the table, physical or virtual!

Pitch

Once they’re all in place, hit them with step 4: the pitch.

This is when you’re gonna talk about what Draw Steel is. The first three pages of the manuscript are perfect for this; talk briefly about the fact that this game is heroic and cinematic, about its main differences from D20 games, and what this game is good (and not so good) for.

No rules yet, though! Don’t jump the gun.

This is also when you’re gonna talk about what made you excited for Draw Steel. Highlight the stuff that made you back the game, that made you want to run it. This is very personal, of course, but for me it was actually Flee Mortals!

Character sheets

Once you’re done pitching the game, move on to step number 5: the character sheets.

For my demo of Draw Steel I made some compact character sheets that were already filled out. I used @lord_durok’s pregens and tweaked @mrmattdollar’s Character Sheet Toolkit to arrive at what I think is a pretty good introductory experience.

Now let’s take a look at what the compact sheets look like.

Each pregen is only two pages, and contains no extraneous information. The first page is the most important, and contains facts about the character on the left side, stats and trackers down the middle (including conditions), and their most important abilities on the right side.

The second page contains all other abilities and three mini cheat sheets to help your players remember the most important rules. I even made some slight adjustments to avoid confusions, like marking Free Strikes as Free Triggered Actions since this is their most common use case.

It’s all color coded too, with actions and signature actions in red, maneuvers in blue, and triggered actions in green. If it’s free, it gets an F, if it has a cost, it gets a number. Some pregens even get note cards that clarify rules that are specially relevant for them.

If you decide to use my compact pregens, you can get them for free from the link in the description.

Either way, once you get the premade character sheets out, I suggest talking a little bit about their ancestries and classes so that your players can express their preferences.

This is when you can try to draw them in by saying, for instance, that dwarves grow crystals on their faces, that tacticians can command the battlefield, or that each character comes built in with an inciting incident.

Power roll

Only now that your players have chosen their characters, I suggest that you move on to step 6: explaining the power roll.

This is the core resolution mechanic of Draw Steel, so I think it’s also the first rule you should cover. I personally wouldn’t even mention combat abilities yet, just that, for Tests, one should roll 2d10, add a characteristic, and sometimes also add a skill.

Explain the three outcome tiers, that there are no Difficulty Classes like in D20 games, and that’s it! Don’t overdo it; this step should feel as simple as possible, with a few examples but no dissertation on the qualities of the power roll.

Start

And now that they are onboarded, it’s time for step 7: start the adventure!

Let your players name and introduce their characters so that they get in the mood. Describe the situation they’re in and let them roll a few Tests before getting into combat, just to warm up.

If you’re running the Bay of Blackbottom, the Voyage Vignettes are perfect for this.

Draw steel!

Once your friends are comfortable with the power roll, spring step 8 on them: draw steel!

Start the combat by explaining how rounds work in the game, alternating between Director and players. Then, go through the stuff that every character has, like stamina, recoveries, surges, and speed.

If the monsters go first, let the players see what a regular turn looks like. Once it’s the players turn, grab their attention once more to explain how actions, maneuvers, and triggered actions work, then finish off by talking a little bit about the specifics of what each character can do.

I personally suggest going player by player and summarizing the abilities on the first page or their compact character sheet. Once you’re done, they will be well-equipped to decide which character should go and take their very first turn.

Heroic resources

If you’re feeling bold, you can power through to step number 9: explaining heroic resources.

I waited a couple of player turns to get into heroic resources, but you can choose to wait more or less depending on how well your friends are doing.

This was a delicate step for me because it’s probably the one that adds the most complexity to the game. You have to tell them what their resources are and how they can be spent on heroic abilities.

This will likely prompt them to look at the second page of their pregens, which is exactly what you want. They might even ask about free strikes or weird class specific abilities. Perfect; let them!

As the battle goes on, remind them to keep track of their resources and help them choose what to do on their turns if they ask for your help.

Feedback

When the battle is over, wrap up the session and ask your friends how they liked it. That’s it! This is step number 10: you did it!

Now it’s up to you. If you all really liked it, you might want to run again! Also: you might not have liked it! That’s fine too, no one’s forcing you to like Draw Steel. Just remember to wait for the full release before giving it another go, because art and layout really help.

Outro

Anyway, those were my ten tips for how to introduce your friends to Draw Steel: don’t push it, read the rules, prep a little, pitch the game, hand out pregens, explain the power roll, start the adventure, run a single combat, help your players remember their coolest abilities, and then ask for feedback.

If you want more Draw Steel content, including my DS news podcast, subscribe to The Dice Society on YouTube! If you also sign up to my newsletter, you’ll be among the first to play my upcoming Draw Steel adventure: Green Fog at Morning.

See you all next time, thank you very much, and goodbye!

Intro

Hello everyone and welcome to the fifteenth episode of The Dice Society Podcast! My name is Caio and this is a show about MCDM’s Draw Steel TTRPG, where I talk about its development, my playing experience, and first- and third-party content being made for the game.

Today we’ll start the show with the headliners: I’ll tell you everything there is to know about the Beastheart and the Summoner, MCDM’s brand new classes for Draw Steel. Then, we’ll talk about the latest changes coming to the rules in the news segment of the podcast. And last, but not least, I’ll go over the creations from the community, highlighting a new adventure currently in crowdfunding!

Cool? Cool. Now let’s draw steel and get started!

New classes

Draw Steel will ship with nine core classes. If you haven’t heard the list before, they are: the Censor (a religious knight), the Conduit (a devoted priest), the Elementalist (a scholar of the elements), the Fury (a raging warrior), the Null (an unarmed psion), the Shadow (an expert assassin), the Tactician (a weapon master), the Talent (a psionic caster), and the Troubadour (a swashbuckling storyteller).

Instead of resting on their laurels, though, the dev team at MCDM is already making the next classes that will be added to the game. Since Draw Steel doesn’t have multiclassing, this means that they can create niche, flavorful classes without worrying that they will break the game’s balance when combined with one of the core classes.

The first one they are working on is the Beastheart; this is MCDM’s warrior from the wilds, an adventurer that fights alongside a powerful pet companion. Be it a wyrmling, an earth elemental, or a freaking owlbear, the Beastheart has a mystic connection with their bonded creature, which allows them to combo off of each other during combat. But beware! A Beastheart’s companion might enter a rampage if their ferocity is not kept in check.

Dope, right? If you’ve been following Matt Colville and MCDM for a while, you probably know that this class is already out for D&D 5th Edition! What they’re doing now is porting the class over to Draw Steel, transforming it into what the team has dubbed the ‘Beastheart UNCHAINED’; a version of the class that is not kept back by 5e’s rules.

According to James, the Beastheart UNCHAINED is already being tested, and they are exploring different ways of making the class as cool as possible. However, they haven’t shown it off to the public yet; once they have a public prototype, I’ll make sure to talk about it in the podcast.

Now let’s talk about the second class MCDM has been working on: it is the Summoner! This is a brand new class, one that the devs have wanted to implement for a while, actually. The fact that the monsters rules were still in the works is what delayed their plans, but now that they are free to summon the Summoner, it is getting made. Unlike the Beastheart, this class is already in prototype phase, so we have a lot more information about it.

So, what is the core fantasy of the Summoner? According to Willy, the designer in charge of implementing it, their main inspirations are Diablo’s necromancer, Yu-Gi-Oh!’s upcycling mechanics, and Pikmin. The goal here is to have the player control a squishy caster whose main feature is commanding a small army of minions.

Flavor-wise, the Summoners are defined by the kind of creature they are able to summon. There are currently four planned subclasses: undead (which are tanky, but slow moving), elementals (which can control the terrain), demons (which are fast harriers), and pixies (which are good at buffing and debuffing).

Ok, so you are playing a necromancer, or a pixiemancer, or whatever, but what is the actual gameplay loop of the Summoner? Well, I’m glad you asked! It all hinges on the minion lifecycle; at the start of the round, you get four of your signature minions, which are your smallest possible summons. Then, on your turn, you can either command those minions to attack, use a maneuver, you know the basics, or sacrifice your minions to gain Essence, your heroic resource. Then, you can use that Essence to cast some spells or summon bigger, stronger minions.

Hearing this, you might be wondering just how long a Summoner’s turn is. Unsurprisingly, the devs have already thought about that. The first limiter to the complexity of this class is its minion ceiling; right now, they can’t ever have more than 12 minions on the field. The next limiter is the fact that minions do static damage, so the Summoner is still only making at most one or two Power Rolls on their turn. Finally, their actions and spells mostly work on their minions; their free strike, for example, simply commands their minions to attack again.

If you want to see a necromancer Summoner at work, make sure to check out Matt’s stream from January 31st. There you’ll be able to see Bjorn, Again at work! My favorite moment from that stream is definitely when Matt gets to use his Minion Bridge ability to be crowd surfed by his skeletons up a cliff… You just can’t make that shit up.

Fine, now you’re excited. When can we get our hands on the Beastheart and the Summoner? Bad news: no one knows. According to the devs, they still haven’t decided on which product these classes will be coming out, so we’ll have to wait a little longer until we know just how long exactly we’re gonna have to wait. I know, it’s sad, but what are you gonna do?

And that’s all we know about the new classes. Again, once we have more information about them, I’ll share everything on the podcast. But before you leave, let me know which one you’re most excited for. I personally really wanna summon some demons, I don’t know why. But I think I should talk to my therapist about that…

Now let’s get into the rest of the news: everything that is changing in the core rules of the game!

Intermission

Hey, quick break before we move on! I just wanna remind you to subscribe to The Dice Society’s mailing list if you don’t want to depend on an algorithm to receive updates from me. Also, don’t forget to rate this episode in your platform of choice, ‘cause it really helps me reach more people.

That’s it! Back to the show…

News

Most of the news for today is about the little changes the devs are implementing while Draw Steel is in editing and layout. As I’ve said in the previous episode, the game is content complete, meaning there will be no new features added, but this does not mean that the game is done.

According to James, lead designer at MCDM, their plan is to release the full PDF before sending the files to the printer, allowing them to make any last-minute changes before the text is set in stone… Or paper, I guess. Anyway, this helps avoid things like day-one errata. So we can expect minor tweaks to the rules up until the physical books are finalized.

But, come on, let’s get on with it and talk about those changes that have already been implemented!

A bunch of stuff was renamed. The Troubadour Skald is now the Auteur, the Fury’s Rage is now Ferocity, monster bands are now hordes, and monster troops are now elites. The devs are also working on better wording to explain some rules, and Djordi is making a few diagrams to help us visual learners.

On the balancing department, minions should now be coming in packs of four instead of eight, solos should now have to buy their second action with Malice, and some ancestries got more or less trait points depending on the power level of their signature traits. The devs have also clarified that two Victories (not three) will equate to an extra hero in the party for the purposes of encounter building.

To finish off the changelog, there are some news about the Draw Steel VTT, aka the Codex. Development is now full steam ahead, and the devs have been adding some pretty nice features over the past few weeks! I don’t have a list of everything that has changed, but make sure to check out the links in the description for demos of their new smart targeting system and forced movement automation.

As for new stuff coming to Draw Steel, Matt has briefly mentioned the Radenwight and the Gol ancestries, which might be coming in the Vasloria line of products. There are also some new classes, of course, but I’ll talk about those in a second…

To wrap up the news, we have a glimpse of the business side of things. Apparently, month-over-month preorders of Draw Steel are going up, even if you account for the spikes caused by the release of new videos and that kind of stuff. Things are looking good for Draw Steel!

And using that as a nice segue, let’s switch gears and talk about the community members making the most out of this rising interest in the game.

Community

Even two months after the release of the latest playtest packet, people are still making a lot of content for Draw Steel. Since I don’t wanna be here for the next couple of days, I’ll only talk about the community creations that caught my attention, so make sure to sign up for MCDM’s Discord if you want to see everything that people have been making for the game.

Let’s start with a bang… The very first third-party Draw Steel crowdfunder has launched: it’s called The Great Thaw of Gryzmithrak Spire! According to Andie Margolskee and Shae Dunser, the creators of the campaign, it is going to be a “level 1 adventure compatible with MCDM’s Draw Steel […] in which the heroes confront an ancient evil to stop an impending climate disaster.”

I won’t spoil the whole pitch—for that you’ll have to check out the crowdfundr—but it features kobolds, war machines, an ancient artifact, and a red dragon! The adventure is “packed with simple, high stakes intrigue and a growing crisis that only the heroes can stop.”

The creators were asking for 250 dollars to fund the PDF, but they have already soared past the 500 dollar mark with more than two weeks still left in the campaign. For four dollars, you can get yourself a PDF copy of the Great Thaw, for 25 bucks you get to play with the creators, and for 30 you get to participate in a 1-hour call with Shae to help develop an NPC or encounter for the adventure.

As I record this, they’re sitting at around 650 dollars. If they reach 750, they will be commissioning two custom pieces of art, so go back this campaign right now!

Before we move on to more creations from the community, let me just relay to you something Andie and I talked about over on Bluesky. I asked them what was the inspiration behind the adventure, take a listen:

“The inspiration came partly from my background as a climate scientist and partly from a ski trip I was on, where I found myself thinking about climate change, loss of snow cover, and what that does to local communities that rely on tourist activity. Until about a month ago I was a postdoctoral research associate working in a modeling group studying the Southern Ocean, and I really like thinking about how rapid shifts in local conditions create compelling stories as people react to changing conditions. I also have a soft spot for kobolds, so I couldn’t resist the pull of Draw Steel’s new angle on them as legions.”

I don’t know if the final product will be any good, but from the effort the creators have put into the campaign and the deep scientific background that inspired it, I think it’s worth your four bucks. The link to the crowdfundr page will be in this episode’s description.

Ok, so, with that out of the way, let’s talk about a couple of livestreams. The first one is an actual play of the Bay of Blackbottom; Leon Barillaro, the adventure’s author, ran it as a one-shot on TTRPGifs’ Twitch channel in order to raise funds for the SoCal fire relief. People could even donate money to make dope stuff happen during the game! Do check it out, it was super fun.

The second stream is the third part of Matt’s adventure brainstorming series. This is his unedited process of creating the outline for a Draw Steel adventure he wants to run for his friends; at some point, we might even get a recording of him running said adventure. The final videos are a bit on the longer side, but I really think they’re worth the watch if you care about adventure design.

Now, leaving the world of live video, let’s talk about a couple of… Dead videos? Pre-recorded videos, yes. Starting with a Danger Room in The Draw Steel Codex, by Rise Heroes Rise!; This is an actual play that shows off the Codex, so it’s the perfect watch if you want to see the VTT doing its thing. The Rise Heroes Rise! YouTube channel also has some fun shorts of their other actual plays if you want to check those out too.

The other video I want to mention is The Ten Thousand Year Cataclysm, a level 10 actual play by d20play; Tom has been covering Draw Steel for some time already, but this one-shot was a truly epic adventure. Also take a look at the rest of his YouTube channel for more videos about Draw Steel and even some interviews with James Introcaso.

Moving on from actual plays to actual interviews, I just gotta highlight the chat Jon de Nor and I had over at Goblin Points. Jon is such a cool guy, a great interviewer, and he had some really deep and interesting questions for me during the episode. We talked about moderation, advertising, YouTube, the whole deal; I highly recommend you listen and subscribe to Goblin Points, his awesome Draw Steel podcast.

The second interview I want to talk about is Aestus’ conversation with Dale Kingsmill; if you don’t know her, she’s a D&D YouTuber and podcaster who also does most of MCDM’s developer Q&As. During the interview, they talked about mythology, growing up in Australia, fantasy literature, and a whole lot more. Aestus has also done other interviews about Draw Steel with James and Djordi, which you can check out on his YouTube channel.

Off of social media we also had plenty of creations from the community. The first two are character sheets: a custom PDF sheet by Plusmouse and a digital sheet by Jon de Nor. The former is now the default output of my favorite character builder, Forge Steel, while the latter is integrated into the Stawl Draw Steel toolset. Make sure to check both out before playing your next hero!

And, to close off this section, let’s just do a quick lightning round of some miscellaneous stuff that caught my eye:

• Three Little Guys in a Trenchcoat is a fun new ancestry by Vitruvian_Link,

• Demo Adventure Kit is a guide on how to introduce Draw Steel to your friends by Lord_Durok,

• The Gunslinger is an awesome new class by Tamwin5,

• Atlas’ Onboarding Slides help players better understand the game’s ancestries and classes,

• Solace did the monster math to help you with your homebrew enemies,

• Draw Steel Ability Cards is an incredible website by Cal which lets you see all of your abilities as pretty cards, and finally,

• Character Creation: Ancestries and Cultures is a cool blog post by Seth Lang that goes through character options in their homebrew world.

That’s a wrap! Let’s hope the community segment of the podcast is always this full of awesome stuff to highlight.

Outro

And that’s it for today, folks. I hope you guys enjoyed the episode!

Make sure to check out this episode’s description for links to all of my socials, The Dice Society’s mailing list, and a full transcript of this episode. I’ll also leave some links there to James’, Matt’s, and MCDM’s accounts so you can follow them too.

See you all next time, thank you very much, and goodbye!

Intro

Hello everyone! Happy 2025 and welcome to the fourteenth episode of The Dice Society podcast!

In case you’re joining me for the first time, my name is Caio and I’m the author of thedicesociety.com. This is a show about the Draw Steel TTRPG, where I talk about its development, my playtest experience, and first- and third-party content being made for the game.

There is a lot to cover today, folks! Just before the holidays, MCDM released new playtest packets for backers and patrons! According to the devs, the system is now content complete. We’ll talk about what that means and all the new rules we got in just a moment.

With the new packets, the creators in our community had a field day. There are so many cool creations to talk about that I decided to devote a whole segment of the podcast to them. Prepare your browser, ‘cause you’ll be opening a lot of tabs!

But, before we handle all of that, we’ll see what James had to say about future products in the news segment. Cool? Cool. Now let’s draw steel and get started!

Community and news

News

Besides the release of the new playtest packets, there’s actually not a lot to talk about. The MCDM team took a well deserved break for the holidays and then spent the beginning of the new year planning their next moves.

In a recent Patreon post, James summarized what they want to make in order to properly support Draw Steel over the course of the year:

• Number 1: adventures. The team wants to have two adventures ready by the time the game is released: one for total noobs, and one for people who have already played the game during development. The first one will be an expanded version of the Delian Tomb, meant to introduce the system little by little. The second one will be an updated version of the Fall of Blackbottom, meant to get the players going quickly with a hot start.

• Number 2: settings. Vasloria, Capital, the Timescape, all that good stuff. Matt talked briefly about a possible setting product set in the former kingdom of Good King Omund, but that is still highly volatile.

• Number 3: player options. The devs want to create some new ancestries, like “goblins, shadow elves, gnomes, and kobolds”. As for classes, the first newcomers to the game are likely to be the summoner and the beastheart. James even mentioned that these might be coming the patreons’ way… Soon (TM).

• Number 4: director options. This includes stuff like monsters, encounters, montages, negotiations, advice, etc. No extra details, though.

• Number 5: new subsystems. James said that they will “likely be updating and adapting the warfare rules from Kingdoms & Warfare sometime soon to support several different adventures”. Matt had already mentioned that warfare could be an important component of adventures set in Vasloria, so this might be what James was talking about.

• And finally… Number 6: play aids. This includes a Director screen and, more excitingly, their VTT. As I said in the last episode, the Codex is already being tested, but it seems like we might get more tests now that the rules have settled down.

And, speaking of rules, let’s leave the news behind and move on to our first main topic for today: the new playtest packets!

New packets

On December 20th of last year, the Draw Steel community got what are, most likely, the final public playtests of the game. While BackerKit backers got levels one through three, Patreon supporters got basically the whole game, save for a few details here and there.

And by ’the whole game’, I mean the whole game: 9 classes, 12 ancestries, 18 careers with 6 inciting incidents each, 100 complications, more than 400 monster statblocks, and enough kits, perks, titles, and treasures to make you give up counting.

From now until the release of the game in the late Q2 / early Q3, it’s just polish, polish, polish. That means a bunch of editing, balancing abilities and monsters, making things clearer in the text, and laying out the books. But there will be no new mechanics added; the game is content complete.

So, what has changed from the previous packets? Quite a lot, actually, but nothing too unexpected. I’ve talked about a few of these changes in episodes 011 and 012 already, so I’m not gonna go through them all over again; Build-a-Bear ancestries, cooler heroic resource uses, perks on every other level… That’s all been talked about before.

As for truly new stuff, there are minor changes all over the documents. Revisions like renaming the Censor’s Judgement to Wrath, tweaking how the Tactician’s Mark ability works, downgrading the Catch Breath action to a maneuver… That kind of stuff is everywhere.

But there are also more substantive alterations. On the damage front, most single-target abilities now add a characteristic to the damage so that they scale better with level; for example, the third tier result of the Fury’s Brutal Slam now does ‘9 + Might damage’. Damage mitigation also got an upgrade, with kit stamina bonuses now scaling with echelon of play.

Surges and potencies were the next area to receive a major facelift. If you need a quick refresher, surges are a little resource that you are given by some abilities and that you can spend to power up your own attacks, while potencies are thresholds that monsters need to pass in order to avoid the negative effects of some abilities.

Surges are now much more consistent in their application, and the receiving player is always the one who decides when and how to use them. There are two options for spending surges: you can “increase the damage you deal by an amount equal to your highest characteristic score per surge spent to one creature or object targeted with the ability”, or, in the case of abilities with potencies, “spend two surges to increase the potency by 1 for one of the creatures targeted with the effect”.

With these changes and some additional tweaking to the default potencies values, resistance rolls are no longer a part of the game. Some monsters still might ask heroes to roll a test in order to mitigate the effects of their abilities, but this is no longer called a resistance roll.

On the usability front, XP to level up is now the same for every level, the devs added quick build options for faster character creation, and there is a new gorgeous character sheet. I honestly can’t tell you how much I like this sheet.

For directors, there is now a big chapter at the end of the book containing tips and trick on how to run the game. Of note, there is a big list of sample negotiators, examples of montage tests, and a whole section dedicated to campaign pitches. There is also a link to Matt’s Running the Game series, ‘cause… You know… That’s actually where you’re gonna learn how to run the game.

And that’s it for the Heroes book, but the Monsters book also has some new goodies. Besides an introductory chapter about the purpose of monsters, a huge section dedicated solely to encounter objectives, updated encounter building guidelines, and new factions like animals and dragons, the bestiary has some fantastic additions.

For example, there are now whole chapters dedicated to rivals and dynamic terrain objects. Rivals are monsters with class abilities and variations for each echelon of play, so they can gain levels kinda like heroes; there are also options to add ancestries to their statblocks, making them even more like PCs. Dynamic terrain objects (or DTOs) are hazards, traps, siege engines, or even arcane objects that affect the the dynamics of an encounter; they also have statblocks, with information about stamina, triggers, and how to disable them.

Retainers also got their own section. They work similarly to Flee Mortals retainers, gaining new abilities and more stamina as they level up. The difference here is that you can choose abilities from their faction or from their role! For example, the bugbear retainer is an ambusher, so at level 4 they can gain an exclusive bugbear ability or a generic ambusher ability.

To finish off the bestiary changelog, most monsters got a new tag in addition to their level and role: their organization. This is, if I understood it correctly, an indication of how many creatures it takes to ’equal’ a hero; for example, you need eight minions to challenge a hero, but you only need one solo to challenge five heroes. Between minions and solos, we now get, in increasing power, bands, platoons, troops, and leaders.

Phew! That was… A lot. But the biggest new thing we got was, for sure, an updated Creator License, which means we can all start making content for this new version of Draw Steel! And a lot of people have already made some pretty cool stuff. Let’s talk more about this after the break.

Intermission

Hey there! Before we move on to the next segment of the podcast, let me just quickly plug The Dice Society’s mailing list.

We all know how messed up social media algorithms are and how they have a weird tendency of not showing your stuff to your followers. If you want to avoid the algorithms altogether, how about subscribing?

I won’t flood your inbox, I swear! I just wanna send you a ping once a new piece of content is out, that’s all. You can subscribe at the link in this episode’s description and you can always unsubscribe if you feel like it’s not worth the space in your inbox.

Thanks for your time! Now back to the show…

Community creations

Alongside the new playtest, we got an updated Creator License. Actually, we got the same license, but with a note saying that now it also applies to this most recent backer packet; nothing about it applying to the Patreon packet, though, so content above level three is still off limits.

With the license, creators can “reuse and freely reference the DRAW STEEL text, mechanics, and game rules, including proper names, locations, and characters”. MCDM’s artwork can’t be reproduced or copied, but you can use Draw Steel’s “visual designs as inspiration to create your own original illustrations”.

Given this very permissive license, creators went to town! There is so much cool stuff to talk about that I decided to gather them all into their own section for this one episode. With the sheer volume of items to go through, I’m gonna break down the creations that caught my eye into subgroups and dive deeper into a single creation of each category.

Before we begin, though, let me just highlight the Manifold Creator Collective. This is a new Discord server idealized by @aestus_rpg with the goal of giving Draw Steel content creators a place to talk shop, ask for feedback, brainstorm, and share our projects with each other. If you are interested in creating content for Draw Steel, make sure to leave a comment on the linked thread to get added to this awesome little community.

With that out of the way, let’s start with online tools. My favorite character builder at the moment is for sure Forge Steel by @andyaiken, and it was recently updated for the new rules. Actually, Andy has been updating it with new cool features all the time, so you might want to check out the thread to catch up with the latest additions. In fact, I like Forge Steel so much that I’m going to mention it twice more today.

Other online tools that caught my eye were the updated Stawl encounter builder by friend of the show @jonstodle, a character sheet with built-in rules reminders by @xochilex, the character sheet toolkit 2 by @mrmattdollar, and a simplified encounter calculator by @strugglebus07.

Moving on to director options. Strongholds & Followers for Draw Steel by @zetesofos is an attempt to adapt the S&F D&D rules into Draw Steel. It’s already a pretty solid document, with strongholds by class and even specialist shops.

I also liked the Blood Wolf armor by @.thelazyhero1220, a tactician retainer by @max_falcon_est, and new perks by @zetesofos.

As for player options, meow-o-nekos by @tamwin5 definitely caught my eye. This ancestry is a cat person that has fun traits like ‘Everyone speaks Cat’ and ‘Actually a Liquid’. According to Tamwin, they are ’the native denizens of axiom, the pwane of uttewmost Nya’.

Running the risk of having to pay them royalties, @zetesofos also made some cool player options: the Shadow College of the Crimson Embrace and the Conduit Journey & Glory Domains.

We also got some videos from the community! The first one, called Let’s Make a Draw Steel Hero in Forge Steel!, is from me. In it, I use some artwork by MCDM’s own Grace Cheung as inspiration for my own Harlequin Mask Shadow. Since I go through the whole process with Forge Steel, it’s super easy to follow and might help beginners better understand how to create their own characters.

There were some other interesting videos too, like Running Mysteries in Draw Steel by @sterling2063, and The Curse - A Draw Steel Adventure by @aestus_rpg (which actually shows up again in a second). In case you missed them, there were also Brainstorming a Low-level Adventure and Adventure Brainstorming, Part II!, both by someone called @mattcolville.

In the tokens and cards department, Hero Token cards by @virtuegm55 is a set of MTG-like cards that explains how to use Hero Tokens. As a Magic: the Gathering player, I can 100% see myself handing these out to my players when they do something heroic.

Also make sure to check out 3D printable monster tokens by @aryisiege, condition cards by @dragonturtlemk1, and monster tokens by @zetesofos.

Speaking of tokens, let’s talk about VTTs. Stat Bubbles for Draw Steel by @ectoseamus is an Owlbear Rodeo extension that can display temporary stamina and heroic resources on your tokens. I’m a big fan of OBR, so I’ll definitely be using this for my sessions.

If you don’t use Owlbear, there is also an updated Draw Steel Ruleset for Fantasy Grounds by @kasrith37, an updated Roll20 VTT Setup by @exxodis, and a tool for using Forge Steel character sheets with Roll20 by @jackpoll4100.

In the reference materials category, I loved the Draw Steel cheat sheet by @strattonimbus. This is an updated version of ‘How To Look Cool While Playing Draw Steel’, the cheat sheet that came with the previous backer packet. It’s a single page and contains all the information you need, what more can you wish for?

Class intros by @sparksign, player-facing quick reference cards by @beartech11235, and a 12 panel director screen by @virtuegm55 are some other reference materials that you might want to check out.

To finish off, the community also made some cool adventures for us directors to run. The Curse by @aestus_rpg is a short adventure that introduces a potential campaign antagonist: the Petal Prince. I read it from start to finish, and it’s very fun and evocative. Plus, it includes a new monster and three new items!

If you need more to run, check out a conversion of Fall of Blackbottom by @kj_tailor, and Plug-And-Play Combat Encounters by @gubdm.

Gosh, now I need some water… But yeah, it’s a lot of new stuff! I’m super happy to see all of these amazing creations before the game is even out. Make sure to read this episode’s description for links to every single thing I mentioned and Aestus’ thread introducing the Manifold Creator Collective in case you want to start making stuff for Draw Steel.

Oh, and if I forgot your favorite creation from the community, make sure to leave a comment under this episode so that I can feature it next time. Thanks!

Outro

And that’s it for today, folks. I hope you guys enjoyed the episode and the topics I chose this time.

Make sure to check out this episode’s description for links to Matt’s and James’ Twitch channels; MCDM’s and Matt’s YouTube channels; Draw Steel’s, MCDM’s and Matt’s subreddits; MCDM’s Patreon; MCDM’s Discord; all of my socials; The Dice Society’s mailing list; and a full transcript of this episode.

Before you leave, make sure to rate the podcast in your platform of choice and leave a comment on YouTube or Spotify if you have any questions or suggestions for future episodes.

See you all next time… Thank you very much for listening to me for this past year, and goodbye!

Intro

Hello everyone and welcome to the thirteenth episode of The Dice Society podcast!

In case you’re joining me for the first time, my name is Caio and I’m the author of thedicesociety.com. This is a show about the upcoming Draw Steel TTRPG, where I talk about its development, my playtest experience, and, once the time is right, first- and third-party content being made for the finished game.

While the MCDM devs are hard at work getting playtest packets ready for us, we got a couple of cool previews on Patreon. Today’s main topics are exactly that: the preview of the complications section of the game and the preview of consumable treasures for 2nd, 3rd, and 4th echelons.

Before all of that, though, I’ll be going through some creations from the community and a handful of news items that might be of interest to you, the main one being those playtest packets that I’ve just mentioned.

As usual, however, everything we’re going to talk about is subject to and probably will change, so don’t get your hopes up if you really like any of the stuff I describe here, cool? Cool. Now let’s draw steel and get started!

Community and news

Community

As we get closer to the end of the year, we’re seeing fewer creations from the community. I expect this will drastically change once the next backer packet comes out, along with an updated creator license, but we’ll have to see.

In no particular order, today’s featured creations are:

• Some Dice Probability Graphs, by Jon de Nor (@jonstodle). Jon is still adding more and more useful stuff to Stawl and this time he’s included a whole probability visualizer in the app. Make sure to use it before trying to replace Draw Steel’s 2d10 with 1d20, ok, folks?

• Next, The Bow Languor, by Aestus (@aestus_rpg). The latest homebrew item from Aestus is an interesting leveled treasure that has both virtue and vice progressions. I thought this was a very cool idea, you should definitely go check it out.

• Also from Aestus (@aestus_rpg), a few Tavern Games. This two-page PDF contains a handful of simple games that you can add to the taverns of your Draw Steel world and each only takes five to ten minutes to resolve.

• Next up, Overhauled Draw Steel Character Sheets in Foundry by LozoSlays (u/L0EZ0E). This Reddit user improved on their previous DS character sheet for Foundry, adding ‘skills, languages, speed, stability, and a whole lot more’ to the design.

• Second to last, an adventure collab by Delport Breckland (@delbreck). In an effort to start a collaborative project, Delport wrote a thread on Discord looking for volunteers interested in creating an adventure together. If you want to lend them a hand, head over there!

• And lastly, 1 year of Goblin Points. This isn’t technically a community creation, but I just wanted to congratulate Jon de Nor on reaching the 1 year milestone since his first full episode. Happy birthday to Goblin Points and here’s to many more years of podcasts!

Speaking of celebrations, The Dice Society podcast is also turning 1 year old in January! If you have any questions about the show, the Draw Steel development process, or anything else that’s evergreen, make sure to post it in the comments of this episode. My goal is to have a Q&A section in the next episode to celebrate the occasion!

News

Now let’s move on to the news. This time, this section of the podcast is a little thin; the devs are hard at work finishing the rules before it’s pencils down. What we do have is:

1. New terminology. The team has decided to change the ‘attack’ keyword to ‘strike’, making it easier to differentiate what is an area ability from what is a single-target damaging ability. What was formerly called ‘movement’ has also been renamed to ‘move action’.

2. The playtest packets are coming. According to the team, they hope to release the next Patreon packet and the next backer packet in the near future! Patreons should be getting basically the whole game, while backers will get everything from levels one to three.

3. Codex is getting tested. DMHub, the team behind the Draw Steel VTT, was looking for people on their Discord interested in testing early versions of Codex. They even created a new channel to showcase the VTT in use!

4. The lightning round! MCDM already got the first production samples of the Draw Steel dice crowdfunder, apparently there will be statblocks for traps in the book, and monsters are being further simplified before the next packets are released.

And that’s it for our news today. Let’s move right along to our main topic of this episode: the previews that the patreons got over the last few weeks. See you on the other side!

Complications preview

Recently, James posted on Patreon a preview of the full complications section of the Heroes book. According to the post, most of it was designed by Paul Hughes, the author of the Blog of Holding! If you like reading about TTRPGs and the math behind monsters, I highly recommend checking it out, by the way.

If you need a quick reminder of what complications do in Draw Steel, the PDF itself contains the answer: “A complication is an optional feature you can take to enrich your hero’s backstory, with any complication providing you both a positive benefit and a negative drawback.” If you have played Baldur’s Gate 3, these are similar to Karlach’s infernal engine or Gale’s Netherese Orb, for example.

The full preview contains 100 complications, which would take, according to my estimate, over an hour for me to read aloud… That being the case, I have compiled a few of my favorites for us to discuss here.

Each complication starts with a paragraph of flavor text followed by its benefit and drawback. Probably the most quintessential in my opinion is the Infernal Contract complication, so I’m going to read its full text for you get a better sense of what they look like. Ahem…

“You made a deal (perhaps unknowingly) with an archdevil that has tied you to that fiend’s service. When you first learned of this deal, you were taken to the Seven Cities of Hell, where some of the timescape’s best minds taught you the ways of battle or magic. The archdevil allows you to use these gifts as you will… until they require a favor from you.

Benefit: Whenever you are present for a battle in which all the creatures on one side are not surprised, your side goes first on a result of 4 or greater on the d10 roll […].

Drawback: The archdevil occasionally asks you to defeat enemies on their behalf. If you refuse, your fiendish patron sends devils after you and those you care about.”

As you can probably tell, the benefit in this case is mechanical; it would be the rough equivalent of getting a better initiative bonus in D&D. The drawback, on the other hand, is pretty narrative; it’s up to the Director to determine how your infernal patron is going to become part of the campaign.

This pattern of mixing mechanical features with narrative hooks for the Director repeats itself in most complications. This is why it makes sense that this section is optional and explicitly asks the player to talk to their Director before picking or rolling for a complication.

There’s even a more evil version of this complication called Infernal Contract… But, Like, Bad. In this case, the benefits are even cooler (allowing you to choose between more Renown, more Wealth, or more Stamina), but the drawbacks are proportionally worse (you bear a fiendish mark and, when you die, you can’t be restored to life ‘cause, you know, you soul is forfeit).

This showcases one of the design principles behind complications: their benefits are balanced by their own drawbacks. As the text puts it, “If you have a powerful positive side to your complication, be prepared to have an equally influential bit of negative backstory as well.” This means that a hero without any complications will still be balanced with heroes who opted to pick one.

In a few rare occasions, the benefit and the drawback are part of the same feature. For example, in the Feytouched complication, where your birth was attended by faeries, the benefit and drawback section simply says “At the start of a combat encounter, you can gain 1 additional heroic resource. If you do so, the Director gains 3 Malice.”

Some complications can give you new abilities, some can be mostly mechanical, some can be mostly narrative, but what stays consistent is their character-defining nature. The Elemental Inside complication describes a hero who has been infused with an elemental; its benefit is a bunch of additional Stamina at certain levels, but its drawback is the real star of the show. It reads as follows:

“Drawback: When you are dying, your possessing elemental takes control of your body. The elemental yearns for destruction, causing you to attack the closest creature they notice without regard for your desires or your body’s safety. The Director or you can control the hero, but whoever does must do their best to kill any creature they notice until you are no longer dying.”

My favorite example of a complication that can completely change how you see and play your character is called Lost Your Head. I’m going to read its full text, but bear with me ‘cause it’s worth it…

“A bredbeddle stole your head! Normally, being beheaded by one of these giants is fatal, but due to your latent psionic ability you’re able to survive despite your decapitation.

Benefit: You gain the following ability.

Share Head […] Target: One willing creature […] You can see, hear, and smell as if you were in the creature’s space. Additionally, you can borrow their mouth to speak when you wish to do so. You speak in a different voice than theirs. This effect ends when you use Share Head on a different target, when the creature moves more than 10 [squares] away from you, or when the creature is no longer willing to share their head with you.

Drawback: Having no head, you can’t see, hear, smell, or taste except by using the Share Head ability. Additionally, you can’t wear gear that requires a head, such as helmets or hats.”

Like, imagine going through the whole character creation process, then deciding to roll on the complications table and getting something like this! At least to me, this would be one of the funniest and most interesting complications to get for a one-shot or a comedy campaign, but I wouldn’t want it on a more serious adventure.

And the very fact that this system is completely optional is what makes it so powerful. This optionality means that you don’t have to het rid of these crazy complications that wouldn’t work for every table out there.

So, what did you think about these complications? I’m a big fan of this design, but I would wait a least one or two campaigns before letting my players add this kind of complexity to their heroes. I feel that being familiar with the Draw Steel system would have a big impact on how they perceive and use complications.

And before we move on to the next Patreon preview we got, let me talk just a little bit about The Dice Society’s mailing list.

Intermission

Hey there! Before we move on to the next segment of the podcast, let me just quickly plug The Dice Society’s mailing list.

We all know how messed up social media algorithms are and how they have a weird tendency of not showing your stuff to your followers. If you want to avoid the algorithms altogether, how about subscribing?

I won’t flood your inbox, I swear! I just wanna send you a ping once a new piece of content is out, that’s all. You can subscribe at the link in this episode’s description and you can always unsubscribe if you feel like it’s not worth the space in your inbox.

Thanks for your time! Now back to the show…

Consumables preview

The other cool preview we got since the last episode of the podcast were consumables. James posted a short PDF on Patreon with the draft of consumable treasures for 2nd, 3rd, and 4th echelons, showcasing the kinds of items we can expect heroes to gain in Draw Steel.

I’ve already explained how treasures work all the way back in episode nine, but here’s a short refresher in case you need one: treasures are Draw Steel’s magic and psionic items; they come in four flavors, namely consumables, trinkets, leveled treasures, and artifacts; each item has a recommended echelon, which is the tier of play they work best in; and they all come with some crafting requirements.

Now, before we explore some of my favorite consumables, a quick reminder: as with everything else we talk about here, names will likely change, there will probably be some balancing, the usual stuff. The overall look and feel, though, shouldn’t change that much from now on, so this is why I’m super excited to talk about them.

Let’s start with the Scroll of Resurrection, which sounds similar to something you’d find when playing Baldur’s Gate 3, but actually has an interesting twist to it. This is a 2nd echelon consumable and reads as follows:

“You repeatedly chant the contents of this scroll over the remains of a creature who has been dead for less than 1 year as a respite activity. The creature’s soul must be willing to return to life […].

A creature with a willing soul returns to life at the end of the respite with full Stamina and half their Recoveries. You regain only half your Recoveries at the end of the respite, and the scroll is consumed.”

So, what’s interesting here is that resurrecting a dead hero seems to be quite an ordeal in this game. Sure, it works with characters who’ve been dead for a long time, but the ritual takes at least 24 hours and stops the caster from getting all their recoveries back.

Even if you have a Conduit in your party, their Minor Miracle ability still can’t revive a hero in the middle of combat. First of all, it only works with someone who’s been dead for less than a day, but it takes the same 24 hours as the scroll and also stops the Conduit from fully recovering.

Anyway, let’s move on to the next 2nd echelon consumable: the Scroll of Shadow Friendship. It reads as follows:

“As a maneuver, you can target a creature of your size or smaller and recite the incantation from this scroll. A doppelganger made of shadow of the creature pulls itself out of the target’s mouth. It retains the same statistics and abilities as the target, but has half the target’s remaining Stamina, can’t regain Stamina, and only fights the target. The shadow creature lasts until it is defeated or the end of the encounter, when it disappears into a hazy mist.”

Is this broken? Given the fact that you can clone the boss and have it fight itself… I think so, yeah! I don’t know, it might get adjusted or this might be intended, I can’t be sure.

The truly cool thing about this treasure, though, is its crafting prerequisite: ‘your own shadow, captured during a full moon.’ If we were to believe the haters, a tactical game simply can’t have interesting narrative moments, open-ended rules, or evocative descriptions. But, and this probably won’t surprise you, there are no instructions here on how to capture someone’s freaking shadow!

If you party wants to craft a Scroll of Shadow Friendship, it’s completely up to the Director how to adjudicate this. It can be a cool side quest, it might require an NPC’s help, or it can even be straight up impossible! I honestly love this kind of thing, and my mind is already racing with interesting ways to make an item like this a central feature of a future campaign.

Now moving on to my favorite consumable, a 3rd echelon item called ‘Better Summon G’Allios’ Business Card. Its effect is:

“This card permits the bearer to employ a devil to avoid the damage and effects of any single ability targeting them. You can tear the card as a triggered action to make a devil momentarily appear when you take damage. The devil redirects the ability to a target anywhere on the same world of the devil’s choosing. You are treated to a clear vision of whoever suffers the damage. The devil then disappears.”

This is, to me at least, peak design. Give this treasure to a player, wait for the right situation to arise, and watch them come to grips with the trolley problem in real time!

Will they behave in the tactically optimal way and use the business card to avoid Ajax’s rage, or will they be scared of the potentially devastating narrative consequences that this might incur? What if the devil chooses one of the hero’s loved ones to be the target? What if they choose another hero that is in the same battle? Is the hero willing to risk loosing someone near and dear to their heart in order to protect themselves? *Chef’s kiss* Absolutely perfect!

Next up, another item from the 3rd echelon. This one is called Bottled Paradox and works like this:

“This potion may be drunk or thrown up to 10 squares as a maneuver. When drunk, you select a test you made in the last minute, the outcome of that test is rerolled until the outcome changes. Alternatively, the potion can be thrown, creating a 3 cube area of effect. An event that took place […] in the last minute within that area changes at the discretion of the Director. Literally anything can happen.”

Anything can happen!? Did I just read that!? Again, another amazing treasure that lets the Director go absolutely nuts! Its prerequisites, by the way, are ground sapphire and 1 month of lifespan. How does one collect that, you ask? Good luck with your new side quest, I guess.

To finish off, an example of what a 4th echelon consumable looks like. It’s a little more conventional than the other ones I’ve shown up until now, but it’s very powerful. It’s called Page from the Infinite Library: Solaris and it says:

“As a maneuver, you may spend 1 Heroic Resource [to] destroy the page and create a 4 cube area within 20 squares that contains a tiny sun at its center until the end of the encounter. A creature who starts their turn in the area takes 20 fire damage and is dazed (EoT).”

I like that it costs 1 Heroic Resource independently of your class, which means the dev team is confident that they are all worth basically the same. I’m interested to see how many other treasures spend Heroic Resources when used.

So, what did you think of these items? I personally love this kind of design, with clear combat applications, but very vague and narrative secondary mechanics. I might be in the minority, though? Let me know in the comments, I love reading y’all’s replies.

Outro

And that’s it for today, folks. I hope you guys enjoyed the episode and the topics I chose this time.

Make sure to check out this episode’s description for links to:

• Matt’s and James’ Twitch channels,
• MCDM’s and Matt’s YouTube channels,
• Draw Steel’s, MCDM’s and Matt’s subreddits,
• MCDM’s Patreon,
• MCDM’s Discord,
• All of my socials,
• The Dice Society’s mailing list,
• And a full transcript of this episode.

Before you leave, make sure to rate the podcast in your platform of choice and leave a comment on YouTube or Spotify if you have any questions or suggestions for future episodes.

See you all next time… Happy holidays, thank you very much and goodbye!

Intro

Hello everyone and welcome to the twelfth episode of The Dice Society podcast!

In case you’re joining me for the first time, my name is Caio and I’m the author of thedicesociety.com. This is a show about the upcoming Draw Steel TTRPG, where I talk about its development, my playtest experience, and, once the time is right, first- and third-party content being made for the finished game.

• Little experiment, no script this time

• Main topics: 3rd Patreon packet and the new rules that were announced, changes they’re making as a result of feedback

As usual, however, everything we’re going to talk about is subject to and probably will change, so don’t get your hopes up if you really like any of the stuff I describe here, cool? Cool. Now let’s draw steel and get started!

Community and news

Community

• The Kobold Ancestry, by Pesto

• Xentis’ Steel Compendium, by @Xentis

• Emblazoned Character Sheets, by @DarinLammers1992

• Mobile friendly rules reference PDF, by @Ghost.of.Ezekiel

• Owlbear Rodeo: DS Conditions & Tooltips, by @TerriblyAngryFennec

• Interview with Djordi discussing class design, by @Aestus_RPG

• “Introductions”, #0 | Into the Wode, by RobinBaggett (@exxodis)

• Myths of Hecenae Episode 1, by @Lavender_Gardens

• Green Fog at Morning, by @TheDiceSociety featuring @Aestus_RPG, Jon de Nor (@jonstodle) and @Tamwin5

News

• “Full” game with contractors

• Content complete by end of december

• Hopes to release starter adventures with/soon after the game is released

• Half the hexes in the vasloria box filled by them. The other half is up to the director

• Easier self healing to make it more viable without conduit

• “We will have an updated license when the Backer Packet #2 releases.”

• “We are planning to release a beta version [of Codex] to MCDM patrons initially. Couldn’t give you a date, I don’t expect this to be this calendar year.”

New rules

Third Patreon packet

• “Players who like building melee-focused heroes is that they had a hard time locking down their foes and protecting their counterparts. Similarly, Directors had a hard time protecting their squishy artillery, hexers, and controllers! So we made it a little harder to shift. Instead of being able to shift half your speed with a move action, you now can take the Disengage move action to shift 1 square (with some character options allowing to shift 2 squares). You also can’t shift into difficult terrain.”

• “Damage has been reduced to make the game more challenging. Many areas of effect have had their size reduced. Many effects have changed to accommodate new rules or address balance changes.”

• “Added the following careers: Agent, Aristocrat, Beggar, Disciple, Explorer, Farmer, Politician, Sailor, Warden, Watch Officer. Careers no longer provide a title. Now they provide a perk. Many careers now provide a starting wealth bonus in addition to the other available bonuses”

• “There are new rules for using heroic resources outside of combat for each class”

• “You can no longer jump out of difficult or damaging terrain”

• Resources working in different ways, but generated at the same pace. Prayer more of a gamble; tactician can pump focus into marks; edges reduce the cost of abilities for shadows.

• EoE gone

• Tiers -> Echelons of Play

• VP -> Malice

• A perk every even level

Level 10

• Conduit level 10: Avatar

• Shadow level 10: Umbral Knight, Shadow Clone

Intermission

Hey there! Before we move on to the next segment of the podcast, let me just quickly plug The Dice Society’s new mailing list.

We all know how messed up social media algorithms are and how they have a weird tendency of not showing your stuff to your followers. If you want to avoid the algorithms altogether, how about subscribing?

I won’t flood your inbox, I swear! I just wanna send you a ping once a new piece of content is out, that’s all. You can subscribe at the link in this episode’s description and you can always unsubscribe if you feel like it’s not worth the space in your inbox.

Thanks for your time! Now back to the show…

Green Fog at Morning

Mouthfeel

• Works really well, mouthfeel was great

• A bit too many conditions

• Test consequences/benefits are hard to make up on the spot (for me)

• After action report, by @Aestus_RPG

Feedback

• Feedback about surges: working ok, but too many ways to gain/apply. Try to implement a universal way of how they work (like only applying to the next attack). Surge can be tracked and you choose when to spend (on any target); spend at most 3 surges, but keep as many as you want; they go away at the end of combat.

• No shields! Less stuff triggering off Magic, Psionic, Weapon.

• If you impose a condition, it only lasts until EoT for the most part. Potency numbers have been adjusted.

• Censors and tacticians changed resource generation. No longer banks focus/judgement; you mark/judge and then have triggers to fuck the target that spends focus.

• “No matter what we do, we’ll be rebalancing the math to avoid some stuff like that and give heroes opportunities to increase their potency temporarily to overcome boss defenses”

• Feeling A Bit Dejected, by u/MrAxelotl

Outro

And that’s all, folks. I hope you guys enjoyed the episode and the topics I chose this time.

Make sure to check out this episode’s description for links to:

• Matt’s and James’ Twitch channels,
• MCDM’s and Matt’s YouTube channels,
• Draw Steel’s, MCDM’s and Matt’s subreddits,
• MCDM’s Patreon,
• MCDM’s Discord,
• All of my socials,
• The Dice Society’s mailing list,
• And the show notes this episode.

Before you leave, make sure to rate the podcast in your platform of choice and leave a comment on YouTube or Spotify if you have any questions or suggestions for future episodes.

See you all next time… Thank you very much and goodbye!

Intro

Hello everyone and welcome to the eleventh episode of The Dice Society podcast!

In case you’re joining me for the first time, my name is Caio and I’m the author of thedicesociety.com. This is a show about the upcoming Draw Steel TTRPG, where I talk about its development, my playtest experience, and, once the time is right, first- and third-party content being made for the finished game.

Today’s episode is packed! It’s been a whole month since episode ten, so we’ve got a lot of ground to cover. We’ll start with creations from the community and then the news, where I’ll talk about the upcoming Patreon playtest and the future of Draw Steel.

Then, our main topic for today will be the big revision that the game is going through as a result of backer feedback. We’ve got blessings, we’ve got surges, we’ve got shields, we’ve got potency, we’ve got Build-a-Bear ancestries… It’s too much for the intro! We’ll go over all of that and more after the news.

As usual, however, everything we’re going to talk about is subject to and probably will change, so don’t get your hopes up if you really like any of the stuff I describe here, cool? Cool. Now let’s draw steel and get started!

Community and news

Community

For the first time, we’ll start our news segment with creations from the community! Since you folks are making such cool stuff for Draw Steel, I feel like it’s time to give it permanent home here in The Dice Society podcast.

I’m not gonna share everything that I come across, mind you. I’m just gonna highlight the products that caught my attention or that I have personally used in my game.

In no particular order, today’s featured creations are:

• A new Timescape Wiki by Lord_Durok, the king of the mods. I’m personally a wiki lover, so I was super happy to see that there is a movement to take the Timescape Wiki away from Fandom. It’s still in its infancy, but there are already 33 pages there!

• Next, the Stawl website, by friend of the show Jon de Nor. This is a shockingly good free toolset that lets you lookup monsters, build encounters, and even run battles from your browser. Go give it a spin and support Jon on Patreon if you like his stuff.

• Then, there’s 5T, Tamwin’s Treasures, Troops, Trinkets, and Traditions. This is a collection of player-facing homebrew that includes kits, subclasses, and the first level of a Gunslinger class.

• And, in the same category as 5T, we have Aestus’s Homebrew Master Doc, by Aestus_RPG. This is a 35-page Google Doc full of homebrew, from simple items to an experimental pet system.

• Second to last we have Draw Steel Initiative Tracker, by StinkyPaps. This is an extension for Owlbear rodeo that allows you to track initiative straight from inside the VTT. I still have to try this out, but it looks amazing!

• And lastly, You Meet in an Ambush, by me! This is an introductory one-shot that gives the heroes a reason to become a party with a common goal. It also takes place in a tavern. It’s free on Itch, and it comes with a fully laid out PDF and a pretty map by Dyson Logos.

News

Now let’s move on to the news. Since today there’s just too much stuff, I’m gonna talk about everything that isn’t related to the core rules; those changes are all gonna get talked about during the main segment of the show instead, ok?

Without further ado, our news items for today are:

1. The next Patreon packet. According to the team, the next playtest packet is coming out for Patreon subscribers before the end of October and will feature the first three levels of all 9 classes! Additionally, we’re getting the rules for crafting, research, downtime activities, treasures, and more, so this is gonna be a chunky one!

2. Rules for retainers. Djordi is currently working on a system for retainers that, if everything goes according to plan, will be featured in the Heroes book. According to him, the system is meant to be quick and flexible: we’ll get statblock templates to which we can add faction abilities (like ‘crafty’ for goblins) and monster role abilities, that’s it.

3. Future classes. The devs are already thinking about the classes they want to design once the core game is done. Their list includes the Summoner, the Operator, the Acolyte, a gish class, the Beastheart, the Illrigger (maybe as Censor subclasses), the Alchemist, and a psionic class akin to a Jedi.

4. Future products. The devs are also discussing what products will be coming after the core rules. A notable mention is the Vasloria box, containing lore, instructions on how to run a heroic sandbox, and adventures. Other regions of Orden such as Higara, Khorsir, and Ix might get their own products if there is demand for them.

5. The future of the Patreon. Once the core game is done, the devs plan on releasing the content of future products on Patreon piece by piece. This means that subscribers might be getting classes, ancestries, and other options in PDF form as they get designed. This isn’t a certainty, of course, but I thought it might be of interest to you folks.

6. Orden’s living metaplot. Still on the topic of future support for Draw Steel, the team is thinking about having Orden become a living setting with a metaplot. That means players can affect the canon of future products by playing in games during special real-world events. This sounds very cool and I hope we hear more about that in the near future.

And that’s all I have for the news segment today. Our main topic—the big revision the game is going through—is coming right up!

Revision (part 1)

As we all know, Draw Steel is still in active development; the core of the game is mostly settled, but a few kinks still need some ironing out. As feedback from the backer playtest poured in and as the designers played the game for longer stretches of time, it became clear that some issues had to be addressed.

As a result, the devs spent the last month making a bunch of tweaks to the game. We’ve got some little things and some quite big ones, and it seems like all of these changes will be coming to the next Patreon playtest.

Are you curious already? Let’s crack this revision open and get started!

Caster kits

The first (and probably biggest) change are caster kits. Kits overall were a big hit, and people playing martial classes loved the flavor and mechanics that these loadouts brought to the game. Caster kits, on the other hand, had some satisfaction problems…

Flavor-wise, they’re not as strong as martial kits. For example, most people can instantly tell what archetype I’m referring to when I say my hero wears a Shining Armor, or Cloak and Dagger, or are a Martial Artist. Compare that with caster kits like Frigid, or Missile, or Rook. The fantasy of casters differentiates between types of magic, like arcane Elementalists or divine Conduits, but not as much between what implements they use or how they’re casting their spells.

Mechanically, the wards that came with caster kits were a little too powerful when paired with martial heroes. This was especially noticeable because Tactician players, who can choose two kits, felt like they had to take a caster kit in order to avoid the benefit collisions that come with having two martial kits.

Additionally, James shared that less than 3% of non-Tactician players used caster kits with martial classes or martial kits with caster classes. All in all, caster kits weren’t delivering on the flavor, were creating some bad incentives for Tacticians, and most players weren’t taking advantage of the fact that you could mix and match kits and classes.

So, what’s their solution for this pickle? Get rid of caster kits entirely!

Calm down, calm down… Casters are not losing customizability. In fact, they are more customizable than ever because now they gain some new class features: wards, blessings, and an extra signature ability! In fact, if you squint, caster kits were simply broken up and then bundled into the classes themselves.

Starting with wards, these are basically the wards that you used to get with your caster kit. Elementalists, for example, can choose to take an Absorption Ward, an Elemental Immunity Ward, an Explosive Ward, or a Vine Ward.

Then there are blessings, which are the new form of the old numerical bonuses from caster kits. They change name with class, so Elementalists have elemental enchantments; examples are Flame’s Enchantment, which grants them +1 damage to Magic abilities, or Stone’s Enchantment, which grants them +3 Stamina and +1 Stability. There’s also something equivalent to choosing a martial kit in the form of the Warrior’s Enchantment, which lets them use medium armor and a light weapon.

Finally, to compensate for the fact that you used to get a second signature ability from your caster kit, casters can now simply choose two signature abilities from their class instead of one. This also comes with new signature abilities for each class, so you have more options to choose from; for example, Elementalists now have an option called Split Flame, which is suspiciously similar to the Split Beam ability from the old Spellslinger kit.

To summarize, caster kits were merged into caster classes as class features. This means that only martials get kits now, but the old kit benefits are still there for the casters. As an added bonus, these benefits can now be mixed and matched, so you don’t have to commit to a full ward + numerical bonus + signature ability bundle.

The cherry on top of the caster kit rework is that, now, the devs are able to implement gish-like kits for martials without the fear of making casters overpowered. The new kits they created are the Arcane Archer, the Battlemind, the Spellsword, and the Warrior Priest. The Spellsword, for example, has an ability that causes lightning to leap to a second target nearby once you hit the first with your weapon.

Surges & Shields

Phew, that’s a lot about caster kits. Let’s move on to the next big change coming to Draw Steel: Surges and Shields.

The problem that motivated these new pieces of tech is that heroes can hand out a lot of buffs in this game; this in intentional, because the goal is to reinforce heroic teamwork. However, having too many temporary Edges and damage bonuses floating around can be a little bit too much to remember.

The solution is a universal buff. Now, instead of an ability saying something like ‘attacks against the target deal extra damage equal to your Reason score’, the ability would simply say ‘attacks against the target have a Surge’. The keyword also currently comes with a pretty lightning symbol, so it’s easy to see it on the character sheet.

I know it seems like this is not a big change, but the trick is that the value of a Surge is defined on the sheet of the receiver. Right now, every hero gets a little table on their sheet that says how much extra damage they deal from having one, two, or three Surges. And, as you can probably imagine, Surges from different sources stack; this is what makes it truly a universal buff.

The defensive counterpart of the Surge is currently called the Shield and is represented by—you guessed it—a shield symbol. The only difference between Surges and Shields is that Shields subtract damage from incoming attacks instead of adding damage to outgoing attacks.

As for their values, Surges and Shields are based on your best stat; so at level 1, each Surge is worth +2 damage and each Shield is worth -2 damage. Abilities can even grant more than one buff at a time, like the Tactician’s Parry, which now reduces the incoming attack by two Shields, or, in other words, -4 damage.

The side effect of having Surges and Shields is that the devs can now reduce the amount of Edges being handed out. According to Matt, “Edges are bonuses to your power roll as a result of using superior tactics. Flanking, getting the high ground, attacking while hidden, etc…”

Overall, this tech simplifies tracking buffs by a whole lot without sacrificing the feeling that the heroes are working together. We’ll have to wait and see if the testers find any insurmountable issues with this system, but the team seems hopeful that it’s gonna work out.

Condition gates

Finally, the third and last major change coming to the game is what they’re calling condition gates or Potency. The problem being solved here is related to the ’too many buffs problem’: there are also too many debuffs.

Since Draw Steel is heroic and tactical, it makes sense that heroes and monsters are applying debuffs to the other side; stuff like ’everyone within 5 squares of me is weakened.’ But the devs are committed to reducing the number of rolls when it’s not your turn, so most of these effects simply happened without a resistance roll. The thing is, this feels kind of bad because you had no way of resisting the debuff; on your turn you could save to end the effect, sure, but you had no way of avoiding it in the first place.

The solution here are condition gates: instead of having you roll to prevent a debuff, abilities can now point to a stat and say that the bad effect only happens if the defender’s stat is lower than a certain threshold.

An example is the Tactician’s improved Mark ability. By spending four Focus, it does, among other things, the following effect: “R2: the target’s speed is reduced to 0 for the rest of their turn.” R2 here means that the debuff only happens if the target’s Reason is lower than 2.

Another example of the potential of this mechanic is the Tactician’s Try Me Instead. This ability can frighten the target, but the condition gate gets higher, the better you roll! So on a tier 1, it only frightens I1, that is, targets with Intuition 0 or lower; but at tier 3, it frightens I3, or Intuition 2 or lower.

Of course, most of these debuffs are not permanent, so how do you get rid of them with the new rules? Well, you still get a save at the end of your turn, but they’ve been streamlined: now, you simply roll a d10 and clear the effect if you roll 6 or higher. This is similar to saves in D&D 4th Edition, by the way, so it’s not unheard of.

According to Matt, there is still room in the game for the old resistance rolls, like when a dragon breathes fire on you, but these will be much rarer than they previously were.

All in all, this allows Draw Steel heroes and monsters to keep applying negative effects like they used to, but simplifies a lot of the back and forth between players and director. Like Surges and Shields, I’m super excited to see if this new mechanic gets past the testers and, if it does, how it feels at the table.

And that’s it for the major changes that the designers announced since the last episode. But we aren’t in the clear yet… There are still a bunch of smaller—but nonetheless important—tweaks to talk about. Go refill your coffee mug and come back after the intermission for more revisions!

Intermission

Hey there! Before we move on to the next segment of the podcast, let me just quickly plug The Dice Society’s new mailing list.

We all know how messed up social media algorithms are and how they have a weird tendency of not showing your stuff to your followers. If you want to avoid the algorithms altogether, how about subscribing?

I won’t flood your inbox, I swear! I just wanna send you a ping once a new piece of content is out, that’s all. You can subscribe at the link in this episode’s description and you can always unsubscribe if you feel like it’s not worth the space in your inbox.

Thanks for your time! Now back to the show…

Revision (part 2)

Welcome back! Now that we’re done with the big changes, let’s talk a little bit about the smaller ones. There are three main changes, so let’s start with those.

Ancestries

The first one is an update to ancestries which I suspect most of you are going to like: now they’re all Build-a-Bear ancestries! According to James, the Devil was the best rated ancestry from the previous playtest and the reason is customization; unlike the other species, Devils have a core trait which all individuals get and a menu of features from which the player can pick two or three depending on how many fiend points they cost.

So, for example, every Devil gets a silver tongue, but one might create a Devil that also has wings and horns. Or, one might create a Devil that also has a barbed tail, glowing eyes, and hellsight. The combinations are endless!

It’s not at all surprising that people loved this Build-a-Bear ancestry, so the devs went to town designing feature menus for every single ancestry of the game. However, it isn’t a given this is going to survive testing, especially because it exponentially increases the amount of combinations that need to be tested.

I, for one, am super excited just to see what kinds of benefits the Humans get in this new system. Anyway, that’s it for the changes to ancestries.

Heroic resources

The second update has to do with heroic resources. According to James, it was good that each class had its own way of generating heroic resources, but something was still missing…

The Fury, for instance, can spend their Rage on abilities, sure, but they also have a secondary mechanic associated with it: they can accumulate Rage to gain extra benefits. This makes Rage stand out in a positive way from resources like the Tactician’s Focus, which can only be used on abilities.

The devs then decided that every resource should have its own secondary mechanic to make them all stand out more from each other. The first glimpse we got from this new design is the Tactician’s new Mark ability, which now lets you bank Focus on the targeted creature to gain extra benefits. For example, if you bank two Focus on someone, the benefit is “you and your allies have an edge on attacks against the target. And the target is taunted by you while they are marked.”

Again, this is early days of this new system, so we’ll have to wait and see whether it survives contact with the enemy. For now, let’s move on to the next of the minor updates: perks.

Perks

Perks are a new kind of class benefit that heroes can gain upon leveling up. They work kinda like Titles, but you don’t have to earn them by doing specific deeds like killing a dragon or becoming a hawklord.

From James’ examples, they feel like interesting things that the heroes can use outside of combat; for instance, you can gain a familiar, you can become a master of disguise, you can become a monster whisperer, that sort of thing. They all come with some benefit that reinforces the fact that Draw Steel heroes aren’t necessarily only good at killing things.

With this new system in place, careers now give you a selection of perks to choose from, instead of a single predetermined career title. But, as of yet, that’s basically everything we know about perks.

Misc

Don’t leave yet, though! There are still a few tiny revisions that I need to mention, and these are all going into the lightning round:

• James mentioned that the math of the game got revised so that heroes aren’t unstoppable killing machines anymore.

• Tests were well received by the backers, but the three levels of difficulty might get revised to better suit people’s way of setting DCs.

• ‘Tiers of play’ are getting renamed to ‘ranks of play’ in order to avoid confusion with power roll tiers.

• The Mobility feature that some kits had is probably being replaced by something called Disengage, but we aren’t sure what that means yet.

• And finally, the number of Villain Power that gets generated each round is probably increasing to challenge heroes with a lot of Victories.

Outro

And that’s it for today, folks. I hope you guys enjoyed the episode and the topics I chose this time.

Make sure to check out this episode’s description for links to:

• Matt’s and James’ Twitch channels,
• MCDM’s and Matt’s YouTube channels,
• Draw Steel’s, MCDM’s and Matt’s subreddits,
• MCDM’s Patreon,
• MCDM’s Discord,
• All of my socials,
• The Dice Society’s mailing list,
• And a full transcript of this episode.

Before you leave, make sure to rate the podcast in your platform of choice and leave a comment on YouTube or Spotify if you have any questions or suggestions for future episodes.

See you all next time… Thank you very much and goodbye!

TL;DR: download at https://thedicesociety.itch.io/you-meet-in-an-ambush

About

You Meet in an Ambush is a one-shot adventure for Draw Steel. It’s based on Bay of Blackbottom, but with a few twists…

Much like Bay of Blackbottom, this one-shot takes about 2 to 3 hours to complete and is optimized for five 1st-level heroes. It works as a gentle introduction to the Draw Steel system, demonstrating the main mechanics that make up the game. Unlike the playtest adventure, however, You Meet in an Ambush assumes that the characters don’t know each other and gives them a reason to become a party with a common goal. It also takes place in an environment well-known to any fantasy TTRPG player: a tavern. The hope is that this adventure can be the beginning of any fantasy campaign, easing D20 players into the heroic gameplay from a familiar place.

You can get it right now on Itch at the link above!

Feedback

This is the first adventure I have ever designed, so expect a few rough edges. I tried to mirror Bay of Blackbottom’s structure and encounters as much as possible exactly because I thought it was a great adventure, but I might have messed something up.

If you have any constructive feedback about the adventure, please let me know! You can tweet at me @thedicesociety or send me an email at contact@thedicesociety.com.

Thanks for playing!

Previews

Intro

Hello everyone and welcome to the tenth episode of The Dice Society podcast!

In case you’re joining me for the first time, my name is Caio and I’m the author of thedicesociety.com. This is a show about the upcoming Draw Steel TTRPG, where I talk about its development, my playtest experience, and, once the time is right, first- and third-party content being made for the finished game.

Our main topic for today is the new BackerKit playtest packet, which came out a couple of weeks ago! And, if you’re interested in creating content for the game, we’re also going to talk a little bit about the Draw Steel creator license that came out with the packet.

As usual, however, everything we’re going to talk about is subject to and probably will change, so don’t get your hopes up if you really like any of the stuff I describe here, cool? Cool. Now let’s draw steel and get started!

News

Before we jump into our main topics, let’s get some of the news out of the way, starting with:

1. A dice crowdfunder! On September 24th, MCDM will launch a BackerKit campaign to create some custom dice for Draw Steel. According to the preview page, it will be made by Chessex and will feature two twenty-sided d10s for optimal platonic Power Rolling and one six-sided d3 for the Furies out there. As you can probably imagine, you could just use your regular D&D dice instead of spending 20 bucks on one of these custom sets, but it’s going to be a pretty cool souvenir for fans. If you’re at all interested, you can follow the campaign at mcdm.gg/dice.

2. Levels one through ten. The devs are currently hard at work finishing the full prototypes of the classes; they already have levels one through three of every single class, and levels four through ten of the Fury, Conduit and Shadow. They expect that heroes will have around ten abilities at level ten, but we’ll have to wait and see.

3. Patreon feedback. James has gone through all of the feedback of the Patreon playtest packet, and is already implementing some changes. I’ll talk more about this later in this very episode, but the devs are listening to what we have to say.

4. The lightning round! They are considering new ways to make Heroic Resources feel more distinct from one another, caster kits might be changing once more to solve some balancing and flavor issues that were raised by playtesters, Victories might also be changing a little for balancing reasons, and, lastly, creature sizes are getting standardized as X-by-X, so no more long or wide creatures.

And that’s it for the news segment. Now let’s get to the backer packet!

BackerKit packet

If you’ve been paying any attention at all to the nascent Draw Steel community, you probably already know about this, but here it goes anyway: the first playtest packet for backers is out!

If you have backed the Draw Steel BackerKit campaign and didn’t know about this, go check your email right now, ‘cause you’re in for a treat. It actually came out almost three weeks ago, but I’ve been super busy and wasn’t able to make a podcast episode sooner, sorry…

Anyway, what’s in the packet? Actually, almost the same stuff that was in the Patreon packet that I’ve talked about in episode 8. You get the basic rules of the game (with character creation, combat, negotiation, and so on), a bestiary with 31 monster-filled pages, a cheat sheet for use at the table, a big introductory adventure called The Fall of Blackbottom with all the necessary maps and tokens, and five pregen characters for you to play.

But wait, there’s more! This packet also came with some new stuff, namely ancestry art, a second adventure called The Bay of Blackbottom, and some rule changes.

Starting with the ancestry art, they are (pardon my Portuguese) f*ing gorgeous. Every piece is tall and narrow and features both a male and a female member of that ancestry. They are really evocative, so much so that I want to describe them in case someone listening doesn’t have access to the backer packet. And if you’re watching this episode on YouTube, I’ll be able to see the art right now.

The first ones are the Dragon Knights, wielding weapons in combat position on an open field with ruins, wings outstretched and imposing. Next are the Dwarves, holding mining equipment inside a dungeon, beardless and stone-skinned. Then come the High Elves, beautiful with wisps of gold on their faces and arms, walking down the stairs, one holding a wand, the other holding a harp. Fourth are the Wode Elves, picking fruits in a forest, with their huge furry ears and big round eyes.

The Hakaan art isn’t finished yet, but we got the draft of these half-giants made of stone wearing some colorful attire and awesome jewelry. Next are the Humans, standing on some stone steps, one holding a curious-looking flask, the other holding a bow and a pink falcon. Second to last are the Memonek, wearing futuristic clothing that reveals their part ceramic, part metallic bodies while they stand confidently on a sailing ship. And lastly are the Orcs, just like the ones from Flee Mortals with their very angular faces, one playing something that looks like a fantasy bass, and the other holding blacksmithing equipment.

We still have no art for Devils, Polder, Revenants, and Time Raiders, though! Those might be coming on a future packet, we’ll have to wait and see.

Besides the beautiful art, I also said that the packet came with a second adventure: The Bay of Blackbottom. This one, written by Leon Barillaro, is actually a prequel to The Fall of Blackbottom that onboards players into the system a little more gently than the (much meatier) Fall of Blackbottom.

This adventure is meant to be played in a single session and starts with basic tests, then graduates into a fight, and ends with a negotiation or a fight depending on the heroes’ actions. I won’t spoil it here ‘cause I’m sure many people are still going to play it, but I thought it was a much better introduction to the system than its sequel.

And speaking of the system, what has changed since the previous playtest? Well, not that much. There are some minor tweaks here and there, but the main thing that changed is that combat is now easier for Directors to run.

As I said in episode 8, there were lots of things for the Director to remember during combat and apparently I was not alone in thinking that. James explained in a recent Patreon post that the feedback they got from the Patreon packet was loud and clear: “running combat with the old rules was too much of a mental burden on Directors”.

So now, monster factions don’t each have their special way of generating Villain Power anymore, there are fewer options where to spend VP, and the value of VP went up so that you can track it in smaller numbers. They also removed captain traits, printed ancestral traits directly onto the stat blocks, and generally revised monsters to make them a little simpler.

Honestly, I love these changes; I didn’t get the chance to playtest these new monsters and VP mechanics yet, but they are already a win in my book. And this also serves as a reminder that MCDM is taking our feedback into account and is trying to make this game as fun as possible for everyone to play.

So, if you do end up playtesting the backer rules, make sure to answer the survey they sent you! It really helps as we can all clearly see.

And I think that’s basically it for the backer packet. New art, a new adventure, and some refined rules for us to test… Oh, and there’s this one file here that I haven’t mentioned: a creator license! Strap yourselves in, folks, ‘cause after the break we’re going to talk about how you (yes, you!) can create content for Draw Steel right now!

Intermission

Hey there! Before we move on to the next segment of the podcast, let me just quickly plug The Dice Society’s brand new mailing list.

We all know how messed up social media algorithms are and how they have a weird tendency of not showing your stuff to your followers. If you want to avoid the algorithms altogether, how about subscribing to my mailing list?

I won’t flood your inbox, I swear! I just wanna send you a ping once a new piece of content is out, that’s all. You can subscribe at the link in this episode’s description and you can always unsubscribe if you feel like it’s not worth the space in your inbox.

Thanks for your time! Now back to the show…

Creator License

Alongside the backer packet, the MCDM team released a Creator License for those who want to create content for Draw Steel, and you can already access it at mcdm.gg/ds-license. For now, it only applies to the first backer packet, but it can be amended to apply to further publications; more on that in a second.

Before I walk you through the basics, though, an important point: I’m not a lawyer, ok? You should read the Creator License for yourself before creating a product, so don’t sue me if you mess up, that’s on you. If someone notices something wrong with my summary, I’ll post a correction in the description of this episode.

Now, about the license… First, what you cannot do according to the document: it doesn’t let you use their art without explicit permission, you can’t use the MCDM logo or the Draw Steel logo in your product, and can’t give the impression that MCDM endorses or sponsors your product in any way.

And what you can do: you can use their visual designs as inspiration for your own, you can use all of the game’s mechanics and text (including proper names and characters), and can and are encouraged to use a Powered by Draw Steel logo that they have made available.

In order to actually use the license, you need to include a short snippet of text on the outside of the product and on the website where you promote it. If you do this and respect the terms of the license, you can publish your Draw Steel compatible products without permission from MCDM.

Besides these basic rules, they also have a little bit of legalese to protect themselves from misuse of the license. They say that they take no responsibility for claims against your product, that you should not violate the IP of any third party, and that any legal disputes will be governed by the laws of California. If you fail to comply with these terms, your rights under the license will be automatically terminated.

The last important point of the license has caused some stir in the RPG community: the text says that the license can be revised or modified at any time, which, after the OGL debacle might sound a little scary. However, it also states that these changes are not retroactive and that products being sold and in development at the time of a license amendment can continue using the previous version of the license.

All in all, I think the document is pretty solid and this license modification thing will not harm creators. And I know I’m not the only one who thinks this, because after the license was released, there has been a flood of Draw Steel compatible products made by the community!

MCDM has even created a homebrew channel on their Discord where people can share their creations, and in less than three weeks there are already dozens of products for you to check out. My personal highlights are, in no particular order:

• Ability Cards for Draw Steel by Cal, a truckload of printable cards with every Draw Steel ability for you to use at the table.

• Draw Steel in Foundry VTT by haezan, a module that allows you to Power Roll inside Foundry VTT.

• Disdiar - a Discord bot for Draw Steel by friend of the show Jon de Nor, a nice Discord bot that knows how to Power Roll and can list monsters, kits, and abilities.

• FORGE STEEL by Andy Aiken, a very sleek online character builder that can even export your character sheets as PDFs.

• Draw Steel Elements by xentis, an Obsidian plugin that can render abilities on your markdown documents.

• Draw Steel Crash Course also by xentis, a full presentation for you to teach the game to your players.

• Layout Template for Draw Steel by Solace, an Affinity Publisher template with a bunch of features to use with your own published adventures.

• The Oleumancer by Pesto, a new class for Draw Steel that controls acids, slimes, and oils.

• And Getting Started with Draw Steel (Backer Preview) by me (!), a YouTube video that walks newcomers through the basics of the game.

Links to all of these are in this episode’s description. If people like this kind of stuff, I might keep doing this spotlight on every episode, we’ll see. Maybe a deep dive into a single product? Let me know what you prefer in the comments.

Outro

And that’s it for today, folks. I hope you guys enjoyed the episode and the topics I chose this time.

Make sure to check out this episode’s description for links to:

• Matt’s and James’ Twitch channels,
• MCDM’s and Matt’s YouTube channels,
• Draw Steel’s, MCDM’s and Matt’s subreddits,
• MCDM’s Patreon,
• MCDM’s Discord,
• All of my socials,
• The Dice Society’s mailing list,
• And a full transcript of this episode.

Before you leave, make sure to rate the podcast in your platform of choice and leave a comment on YouTube or Spotify if you have any questions or suggestions for future episodes.

See you all next time… Thank you very much and goodbye!

Intro

Hello everyone and welcome to The Dice Society! Today I come to you in video form to give y’all an overview of the brand new Draw Steel playtest packet that went out to the backers last Friday.

Did you just get the packet yourself and don’t know where to start? Do you want a short introduction to share with your players before running for them? Are you just curious to know how Draw Steel works? Well, this video is for all of you! Let’s jump right in…

What is Draw Steel?

So what is Draw Steel? DS is a tabletop RPG in the heroic fantasy genre; it’s in the same ballpark as D&D, so characters all have classes and levels, players roll dice to determine outcomes, you know the drill. But there are a few important differences between DS and D&D.

First: Draw Steel is explicitly heroic, meaning characters already start as competent monster slayers. This isn’t the kind of game where a you’ll be playing a farmer who just picked up their first sword.

Second: it’s a tactical RPG meant to be played on a grid. Every class has a few cool things to do on every turn, even at first level! Positioning matters! Teamwork is vital! No “I swing my sword and pass” turns here.

And third: DS is designed to be cinematic, so every ability is evocative and visual. Additionally, like movie heroes, characters don’t have to track torches, stop to rest all the time, or even worry about rations; this isn’t an OSR game.

To summarize, Draw Steel is a heroic, tactical, cinematic fantasy TTRPG. If this is your cup of tea, let’s talk a little bit about the main mechanic of the game: the Power Roll.

Power Roll

The core resolution mechanic of D&D is the d20; in Draw Steel we have 2d10, dubbed the Power Roll. Much like in every d20 game, you’ll be rolling these dice, adding them up, and then factoring in any extra bonuses like characteristics and skill.

Unlike in D&D, however, you won’t be comparing your result to a numerical difficulty value. In this game there are outcome tiers: an 11 or lower is a Tier 1 result, a 12 through 16 is a Tier 2 result, and a 17 or higher is a Tier 3 result. Natural 19s and 20s are crits, so Tier 3 with a cherry on top.

What each tier means depends on what you’re trying to do. For combat abilities, Tier 1 results do a little damage, but nothing more, while going all the way up to Tier 3 gets you a bunch of damage, plus a powerful effect determined by the ability.

Notice how this means you can’t miss attacks! Characters (and monsters) always do at least some damage on their turn, keeping combat dynamic, interesting, and heroic for everyone. Oh, and in combat rolling a crit awards you a full extra action, so do pray for those!

Now, when we’re talking about resistance rolls, you’re trying to avoid a nasty effect, so the order is reversed: a Tier 3 means you suffer minimal impact, while a Tier 1 means you’re screwed.

Finally, when you’re outside of combat and want to roll a test, a Tier 1 result is always a failure and Tier 3 is always a success. Depending on the difficulty set by the Director, though, a Tier 2 might count as a failure, a success with a cost, or a full success.

And that’s it! It might sound a little finicky, but think of it like D&D with two fixed DCs: 12 and 17. Once you roll a few times, the tiers become second nature and resolving a roll will actually become much faster than in d20 games because you don’t have to ask if your attack hits the target every time.

The only stuff that’s left to talk about are edges and banes. These are like advantage and disadvantage in D&D, but you can have up to two of each. An edge awards you with a +2 to your roll, while a double edge bumps your result up by a whole tier. Banes work in reverse, that is, a -2 for a single, and a tier downgrade for a double.

Now that you know how to Power Roll, let’s talk about the stars of the show: the heroes.

Characters and rules

The meat of a hero in Draw Steel is their ancestry and class. The game is packed full of fantasy ancestries, from the beloved classics, like elves, dwarves, and humans, to the more… Exotic, like revenants, memonek, and hakaan.

As for classes, the packet comes with five of the game’s upcoming nine. The options are Conduit (a cleric), Elementalist (kinda like a wizard), Fury (their barbarian), Shadow (sort of a rogue), and Tactician (a fighter/warlord from 4e).

But don’t let my analogies fool you! These classes work super differently from D&D, with Shadows being able to use Black Ash sorcery to poof away, Furies getting stronger as they accumulate rage, and Tacticians allowing their allies to attack outside of their turns.

The coolest thing about classes, though, are heroic resources. In this game, your most powerful abilities require you to spend some resource that you can only get back through combat.

The Shadow, for example, gets two Insight at the start of their turn and one extra whenever they roll a Tier 3 on an attack. Then, once they have five Insight, they can spend it to use something like Quickness, an ability that let’s them attack twice instead of once on their turn.

Having these resources means that, the longer battles drag on, the more powerful the heroes get. This is a big incentive for heroes to keep fighting instead of going back home! No more 5-minute adventuring days! No more saving up spell slots that go unused!

Besides heroic resources, most aspects of the character sheet will feel familiar to d20 players. Might, Agility, Reason, Intuition, and Presence are the characteristics you’ll be adding to your Power Rolls; stamina is your measure of health; and skills are like proficiencies, adding +2 to your tests.

The new stuff are stability, which reduces how many squares you move when you’re forced pulled or pushed; victories, which counts how many battles you’ve won and become extra heroic resources once combat starts; and recoveries, which allow you to recover some stamina when you’re running low.

The last thing you need to know about characters is kits, which are a more open-ended version of equipment. Like, when choosing a kit, you don’t get a battleaxe or a warhammer, you just get a heavy weapon that you can flavor however you want.

What’s cool about kits is that, besides some bonuses, they all give you a special ability! Raiders get a shield bash, snipers can take a patient shot, and bloodpacts can use drain.

Once you do go into combat and start using these cool abilities, you’ll notice a couple of other Draw Steel innovations. The first is the initiative system itself, where initiative bounces from side to side, but players can freely decide in which order they’ll go.

Another cool piece of tech are maneuvers. While D&D’s bonus actions live in a weird limbo of useful for some and useless for others, all characters in Draw Steel have cool things to do with their maneuvers.

So your turns will have a familiar structure, with an action, a maneuver, and a move (plus an off-turn trigger), but you’ll be using all of them much more often and much more tactically.

Outro

And that’s basically it for the core game, folks! Of course there’s a lot more, like negotiations, titles, and all sorts of cool player options, but I can cover those on future videos.

I hope you liked this video and, if you did, subscribe to the channel and to my mailing list; the link is in the description. See you all next time… Thank you very much and goodbye!

Intro

Hello everyone and welcome to the ninth episode of The Dice Society podcast!

In case you’re joining me for the first time, my name is Caio and I’m the author of thedicesociety.com. This is a show about the upcoming Draw Steel TTRPG, where I talk about its development, my playtest experience, and, once the time is right, first- and third-party content being made for the finished game.

In today’s episode, we’ll talk about the feedback the devs got from Gen Con, the next revision of the game, how the Talent might work, and loads more in the News segment of the podcast.

As for our main topics, I’ll tell you everything the designers shared with the patrons about treasures, and my experience running a negotiation from the latest playtest packet. We’re getting closer and closer to getting a complete game, folks! Hang tight!

As usual, however, everything we’re going to talk about is subject to and probably will change, so don’t get your hopes up if you really like any of the stuff I describe here, cool? Cool. Now let’s draw steel and get started!

News

Our first segment is, as always, the news. Let’s go through them one by one:

1. Feedback from Gen Con. According to James, the feedback they got from the games they ran at Gen Con was really positive! Apparently, most of the negative feedback came from the Director side, as some people thought there was a bit too much stuff to keep track of. Which leads us straight into…

2. The next revision of the game will be a bit simpler. Working off of the feedback they got, the devs are trying to simplify Villain Power options in such a way that they’re not overwhelming Directors. The goal is to have fewer, but more meaningful options for spending VP.

3. The Talent is going forward. In episode 7, I said that the Talent might get replaced by the Summoner in the core rules, but the team has decided that this will not be the case. This mostly came down to the fact that implementing the Summoner would involve rushing monster design, so the devs decided to go with the class that had less dependencies. And speaking of classes…

4. More class sneak peeks. In Matt’s recent “Let’s Make a Hero” stream, he showed off the Null’s three subclasses: Chronokinetic, Cryokinetic, and Metakinetic. Since they’re both psionic classes, these are related to the Talent’s subclasses: Chronopath, Telepath, and Telekinetic. We also got a little bit of information about the Talent’s resource, called Clarity. This is a resource that works like any other, but you can go into Clarity debt in order to push yourself like the 5th Edition’s Talent; in this situation, you’re considered Strained and you character is hindered in some (yet unspecified) way.

5. More Patreon packets! In the latest Q&A, James mentioned that their plan is to send packets to Patreon backers more frequently from now on. As for the first BackerKit packet, it will probably come with the license for the game and a homebrewing Discord channel so that people can start sharing their creations with the community.

6. Ancestry art. In that same “Let’s Make a Hero” stream, Matt showed off the art for most of the ancestries in the book and, in this host’s humble opinion, they’re looking great. The dev team is also getting the old ancestries in line with the most recent design standards, so brace for some new awesome ancestry mechanics in the coming weeks or months.

7. Lightning round. The devs are currently working on making levels four through ten for the existing classes; the team is talking about possible level zero rules, but this might not fit into the core books; more caster kits are coming; and the crit ranges of abilities and tests are getting unified.

And that’s it for our news. Now let’s move on to our first main topic of the day: treasures. See you on the other side!

Treasures

Treasures are Draw Steel’s magic and psionic items. James Introcaso recently wrote a whole Patreon post about them and I though it was just too cool to not talk about it. so let’s dig in and get to know a little more about this aspect of the game.

First and foremost, there are four types of treasure: consumables, trinkets, leveled treasures, and artifacts. Consumables and trinkets are both minor items which are balanced for a specific tier of play, while leveled items, as their name suggests, keep up with the heroes in such a way that they are always relevant and level-appropriate. Artifacts, though, are basically broken and are meant to be given out if you want to see your players engage in some OP hijinx.

An example of a consumable is the Mirror Token, an item that can be used once as a triggered action to reflect an attack back at someone, having them take half the damage and all of the effects of the triggering attack. Super simple and straightforward, not much to see here.

Trinkets are a little more interesting because these can be used as many times as you want. A trinket example are the Gecko Gloves, an item that makes it impossible for you to be disarmed or to fall while climbing, plus it makes it harder for other creatures to escape your grapple. Again, a minor item that helps the character a little.

Things start to get more impressive with leveled items, which are so powerful that you can only benefit from three at a time. If you try to use more than three, you run the risk of being possessed by one of them during the night and discarding all other leveled items somewhere you can’t remember. This is so much cooler than attunement, I can’t even begin to describe it…

Anyway, an example of a leveled treasure they give us is Revenger’s Wrap. At level one, this cloak marks for revenge the last creature who attacked you, granting you an edge on attacks against them and, if you do attack them, making them suffer bleeding until the end of their next turn. Then, at level five, more than one creature can be marked for revenge at the same time and the bleeding they suffer lasts until the end of the encounter. Finally, at level nine, if you have more than two creatures marked for revenge, single-target attacks against any one of them also targets all of the others regardless of distance and such.

Now is a good moment to talk a little bit about crafting; consumables, trinkets, and leveled items can all be crafted by heroes and each comes with information on how to do that in the form of item prerequisites, research materials, a project roll, and a project goal.

The item prerequisites are the resources you need to craft the item, which you will need to procure before starting to work on it; for example, in order to create Gecko Gloves, you’d need 10 gecko tails. The research materials are like the recipe you’d need to bake a cake and most of the time these are texts written in some particular language; in order to craft, say, a Mirror Token, you’d need texts in Variac, the language of gnomes.

Once you have the item prerequisites and research materials, you can start making project rolls in order to reach a project goal. The Patreon post doesn’t have much detail about this process, but the project roll seems to always be a power roll and the goal seems to always be a number which you must reach by making a bunch of project rolls. The Revenger’s Wrap project, for example, is 2d10 + Might, Reason, or Intuition, with a project goal of 450.

What sets artifacts apart from the other item types is that they seemingly cannot be crafted by the heroes. While every consumable, trinket, and leveled item have crafting instructions, artifacts are simply too powerful to be craftable.

The only example of artifact they gave us is The Encepter, a scepter that awaits its champion “high in the sky, resting within an endlessly raging cyclone”. First of all, it makes any Presence power roll you make get an automatic tier three result, which equates to always getting the best result possible in every test and combat ability that uses Presence.

As if that wasn’t enough already, you can also trace a line of light with your movement and, if you cross this line again, everyone unlucky enough to be encircled by The Encepter’s light becomes lassoed by it. Creatures lassoed in this way can’t move or teleport away, and you can use your action to deal a truckload of damage to these poor creatures.

Oh, and by the way, don’t use The Encepter if you don’t need it. Its rules specify that if it was taken without the purpose of vanquishing a “terrible threat”, then one of those is definitely happening within three days. I’m sure no one would do that, right? Right?

Anyway, that’s it for treasures. For now, let’s move on to our next topic of today: the negotiation system.

Intermission

Hey there! Before we move on to the next segment of the podcast, let me just quickly plug The Dice Society’s brand new mailing list.

We all know how messed up social media algorithms are and how they have a weird tendency of now showing your stuff to your followers. If you want to avoid the algorithms altogether, how about subscribing to my mailing list?

I won’t flood your inbox, I swear! I just wanna send you a ping once a new piece of content is out, that’s all. You can subscribe at the link in this episode’s description and you can always unsubscribe if you feel like it’s not worth the space in your inbox.

Thanks for your time! Now back to the show…

Negotiation

I’ve talked about Draw Steel’s negotiation system in the past, but today I want to take some time to really explain how it currently works so you know what to expect once you get your hands on the core rules. This is a major feature of the game that is mostly absent from d20 RPGs, so some people might have negative, knee-jerk reactions simply because they have never seen anything like this before.

So, when does a negotiation start? Well, that’s up to the Director, but it isn’t the same thing as a simple Persuasion check in D&D. If you want to, say, get a discount when buying a Healing Potion, you can just make a Persuade test like in any other RPG. If the seller is not listening, then an Intimidate test might be in order; on the other hand, if the seller seems a little too interested in listening, then a Flirt test might be more appropriate.

In any case, basic tests are still broadly useful when trying to resolve quick interactions between heroes and NPCs. Negotiation comes into play, according to the latest Patreon packet, with “named NPCs who can provide information, items, or services that dramatically change the course of an adventure”. If you and your allies are trying to convince a king to lend you aid during a war, then that’s when a negotiation starts.

During a negotiation, NPCs have four stats: interest, patience, motivations, and pitfalls. In adventure modules these might come prespecified, but the Director can always quickly improvise some stats on the spot like they might do with the DC for a Persuasion check in D&D, for example.

Interest is a number that goes from zero to five and represents how… Well, interested the NPC is in the heroes’ talking points. This stat can go up and down depending on how well the heroes negotiate and, once negotiation is over, it is also what determines how good the NPC’s final offer is. Likewise, patience is also a number ranging from zero to five, but it basically represents how many arguments the heroes get to make before the NPC makes a final offer.

Motivations and pitfalls, on the other hand, are the kinds of arguments that particularly resonate or irritate the NPC. A revolutionary leader, for example, might have freedom as a motivation and higher authority as a pitfall; when negotiating with them, arguments that appeal to the revolutionary’s sense of freedom will require an easier test than those that don’t, while arguments that mention higher authorities will not work and can reduce the NPC’s patience.

There are currently twelve types of argument in the list of motivations and pitfalls. These are: benevolence, discovery, freedom, greed, higher authority, justice, legacy, peace, power, protection, revelry, and vengeance.

Once the Director decides the negotiation stats of the NPC, the heroes can start talking. One of the heroes should begin by making an argument or offering something in exchange for the NPC’s favor, making an easy test if they appeal to a motivation or a medium test if they don’t. Each type of test has a different outcome for each tier, but, most of the time, the NPC’s patience will decrease by one and their interest will go up, down, or stay the same depending on how well the hero rolls. Mentioning a pitfall, though, is an automatic fail, and the NPC’s interest and patience both decrease by one.

Now it’s time for the NPC to make an offer. If their current interest is five, they accept the heroes’ deal and go out of their way to do something extra for them; if their interest is four, they accept the deal, that’s it; if their interest is three, they accept the deal, but ask for something more in return. Now stuff starts to get ugly if their interest is lower than three… At two, they reject the deal, but are willing to do something to help the heroes out; at interest one, they flat out refuse the heroes’ deal; finally, if their interest is zero, they reject the deal, stop listening, and try to make the heroes’ lives more difficult.

If after this first argument the NPC still has some patience left, the heroes can either accept the offer or make another argument to try and sweeten the deal. Then, rinse and repeat until the NPC either runs out of patience, or their interest reaches zero or five.

There are still more elements to this system, like consequences for lying, ways to uncover motivations and pitfalls, how sharing languages with the NPC affects their patience, the impact renown has on tests, etc. But I think this was a good enough summary.

Now, before I start talking about my impressions of this system, I have a question for you, dear listener: what do you think of these rules? Do they fit your idea of how negotiations should be done in RPGs? Do you think they’re even necessary? Please, let me know in the comments, ‘cause I’m very interested in what the community has to say about negotiations in Draw Steel.

With that out of the way, onto my take. Last week I played the second act of Draw Steel’s latest Patreon packet, which features a couple of optional negotiations. My players talked to some hawklords, mounted warriors that have been pressed into the service of Ajax the Invincible. Overall, my players weren’t fans of the negotiation system.

Part of this may be due to my lack of experience; I didn’t know the possible outcomes of each test by heart, so I had to keep referring back to the rules instead of engaging with my players. Another possible factor may be the adventure itself; my players knew nothing about the hawklords and they show up in the middle of a fast-paced scene where a negotiation doesn’t even look like a possible course of action, so I kinda had to shove this possibility in their faces, which made it feel super forced.

As for me, I’m still not sure what I think, sorry. Having a list of motivations and pitfalls for each important NPC would be, no joke, one of my favorite features of adventures made for Draw Steel. And I do love having some structure in the social pillar of a game, but keeping track of patience and interest like some social hit points felt like a step too far.

However, I’m pretty decent at improvising NPC interactions and I do an ok job tracking what NPCs think of the heroes, so a fully fledged negotiation system felt like bit of a burden. What I’m guessing, though, is that rules like these could really help people who aren’t that good with improvisation or modeling the internal state of a made-up person.

So currently I’m cautiously optimistic that this system won’t get in my way once I get better acquainted with it and that it can do a lot of the heavy lifting for Directors who need a little help with the social pillar. And, in any case, you could simply ignore the negotiation rules if don’t like them, it’s not the same as not liking the combat rules in a game about fighting monsters; this isn’t a game about asking kings for help, it’s just one of the things you do.

Outro

And that’s it for today, folks. I hope you guys enjoyed the episode and the topics I chose this time.

Make sure to check out this episode’s description for links to:

• Matt’s and James’ Twitch channels,
• MCDM’s and Matt’s YouTube channels,
• MCDM’s and Matt’s subreddits,
• MCDM’s Patreon,
• MCDM’s Discord,
• All of my socials,
• The Dice Society’s mailing list,
• And a full transcript of this episode.

Before you leave, make sure to rate the podcast in your platform of choice and leave a comment on YouTube or Spotify if you have any questions or suggestions for future episodes.

See you all next time… Thank you very much and goodbye!

Intro

Hello everyone and welcome to the eighth episode of The Dice Society podcast!

In case you’re joining me for the first time, my name is Caio and I’m the author of thedicesociety.com. This is a show about the upcoming MCDM RPG, where I talk about its development, my playtest experience, and, once the time is right, first- and third-party content being made for the finished game.

In today’s episode, we’ll talk about Draw Steel! Yup, the official title of the MCDM RPG has finally been announced alongside a new playtest packet for Patreon supporters. I’ll go over the announcement and loads more in the News segment of the podcast.

And speaking of the new playtest packet, today’s main topics are all about that. First I’ll walk you through the contents and structure of the packet, and then I’ll talk about how it felt to run the first act of the included adventure.

As usual, however, everything we’re going to talk about is subject to and probably will change, so don’t get your hopes up if you really like any of the stuff I describe here. Cool? Cool. Let’s draw steel and get started.

News

First things first: the game has a name! After over a year and a half in the works, the team has finally announced that the MCDM RPG is officially called Draw Steel. Short and punchy, evocative as hell, and very cinematic; it says this is a game about fighting monsters like nothing else. Of course some people didn’t like it, but it was never gonna please everyone and, honestly, that’s fine.

Did I suspect this was gonna be the title? Well, I have no way of proving this, but yes. Matt had said multiple times that the name wasn’t a secret, it just hadn’t been announced yet. To me this meant that the name was already public, they just hadn’t told us it was the actual title of the game.

Draw Steel was my best guess because that’s the way they call for initiative when running combats; that’s why I say it on every intro before getting into the News section and now it has a whole new meaning! The BackerKit campaign even had a Prepare to Draw Steel! banner at the top of the page since it launched… It was there all along. By the way, now it says Prepare for Draw Steel!

With the title out of the way, let’s get to the rest of the updates. Since the team was very busy getting the playtest packet ready and gearing up for Gen Con, there’s not a lot of news to talk about. Let’s go over them one by one:

1. The dev team is now playing a campaign. Since they believe the game is already feature-complete enough, the devs started playing a full campaign to see how the game plays over a longer stretch of time. This is meant to test character progression, Victories, Experience, that sort of stuff.

2. Ancestry write ups are done. One of Matt’s main tasks as of late was writing an entry for each ancestry that explained a little bit about it through fiction; this could be a scene, some in-world text, anything that wasn’t bland and boring like an encyclopedia entry. Well, it seems like he’s mostly done with those and many were already included in the latest playtest packet.

3. Three Class sneak peeks. The first was the Troubadour, a sort of Bard analog, who is getting three subclasses: the Skald, a storyteller that can “rewrite” events, the Virtuoso, an inspiring musician, and the Duelist, a flourishing swordsperson. The second was the Censor, our Paladin-y class, who also gets three subclasses: the Paragon, a classic knight in shining armor, the Exorcist, a monster hunter, witcher-like character, and the Oracle, more focused on healing and buffing. The last one was the Null, the Monk for this game, who’s probably getting their subclasses from the Talent’s disciplines, but we don’t have any more information than this.

4. Dragon Knight sneak peek. This is MCDM’s dragonborn, but with a twist: in Orden, dragon people were created by sorcerers. Even the term Dragon Knight aludes to the fact that most were created to be part of King Omund’s Dragon Phalanx. Mechanically, Dragon Knights have protective scales and an extra feature that the player chooses; this can be either flight speed, or wings that absorb damage, or a frightening roar.

5. Caster Kits have changed a little bit. Last time we talked about this, caster Kits gave your Hero a Signature Ability and a Maneuver, but now they give them a Signature Ability and a protective Ward. This Ward might hinder enemies, damage attackers, grant immunities, that sort of stuff.

6. A video for backers. According to Matt, they plan on releasing a video for BackerKit backers alongside their playtest packet explaining what is still likely to change and what they think is close to final. This is meant to set expectations for the finished version of the game and get everyone up to speed with their development process. Unfortunately, we still have no information as to when this packet might be coming out.

And that’s it for our news. Now let’s talk about the playtest packet the patrons recently got, see ya there!

2nd Patreon packet

On July 26th, MCDM’s Patreon supporters got the notification they were waiting for: the second playtest packet of the MCDM RPG was out. After weeks of chewing on drywall in anticipation for this very moment, it was as if the Discord breathed a sigh of relief. And as an added bonus, it came with the official title of the game!

So what’s in the packet? Obviously there are the rules, which look similar to the ones I playtested a few weeks ago and talked about on episode 7 of the podcast. This version, however, is significantly slimmer, missing any rules for Research, Crafting, and Treasures. We also only got the first level of each Class, with levels two and three currently absent. Matt said that they want to iterate faster on the Patreon packets now that the game is closer to feature-complete, so we might not have to wait long before we get these missing rules.

The biggest change I noticed was with Inciting Incidents, which have been almost completely redesigned. According to James, the team came to the conclusion that Incidents had conflicting purposes; now they’re simply a list of narrative reasons for why you left your Career to become a hero. The benefits and drawbacks these used to give you are now Class-agnostic and have moved to the brand new Complications section of character creation.

Besides the rules, we also got a bestiary with a preview of the encounter-building guidelines and almost 70 statblocks. There are demons, goblins, humans, radenwights (which are rat people), time raiders, and war dogs (which, despite the name, are Ajax’s humanoid patchwork soldiers).

The statblocks are very compact, spanning about 20 pages with plenty of whitespace around them. The longest creature takes up half a page, while the shorter ones probably take up an eighth. Most creatures have a Signature Ability, and either a Maneuver or a special passive ability. Beefier non-minion enemies might get a second option for their Actions, an Ability that consumes Villain Power, or a Triggered Action. Bosses are the most complex of all, with an additional three Villain Actions each, à la Flee, Mortals!.

Speaking of villains, we finally got to learn how Villain Power works. The Director generates VP at the top of each round equal to twice the number of Heroes in the party. Each monster faction also awards the Director some VP when they do something that synergizes with their tactics; goblins, for instance, give you one VP when they attack a flanked enemy without a Bane.

This VP can then be spent on monster Abilities like the Ruinant’s Salt Wounds, which deals some ranged damage to Winded Heroes. Each faction also gets a few generic VP Abilities, which can be activated at the start of any creature from that faction’s turn. Any human, for example, can spend two VP to use Staying Power, which allows them to recover a third of their max Stamina.

All of this contributes to the overall tactical nature of the game. Despite not being that complicated on their own, monsters have loads of tactical options and interesting effects to keep the Heroes on their toes.

Now back to the packet! Alongside the rules and the bestiary, we got a nice 15-page adventure. Again, no spoilers of the plot because it is probably going to be featured in the Gen Con demo in some way or another. What I can say is that it is composed of three acts, contains a total of 11 encounters (but some are optional), and by my estimates should take about 10 hours to complete.

In order to help you run this adventure, the packet also comes with high-definition maps, tokens for every creature, a cheat sheet for players and Directors, form fillable character sheets, and five pregen Heroes in case your group doesn’t want to go through character creation.

And that’s basically it for the contents of the packet. There’s not art, no layout, and it hasn’t gone through a thorough editing pass either… So if you’re not the kind of nerd who enjoys reading raw, unformatted text, I don’t suggest you subscribe to their Patreon just to get access to these documents. You only get one first impression, and seeing the rules in this state might make you think less of the product.

But if you are a patron, you should be getting a survey about this playtest packet after Gen Con. Make sure to actually test the game though, ‘cause you simply cannot tell how the game plays just by reading the rules. Which is a nice segue into the next section of the podcast, where I’m gonna talk about my impressions of actually running this version of the game. See ya!

My impressions

Before I get into my impressions of the playtest, let me just go off on a tangent for a second. Last episode I talked about the “mouthfeel” of the game and more than a few people seemed to… Well, dislike my word choice. Some thought it didn’t fit right, some thought there were better options, some just thought it was funny.

So let me try and explain what I meant when I used the term mouthfeel. For example, just because some food is made with ingredients you like on their own, doesn’t mean the final product is gonna be good. I like peanut butter and cotton candy, but mixing the two is probably going to result in a goopy, sugary mess.

Coming back to RPGs, I like tactical games, but just because Draw Steel is tactical, doesn’t mean I was going to like the end result. For instance, the rules could feel clunky or the mechanics could feel dissociated from the fiction. If you sell me on a powerful spellcaster that can bend reality with their mind and give me a first-level Wizard that has to worry about spell slots… Well, that has bad mouthfeel.

Matt said it best on the Discord, which is where the term started being used in the first place: “did the experience of play in combat match the fantasy?” It did! And that’s why I thought the game had a good mouthfeel and used the term in the title of the episode.

Just so we can go back to the main subject, I stand by my decision to use that word, but I think it caused more friction than I expected. From now on I’ll just say that something feels right or matches the fantasy. We good? Ok, then let’s get to my impressions of the packet.

My story actually starts a few hours before it was released. I had some friends coming over from overseas, so I started prepping a 5e adventure for us to play. It was 11 PM my time and I was one page away from finishing my prep when the Draw Steel packet came out… So, like any sane person would do, I started prepping the Draw Steel adventure.

I already knew most of the rules because of my previous playtest, but I had to read the adventure, get the maps ready for printing, and learn the rules for running monsters. In the end, I went to bed at around 2 AM and had to wake up quite early to get the house ready for them. So I wasn’t in top directing shape, let’s say.

When they got here, we went through the basics of the game using the cheat sheet and I let each one of them choose a pregen from the packet. Then, I read each player’s character sheet with them so they understood everything that their Hero was able to do. It’s not a simple game by any stretch of the imagination, but my friends are well acquainted with TTRPGs, so the whole process must have taken us around 45 minutes from start to finish. Oh, and we only had three players, so one hour would be more realistic if we had a full party of five.

In the end, the party was made up of a Wode Elf Shadow, a Dwarf Conduit, and an Orc Fury. Minis were chosen, the music started playing, and I began to set the scene with the flavor text provided by the adventure. Once the intro was over, it was time to draw steel!

In no time, the Shadow was teleporting all over the map, the Fury was splitting demons in half, and the Conduit was rolling like shit. Like my own Elementalist in the last episode though, that didn’t mean the Conduit was missing, nuh-uh. They were still racking up Piety and casting some nasty area of effects that got rid of plenty of my minions.

Over the next two or three hours, they cheered when the Fury got a crit, they laughed when I rolled low and took as much damage from the Conduit’s Spirit Ward as the Conduit took from my attack, and rooted for the Shadow when they eradicated a whole squad of minions with their Blade Dance ability.

Once we were done with the first act of the adventure, we stopped, and started talking about how the game felt. And unless my friends were lying to me, it seemed like they enjoyed it! All of them played the previous playtest packet with me last December and a couple of them mentioned how much they felt like the game had improved. They all found the initiative system more intuitive the second time around, and the Shadow player said that remembering to gain Insight at the start of their turn was much easier than they had anticipated.

There was also some negative feedback, of course. They thought the Heroes were a bit too complicated for first-level characters, but one of them mentioned that this might’ve been because they didn’t build their characters from scratch, so this feeling could come from the fact that they simply weren’t well acquainted with their Heroes’ Abilities. The character sheet also got a bit of heat, but presentation is not something that they’re really testing right now.

So what about me, the Director? In the last episode, I mentioned that it looked like the system was asking a lot of the person running the game. And I’m happy to say that it wasn’t as bad as I thought! Since statblocks are compact, I was able to fit every monster I needed into a single page for each encounter.

I’m not even used to running RPGs in person, and it was surprisingly easy to keep track of my creatures! I always remembered to gain Villain Power at the start of each round, I was mostly able to use my monsters’ passive abilities, and squads of minions commanded by a regular creature worked quite well.

But I did forget to track some stuff, I’m not gonna lie. Faction Traits, for example, are things that every non-minion of that faction has, but I always went straight to attacks when it was my turn; I couldn’t remember to check traits for the life of me. Faction VP Abilities were easier to remember because they were a great way to spend a lot of VP, but demons had so many that I had to print them on a separate sheet of paper, and ended up forgetting about it for half the battle.

None of this detracted from the experience, mind you! My friends had no idea I was forgetting these Traits and Abilities, so no one minded. Overall, I do think there’s a lot of stuff for the Director to remember during combat, but I bet time and a dedicated VTT will do wonders to help with this. And, as always, the game isn’t done yet! It might all change tomorrow, VP might get scrapped, monsters might get more complicated, we just don’t know!

So these are my impressions of running the game. It’s great, if feels right, my players seemed to like it, and I’ll probably keep playing it after it comes out. There are rough edges and some stuff might not be for everyone, but we’ll have to wait and see before we pass any judgement on that.

And what about you, dear listener? What else do you want to know about the playtest and directing it? Please let me know in the comments on YouTube or Spotify, because I read them all and love learning what y’all thought.

Outro

And that’s it for today, folks. I hope you guys enjoyed the episode and the topics I chose this time.

Make sure to check out this episode’s description for links to:

• Matt’s and James’ Twitch channels,
• MCDM’s and Matt’s YouTube channels,
• MCDM’s and Matt’s subreddits,
• MCDM’s Patreon,
• MCDM’s Discord,
• All of my socials,
• And a full transcript of this episode.

Before you leave, make sure to rate the podcast in your platform of choice and leave a comment on YouTube or Spotify if you have any questions or suggestions for future episodes.

See you all next time… Thank you very much and goodbye!

Intro

Hello everyone and welcome to the seventh episode of The Dice Society podcast!

In case you’re joining me for the first time, my name is Caio and I’m the author of thedicesociety.com. This is a show about the upcoming MCDM RPG, where I talk about its development, my playtest experience, and, once the time is right, first- and third-party content being made for the finished game.

In today’s episode, you’ll get caught up in the most recent MCDM RPG news. We have new ancestry sneak peeks, a VTT demo, and an update on the release of the next playtest packet. I’ll go over all of those and a bunch more in the News segment of the podcast.

As for our main topics, I have some exciting stuff. First I’ll talk about the Tactician prototype that Matt shared with the patrons, and then I’ll tell you all about a playtest I took part in; I’ll share my impressions of how the rules are coming together, the class I got to play, and the general mouthfeel of the game.

As usual, however, everything we’re going to talk about is subject to and probably will change, so don’t get your hopes up if you really like any of the stuff I describe here. Cool? Cool. Let’s draw steel and get started.

News

As always, we’re gonna start with the news. Let’s go over them in an algorithm-friendly numbered list:

1. Devil sneak peek. This ancestry is exactly what it sounds like: people native to the Seven Cities of Hell. The main way they become citizens of Orden is by being summoned through a ritual and having the summoner die, leaving them with no way back. Customizing a Devil might involve “buying” features like horns, wings, detachable limbs, tails, etc. Oh, did I mention detachable limbs? Yeah, detachable limbs.

2. Polder sneak peek. These are MCDM’s Halfling analogs, and we got a Patreon post from Willy explaining some of their characteristics: they are nimble enough to ignore difficult terrain, their footsteps don’t make any sound, and they can flatten themselves as a shadow into the wall. Is that dope enough for you?

3. The VTT is getting cooler by the minute. Go check out Denivarius’s post on the subreddit showcasing the ability to stack multiple maps to get a nice parallax effect, indicating each region’s height. I promise you it’s gonna blow your mind.

4. Magic items are online. In this game they are called Treasures because they encompass psionic items as well as magic ones. James gave an example on stream of the Knife of Nine, a dagger that increases its damage bonus with each new attack you make with it (up to a limit, of course). Then, at level 5, with each new enemy you slay, the knife gains a charge that can be converted into even more damage. Finally, at level 9, it grants a huge damage bonus whenever you attack after falling on top of an enemy.

5. Research and Crafting are also online. With these systems you can use alchemical ingredients, monster parts, knowledge of languages, and much more to create Treasures by yourself. If this makes into the final game, it’s probably going to be a big hook for players to find adventures on their own instead of just waiting for the Director to throw something at them.

6. The Talent might be replaced by the Summoner in the core rules. This is due to the fact that the Talent overlaps a bit too much with the Elementalist right now, so the Summoner could be an interesting substitute. The team will have a clearer idea of the future of these classes once they have kickoff meetings for both.

7. The packet date has been updated. As of right now, the team believes that the Patreon playtest packet is coming before GenCon, that is, by the end of July, but do not hold your breath: this is not a promise, only an estimate. As for the backer packet, it looks like it will be coming in August. If everything goes according to plan, the game’s license is also coming out at the same time so that the community can start to get to work on their own third-party products.

8. The lightning round! Caster kits were reflavored as casting styles and now they also give your hero a Maneuver. The devs have estimated that the Monster Book will feature somewhere between 350 and 450 statblocks. The Conduit has been slightly redesigned to work with only one resource, now called Piety, instead of two. And lastly, Basic Attacks have been renamed Free Strikes at the moment.

And that’s it for our news. Now feel free to sit down and relax, as the next section is a long one. I’m going to talk about the Tactician prototype, one of the most interesting Patreon posts up until now, let’s go!

Tactician prototype

I’ve talked about class prototypes in the past, but they were always skeletons meant to test game mechanics, not actual class mechanics. Now, for the first time, Matt has shown us the real Tactician class prototype in a recent Patreon post. It’s a chunky post detailing their whole design process, so I’ll do my best to summarize it and get as soon as possible to the juicy bits. If you want to learn everything they can teach you about tabletop RPG design, I highly suggest becoming a patreon, ‘cause this post is gonna be your jam.

Anyhow, the first thing we should know is… What the heck is a Tactician? If you were not here for the previous episodes, in the MCDM RPG, the Tactician is their martial warrior class, closer to D&D 4th Edition’s Warlord than to 5e’s Fighter. They are masters of the battlefield, tactical geniuses, and the best at using weapons. The fictional analogs the devs usually mention when talking about this class are Aragorn and Captain America.

So, in practice, what are Tacticians good at? In their Theory of Classes meeting, the designers outlined their current thinking for what each class is good and bad at. Our tactical friend has high stickiness and command, meaning it’s hard to get away from them and they excel at leading the party. By contrast, they have low mobility and damage, for example.

Knowing this, we can start talking about the broad stuff every Tactician has in their arsenal. For instance, they get an ability called Mark, which incentivizes the party to attack a specific enemy by granting bonuses to anyone who attacks the poor target. The inverse ability is Taunt, which encourages enemies to attack you by penalizing attacks against your allies. Besides these two features, they can also grant extra attacks to other party members, give them extra movement, redirect attacks, etcetera… See how all these features make the Tactician good at commanding the battlefield? Well, that’s the goal.

Seeing all of these mechanics, the three subclasses I mentioned in episode 5 start to come into focus. The Mastermind is a Mark-focused Tactician: a character who leads from the rear, who conducts the battle like a maestro. The Knight-Protector, on the other hand, is Taunt-focused, leading from the front, drawing fire to themselves. Lastly, the Insurgent is more of a guerilla warrior that focuses on dirty tricks like buffing and debuffing, redirecting attacks, that kind of stuff.

And don’t you forget that all of these names and features are subject to change! Don’t come complaining to me when these subclasses switch names and do different stuff by next month, I don’t know… You’ve been warned.

Now that we know the high-level overview, we can move on to… Wait, I almost forgot! We haven’t talked about weapons yet! In the beginning, the designers were also considering a fourth subclass, one that focussed on being the weapon master. Well, turns out that this fits the fiction of every archetype, so it got merged into the base class. With the Field Arsenal feature, every Tactician can wear two Kits and keep the best bonuses of both. Cool, right?

Now I think we’re ready to move on from the high-level stuff. The devs got into a meeting and brainstormed the hell out of the features for this class; in total, they listed more than forty abilities that Tacticians might be able to get over the course of their careers. I’ll spare you the nitty-gritty details, especially because the list will probably still change a lot, but here are some of my favorites:

• You can force an enemy to go next or last in initiative.

• If the party is not surprised, the characters can rearrange themselves in the starting zone.

• Allies can’t get Tier 1 results while next to you.

• You can summon reinforcements (maybe during a Respite, maybe during a battle).

• And my favorite: you can move to heal someone and the number of opportunity attacks you take increases the amount you heal.

Unfortunately, none of this comes into play for the level 1 prototype. I just want you to see what a Tactician might get as they level up and how cool this is compared to a D&D Fighter, which basically just gets to swing their sword more often. Anyway, from this big list of 40 abilities, some were selected to make up first level and then an MCDM producer created the pre-made Tactician we got in the Patreon post.

I’ll go over each part of the character sheet and tell you a little bit about every single ability this Tactician has. It’s a lot of stuff, but I’ll try my best to make it as digestible as possible. Are you all sitting comfortably? Let’s begin with the basics:

• Our prototype has 33 Stamina, and that’s 21 from the class and 12 from armor. They have 11 Recoveries and, coincidentally, their Recovery Value is also 11. Just as a quick reminder, Recoveries are like Hit Dice in 5e, but you can use them during combat.

• Now for a bunch of little numbers: their Size is 1, their Weight is 4, their Speed is 6 squares, their Reach is 1, and their Forced Move Resist is also 1. The characteristics are: 2 Might, 1 Agility, 2 Reason, -1 Intuition, and 1 Presence.

• The character knows Caelian, Hyrallic, and Zaliac, which in D&D would be like Common, Elven, and Dwarven. They also have some skills: Alertness, Blacksmithing, Climb, Endurance, Monsters, Sabotage, Search, Sneak, and Track. From their Career, they get 1 Renown, and the Versatile Warrior Title.

And that’s it for the basics; now we can talk about equipment, class features, and subclass features. None of these are directly related to combat, I’ll get into that afterwards. Let’s go:

• The two Kits chosen by this Tactician are Shining Armor, the most protective of all, and Rapid-Fire, a Kit optimized for quick archers. It’s interesting to note that the +3 Stamina Bonus awarded by Rapid-Fire gets overridden by the much nicer +12 from Shining Armor. They also get the Signature Actions from both Kits, but more on that in a second.

• Then comes the most important bit: Focus. This is the Heroic Resource of this class, the thing which fuels its most powerful abilities. They get 1 Focus at the start of their turn, but there are a bunch of other triggers and abilities that can give them some extra Focus.

• Finally, there are some subclass features. This Tactician is a Mastermind, so they get Grand Strategy, Battlefield Awareness, and I Read Your Book! The first grants a Lore Skill, the second slows down Marked enemies, and the third is useful for Research and getting information about about future encounters.

Phew! We’re almost done, I promise. To finish off, we have to talk about combat abilities, arguably where the Tactician really shines. There are 10 in total, but some are more important than others, let’s check it out:

• Starting with Triggered Actions. This character has two: Overwatch, which allows an ally to attack a moving enemy, and Form Up, which lets all allies within 10 squares to shift 2 squares when the Tactician’s turn starts. Shifting, by the way, is moving without provoking Opportunity Attacks.

• And speaking of Opportunity Attacks, there are melee and ranged options. In this game, OAs happen via Free Strikes, so there’s not much to see here. They both do around the same damage: 4 in Tier 1, 8 in Tier 2 and 10 or 11 in Tier 3.

• Then there are four Signature Abilities. Mark is a Maneuver that you already basically know: it gives you allies an Edge on Power Rolls and an extra 1d3 damage against the target. Seize the Opening forfeits an Action in order to let an ally move and attack with 1d6 extra damage. The next two are Kit abilities: Protective Attack, the one from Shining Armor, deals damage and Taunts the target until the end of their turn; and Two Shot, the one from Rapid-Fire, does ranged damage to, you guessed it, two targets.

• Lastly, the Tactician has two Heroic Abilities where they can spend their Focus on. This prototype has Phalanx Forward!, that costs 3 Focus and allows every good guy within 10 squares to move and push one adjacent enemy, and Now!, that costs 5 Focus and allows every ally within 5 squares to make an attack.

Aaaand that’s it! We did it! You get a gold star for hearing me list all of these abilities for this long without any visuals. Now I want to know what you think about this prototype… Is it cool? Does it fit the fantasy that you pictured when I described the class? Is it too complicated?

Personally, I like it. I think it’s a bit complicated for a first level character, but not enough that it’s overwhelming I think? I’d have to play it to be sure, but it feels on par with a third level Wizard in D&D; it’s got fewer abilities to choose from, but more side effects on each ability, so I’m guessing I’ll be a wash.

Now that we’re done with the Tactician, let’s go to the next segment of the podcast, where future Caio is gonna tell you all about the playtest he participated in. See ya there!

Mouthfeel

Ok, so where were we? Oh, that’s right, the Tactician prototype! Since I wrote the previous segment, I took part in a playtest of the RPG with some of fine folks of the MCDM Discord. It was an awesome experience and I hope I get to do it again in the future. The people were super nice, our Director was very patient with our questions, and overall I had a great time. 10/10, for real.

What did I think of the game, though? Well, to answer that I need more than a few lines of script, so here’s how this segment is gonna work: first I’ll talk about everything that happened before the playtest, then I’ll tell you a little bit about our actual session (trying as much as possible to not spoil the adventure), and finally I’ll summarize my thoughts and answer a few questions people had for me on the Discord. Does that sound good?

Before the session

So, without further ado… I was selected on a Tuesday to participate on a playtest pool session that was going to happen that Friday. It was going to be a test for the adventure MCDM is taking to GenCon, so each player had to create a level 1 character and get ready for four hours of heroic combat.

The rules document was, and I’m not exaggerating, 196 pages long. But it wasn’t that bad, hear me out. A bunch of the rules hadn’t changed that much since they were shared with the patrons and some chapters were not going to be used in this particular playtest. All in all, I was able to choose my class and read the necessary rules in a couple of days.

The biggest chunk of the document was character creation, which still follows the structure I outlined in episode 5 of the podcast. To create a hero, you simply go through the following chapters in order: Ancestry, Culture, Career, Inciting Incident, Class, and Kit. Once you’re done choosing those, the rules include a nice optional set of questions that help the heroes in the party forge some connections.

Then there are chapters detailing Tests, adventuring, Abilities, combat, Negotiation, Research, Crafting, and Treasures. Most are self-explanatory, except for adventuring, which includes rules that “will be organized differently as the game is developed”; right now, this chapter talks about Resistance Rolls, hiding, languages, Renown, and Wealth.

To be 100% honest, I’d love to talk about every single detail contained in the rules, specially Renown, Wealth, Research, Crafting, and Treasures. The problem is that they haven’t shared these rules with the patrons yet, which means that they’re probably not ready for prime time. If I talk about them now, I’ll likely have to spend another full episode explaining everything that changed in the meantime.

Instead, let’s talk about the character I created: Sohan. Sohan was a Devil; he had horns, glowing eyes, and a tail. He was also from Capital, an Urban environment with a Bureaucratic culture, and had a Noble upbringing; a true gentledevil. Before becoming an adventurer he was a Mage’s Apprentice, but everything changed once he found out that he was going to explode some day. Yup, you heard it right. If Sohan ever went more than three days without casting magic, he would explode and wipe everything in a 100 mile radius, including himself. Shout out to the Baldur’s Gate 3 crew.

For his class, I went with Elementalist. I know I said in the previous episode that my most anticipated build was the Harlequin Mask Shadow, but after I saw the Elementalist class… Boy, I just had to go with that. For my subclass, I kept a little bit of the flavor of the Shadow and went with Void for my element of choice. Void mages are good with illusions, teleportation, and other obscure arts. Finally, his Kit was the Missile Kit, which allowed Sohan to throw his implement at his enemies like a dodgeball player. He was a cool dude, not gonna lie.

If now you’re waiting for a full breakdown of all of his abilities like I did with the Tactician prototype, I’m sorry to say that I won’t. This episode is long enough with only one character breakdown, and I’d rather talk about Abilities that MCDM trusts enough to show the patrons than Abilities that might be more susceptible to changing. Once we have an official Elementalist prototype, then I might do another deep dive like today’s.

Anyway, character creation was pretty straightforward; I just followed the chapter sequence, making choices whenever they were necessary. My main takeaway of this process was how cool the Inciting Incidents are! In my opinion, a few of them have the potential to be disruptive for some campaigns, but overall I thought they were dripping with flavor. Honestly, if they removed the Culture chapter and added more Inciting Incidents, I’d be fine with it.

Since there isn’t yet an official character sheet, I copied all of Sohan’s stuff into a Google Docs. When I was done, I looked at the page count and gasped. Four pages. 11 abilities that I could use in combat. A handful of others for outside of combat. It was so much stuff that I started to seriously wonder whether I was even gonna be able to play this level 1 character. Then came the playtest.

During the session

In order to protect the privacy of my fellow players, I’m going to be referring to them by their characters; besides my Devil Elementalist, we had a Dwarf Tactician, a Wode Elf Fury, a Revenant Shadow, and a Time Raider Conduit. As for the adventure, I can’t say much… Since they’re going to run it at GenCon, I really don’t want to spoil the setup. Suffice it to say that it took place in a three-story building and we had to work with some time pressure.

We strategized and began to fight the enemies. Since we get to choose our order in initiative, my allies moved into position and started to chip away at the enemy forces while I waited for an opportunity to jump in. Once my turn came, I realized that my character sheet wasn’t too large, and in fact it was quite manageable.

First of all, about one-fourth of my makeshift character sheet was for outside of combat features, things that didn’t matter at all in the moment. Another full page had rules for casting spells, making abilities persistent, generating Essence (the Elementalist’s Resource), and that sort of stuff; it’s the equivalent to adding the rules for spellcasting and Concentration in a D&D Wizard’s character sheet! This is important information, but you get used to it after a couple of rounds and it doesn’t add any decision points during a combat.

Then, of my 11 combat abilities, two were Free Strikes, that is, stuff that you’re only supposed to use for Opportunity Attacks and the like. Another one was a one-off thing that granted my allies the ability to see invisible creatures; again, it wasn’t something that came into consideration during a regular combat. And lastly, two of my abilities required three or more Essence; since I only generated two Essence per round, they only came up at most every other turn.

On average, I only had to consider around seven abilities per round: two were Triggers, two were Maneuvers, and three were Actions. A regular-ass level 1 D&D Wizard has something like nine spells available at all times! I didn’t have to worry, Sohan only seemed complex because my character sheet was kinda bad…

Once round three came, I was able to run Sohan like any other fantasy caster I had ever ran, except that I didn’t need to worry about running out of spell slots. Which is to say: it was fun as hell.

Since I reliably generated 2 Essence every round, I could think ahead and really plan my next turns. Since you do some damage even if you roll low (and I did that a lot), I never felt like I had wasted a turn. Since I had abilities that teleported my allies, interrupted enemies during their movement, and let me throw my crystal ball at people’s faces, I was able to focus on the action and not on, I don’t know, slots. Since the game gave me dope options, I was just having fun being a freaking Devil that was able to surround himself with explosive fire. And there you go, the four keywords of the game: it was tactical heroic cinematic fantasy.

This is not to say that it was perfect! No, the game is still not finished. For instance, I felt like I wasn’t generating enough Essence to do as much cool stuff as my fellow heroes. But it did confirm to me that the game is going in the right direction and fulfilling its design goals, even if it’s not a game for everyone.

The playtest went on for four hours and it was epic. At some point the Time Raider Conduit was holding on to a ledge with their upper arms when the Tactician was pushed off of the same ledge; using their lower arms, the Time Raider caught the Tactician and held them just long enough that they could climb back to the battlefield. The Shadow took damage on purpose a couple of times so that they could teleport into a more advantageous position. And the Fury must have pushed half a dozen minions off of our floor after making sashimi out of their captains. As for myself, I’m proud of casting Explosive Ward and triggering a few Opportunity Attacks in order to damage and push some nearby enemies.

You might think that four hours is a lot, but we were five heroes and the Director must have run around 40 monsters across the three stories of the building. If my D&D sessions can be considered typical, this was a pretty good time to run so much combat.

After the session

After the session, we had one hour of feedback. Most of our critiques were related to the adventure itself, so it’s not particularly relevant for me to go into that right now. Overall, though, people seemed to like the system! There were some one-off comments about resource generation, ambiguous language, and character creation, but I felt like everyone enjoyed the game.

After relaxing about character complexity, however, I was left with the impression that the system was asking a lot of the Director. Since I wasn’t the one running the session, I can’t be sure if that was because of the adventure or because of the system, so I’ll have to report on that once the Patreon playtest packet is out.

Only time will tell, but I’m super excited for the future of the MCDM RPG. All in all, I think the system has an amazing potential and, if this playtest was any indication, it could very well replace D&D for a lot of people.

And speaking of people, let’s answer those questions I got on Discord. Starting with Koulga, who said “I’d love to hear about the differences in Heroic Resources between classes, and how that affects the vibe/feel for those classes”.

Well, I haven’t played any other class besides the Elementalist, but I could see that the Resource of each class really impacted how it felt. Shadows, for instance, get Insight by attacking with Edges, so this incentivizes them pretty heavily to get into advantageous positions. On the other end of the spectrum, the Fury rolls for Rage at the start of the round, so their biggest tactical decision is whether to use or keep it.

The next question was from Mandored, who said “I would really like an in-depth dive into the mouth feel of whatever class it is you playtested as.” I hope this whole segment of the podcast works as my answer, but the gist of the Elementalist for me was: predictable Resource generation and persistent spells made Sohan feel like the most consistent of the heroes, like the only dude who was able to keep their cool during combat. But again, I rolled like ass, so someone else might feel differently.

Bella’s comment was “personally I’d love a look on how you feel about character creation”. As I’ve mentioned a few minutes ago, I found Inciting Incidents to be the highlight of character creation. Culture feels a bit lukewarm to me, but that is super personal; another playtester even noted how cool they thought the whole process was. Generally speaking, I think layout and wording can have a big impact on this aspect of an RPG, so I reserve the right to change my mind once the finished game is out.

MeatShield wanted to know about the actual experience of the game, besides the “on paper” side, and I think I mostly answer that with my playtest report. They also had two specific questions: “on a scale from 5E Champion Fighter to 5E Wizard, how mentally taxing is it to play during combat?” and “does it feel like the martial/caster divide will be a problem in this game too?” Playing the level 1 Elementalist felt close to playing a 5e Wizard at level 2, maybe 3, but without having to understand what spell slots are. As for a martial/caster divide, I think this won’t be a problem because they are specifically trying to bring martials up to speed with the casters. The Fury and the Tactician felt as tactical and heroic as the rest of us in the playtest.

Lastly, Zenward asks “How does it feel to face off against Squinions?” Similar to fighting against Flee, Mortals! minions in that they are easy to kill but can mess you up in large numbers. The only big difference is that their captains give them special abilities, so you have to be more strategic with regards to who you’re going to attack first: minions or captains.

Before I leave you with the outro, I just wanted to thank everyone who sent me their questions and all of the fine folks at the MCDM Discord. Y’all are really a great community. A special thanks to the people who playtested with me and contributed to having such a great time. It was really awesome playing with you guys.

Outro

And that’s it for today, folks. I hope you guys enjoyed the episode and the topics I chose this time.

Make sure to check out this episode’s description for links to:

• Matt’s and James’ Twitch channels,
• MCDM’s and Matt’s YouTube channels,
• MCDM’s and Matt’s subreddits,
• MCDM’s Patreon,
• MCDM’s Discord,
• All of my socials,
• And a full transcript of this episode.

Before you leave, make sure to rate the podcast in your platform of choice and leave a comment on YouTube if you have any questions or suggestions for future episodes.

See you all next time… Thank you very much and goodbye!

Intro

Hello everyone and welcome to the sixth episode of The Dice Society podcast!

In case you’re joining me for the first time, my name is Caio and I’m the author of thedicesociety.com. This is a show about the upcoming MCDM RPG, where I talk about its development, my playtest experience, and, once the time is right, first- and third-party content being made for the finished game.

In today’s episode, we’ve got some exciting news items! The dev team is complete, the Power Roll is locked in, we learned a bit more about two new ancestries, and we got a sneak peak into Inciting Incidents. I’ll go over all of those and a bunch more in the News segment of the podcast.

As for our main topics, first I’ll talk quite a bit about monster design, which is proving to be a hard nut to crack for the devs. And then you’ll all get a nice playtest report that Donald Schepis shared on the Discord which I bet you’ll enjoy.

As usual, however, everything we’re going to talk about is subject to and probably will change, so don’t get your hopes up if you really like any of the stuff I describe here. Cool? Cool. Let’s draw steel and get started.

News

This time we’ve got a bunch of little news items to go through, so instead of my regular… Unstructured rambling, you get a nice numbered list so you can keep track of everything.

1. In the last episode, I talked about the prototypes for the Shadow, the Fury, the Elementalist, the Conduit, and the Tactician. Now we know what other classes will be playtested for the core rules: Talent, Troubadour, Null, and Censor. If you really want to make a parallel to D&D 5th Edition, this means we’ll get analogs for Rogues, Barbarians, Wizards, Clerics, Fighters, Mystics (which is a psionic class that appeared in Unearthed Arcana), Bards, Monks, and Paladins.

2. d10s! Last episode I mentioned that the 2d10 Power Roll was official, but now it’s official official. According to James, due to the manufacturing of the Ajax Edition, the 2d10 Power Roll is now seemingly final! Maybe there’s more tweaking to do, but it looks like they are pretty confident in this design and I’d go as far as to say that it’s now unlikely that they will change it too much.

3. The dev team had previously mentioned that they wanted the BackerKit backers to get a playtest packet around July, at the same time as the second Patreon playtest packet. Now it seems like the Patreon packet might come before the BackerKit packet, which likely won’t make its July goal. This delay is due to the time they are devoting to monster design, something I’ll talk about later in this very episode.

4. The dev team is now complete with four people! Joining Matt, James, and Djordi (the previous newest hire) is Willy Abeel, a game designer which you might know from such places as Arcadia and the Matt Colville YouTube channel. Let’s hope we get to meet him in the next Patreon Q&A so I can bring you more news about what he’s been up to inside MCDM.

5. Matt showed off a couple of ancestries that they are prototyping: the Time Raiders and the Hakaan. The former are space pirates with four arms and eyes made of shimmering stone; nothing much, just the dopest thing ever! You can find them in Flee, Mortals!, by the way, in case you want to know what they look like. The latter is a half-giant ancestry that can see the time of their deaths; I take it back, this is the dopest thing ever! Unfortunately, I don’t think there is any public art of them, so we’ll have to wait to know what they look like.

6. They are currently testing class-related Inciting Incidents and they even gave us some examples of what this might look look like in the May Q&A. One for Conduits is getting captured by cultists and being saved by a member of your faith midway through an unholy ritual; now you’re partially incorporeal and can move through walls, but you’re also vulnerable to corruption damage. They all come with benefits and drawbacks like this, which is pretty freaking cool if you ask me.

7. We got a Patreon post about the VTT! Eventually I plan on making a whole episode talking about the VTT (dubbed The Codex), but for the moment I’ll just list some of the features they plan on implementing: tactical battle maps, character management, encounter building, document sharing, map creation, a full marketplace, and Lua-based modding to boot. These guys are not messing around. The VTT will likely be distributed as a cross-platform app on Steam, so everybody can get it as easily as possible.

8. Now a lightning round to finish off: movement may become its own thing separate from Maneuvers, Caster Kits will get more evocative names, the Gen Con adventure they will be running will likely take place during the fall of Blackbottom as seen in the Chain of Acheron, Wealth is currently tied to character level but Titles can increase it, and, lastly, the team seems to be aiming for subclasses to give about half of your character’s class features.

And that’s it for the news. Please let me know if you like this format, or if you’d rather get less news items with more in-depth explanations. Now let’s move on to what we currently know about monsters. Let’s go!

Monsters

So, let’s talk a little bit about monsters. According to James, until relatively recently the dev team assumed that they could convert the monster design from Flee, Mortals!, their fifth edition monster book, into the new RPG. Since Flee, Mortals! was such a huge hit, this was a very reasonable assumption to make and the public would likely love it.

But this is a different game and the devs realized that it needs its own theory of monster design. They tried a lot of stuff over the last few weeks and, at least from the outside, it proved a tough nut to crack.

Now, mind you, they still want to have the stuff that made Flee, Mortals! cool: monsters that are fun to run, that challenge the players, and that help the DM feel like a tactical genius. But in the MCDM RPG there is no to-hit roll, the Director chooses when monsters go on initiative, and so on. So there’s got to be some new tech in order for monsters to work just the way they want to.

Their first attempt is what the designers called atomized monsters. These were super simple enemies that basically did only one thing, which meant the Director could activate a specific monsters exactly when they needed to do what that monster was good at. As added bonuses, you could fit tons of those in the monster book and organizing them into encounter sheets was trivial.

However, there’s a problem: atomized monsters are hard to run tactically if you are not already a tactical genius. In this framework, prepping encounters is harder, figuring out synergies is harder, and choosing what monster to active is harder. Atomized monsters was not the solution they were looking for.

Next, they tried phases. This meant bundling monsters into groups: artillery, control, melee, and support. Then, the Director activates these in order. Simple! For example, the first time the Director gets a turn, they activate their artillery creatures; on their second turn, they activate their control creatures; and so on, and so forth.

This also didn’t work as expected and you can probably see why. This felt a bit stifling the Director, which is arguably worse than requiring a lot of thinking. So it was back to the drawing board.

To be fair, the way I’m telling this story makes it seem like they were going back to square one on every single iteration of the design. There was good design that they kept from one iteration to the next, I’m just glossing over some of the details so you’re not stuck here listening to my voice for the next few days.

Anyway, what’s the state of monster design right now? According to James’ post on Patreon, they are testing what they’re internally calling: Squinions. Yeah, Squinions. Squad + Minions. Shut up, it makes sense! Let me explain…

Minions now share a pool of Stamina. The example James gives are Zombie Minions, which have 5 Stamina each. If you bundle 5 of those into a squad, they have collectively 25 points of Stamina. Say a hero deals 10 damage to any Minion of the squad or the squad gets hit by an area of effect that deals 10 damage; two Minions will die, not only one. You can describe how your sword cleaves two adjacent zombies, how your beam of magic causes the ground to shake and a rock to fall on a faraway zombie’s head, standard heroic stuff, you know what I mean. The important part is that every extra multiple of 5 damage kills another zombie.

These Squinions, just like regular Minions from Flee, Mortals!, allow characters to be heroic, killing hordes of monsters in a single combat. Djordi even proposed the existence of different kinds of Minions, such as artillery Minions, brute Minions, and so on. It’s still a tactical game, after all.

The big twist with Squinions, however, is that each squad can have a captain! This is a stronger and more complex non-minion creature which can grant their squad special abilities. Plus, they work by themselves so you don’t necessary need them to chaperone a bunch Minions into the combat.

If I understood everything correctly, this framework is a nice balance between Flee, Mortals! and atomized monsters. You have complex creatures that can work as captains, but also simpler ones in the Minion category. You have to choose who goes when, but this is alleviated by the fact that you choose a whole squad instead of a single creature. You can have heroes fight hordes of little creatures, or one or two stronger enemies.

The one thing Squinions don’t solve is battles loosing momentum from the Director side as time goes on. This issue has been thoroughly solved for players with Heroic Resources; unlike d20 fantasy, where characters spend their resources as the battle rages on, in the MCDM RPG, heroes accumulate more Heroic Resources which allow them to do more dope stuff, not less.

The design team doesn’t like the fact that Directors were not getting cooler options by the end of combat like the rest of the players, so they are now prototyping Villain Power (A.K.A. VP), a Director resource that fuels special abilities, terrain features, and other events for the heroes to deal with. James talked about their first draft of how the Director accumulates VP, but apparently this was already scrapped, so we’ll have to wait and see.

And that’s it! Simple, right? You have Minions, captains, squads, Villain Power to track… That doesn’t sound simple at all, actually. And the dev team knows. Matt has said on a Twitch stream “our game is more complicated than d20 fantasy”.

Right know, they believe that building and running encounters will be a little more complicated that in D&D. Their counterargument is that d20 combat is only simple because there’s not a lot of structure; the DM can’t choose when monsters go, they have very little tactical choice, creatures have boring statblocks… Do you see my point?

The current thinking is that there will be a little bit of a learning curve for Directors who aren’t used to tactical combat, but, once they get over this hump, fights will be much more interesting to run than in D&D. The million dollar question now is: what is the right amount of cognitive load to ask the Director to bear? There is not a clear answer to this yet, so it remains to be seen how many people will be willing to engage with this more complex system. Or, in simpler terms, will the MCDM RPG be the game for you?

If you’re unsure, keep listening. On the other side of the break, I have a playtest report that just might make you want to engage with their more tactical system.

Schepis’ playtest

Before I end this episode, let me relay to you a recent playtest report from a member of the MCDM Discord called Donald Schepis. He shared his experience testing with Pesto’s group on July 1st and, man, this is so cool.

Since I haven’t been able to make any playtests, reading these reports is what has made me the most excited for what’s to come. He even played a College of the Harlequin Mask Shadow, my most anticipated subclass of the whole game right now! If you like this kind of stuff, I highly recommend joining the Discord.

Anyway, enough chit-chat. I’ve slightly edited his messages so that it works better in audio, but otherwise I’m simply reading you his text; the credit is all his. Let’s go:

“A goblin tribe raided a village and captured a hostage. They converted the tavern into a stronghold to fend off any rescue teams. We’re the rescue team. We’re outside the tavern. As a College of Harlequins Shadow, I peek through the window and let the goblins know, I’m On Your Side!. I weave an illusion and transform into a perfect copy of one of the goblin bodyguards. We’ll call him Gerald. Luckily, their defenses betray them. They can only see parts of my ‘goblin’ form as I lead the ‘prisoners’ to the front door. The goblins are dumbfounded by my striking resemblance to Gerald, but they’re yet to catch wise.

Still, they’re on alert. A few toughs flank the doors, and a dozen minions jump up on the bar, ready for a fight. The door opens, and we see the hostage in the claws of the tribe’s leader. We win initiative. The Conduit drops his false bonds and smites a mother trucker. He warns the goblins to flee lest they suffer the same. Hesitation is Weakness, so I jump the initiative, scream, ‘I’ve been tricked!’, and scuttle away to hide behind the leader. And more importantly, right behind the hostage.

Little did we know, the archers of this tribe are crack sharpshooters. They replace a bucket of blood in the Conduit’s body with wood and steel. Good thing I’m safe on the winning side! Except Gerald can see through the illusion. He slaps the archer beside him, points her at his twin, and orders her to fire. She hesitates. If that arrow hits me, the jig is up. The illusion will drop, and I’ll be in the middle of a green, 4-foot-tall death scrum. But if the Harlequins’ Shadows are good at anything, they’re good at Misdirection.

The archer blinks, and now I wear the face of her leader. And her leader wears my face. Which is currently Gerald’s face. She follows orders, shoots Gerald, and blinks again. The arrow is stuck in her chieftain’s leg! I continue to cower behind the tied-up human. Then, the Stormwight Fury enters. He leaps, transforms into a wolf mid-air, slams down on the chieftain, and tears him apart.

Then, a bunch of combat happens. We come back to the archer’s turn in round 2. The first archer fires. The Orc Elementalist drops below 0. But Orcs are Relentless. He hurls lightning for his opportunity attack and slays a goblin! When that happens, he can spend a recovery and crawls back into positive stamina. Then, it happens again. And then again. On the third blast of lightning, he rolls a critical! But, he only injured the goblin and remains dying. Job done, the Elementalist converts his free action (from the crit) into a maneuver and heads into the backroom (and out of line of sight) for some well-deserved rest.

On my turn, I cut the hostage free. When my dagger touches the rope, the illusion falls. I’m exposed! ‘Thank Ajax!’ the hostage exclaims. Yikes. A problem for another time. I slap him, yell, ‘Flee!’, and cloak myself in his visage. Now, the goblins only have a 50/50 chance to shoot the hostage! Which is extra good as a horde of reinforcements descend on the tavern. The rest of the party whoops some ass before we flee out the back window.

I didn’t attack a single creature. And it was awesome.”

Come on! If you’re not excited for this game, I doubt you even have a heart! It might be too tactical for some, the cognitive load seems to be the higher side for the Director, but man, you gotta give it a shot. In this host’s humble opinion, d20 fantasy can’t hold a candle to this kind of combat, sorry!

In any case, thank you very much for the playtest report, Donald Schepis. I’ll be patiently waiting for the next one!

Outro

And that’s it for today, folks. I hope you guys enjoyed the episode and the topics I chose this time.

Make sure to check out this episode’s description for links to:

• Matt and James’ Twitch channels,
• MCDM and Matt’s YouTube channels,
• MCDM’s subreddit,
• MCDM’s Patreon,
• MCDM’s Discord,
• All of my socials,
• And a full transcript of this episode.

Before you leave, make sure to rate the podcast in your platform of choice and leave a comment on YouTube if you have any questions or suggestions for future episodes.

See you all next time… Thank you very much and goodbye!

Intro

Hello everyone and welcome to the fifth episode of The Dice Society podcast!

In case you’re joining me for the first time, this is not my voice… I’m just a bit sick and didn’t want to wait any longer to record this episode, so let’s get started. Anyway, my name is Caio and I’m the author of thedicesociety.com. This is a show about the upcoming MCDM RPG, where I talk about its development, my playtest experience, and, once the time is right, first- and third-party content being made for the finished game.

Since the previous episode, we’ve gotten a lot of new information about the RPG. MCDM has a new designer on the dev team, Matt showed us a new core ancestry, and we got a sneak peak into the encounter sheet they are designing to help overwhelmed Directors with combats. We’ll go over all of that and more in the News section of the podcast.

As for our main topics of the day, they are all related to character creation and progression. First, I’ll tell you everything there is to know about the Culture and Career systems that were presented to the MCDM patrons over the last few weeks. Then, as a treat, I’ll share some hot new details we got this week about class progression and subclasses. It’s exciting stuff, I’m sure you’ll love it.

As usual, however, everything we’re going to talk about is subject to and probably will change, so don’t get your hopes up if you really like any of the stuff I describe here. Cool? Cool. Let’s draw steel and get started.

News

Our first news item is actually just a confirmation of something I’d already mentioned in the previous episode: the Power Roll is in fact moving from 2d6 to 2d10. In order to accommodate the bigger dice, now tier 1 is 11 or lower, tier 2 is 12 through 16, and tier 3 is 17 or more.

With this new math, circumstantial bonuses went back to being called Edges and Banes, but now they are worth +2 and -2 respectively. Double Edges and Double Banes aren’t +-4s, though! Instead, they automatically bump your Power Roll up or down by one whole tier. Still, you can’t get more than two Edges or Banes, and they cancel out one to one; this hasn’t changed. We’ll have to wait and see if this is the last time they tweak the Power Roll.

Speaking of d10s, Djordi, one of the new hires, has officially started to work with the team. He seems to be helping mainly with class design at the moment, but both James and Matt have alluded to some other, less publicly visible stuff he’s been helping with. Djordi shows up from time to time in the patron-exclusive Discord channel to post ominous pictures of his green 20-sided d10s. Mysterious!

Another name we can expect to get used to is memonek. This is the latest ancestry Matt has showed to the patrons and oh boy does it look awesome! Memonek are the native people of Axiom, the Plane of Uttermost Law, and they are humanoid in form, but made of metal, ceramic, and glass. But they aren’t robots; memonek just evolved with a non-carbon-based biology.

As part of the Patreon post, we got some concept art, the first draft of their entry in the Heroes book, and even an idea of how these beings of pure reason start to have… Feelings when they come to Orden. Very nice, very cool, very evocative. 10/10, no notes.

Our last item in the News segment is the encounter sheet. I talked briefly about this in the last episode, and the team seems to be going forward with the idea. Matt even showed us a draft he made to try it out and went into detail of how much simpler monsters could be in this framework.

Now James has also told us that terrain, breakable objects, objectives, and more could be presented on the encounter sheet alongside the monsters. He wants to implement the idea of “action oriented encounters”, where encounters, not monsters, would have openers, reversals, and closers. I’ll let y’all know if and when we get any more news on this.

And our last last news item is a demo of the VTT! This was posted literally minutes after I finished recording, so I snuck this in here. I’ll leave the link to the demo in the description of the episode for you to check it out. It looks amazing, no joke!

For real this time, that’s it for the News segment. Now we can move on to character creation, one of my personal favorite topics. Let’s go!

Character creation

One of the goals of the character creation system is to “separate your physical ancestry from your culture”. Even though D&D took a long time to remove racial stat bonuses, this idea is not that new; is his Patreon post, James even mentions a 2020 book by Gwendolyn Marshall that decouples species from culture in D&D 5th Edition.

With this kind of framework, you can have your classic tough, rough, and buff dwarves, but you can also have a dwarf that was raised in the forest by vegetarian, tree-hugging elves. This gives players maximum flexibility to follow or reject fantasy stereotypes.

As of right now, it seems like there are five components in hero creation: Ancestry, Culture, Career, Inciting Incident, and Class. I might be forgetting something, but I’m 90% positive these are the main steps.

Ancestry is easy. You chose your species (human, dwarf, elf, memonek, etc.) and you get some nice benefits related to your physical form. In the MCDM universe, dwarves are extra durable because of their stone skins, wode elves have an easier time hiding, you get it.

What we didn’t know up until now was how Cultures and Careers worked. Let’s start with the former and then move on to the latter.

Culture

Culture is all about your hero’s childhood. There are four aspects to your character’s culture, namely Language, Environment, Organization, and Upbringing.

First you chose a language: this is the language your culture spoke, not much to see here. The following three steps each will award you with a skill from a set list, so this is the only odd one out.

Next is your culture’s Environment: this describes the, well, environment where your culture lived. The options here are Nomadic, Rural, Secluded, Urban, or Wilderness. An Urban Culture, for example, allows you to gain any one Interpersonal or Intrigue skill.

Third is the culture’s Organization: basically, its system of government. You can choose between Anarchic, Bureaucratic, or Communal. In the Patreon post, the example is a Bureaucratic culture, which awards the hero with an Intrigue or Lore skill.

Lastly is your Upbringing: how your character was raised within their culture. Now you can select Academic, Creative, Illegal, Labor, Martial, or Noble. In this case, it seems like skill options are more tailored to each option instead of broad categories; Martial heroes, for instance, choose one skill of Blacksmithing, Fletching, Climb, Endurance, Jump, Ride, Intimidate, Alertness, Track, or Monsters.

One can easily see how going through this process can help a player discover a little bit more about their character with each choice. One the other hand, it might seem a bit daunting for TTRPG beginners… I can imagine someone just wanting to create a cool dwarf and then having to stop and think about socio-political systems and worrying that there might be a right choice that they are missing. Anyway, this is all a draft! No point in analyzing it right now.

Career

Once you’re done with your hero’s Culture, it’s time for their Career; this is basically what they did in order to make money before they started adventuring. Each Career awards you with at least some extra skills and a Common Title; it might additionally give you some extra languages, Renown, and Project Points. Let me break down each of the benefits we haven’t seen yet…

Titles are like 5e Feats, but you don’t chose when your character gains one; they are exclusively awarded by the Director on special occasions. In the case of Common Titles, the weakest kind of Title, they come with your Career and give you something flavorful to do outside of combat.

Renown represents you hero’s reputation and it grows as they adventure. It helps you in Negotiations and attracting followers and retainers; very Strongholds & Followers if you’ve read that book. In general, Renown starts at 0 unless your Career says otherwise.

Finally, Project Points represents your progress in Crafting and Research projects. Say you want to craft a magic sword; once you have every prerequisite material, you’ll need to gather a certain number of Project Points in order to finish the sword, say 300. As a Respite activity, you can make a project roll and add it to your project, completing the sword when you reach 300. If your Career gives you some starting Project Points, this means your first project will already be partially done once you start it.

Something I haven’t mentioned about Careers is that they also give you some questions to answer. This isn’t a mechanical benefit, but instead a character building exercise that can help you get to know your hero better. I thought this was a really interesting approach, much better than 5e’s Ideals, Bonds, and Flaws.

Now that you fully understand what comes with a Career, I can tell you the full list that they’ve shown us in the Patreon. They are Acolyte, Aristocrat, Artisan, Agent, Beggar, Criminal, Explorer, Farmer, Gladiator, Laborer, Mage’s Apprentice, Performer, Politician, Sage, Sailor, Soldier, Warden, and Watch Officer.

To better illustrate what a complete Career looks like, let me tell you about what a Performer gets…

First there’s a little flavor text: “You can sing, act, or dance well enough that people actually pay to see you do it. Imagine that!” Then come the questions:

• First: “What is the tone of your performances?”
• Second: “What song, role, or dance are you most known for?”
• Third: “Did you perform in the same place each night, or did you travel?”
• Fourth: “Were you part of a troupe or a solo act?”

Lastly, you get the Performer benefits: 2 Interpersonal skills of your choice, the Music skill, 2 Renown, and the Dazzler Title, which says “When a creature watches you perform a song, dance, or role for at least 1 minute, you gain an edge on tests made to influence the creature for 1 hour after the performance ends.”

Nice, right? Notice how this particular Career doesn’t give you character any extra languages or Project Points. Artisans, on the other hand, get both of those, but no Renown.

Anyway, now we’re officially done with Cultures and Careers, so we’re ready to move on to Inciting Incidents. Except that we don’t have much information about this yet, whomp whomp… Apparently it will give your character a cool origin story, plus a nice benefit and a bad drawback for you to deal with. Matt’s example was a hero that had a chance of having a helpful vision at night, but a similar chance of having a nightmare that drains one of their Recoveries.

So, with Incidents also out of they way, the only thing left is, you guessed it, a Class! I have talked about that before, but now we got some information about Subclasses which I want to share with you. Please follow me to the next segment of the episode…

Character progression

According to the devs, the MCDM RPG will probably feature something like eight or nine core Classes; they have thrown around plenty of Class concepts and many of those unfortunately won’t make it into this select group. Shout out to the Summoner lovers, who likely won’t be able to make their Necromancer characters for a while still.

Right now, for the purpose of playtesting the rules, the team is fleshing out five Classes from levels 1 to 3. James has mentioned that this is the first tier of the game, with second tier going from level 4 to level 6, third tier going from 7 to 9, and level 10 standing all alone in its own category. The classes they’ve chosen are the Shadow (a sneaky, backstabbing killer), the Fury (a raging pile of muscle), the Elementalist (a mage who’s able to control the elements), the Conduit (a divinely favored caster that can heal), and the Tactician (a master of combat and strategy).

Apparently, every Class is also getting their Subclass at level 1. Luckily for us, James has talked in a Twitch stream a little bit about every single Subclass they have already designed for these five classes! Let’s go through them one by one:

First, the Shadow Subclasses. Here we have the College of Black Ash, focused on teleporting around the battlefield by using their Black Ash Sorcery. Then there’s the College of Caustic Alchemy, which deals with poisons and bombs, a more assassin-y kind of Shadow. Finally, the College of the Harlequin Mask, for heroes who want to disguise themselves and go unnoticed when infiltrating enemy strongholds.

Next, the Fury Subclasses. First comes the Berserker, the stereotypical rage machine that hits their enemies hard. Then there’s the Reaver, a Conan-esque character that can be a more crafty and stealthy hero. Lastly, the Stormwight, a Fury that has half person, half animal forms; right now, it looks like they would be able to transform into bear, wolf, rodent, and bird forms, each with their own unique features and attacks.

Third, the Elementalist. James hasn’t mentioned which Subclasses they have already fleshed out, but we do know that there will probably be seven in total, one for each element, namely Earth, Air, Fire, Water, Green, Rot, and Void. An Elementalist will be able to pick their spells from any element, but they will be slightly better at the ones pertaining to their Subclass.

Fourth, the Conduit. Again, James hasn’t specified exactly which Subclasses are in the works, but he did explain that Conduit Subclasses might work a little differently than the ones from every other Class. Here, you choose two domains in your god/saint’s portfolio, and then, when you level up, you pick your abilities from the ones available in these two domains.

Last, but not least, the Tactician. The first Subclass is the Insurgent, a crafty warrior that controls the battlefield from behind the lines. Then there’s the Mastermind, which can move people around and help their allies; basically, a tactical genius. Finally, the Knight Protector works kind of like a defender who holds the front line so that their allies can do their things unimpeded.

Awesome, right? After choosing your hero’s Class and Subclass, character progression seems to work similarly to D&D. You’ll get improvements to abilities you already have, more skills, better stats, additional damage across the board, and new, more powerful abilities. Character complexity will increase as a result, allowing for new tactics and combos.

What do you think about these subclasses? Do they make you excited to play the game? What’s your favorite? Mine is probably the College of the Harlequin Mask Shadow, I’m dying to know more about its abilities.

Outro

And that’s it for today, folks. I hope you guys enjoyed the episode and the topic I chose this time.

Make sure to check out this episode’s description for links to:

• Matt and James’ Twitch channels,
• MCDM and Matt’s YouTube channels,
• MCDM’s subreddit,
• MCDM’s Patreon,
• MCDM’s Discord,
• All of my socials,
• And, for the first time, a full transcript of this episode.

Before you leave, make sure to rate the podcast in your platform of choice and leave a comment on YouTube if you have any questions or suggestions for future episodes.

See you all next time… Thank you very much and goodbye!

After the party of heroes defeated the Demon King, they restored peace to the land and returned to lives of solitude. Generations pass, and the elven mage Frieren comes face to face with humanity’s mortality. She takes on a new apprentice and promises to fulfill old friends’ dying wishes. Can an elven mind make peace with the nature of life and death? Frieren embarks on her quest to find out.

If you haven’t read/watched it yet, you should. It is beautiful, emotional, engaging, charming, thrilling, deep, and no amount of adjectives can express how much its story has moved me. If you care about this kind of stuff, at the time of writing, Frieren has surpassed Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood as the best rated anime on MyAnimeList by 0.3 point¹.

One of the things that inspired me the most in Frieren was how elves are portrayed, especially the main character herself. Tolkien elves, D&D elves, and Pathfinder elves are all said to be aloof and distant because of their long lives, but seldom this is the main focus of their personalities.

Frieren, on the other hand, basically forgets that time exists. It’s hard for her to create meaningful connections with the rest of her party despite spending more than 10 years traveling with them. She has a hard time getting up in the morning, focusing on her quests, or even understanding why her human companions are so eager to get things done.

Watching the anime made me want to play a Frieren elf in D&D. Not “humans” with pointy ears that can meditate for four hours and be good to go; I want some mechanics that reinforce the aloofness and the fact that they can live for thousands upon thousands of years.

So I took it upon myself to create a variant elf species for D&D 5e based on Frieren! Since the series hasn’t talked about a lot about elves in general, I modeled my species on Frieren (the character) instead. Here you go²:

Variant Elf

Elves are a longevous, distant people. They have an innate affinity for magic, and some choose to devote their long lives to the study of the arcane. Because of the length of their lifespans, they have a warped sense of time that makes it hard for them to engage with other people. Many even have difficulty expressing their emotions.

On the other hand, most elves need to fight off the boredom that comes with living for millennia. Some spend their days traveling, some take up multiple crafts, and some become daring adventurers.

Variant Elf Traits

Creature Type: Humanoid.

Size: Medium (about 5–6 feet tall).

Speed: 30 feet.

Life Span: Thousands of years on average.

As a variant elf, you have these special traits.

• Darkvision. You have Darkvision with a range of 60 feet.

• Sleepy. Unlike most other species, you need more than 6 hours of sleep in order to be fully rested. When you perform a Long Rest, if you sleep for fewer than 8 hours, you have Disadvantage on Initiative rolls until your next Short or Long Rest.

• Aloof. Given your distant nature, you find it hard hard to read other people. You have Disadvantage on Wisdom (Insight) checks.

• Long Lived. You have Proficiency in the History and Arcana skills.

• Restraint and Hypnosis Resistance. You have advantage on saving throws you make to avoid or end the Restrained and Charmed conditions on yourself.

• Mana Detection. You gain the ability to cast the Detect Magic Spell and, once you cast the Spell with this trait, you can’t cast the Spell with it again until you finish a Long Rest; however, you can cast the Spell using any Spell Slots you have of the appropriate level.

This is an interesting proposition because it could allow new classes to access spells from any book published prior to their release. Think about how Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything has to list every single spell that the Artificer can cast from the PHB because that book was published before the Artificer was released.

The opposite is also true: when WotC releases a new book with spells, they don’t have to list what classes can cast each individual spell, even classes from sources other than the PHB. In The Book of Many Things, for example, they wouldn’t have to say that Antagonize counts as a Bard spell because they could simply list it as an Arcane Enchantment.

This kind of design would allow them to create new classes that are compatible with every conceivable 5e product: old and new, core and optional, first and third-party. They could bring back the Shaman and simply say that it gets every Primal Evocation and Conjuration spells (or something like that); instantly, everything in your Mary Poppins’ Guide to Spells is instantly compatible with the Shaman.

I know I’m dwelling on this point, but I just want to make sure you understand what we could have had. By One D&D’s seventh UA, the team went back to class spell lists and this compatibility dream went out the window.

I’m not saying that the category system was perfect, just that it would foster the creation of more (and more specialized) classes¹. Wouldn’t it be fun if the Swordmage was a class instead of the Wizard’s most broken subclass? Wouldn’t it be nice if fans could design new classes with an expected lifespan of more than a year?

In an interview on D&D’s YouTube channel, Jeremy Crawford claimed that spell categories were dropped because they:

1. Dampened class identity. A big part of the Wizard’s class identity is having the biggest spell list in the game, and having other classes access most of the Arcane spell list made the Wizard feel less special.

2. Didn’t work for Warlocks. Because of Pact Magic, some Arcane spells become too powerful in the hands of Warlocks, so their spell list has to be more curated.

The goal of the rest of this post is to explain why I think spell categories created the problems Crawford mentioned, and to offer a simple solution to this issue that only involves rethinking how most classes work in the game :D

The problem

When WotC tried to divide the casters into three categories, one of them had way more classes than the others. Can you guess which one it was? Take a look:

• Arcane: Wizard, Sorcerer, Bard, Warlock, and Artificer.

• Divine: Cleric, and Paladin.

• Primal: Druid, and Ranger.

The situation gets even worse if you take into account “third-casters”, i.e., classes with subclasses that can access the Wizard spell list. Looking at this table you can instantly tell how everyone wants to be an Arcane class:

To me, this is the actual reason why spell categories ruined class identity. The Wizard didn’t feel special because everyone is looking over their shoulders trying to copy some of those sweet Arcane spells! And, in the same vein, the problem with Warlocks is that there are already too many Arcane classes and, if WotC dropped Pact Magic like they tried to in One D&D’s fifth UA, then there really isn’t a good way to distinguish it from the other Arcane ones.

My solution

My solution to this problem is actually based on Kobold Press’ solution in Tales of the Valiant: create a new spell category! Just to be clear, I’m not a TotV backer, but I did check out the public playtests and watched a few videos of the backer playtests. To summarize what I was able to understand, they kept One D&D’s original categories and added a new one called Wyrd (meaning “fate” or “destiny”) just for the Warlock.

In my opinion, however, we’re wasting so much potential by having only Warlocks dip into Wyrd magic! Why not use this opportunity to bring back a little bit of 4e’s Power Sources and redistribute all those Arcane classes into other categories?

If I were to fork D&D, this is what I would do:

In my system, every spell would have a category, a school and a level of access (full, half, or third). In the Ranger section of the PHB, for example, it would say something like “you have access to every Primal spell for half-casters”, in the Eldritch Knight section it would say “you have access to every Arcane spell for third-casters”, you get it.

In this framework, spells may have two or more categories (Wall of Fire: Arcane and Primal), classes may have access to only some schools (Shaman: Primal half-caster limited to Evocation and Conjuration), and spells may have specific exceptions (Cure Wounds: Divine, Primal, and Artificer).

Now I should probably explain where the Sorcerer went, how the Monk and the Barbarian showed up in the table, and what the heck Mystic magic even is. Let me go through my vision for each magic category one by one.

Arcane

Arcane spells are learned, practiced, and perfected. Wizards, Artificers, and some Fighters can master this discipline thorough meticulous study of the Weave and the science of how to harness it.

This category is basically unchanged, except for the Sorcerer which is now missing. I’m gonna be honest: I was never a fan of the Sorcerer as a limited Wizard with Metamagic… So I shifted its features to the Warlock, because I can.

Additionally, if you’re not a fan of Artificers in medieval fantasy, we could have the Swordmage as a cool Arcane half-caster in its place. I’d personally go this route, but many people love the Artificer, so I kept it as the default.

Divine

Divine spells are granted by heavenly beings. Clerics, Paladins, and some Monks earn the ability to use these powers through prayer, strict devotion to a god, or adherence to a higher purpose.

This category gains a new member: the Monk as a third-caster. Since monks in real life are religious people, I think it’s ok to have a subclass or two gain access to Divine spells. Can’t Way of Mercy Monks get Cure Wounds or something? Come on…

Primal

Primal spells are manifested through Nature. Druids, Rangers, and some Barbarians are in such attunement with the wilderness that they can employ its magical powers as a tool and a weapon.

Just as the Divine category, I added the Barbarian as a third-caster to the Primal classes. In fact, the Barbarian was a Primal class in 4e! Path of the Beast Barbarians already have some sweet beast forms, why not have a subclass that is also able to cast a little Spike Growth while raging?

Mystic

Mystic spells are folk traditions that hold power. Witchcraft, chanting rituals, shadow magic, and cerimonial dances are kinds of Mystic magic. Warlocks, Bards, and some Rogues can perform powerful spells by forging a pact with an otherworldly being, impressing a Muse, or performing forbidden rites.

This is where a lot has changed.

In this framework, the Warlock becomes a full caster whose powers fill the same niche as Pathfinder’s Witch class. They can keep their Patron, Eldritch Blast, Eldritch Invocations, and I’d even give them something akin to Metamagic to really hammer home how they’re basically concocting an incantation every time they cast a spell; add an eye of newt to have the spell last longer, some snake fangs to have it deal more damage, etc. Very Laudna.

The Bard, on the other hand, gets downgraded to a half-caster because, honestly, I think they’re a bit overpowered. I’m of the opinion that they’re much better served by a more swashbuckler-y archetype: charismatic sword fighters that can distract their opponents with illusions, help their allies with encouraging words, and play a few tunes when they need to Dispel Magic.

Can we make a single spell list that works for both Warlocks and Bards? Given that my Bards only get at most 5th level spells and that witchcraft in the real world is often associated with song and dance, I think there’s a chance. If we wanted to make Bards even more like Warlocks, their subclasses could be their Muses instead of their Colleges! Give them more Enchantment and Illusion spells, less Conjuration and Evocation, and Bob’s your uncle.

As for Rogues, I think the “shadow magic” component of the Mystic classes serves very well the Arcane Trickster archetype. A majority of the Arcane Trickster’s spell list can already be learned by Bards, so it’s not even that much of a stretch.

And that’s it! TL;DR: Throw away the Sorcerer, and rework Warlocks and Bards to fit into a new Mystic category along with the Arcane Trickster. Optionally, for some added spice, also give Monks and Barbarians each a third-caster subclass because they deserve it.

What do you think of my solution? Is it too much work? Is making room for new, more focussed classes even worth it? Please let me know, I’m going insane…

I’m just gonna rip off the band-aid and say it: why do we use dice in RPGs?

The question

Let’s start by refining the question, because in its raw state it’s actually wrong and unhelpful. First, it’s wrong because not every RPG uses dice; computer RPGs almost never explicitly use dice, and even some tabletop RPGs don’t use them (some use cards, for example). Second, it’s unhelpful because it doesn’t address the actual question behind the question; this isn’t about the randomization engine the developers choose, it’s about the randomness itself.

Think about how much uncertainty could be done away with if role-playing games didn’t rely on randomness. Wouldn’t it be cool if your character never missed? Wouldn’t it be nice if you always did the maximum amount of damage? How awesome would it be if your PC always passed every perception check, sneaked by every guard, persuaded every noble?

I know, a game like this sounds freaking awful. But why?! In real life, we’re constantly struggling because we can’t do everything perfectly. In sports, the goal of an athlete is usually to become as good as possible, as reliably as possible. But in RPGs, where we’re basically playing make believe, saying “you always do max damage, you pass every check” suddenly makes the game boring.

So a better question might be: why do we find randomness in RPGs fun?

Small aside

It’s important to note that, strictly speaking, not every RPG uses randomness. In Dread, for instance, players pull blocks from a Jenga tower to determine whether an action succeeds, and in Amber, actions are resolved by comparing attributes which the players determine during character creation with an attribute auction.

I think, however, that these are exceptions that prove the rule. RPGs with random elements are much more popular than those without, to the point that even computer RPGs still rely a lot on randomness in order to determine outcomes and/or damage. So the question “why do we find randomness in RPGs fun?” is still valid even if not literally 100% of RPGs use randomness.

The answer(s)

Now let’s try and answer this elusive question. I thought a lot about it, did some research (see the links at the beginning of the post), and finally got somewhere. After too much time, I came to the conclusion that there are three main reasons why we use dice (i.e. randomness) in tabletop RPGs.

Simulation

Randomness is useful when trying to simplify complex systems. Do players want rules that model absolutely every single aspect of an action? Probably not. Even Rolemaster, with its (in)famous charts, still can’t precisely model every aspect of real-world combat, so some kind of simplification has to happen.

Computer games with realistic physics simulations might be able to avoid randomness, but then they become games of pure skill (aiming with your mouse, for example). In tabletop RPGs, where the players have no way of actually controlling their characters’ swords and spells, randomness is necessary to model accuracy and damage; for instance, wargames (D&D’s predecessors) use dice to simulate whether or not a unit hits¹ or misses their target.

“Thus, in a board wargame, […] randomness has a positive aspect beyond creating a degree of uncertainty; it provides simulation value, because in reality, a military commander can never control everything that happens on the battlefield, so ‘random factors’ stand in for all the myriad issues that create uncertainty in a chaotic struggle.”

— Greg Costikyan

Tension

Randomness can help bring a little bit of balance to a situation that in the “real world” would be resolved unambiguously. This keeps everyone on their toes because the tides can turn at any moment; any sure victory can turn into a defeat if the dice don’t play nice.

For example, if a low-level party tries to go against a high-level monster, odds are in the favor of the monster. If all RPGs simply compared stats in order to determine outcomes (like Amber), then the monster would win 100% of the time. With some randomness involved, however, the party can win if luck is on their side!

“While the tension of randomness can sometimes feel unpleasant, having no tension is even worse. Even against an equal opponent, many games can start to feel boring once you’ve won a significant advantage or taken a significant setback. You can either lose hope for victory or any fear of defeat.”

— Dan Felder

Drama

As is usual in RPGs, GMs prepare the outlines of a story that then gets transformed by player actions; the dice, however, can surprise even the players, becoming a new source of drama and narrative uncertainty. In this sense, randomness becomes an agent of emergent narrative, where players and GM alike are all brought along for the ride.

Random encounters are a prime instantiation of this. The GM might generate a random encounter with an NPC that the players then recruit, or with a monster that ends up killing one of the PCs. Both outcomes are ultimately a consequence of player actions, but randomness is responsible for creating the situation (rolling for the random encounter) and influencing the outcome (successful persuasion checks, bad rolls on saving throws, etc).

“This is one of the most important functions of die rolls in a game. By injecting a source of unpredictability as to outcome, however shaped and controlled by the GM, they enable the deliberate derailing of plot trains.”

— Mike Bourke

TL;DR

RPGs, especially TTRPGs, use dice in order to generate randomness. This randomness is desired because it is a tool for simplifying complex systems like swinging swords and casting spells, it keeps players on their toes by doing away with certainty of either victory or loss, and it fosters emergent narrative by surprising both players and GMs with unexpected results.

Now I can rest in peace. Finally. No more questions about randomness in RPGs. Truly. I mean, randomness is fun because it helps simulate stuff, add tension, and create drama. So more randomness = more better! That’s it, I found the nugget of knowledge at the end of the tunnel!² Wait. Unless… No. Please, stop. Let it go. No more thinking about this.

…

Read part 2 now!

Since the Covid pandemic, I really got into D&D. I had never played before, but had friends who had long lasting parties and were DMs, so it was the perfect opportunity since we were all locked up in our houses.

Turns out that it didn’t last more than a few months: we started one campaign at level 1 and disbanded shortly after reaching level 6. Then I found out about Critical Role and became a huge fan (although I’ve given up on Campaign 3…) and started playing with my partner and his friends.

As you can imagine, it wasn’t too long before I started DMing myself and I eventually started watching some of Matt Colville’s Twitch lives and YouTube videos (really recommend those for DMs!). So when Matt’s company MCDM started designing their own RPG, I was pretty excited (if you want to know more about it, you can listen to the podcast The Dice Society, which covers news on the development of the game).

For me, the game changer for this new RPG is the dice. Everyone who plays D&D, be it 5th edition, AD&D or anything in between, is used to rolling d20s, 20-sided dice¹. On the other hand, MCDM’s RPG uses 2 regular, 6-sided dice for attacking, making ability checks and other situations in which your character might need to roll. As of now (March 2024), the game is still in development, so it still might change, but they made it very clear that they want to keep the 2d6 system in the final version of the game.

Why I love the idea of the 2d6 system

I know: d6s are kind of boring compared to d20s, right? Every Farkle and Yahtzee player uses them, after all. But to me, that could be a great advantage: it’s easy to understand and hit the ground running as soon as you know the basic rules, no need to go through weird dice².

And although I’ve become some sort of dice hoarder for the past years, I love the idea of rolling two dice, and more than that, two d6s, because of variance.

Let’s assume we’re rolling a d20. The possible outcomes range from 1 to 20, and tecnically they all have the same probability, 1/20 = 5%. When rolling 2d6, there is a smaller range of possibilities (2 to 12) and they are not uniformally probable (you would expect to roll 12 much less frequently than 7, for example).

That means your modifier has a much more significant impact on the final result than sheer luck³. If you are consistently rolling some value near the mean (7), how good you are at a certain ability will more accurately translate to how successful you are in a skill check or attack. Sure, you can still fumble or do exceptionally well, but those events are less common.

Simulating dice rolls

I remember when I was younger and my Math teacher gave us an experiment: roll two dice 100 times and take note of the results. At the end of the class, we drew a bar plot with the results and found out that everyone drew basically the same plot.

Let’s do the same, but with the RPG context and in a larger scale. We’ll check how the outcome of a character with a dexterity bonus of +3 would roll for a skill check using different dice systems. (MCDM’s stats are not exactly the same, but let’s just assume they are for this thought exercise.)

Rolling 1d20 1000 times

Assuming that every side on a 20-sided die is physically the same, it’s fair to conclude that the numbers 1 through 20 have the same probability of being the outcome. Let’s imagine that we’re rolling the die 100 times and counting how many times each side appears.

Now let’s do the same, rolling the die 1000 times.

The results seem random enough and there doesn’t seem to be a clear pattern. Even if we add the modifier (+3), it’s not that great a difference. The modifier matters much less then the roll of a die.

As a game design, it makes sense that extremely good (or bad) results are rare, but it’s weird that average outcomes are equally probable.

Rolling 2d6 1000 times

If we were rolling only one d6, we would have a similar situation: all 6 sides have the same probability. However, by adding two dice, we invoke the Central Limit Theorem!

What is that, you ask? It’s one of the most important theorems in probability theory that says that, given a sample from a random variable under certain circumstances, the sample mean tends to follow a normal distribution, even if the original variable has a different distribution other than normal. More technically, the limit of a random variable X when n -> Inf is normally distributed. More on that in the next section.

For now, let’s replicate the experiment we did with the d20, this time with 2d6.

This plot shows what we’ve talked before: it’s much more common to roll a 7 than, say, a 12. The same goes for the other end of the curve, too.

Now let’s take a look at what happens if we increase the number of rolls to a thousand:

And a million:

The math behind it: the Central Limit Theorem

If you are not convinced by this little experiment, the proof for the theorem can be easily found online.

I’m not going to bore you with the details because 1, this is not the place for it and 2, I’m not ashamed to admit that I don’t even remember the proof and would just copy it from someplace else anyway.

Balancing predictability and uncertainty

So why does a more consistent result = a better game? (To me, at least.)

Of course it’s fun to have some unpredictability when we’re playing, otherwise we would simply discard the dice. But it’s always frustrating when you know that your character is very good in a skill but you KEEP. ROLLING. ONES.

As a DM, it’s also hard to explain why that keeps happening in a way that makes sense narratively. “Oh, you see that the door is completely rotten but you simply can’t break it despite your Strength (20)” More especifically about D&D, it also creates some significant differences for classes such as Bard and Rogue.

I think only time will tell if MCDM’s 2d6 system works for me in the long run. But for now, I’m excited about changing things up a little and depending a little less on my misbehaving dice.

The great game

Most things you worldbuild will become the backdrop of your player’s adventures unless you make it a point to bring something to the forefront. Gods will only be relevant if a PC is particularly religious or if there is a cult the party needs to fight; the outer planes will only matter if you’re GMing a planar campaign; so on and so forth.

Politics is the exception. In my opinion, politics is the most important component of worldbuilding because your players will probably interact with it no matter what. If you’re playing D&D, it is assumed in the title: you can’t have dungeons without a society to build them in the first place.

For this reason, I want Unaria’s politics to be complex and interesting. There won’t be a whole country full of evil people, much less a whole species¹. Taking a page from Colville’s excellent politics series, all factions should have reasonable and convincing beliefs which might persuade the players to be on their side.

Making it mine

As with most Human kingdoms in the Age of Blood, Ebora used to be an administrative region of the Undying Empire that splintered off in the early years after the Branching.

The Empire depended on powerful magic to maintain their tight grip on the whole territory and, without it, everything was up for grabs. Once magic weakened, for instance, the Emperor couldn’t teleport whole armies to zones of conflict as he once did. In fact, the very spell that granted him his exceptionally long life² deteriorated so much that the poor fool began aging quite rapidly.

Naturally, the first one to claim and retain the title of monarch was Lord Vedres, Ebora’s former imperial administrator. Many local leaders also tried to create their own smaller governments, but these attempts were quickly squandered; the only contender who actually had some success in their bid to become Ebora’s ruler was that era’s Living Saint, the term for the head of the Church of the Pure. Centuries later, Ebora still lives under the coexisting rulerships of the Monarch and of the Living Saint³.

The first one hundred years of independence weren’t easy for Ebora. Violent neighboring states, border disputes, pillaging bandits, internal conflicts, succession crises, all plagued the nascent kingdom. It wasn’t until 189 A.B. that Arthur the Wise was able to, through a complex network of alliances and favors, consolidate the whole territory under his rule.

More than 200 years later, Charles II now rules Ebora during a new period of uncertainty. The last remains of imperial infrastructure are crumbling, monster raids are getting more frequent, and strange cults seem to be growing in popularity. Instability got to such a degree that he began hiring groups of mercenary adventurers to go to the most remote edges of the empire and help his subjects.

In these troubled times, four factions formed among the landed nobility, each seeking to expand their influence while the king struggles with his problems.

• Countess of Corgas, to the east, commands a group of aristocrats who want greater control over maritime trade and the taxation of imports.

• Count of Soldos and his allies in the west, starved of resources, want to enact a system of prince-electors who have a say in the next succession.

• Marquess of Courela’s southern coalition seeks a stronger army capable of annexing more lands for them to farm.

• The Living Saint leads the most powerful faction in the northwest, plotting to increase the power of the Church of the Pure through a series of laws that take power away from the king.

Every single source of instability, including these factions, are a possible hook for players and their characters. Are they going to get involved? Are they going to pick sides? If you run them up a tree, they will have to.

Heaven and Hell

Currently, Unaria only has three planes of existence: the Material Plane (Unaria itself), the Feywild, and the Shadowfell. Now that we know everything there is to know about cosmology, the gods, and magic, we can start working on the rest of the planes. Specifically, I want to explain the outer planes.

I wan’t going to write a whole post about this topic, but one of my players made up his mind about his next character and turns out he wants to make an Illrigger that serves a devil from the Nine Hells. Well… Now Unaria needs something like the Nine Hells.

The main inspiration for the planes of Unaria will be the outer planes of D&D. Nothing from esoteric philosophy this time! My only goal here is to rework them as places where souls go in the afterlife, because this might be important for my player’s backstory.

Making it mine

In my setting, once something is infinite, space can’t handle it anymore. An infinite being, like the gods, can’t exist in any material form and, therefore, collapses unto itself like a black hole curving space-time beyond the reaches of physics. This creates a new plane.

I’ve said before that “The weavers are eight and, intertwining themselves with the threads, they make the mortal realm.” Now you know that this is literally true: the gods are, in every sense of the word, Unaria.¹

Besides being a god, there is another way to become infinite: to be remembered forever. This is a fate reserved for very few mortals and defies the concept of time itself, but it can happen in Unaria. Great tyrants, true liches, master poets, powerful wizards… Those who become larger than life, those who perform deeds that will be in the annals of history forever, become planes of existence. These mortals are collectively referred to as Patrons².

Much like the eight gods, who together became the Prime Material Plane, Patrons don’t each become a different outer plane; they join one of 16 different planes depending on what they did to be remembered forever. These planes mirror the domains of the gods, demonstrating how central the concepts are to the universe:

Once a person passes away, their soul goes on to one of these planes and stays there while they are still remembered. Rituals of memory (where a loved one is remembered and their name is repeated over and over) strive to keep someone’s soul “alive” for longer. If they are in the Domain of Love, for example, that loved one will enjoy more time in absolute bliss before fading into oblivion. However, if they are in the Domain of Death, the rest of their existence in the afterlife will be absolute pain.

Undeath in general is an attempt by mortals to cheat the system and become infinite by brute force. Regular liches are a great example: naive wizards think that achieving eternal life is enough to ascend as a Patron, but the necessity of a philactery is an obvious flaw in the plan. Only a true lich can ascend, but then it (by definition) can’t have a physical form anymore.

In some places, Patrons are even venerated like saints. In this case, they might be referred to as Saints, Heroes, Prophets, etc. Some cultures of Unaria also claim that each Patron becomes a new star in the sky once they ascend to eternal life.

The big twist here is that, unlike the eight gods, Patrons aren’t shy about influencing the Material Plane; they don’t have much power, but that doesn’t stop them. They might create cults in order to keep their memory alive, or even try to erase the name of an opponent from history. There is a lot of potential drama in this system!

In the next post of this series, I’ll start developing the kingdom where my next campaign will take place. Hold on tight, because we’re going to Monfoz.

Realistic magic

My goal here is to create a generic magic system that works with traditional fantasy TTRPGs, but with some nice twists that can create narrative drama. I also want it to feel somewhat consistent, even realistic¹.

For example, I want it to justify (at least a little bit) why Humans don’t have any magical powers; it’s always bothered me that Humans are usually the main characters of fantasy fiction, but they’re always the most boring ones. I know this is because we don’t have magical powers in the real world, but I want there to be an in-world reason for this².

In the same vein, there has to be a reason why people were able to forge magic weapons in the olden days and, currently, adventurers have to sacrifice their lives exploring dark, monster infested dungeons in order to get any kind of magic item.

To square these circles, my plan is to take inspiration from thermodynamics and genetics. The second law of thermodynamics teaches us that, in a closed system, entropy never decresces; if space expands, energy diffuses and becomes more spread out, more sparse. And geneticists have observed that the Y chromosome has shrank in size with every new generation for millions of years.

Making it mine

Think of magic in Unaria as a substance that permeates all aspects of creation: everything has at least a little bit of magic that can be manipulated by a sufficiently powerful caster.

Primal spells, for example, tap into magic from plants and other parts of nature. Divine spells, on the other hand, tap into magic from the gods themselves. Finally, arcane spells tap into the magic of the their components and usually require a lot of study to be mastered.

Sapient creatures, however, already came into the world dripping in magic. Without ever having to learn how to cast a spell, this innate magic of the eight original species fueled their passive magical qualities: Golems had stone skin, Fey could make trees talk, Undying (humanity’s ancestors) could communicate telepathically, etc.

The problem with innate magic is that, as mortals reproduce and multiply, it gets spread out and they become less powerful, diminished versions of themselves. Humans, because they are the one who reproduce the fastest, completely lost their magic over time, while the other species retained at least a few of their original powers. Even Halflings, who also descended from Undying, separated evolutionarily early enough from Humans as to keep some of their powers³!

The most dramatic exception to this rule are Dragons, who are still very magical. Since they live for so long, Dragons realized that reproduction was weakening their species. Since many Dragons are greedy and power-hungry, they stopped reproducing sexually and started spontaneously reincarnating instead. The Dragons who kept sexually reproducing diminished in magic and became Wyverns, Dragonborn, and Kobolds; the rest essentially became living fossils, maintaining the levels of power that their species had.

There are also ways of absorbing magic from other living creatures, but these are usually vile rituals reserved for BBEGs. A lich, for example, can get more magic to feed its immortality by consuming mortal souls. Anthropophagy rites from real Earth’s past (where one might consume the meat of a great warrior in order to get their strength) would also work in Unaria.

One event that changed all of the rules was the Branching. The world split in three, which diffused magic equally among the planes (Feywild, Shadowfell, and Unaria). This not only reduced innate magic, but overall available magic. After the Branching, it became significantly harder to create magic weapons, cast higher level spells, etc.

Now that we understand better how magic works in Unaria, we can move on and explore another aspect of the universe that I still have to explain: the planes.

My goal in this post isn’t to create a detailed history of Unaria, only a short outline of what happened over the ages of the world. When I’m about to run my first campaign in the setting, I’ll add details to the timeline focusing on the specific place and time where the adventure takes place.

A long time ago

Before starting to create random historical events, I decided that the history of Unaria would be constrained by a few basic principles:

• Technology should roughly follow Earth’s history, i.e., exponential progress over time. This creates a nice natural progression that has a lot of room for old myths and strange artifacts from the days of yore.

• The past should feature a great age of magic and wonder. Taking a page from Colville’s Dead Empires, this age would be the origin of all magic items and huge structures that, at the time of the characters, are now lost and buried underground (see time abyss).

• Magic shouldn’t speed up technological development by that much. Since very few people are able to wield significant magical powers, magic can’t meaningfully change the history of Unaria (with the Age of Magic being the obvious exception).

• There should be a single watershed event that marks year 1 for every culture on Unaria. This is for my own sake, because I like keeping track of time during campaigns and, therefore, multiple calendars could become a bit of a hassle.

Since I’m a big fan of Marx’s historical materialism, my plan is to focus on struggle and conflict: Unaria’s history will be seen through the lens of power. Each age of the world will be defined by the source of social power of that period; the name of each age has to make it clear what represented power for the people living at that time.

Making it mine

Now it is time for an overview of the history of Unaria. Each age has a short summary and a more detailed snippet of what Human civilization specifically was up to at the time. Without further ado, from oldest to newest, the ages are:

• Age of Peace: starts at the creation of the universe. Different sages have wildly different estimates for how long this age lasted, but all agree that in the beginning nature ruled supreme with peace abound.

  • Not much to talk about Humans here.

• Age of Fire: starts with the widespread control of fire by the eight original species. During this age, might makes right and the strongest rule over the weaker.

  • The Undying, precursors to Humans and Halflings, still reproduced like rabbits, lived long lives, and had their little talented minds. Unlike in the real world, however, other species offered a lot of resistance to their territorial expansion, which actually slowed them down quite a bit when compared to Humans here on Earth.

• Age of Words: starts with the first divine miracles, defining an era where religion takes precedence over war and the different peoples are able to develop complex cultural rituals guided by their spiritual leaders.

  • With the development of religions, the Undying find a whole new way get to justify their spread around the world. Already at that time, other species found the Undying too obsessed and ardent, too ready to sacrifice their lives for something they believed was bigger than themselves.

• Age of Spears: starts with the first conflicts between clans over land and food, when local chieftains gain control over large territories through hard fought wars. Arcane magic is first controlled here.

  • Once most of Unaria was populated, the different sapient species start waging war against one another and, almost simultaneously, Humans begin diverging from Halflings. The first become proud fighters and expand their territories far and wide, while the latter start avoiding conflicts and flee to nature.

• Age of Laws: starts with the development of cities, agriculture and society. Large gatherings of people need laws to guide them and making the rules becomes the main way someone maintains power.

  • By this time, Humans are already the dominant species of Unaria. Despite having become distinctly non-magical, their domains stretch all over the main continent and their numbers skyrocket; cities and laws become a defining feature of their civilization. Eventually, every other species will end up adopting a similar model for their own societies.

• Age of Magic (~4,500 years ago): starts at the dawn of the first Human empire. The advancements in arcane magic and the development of writing allow unparalleled growth and the creation of wonderful new technologies.

  • Once arcane magic is dominated by Humans, the development of continent-spanning empires becomes inevitable. The peace that flourishes at the centers of these empires promotes unparalleled magical advancements, an age where magical weapons are forged and gigantic temples are built. Human civilization achieves heights never before thought possible.

• Age of Blood (~500 years ago): starts at the Branching, the moment when arcane magic became significantly weaker. Empires crumble and societies devolve into temporary anarchy before finally congealing into feudalism, where birth and blood ties determine worth and class.

  • The Branching is the event that changes everything. This is the moment when the Material Plane shattered into three, giving birth to the Feywild and the Shadowfell¹; from one day to the next, magic became weaker and these two weird copies of the Material Plane appeared by its side (complete with imperfect versions of everything in it). Human civilization was never able to recover and, for the past few centuries, it has been but a shadow of its former self.

It’s important to note that a person living in Unaria would never think of the world this way, mainly because most people don’t know a lot about the past. This division into ages is exclusively used by sages who spend their lives studying the history of Unaria.

As you might have noticed, the main theme of Unaria’s history is that the world is getting less magical: it started with incredibly powerful and magical ancestral species and ended with low-magic feudalism. Next time, I’ll talk about magic and try to explain exactly what is behind this phenomenon.

On the origin of species

Let’s start with the basic premises just like last time. First, I want the species to be created by the gods, but I also want room for natural evolution. Second, I want each species to have a different culture, but it shouldn’t be biologically deterministic.

So what do I mean by premise number 1? Mainly I want it to be plausible for a character not to believe in the gods. I see this everywhere in actual plays and in my own campaigns: a player creates a character that doesn’t really care about the gods. This tends to present a problem in settings where the gods are present and active, because no one in their right mind would ignore all-powerful beings that can smite you whenever they want.

We can get out of this dilemma with something called Intelligent Design, a real life philosophy that claims that some things are better explained by an “intelligent cause” (God) than by processes like natural selection.

In Unaria, this would be the actual way things happened, i.e., the eight gods directed evolution as to create intelligent life. People might question whether the gods really exist or whether it all happened by chance, and even whether clerics truly channel the divine or whether they are just wizards who want to make a few bucks by pretending to be holy people.

And what about premise number 2? By and large, I want different species to have arisen far away from each other and, therefore, to have cultures that reflect the gods that created them. The tough part is that I also want to avoid making generalizations like “all X are…”, so these cultures cannot be deterministic and one-dimensional.

What I can do here is have ancestral species that did have cultures very much defined by their progenitor god. These ancestors, however, changed and evolved over a long time, originating the “modern” species we all know and love, with three-dimensional cultures which only faintly resembles those of their progenitors.

In the end, a group’s culture will depend on many factors that are outside of their control. Most orcs that dwell in the west might be organized into violent tribes that pester the villages of the coast, but this is only because they were displaced from their home by foreign invaders who razed their fields and made them fight for survival elsewhere. People are complex and we should imagine them so.

Making it mine

As we established, the gods created / make up the world of Unaria and they influence it in the subtlest of ways. Over time, they guided natural evolution and natural selection in order to create sapient beings, creatures who could appreciate creation and make something of it. Their goals are inscrutable, but it is clear that mortals can influence reality in a much quicker and more direct manner than the gods.

Each god was directly responsible for creating one sapient species and, indirectly, their descendants. Even though this is the case, mortals don’t feel any special connection to the god who birthed their kind; beyond a certain age, a parent cannot expect to control their child’s every step.

In Unaria, these are the gods that created each species and how that affected their culture¹:

• The Gifted: created the Golems, a talented people that strove to innovate while not forgetting their past. They are the ancestors of dwarves, gnomes, etc.

• The Willed: created the Feral, a fierce people who only fought when their peace was disrupted. They are the ancestors of orcs, goblins, etc.

• The Pure: created the Celestials, a heavenly people whose silence meant as much as their truthful words. They are the ancestors of aasimars, ardlings, etc.

• The Just: created the Dragons, an admirable people with an avid desire to do what they thought was right. They are the ancestors of dragonborn, kobolds, etc.

• The Thriving: created the Fey, a playful people whose long lives made them innately connected to nature. They are the ancestors of elves, fairies, etc.

• The Fervent: created the Fiends, an intense people who were equally devoted to both others and themselves. They are the ancestors of tieflings, proteans, etc.

• The Great: created the Giants, a virtuous people whose lives were dedicated above all to honor and glory. They are the ancestors of goliaths, genasi, etc.

• The Tireless: created the Undying, a curious people that explored the world in the search of answers. They are the ancestors of humans, halflings, etc.

As you can probably tell, the ancestor species are basically creature types from D&D 5e. The only changes are Golems, Feral, and Undying.

Golems replace Constructs because these creatures weren’t literally constructed and because the term elicits life from stone, which is fitting for dwarves and gnomes. Feral replaces Beasts because, again, they aren’t literally animals (but I wanted to keep the reference to classic pig-faced orcs from 1e). Last but not least, the Undying are my version of a mythical ancestor for Humans, which had long lives and minor psionic powers (courtesy of their great minds); these people weren’t literally immortal, but they founded civilizations, crossed oceans, and moved mountains in their heyday.

Speaking of “heyday”, I should probably start thinking more concretely about Unaria’s past and present. See you next time, when it’s time for history.

Today I will think about how these gods created my setting’s main planet, what does that planet look like, and set the stage for the next chapters of my worldbuilding journey.

Building a world

Let’s quickly go back to the my latest addition to the creation myth:

The weavers are eight and, intertwining themselves with the threads, they make the mortal realm. They craft heaven, earth, and everything in between. They are part of creation and creation is a part of them.

In my mind, the gods are the world. This thought isn’t original at all and, in fact, is very reminiscent of Spinoza’s Deus sive Natura (“God is Nature”). In practice, this means that the gods can express their will through natural phenomena and the work of their disciples, but they can’t descend from the heavens and tear a mountain apart.

The basic assumption is that the planet will be fairly Earth-like. No floating islands, no continents with evocative shapes, no magical weather, etc. However, I’m not going for 100% scientific accuracy here! I want the planet to look completely mundane at first glance, but leave you wandering if there is something more to it than meets the eye.

With this prompt in mind, I started playing with online planet generators to see if I could find something that fit the bill. I like this kind of program because they usually create believable coastlines and heightmaps without being too constrained by real world geology. I also can’t draw to save my live, so they’re better than anything I could have done from scratch.

My favorite procedural generators are Donjon’s Fantasy World Generator, Torben’s Planet Map Generator, GM World Map, and Azgaar’s Fantasy Map Generator. They all have their own pros and cons, but the most feature-rich is probably Azgaar’s, so I recommend starting there.

In the end, however, it was a map from Torben’s that caught my attention. The geography was pretty plausible, but what really got me was the shape of the main continent: it formed a rough ring with a massive sea right in the middle. Immediately, I felt like this played very nicely with the concept of the Prime that I talked about in Worldbuilding pt. 01; a fully connected world, with a “positive” side (the peaceful interior sea) and a “negative” side (the untamed outer sea).

Making it mine

After generating the main map, it was time to tweak it until I was completely satisfied. At some point I’ll make a full tutorial about my process, but the gist of it was:

1. Generate the planet and heightmap in Torben’s Planet Map Generator. I spent way too much time on this step. Don’t be like me, seriously.

2. Adjust the color scheme in Affinity Photo or any other image editing software. This is also a good point to fiddle with the heightmap if necessary.

3. Use G.Projector to create as many projections as desired. In my case I also used this software to change where the poles of the planet were, because I wanted the interior sea to be at the north pole.

4. Input the heightmap into Azgaar’s Fantasy Map Generator to get a human-friendly topographic map.

5. Ignore AFMG’s biomes and input that same heightmap into Climate Simulator to get a more accurate biome map.

You can see the final results below. The first image is a Winkel tripel projection with the full world on display, while the second one only shows the north pole with the interior sea. I’m still a bit unsure about the colors, but, since I’m colorblind, this will have to do for now.

These maps might still change a bit, specially once my players start asking questions about it, however I’m pretty confident that it’ll mostly stay as it is. All that’s left to do now is give it a name!

I want my planet’s name to work in both Portuguese (my native tongue) and English, be simple, and mean something. The best one I could come up with was Unaria, where un comes from one or unary, and aria comes from -arium (just like it does in Terraria). I also think this won’t change, but who knows… We still have a lot to do.

And that’s it for today’s chapter. Join me next time, when I’ll start thinking about species.

TTRPGs, however, usually have divine persons and I don’t want to tell my players that their characters have to worship the equivalent of gravity or electromagnetism. This is why today I will create an actual pantheon!

Gods of the universe

As I’ve said before, I don’t want gods like the ones we usually see in TTRPG settings. Most pantheons are made up of gods that have humanoid depictions, well-defined spheres of influence, and bicker amongst themselves like schoolchildren. I’ve come to find this paradigm pretty boring.

My biggest problem with this kind of pantheon is that it begs the question: what is stopping the gods from doing whatever they want with the mortal world? For example, the Forgotten Realms has a Divine Edict that forced the gods to leave the world to mortals, Exandria has a Divine Gate that prevents the gods from crossing into the Material Plane, etc. If you have to stop all-powerful beings from being all-powerful, then what is the point?

On the other hand, I can’t create a pantheon which deviates too much from the default assumptions because players bring some expectations to the table and they’ll get upset if you subvert all of them. My solution is a compromise:

• Gods are still gods: they are divine entities that can grant powers to their worshipers. But gods aren’t all-powerful: the only manifestations of their powers are through their followers and through nature itself (see Worldbuilding pt. 03).

• Gods have intention: they think, have opinions about mortals’ actions, and want to steer History in their own ways. But gods aren’t people: they don’t have human emotions, don’t interact with each other, and don’t have worldly forms (no gender, no species, nothing).

• Gods have domains: they have portfolios and their impacts are usually only felt on a few aspects of creation. But gods have multiple facets: their spheres of influence aren’t well-defined and include contradictory concepts.

If my gods indeed are to follow the criteria outlined above, then it will be very hard for mortals to truly comprehend them. This presents a cool opportunity: what if gods’ names and domains are based on mortals’ attempt at describing the feelings they evoke, the phenomena they influence, and the people they shepherd?

A god venerated by wizards, for example, will also necessarily be associated with the muggles it attracts; it will be a god whose followers always regard themselves as novices in search of more and more knowledge. The “opposite and complementary” aspects of the Prime are baked in to this system!

All I have to do now is find some inspiration. This time I’m going with Buddhism, specifically the Eightfold Path, a series of eight practices which are supposed to help one reach nirvana. I like this as an inspiration because of the qualities associated with each practice:

• Right View: knowing that our actions have consequences, even after death.

• Right Intention: peaceful renunciation, into an environment of non-ill-will.

• Right Speech: no lying, no rude speech.

• Right Action: no killing or injuring, no taking what is not given, no material desires.

• Right Livelihood: no trading in weapons, living beings, meat, liquor, and poisons.

• Right Effort: preventing the arising of unwholesome states.

• Right Mindfulness: a quality that guards or watches over the mind.

• Right Concentration: concentration or one-pointedness of the mind.

Making it mine

Now it’s time to adapt the Eightfold Path and actually create the gods of my setting. In my opinion, having contradictory attributes tied to each god is a feature, not a bug; this adds to their mystery, to the fact that these are just mortals’ interpretation of unfathomable beings. In this system we won’t need a god just for the sea, because every god might have some aspect which relates to the sea.

After a few hours staring at the wall and thinking about Buddhist practices, I think I reached something satisfactory. It’s not a perfect parallel of the Eightfold Path, but you might see some intersections. Each god is named after a quality¹ of their followers and each domain is composed of multiple abstract and complimentary concepts:

• The Gifted: creation and destruction, creativity and banality, sight and blindness.

• The Willed: harmony and discord, intention and indifference, peace and war.

• The Pure: truth and lies, speech and silence, honesty and hypocrisy.

• The Just: justice and tyranny, action and hesitation, protection and neglect.

• The Thriving: life and death, nature and sickness, growth and decline.

• The Fervent: love and greed, dedication and dependence, chastity and lust.

• The Great: virtue and weakness, awareness and disregard, motivation and sloth.

• The Tireless: magic and mundanity, knowledge and ignorance, focus and apathy.

The last step is to add the gods to the creation myth. I want to give the impression that the four threads can’t create matter by themselves and this is what gods are for. This is what I came up with:

Even before time itself, there was the Infinite. The Infinite gives birth to the first of all things, named the Prime. The Prime has Light and Dark aspects, which are simultaneously opposite and complementary. Light and Dark together create the threads from which all other things are woven: Freedom, Autonomy, Order, and Unity.

The weavers are eight and, intertwining themselves with the threads, they make the mortal realm. They craft heaven, earth, and everything in between. They are part of creation and creation is a part of them.

See you next time, when I’m going to create a planet!

Nowadays, if a DM doesn’t deliberately bring attention to alignment, then most people won’t even think about it. I’ve seen a few discussions online about whether Chaotic paladins make sense, but this is probably the full extent of alignment’s impact in contemporary D&D games.

But why is this the case? Alignment is supposed to help new players think about their characters and DMs figure out the best way to create drama; how can we make it do that? Before we come up with answers, let’s first talk about the problems with alignment.

Problems

In my opinion, there are two main issues with the alignment system: lots of players see it as prescriptive instead of descriptive and some alignments “sound bad”.

Saying people consider alignment prescriptive means that they think the alignment chosen at the beginning of character creation should guide their actions during the game. This is a significant problem because the system becomes stifling. Matt Mercer hits the nail on the head in this tweet from 2018:

[…] Alignment shouldn’t inform a character’s actions, actions should inform alignment. Or…just ignore it entirely! — Matt Mercer

A friend of mine’s first character was a paladin and, following the PHB’s “charity and justice” suggestion, they made him Lawful Good… And were miserable for it! My friend just wanted to play D&D and smite some malevolent goblins, not role play Mother Teresa every week. Ideally, they should have chosen an alignment that described their nascent character.

The second problem has to do with Evil. You can spend your whole life debating this concept (as philosophers have done since forever), but the fact is that people don’t want to be called evil even if their actions fit the description¹. As Matt Colville put it in a 2016 video:

People want to do things like randomly murder people, but not be perceived as evil. — Matt Colville.

Colville goes on to say that many players use Chaotic as an excuse to create characters that don’t care about the consequences of their actions; in other words, they don’t want to say that their characters are Evil because the word just sounds really bad. This is actually supported by data: according to D&D Beyond, in 2019 almost 50% of characters created on the website were either Chaotic Good or Chaotic Neutral.

This is also an issue because we want alignment to be actually descriptive, not something the player writes for their character’s Tinder profile. As a DM, I want to know the PCs’ alignment in order to know how to better create drama and, if everyone describes their characters as Chaotic Good/Neutral, then I don’t have anything to go off of.

Answers

The first step in making alignment relevant is to clarify (especially for new players) that it is descriptive and not prescriptive. I suggest going as far as presenting it to players in the form of nouns, something their characters believe in instead of something they are. For example, Lawful Good would become Law & Good.

The second step is to change the words themselves to something that players are not afraid to assign to a character. Paraphrasing Colville, Evil is better interpreted as “every man for himself” and Chaos as “people are best when left to their own devices”. Why not instead choose words that better convey these meanings?

My suggestion is Order vs. Freedom and Unity vs. Autonomy. For starters, all of these words have positive connotations² and, therefore, we can expect players not to reject any alignment based purely on how good it sounds. Additionally, we have room in each axis for morally good and bad people; this means that it is a flexible system that is more likely to reflect characters' actual personal philosophies. If all your characters are Freedom & Autonomy (formerly CE), you can have a Order & Unity (formerly LG) villain that still makes sense.

To finish off, here is my version of the alignment guide found in the PHB; note that, instead of Neutral, I simply omit the axis in which the character is unaligned. Here are my nine alignments and a fictional quote for each:

• Order & Unity (formerly LG): “We must protect our people and our land. We are the only ones standing between civilization and chaos.”

• Unity (formerly NG): “We’re all in this together. I don’t care about what happens next as long as that remains true.”

• Freedom & Unity (formerly CG): “Death to the king! Long live the people!”

• Order (formerly LN): “You can be with me or against me, I’ll uphold my oath regardless.”

• Neutral (formerly N): “The world is already too complicated, I don’t like taking sides.”

• Freedom (formerly CN): “As long as I don’t have serve to anyone, I’ll be fine.”

• Order & Autonomy (formerly LE): “The first rule is: never steal from another thief. Second rule is: never talk to me again.”

• Autonomy (formerly NE): “I’ll do whatever it takes to save him. Please do not get in my way.”

• Freedom & Autonomy (formerly CE): “I know our interests align only temporarily, but I’m glad it’s to chop the head of the king off.”

If you liked this system and think it can really solve the problems outlined in the past section, I suggest reading my post called Worldbuilding pt. 01: cosmology, where I create a whole universe based on these four concepts. See you next time!

P.S.: I’m sure more people have already thought of this specific alternative to alignment (like Matt Colville), but I’ve never seen it written down in this way. If I ever find any other articles that predate mine, I’ll make sure to link them here.

I won’t get into specifics, but my default setting started suffering from the fact that I was a beginner DM when I made it; too many inconsistencies, no room for new player options, cyclic history, yada yada yada.

Now that I have GMed a few successful campaigns, I feel like my world is due for a reboot. The plan is to document the whole process here on my blog, so you’ll be able to follow along and maybe create your own world too! This will be the perfect opportunity to exercise both my worldbuilding and my writing muscles.

So where do we start? Many people like the bottom-up approach, i.e., starting from specific details (like characters or places) and going up from there. My method of choice for this series, however, will be top-down: we’ll start from the literal birth of the universe and zoom in later.

Birth of the universe

I’m a bit tired of fiction with “conventional” creation myths and pantheons. In my humble opinion, too many settings have gods with humanoid depictions, defined genders, fixed alignments, and clear portfolios. You just have to take a look at the 5e PHB for a bunch of pantheons where this is the case.

For this reason I’m taking the inspiration for my creation myth from Taoism, a Chinese system of thought which encompasses philosophy, tradition, and religion. I like Taoist cosmology as a basis for my setting because it doesn’t involve personified deities with human-like emotions. Straight from Wikipedia:

The Limitless (Wuji) produces the delimited, and this is the Absolute (Taiji). The Taiji produces two forms, named Yin and Yang. The two forms produce four phenomena, named lesser yang, great yang […], lesser yin, great yin […].

Note that none of the concepts mentioned above are gods! At least from the descriptions I’ve read, there is no intention or conscience here; all of this just is. Exactly what I was going for.

Even from this short explanation, I bet you can already see things from D&D that could fit into this template. The Positive and Negative Planes, Law, Chaos, Good, and Evil… My first instinct is to do something like this:

The Limitless produces the delimited, and this is the Absolute. The Absolute produces two forms, named Negative and Positive. The two forms produce four phenomena, named Law, Good, Chaos, and Evil.

This is already pretty interesting, but now I think the Limitless and the Absolute feel a bit out of place. As someone with an exact sciences background, I like the idea of the Infinite producing the finite. Meanwhile, the Absolute could become the Prime; it has a lot of gravitas and also evokes both Prime Material Plane and Prime Mover (from Greek philosophy). With a few edits, the creation myth looks like this:

The Infinite produces the finite, and this is the Prime. The Prime produces two forms, named Negative and Positive. The two forms produce four phenomena, named Law, Good, Chaos, and Evil.

The only thing I’m still not satisfied with is the bad connotation that Negative, Evil, and Chaos have. Even though Yin is usually associated with darkness and cold, this is by no means meant pejoratively. According to Taoism, “everything has both yin and yang aspects (for instance, shadow cannot exist without light)”.

To solve this issue, I’ll instead use my own alternative to the classic D&D alignment axes: Order vs. Freedom and Unity vs. Autonomy. In place of Negative and Positive forms, something like Dark and Light aspects is enough to tone down the bad vibes. This is what the myth looks like now:

The Infinite produces the finite, and this is the Prime. The Prime produces two forms, named Dark and Light. The two forms produce four phenomena, named Order, Unity, Freedom, and Autonomy.

Making it mine

To finish off, I think it’s important to make the cosmology truly mine. This is important because, so far, the creation myth is just Taoism with the serial numbers filed off. I don’t want to give my players (or the readers) the impression that my cosmology is a parody of Taoism even though it is heavily inspired by it.

Therefore I want to rewrite the myth with my own words, in own style. For instance, I’d like people to feel as if this has happened outside the domains of time and space, as if the four phenomena are intertwined with the fabric of reality.

This is what I came up with:

Even before time itself, there was the Infinite. The Infinite gives birth to the first of all things, named the Prime. The Prime has Light and Dark aspects, which are simultaneously opposite and complementary. Light and Dark together create the threads from which all other things are woven: Freedom, Autonomy, Order, and Unity.

See you next time, when I’m going to create a pantheon!

5E’s Wild Shape

I have never played a Druid, but some players in my group have. From the DM’s perspective, Wild Shape is full of flavor; it’s straight up awesome to describe the Druid becoming a freaking bear starting to eviscerate the goblins.

The only problem is that, at least in my table, it didn’t come up very often. Sadly, it’s much more “optimal” for the Druid to focus on casting spells during combat instead of transforming into a cool animal (specially if they aren’t of the Circle of the Moon).

In the middle of a fight, my players only found it advantageous to use Wild Shape if they were getting low on Hit Points, effectively using the HP of their beast forms as Temp HP. In my opinion, it felt like a tradeoff: you become less effective, but now you can get into melee and (try to) rip the opponents apart.

To illustrate my point, take Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves’s own trailer. The Druid transforms from a horse into an owlbear (more on that later) and proceeds to completely annihilate a group of guards. If that’s not awesome, I don’t know what is.

One D&D’s Wild Shape

Now let’s talk about One D&D’s Druid, as presented to us in the fourth playtest packet. First things first: now you can transform into an owlbear. Well, kinda…

As you assume a form, you determine its appearance, selecting an example animal from the form’s description, selecting another appropriate animal, or choosing a hybrid form that incorporates visual characteristics from two or more animals. The appearance you choose has no effect on the form’s capabilities.

So you can transform into a owl-bear hybrid, but that’s enough for me. The weird part is that last sentence about your choice not affecting “the forms capabilities”.

The biggest difference between this Druid and 5E’s version comes from the fact that now you don’t choose a creature from the bestiary to transform into! Rather, you get to choose your appearance, but always refer to the same three stat blocks (Animal of the Land, Animal of the Sea, or Animal of the Sky).

In general, I think I like this change. Too often have I waited for my player to choose the exact beast they wanted, so I’m all for streamlining the options. You want to become a Small elephant? Sure. A Large bat? Of course. A Medium giraffe-turtle hybrid? You got it.

However, there is some fine print: the HP of all three stat blocks is “you continue to use your Hit Points and Hit Dice”. That means a Druid no longer gets the HP boost that used to come with 5E’s Wild Shape.

The table below shows the stats of 5E’s beasts grouped by Wild Shape CR¹. As you can see, from level 8 onwards a Druid could conceivably “gain” 52 Hit Points per Wild Shape use (and that’s not even taking the Circle of the Moon into account).

My best guess is that the D&D’s designers don’t want Druids to use Wild Shape during combat. Since players weren’t truly using their beast forms offensively, the game might as well not imply that it is a possibility.

But I think something was lost… I enjoy the idea of a Druid charging into battle as an owlbear and the producers of the D&D movie clearly agree with me.

On The Tome Show’s Discord, @Scipio202 suggested awarding some Temp HP as part of Wild Shape. This is an elegant solution and, according to the table above, a boost of 4 x Druid level would be on par with the average Hit Points they would be gaining in 5E.

What do you think? Please send me an email with your thoughts!

• It’s hard to award magic items that are useful and at the same time feel special for the characters. In my experience, the DM will often either hand out generic magic items or super cool ones which no character can use.

• One solution is to allow characters to buy upgrades for their mundane items. This has a couple of potential drawbacks: players might create broken combos if the upgrades aren’t limited in scope and this can become very costly if the characters regularly swap gear.

• Another solution is to let items have dormant features which awaken once some condition is met. Again this introduces a few problems: the players are back to having no say in what magical properties their items have and it’s impossible for characters to transfer features from one item to another.

In this post I’ll put forward my solution for those issues.

How Gems work

GEM is a backronym derived from the main feature of this magic item system: Gems. Gems are magical items onto themselves and they can grant one or more extraordinary properties when affixed to a piece of gear, but it is impossible to affix more than one Gem to a single item.

Much like regular magic gear, Gems can’t be bought or sold. Additionally, the technology for creating a (capital G) Gem from a (lowercase G) gem has been lost to time, which means that they must be found though adventure, battle and heroism.

Overview

Gems work a little bit like The Armorer’s Handbook’s Runestones, with the important distinction that Gems do not have a set effect and can be removed from any piece of gear without much work.

Calvin finds an ancient sword in a dungeon. It is engraved with a Round Emerald, which grants the sword a +1 bonus to damage rolls. Since Calvin doesn’t use weapons, he removes the Gem from the sword.

A cut Gem always has one (and only one) shape ¹: Round, Oval, Pear, Marquise, Cushion, Square, or Rectangle. The shape determines the mundane benefit that the Gem grants and the type of gear to which it can be affixed.

Calvin asks his jeweler to recut the Round Emerald into a Marquise Emerald, which can be affixed to his spellcasting focus to grant a +1 bonus to spell attack rolls.

Stronger Gems might have, in addition to a shape, one or more styles: Brilliant and/or Step. The shape narrows down exactly what magical benefit each style will grant but, either way, this will come in addition to that shape’s mundane benefit.

Calvin now finds a Sapphire. He wants to make it a Cushion Sapphire, which would grant him a +1 bonus to ability checks. Since Sapphires are stronger then Emeralds, they can also have one style; Calvin must, therefore, chose either Brilliant (+1 bonus to AC) or Step (+1 bonus to saving throws).

There are, in principle, 4 types of Gems (Emeralds, Sapphires, Rubies, and Diamonds). Emeralds can only have a shape, Sapphires can have a shape and a single style, and Rubies can have a shape and both styles. Diamonds are only used in a binding ritual that will be explained in the next section.

Calvin decides on the Cushion Brilliant Sapphire. He’s sad to not get the +1 bonus to saving throws, so he starts looking for a Ruby. This Gem could be cut with both styles in order to become a Cushion Mixed Ruby, which would grant a +1 bonus to ability checks, AC, and saving throws!

Below is a summarized table with every benefit that a Gem can grant. Unless otherwise noted by your DM, the following should be observed: any item that is under the effect of a magical benefit is considered magical as well (weapons deal magical damage, etc), items with Marquise or Cushion Gems require attunement, and robes are incompatible with medium or heavy armor.

If you want the full versions of the effects, grab the PDF here!

Binding rituals

Diamonds are powerful Gems that, through a special ritual, can bind the effects of a target Gem to an item. For the ritual to work, the target Gem must already be affixed to the item and, once complete, it transfers all benefits granted by the target Gem to the item itself. Both the target Gem and the Diamond are consumed in the process.

Since anyone can usually remove a Gem from an item without much effort, this ritual is mainly used to prevent a Gem from being stolen. Another advantage is that characters can name an item after it has gone through this ritual; they can have their own Sting or Glamdring, which is pretty cool.

A Diamond might also grant a one-of-a-kind benefit. Unlike regular Gems, this effect is chosen by the DM and cannot be changed by cutting the Diamond. If a Diamond carrying a special benefit is used in a binding ritual, then this benefit is bound to the item alongside those from the target Gem.

After going through a binding ritual, an item ceases to be mundane and becomes truly magical. From this point forward, no other Gems can be affixed to it.

Variant rules

The rules described in this post are only suggestions. You can obviously change the effects of a shape or style, reduce or increase the number of available cuts, etc. Besides these modifications, some variant rules might be of interest:

• After being cut for the first time, you might want to limit the number of recuts that a Gem can endure before losing its efficacy. My estimate is that allowing 3 additional cuts should be enough for most parties.

• Instead of describing the effects of a Gem through the name its cut, you might prefer adding adjectives to the engraved item, e.g., a sword with a Round Emerald might be considered Keen or Sharp.

• It is possible to allow (lowercase G) gems to be transformed into (capital G) Gems. In this scenario, regular gems should be scarce resources, with emeralds and sapphires costing up to 1000 gp, and rubies and diamonds up to 5000 gp.

• You also could allow specialized vendors to trade Gems. As a rule of thumb, a Sapphire should be equivalent to 2 Emeralds and a Ruby to 3 Emeralds. Diamonds are best left as one-of-a-kind Gems that can’t be traded.

• If you don’t like the complexity of having multiple types of Gems, you can probably make do with a single type if you allow up to three Gems per item. In this case, all Gems should have the same shape and each would grant a different benefit from that row of the table.

Do Gems work?

As mentioned at the beginning of this post, I created GEM as a way to solve a few problems I had with magic items in D&D. Does it help the DM award useful items? Does it help reduce the number of “remarkable” items that have to be hand out?

Firstly, GEM allows players to choose their own upgrades, so the DM doesn’t have to think of useful items to award. Secondly, GEM helps items feel special because characters will grow attached to their own items, with Diamonds playing a big role on this process.

And how does GEM comparte to tags and awakening mechanics from the previous post?

Tags could allow players to create broken builds, so GEM mitigates this by forcing them to chose upgrade paths which are easier to balance. Tags could also become prohibitively expensive, and GEM offers a system with very few fees (only the process of recutting Gems might be charged).

The awakening system removed agency from the players, which GEM gives back by allowing them to chose their own upgrades. With awakenings you also couldn’t transfer benefits from one item to another, while GEM allows Gems to be affixed again and again.

Overall I think GEM turned out pretty good. I’ll playtest it in my upcoming campaign and, once it’s done, I’ll make sure to write a follow-up! See you all next time.

So how can we hand out this many magic items and still have them all feel special? How are we supposed to cater to each character’s needs without simply letting the players choose what items the evil necromancer will drop?

Tags

One solution is to allow characters to upgrade their own mundane items, effectively creating pseudo-magic items. If the math works out just right, the DM won’t have to award as many magic items because the characters will be doing that by themselves, which makes each item feel much more personal and meaningful.

The Armorer’s Handbook (AHB) is a perfect example of one such attempt: the book describes a system of upgrades represented by tags which can be added to gear by regular blacksmiths. For example, a character can pay 100 gp to make their sword Keen, adding a +1 bonus to its damage rolls.

Even though this mechanic is pretty amazing, I find that it creates a few problems:

1. How do you stop players from creating broken builds? If, like in AHB, a character can pay 100 gp to double their chance of landing a crit, Rogues and Paladins will become much more effective earlier in the game. This has the unfortunate potential to throw game balance completely out of whack.

2. How do you charge for upgrades? When a character outgrows their starting gear, they might have to buy the same upgrades all over again, which can get expensive. In AHB’s case, this incentivizes players to hoard money until they can buy the best base gear possible.

Awakening

Another solution is to allow magic items to display new properties over time. Since each item has multiple properties, this effectively removes the need for multiple magic items with one effect each; it also allows the DM to give more screen time to each piece of magical gear the characters acquire.

Both the Explorer’s Guide To Wildemount and The Lord of the Rings Roleplaying (LOTRRP) showcase this kind of system: magic items have dormant features, which only awaken once a specific condition is met. In the latter, for example, a weapon might reveal the Luminescence quality once a character reaches level 5.

This system, however, is also not without its flaws:

1. How do you give agency back to the players? In LOTRRP some rewards are chosen by the characters at certain levels, but, sadly, only a select few features can be made available in order not to break the game’s balance.

2. How do you transfer upgrades from one item to another? If you want to allow a piece of gear to transfer its dormant features to another, there must be a solid way in-universe for this happen. In the case of LOTRRP, this is simply not possible.

The best of both worlds

To me, the ideal solution lies somewhere between these two approaches. I love the idea of allowing characters to go nuts and choose the features that their items acquire, but I’m also a fan of limiting these choices such that broken combos aren’t so easy to make.

It’s also very important to me that players are able to transfer the upgrades from one item to another. This flexibility is important because it allows the gear to grow with the characters and it makes for a better return on investment.

My take on the perfect system is called GEM: Gear Enhancement Method

This is my first post, so I’ll be quick. Here’s a few things you should know about me and this blog:

• I’m a relatively new DM (~2 years), but I’m addicted to writing. Instead of throwing everything on social media, I’ll use this as a hub for all my long-form content.

• I’m mostly a 5E person, but I’ll try my best not to be too D&D-centric. I even created my own system as part of PocketQuest 2022!

• This website is made of stone: the only JavaScript it contains is a privacy-first analytics service called tinylytics, but I’m not tracking or fingerprinting anyone.

If you want to reach out, the Email Me button above will always create an email replying directly to the article you’re reading. You might also want to follow me on Mastodon, GitHub, or via RSS.