TDS 021: Draw Steel & Daggerheart

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

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!