TDS 019: Draw Steel Is Out (for Patrons)

TDS 019: Draw Steel Is Out (for Patrons)

· Caio · #podcast  #mcdm  #ttrpg  #draw-steel 

This episode was originally published on YouTube and Spotify. This page only contains the transcript.

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.

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:

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!