TDS 022: Draw Steel Is Going to the Sun
This episode was originally published on YouTube and Spotify. This page only contains the transcript.
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!