Draw Steel...is out!!

Here we go folks. After years of work and thousands of hours of testing and polish and dozens of people; writers, designers, illustrators, testers, editors, graphic designers working their butts off…Draw Steel is real! We cannot wait to see everything you do with this game. The characters, villains, adventures, worlds you will create. 

Hey everybody, Matt Colville at your service. The core rules…are done! Any problems we find from here on out? That’s what errata is for! :D Possibly second printings or revised editions in the distant future? If all goes well. In the meantime, the game is yours. If you’ve been a patron for the last five months (since February, I think?) check your email! It may take a few hours for thousands of emails to work their way acoss the internet.

ALSO! Thanks to an enormous amount of work by a bunch of people but first among them James, two OTHER products are also done!

The Road to Broadhurst written by Carlos Cisco is available for free on our site now. Internally, we called this “the Conventure.” It’s designed for experienced Directors who already know the rules, and want to run Draw Steel for new players at their local convention or game store. It doesn’t explain how to play, that’s what the director is for!

Because RPG events at a convention can last anywhere from 45 minutes to 4 hours, The Road to Broadhurst has advice on how to skip sections you don’t have time for without affecting the flow of play.

And the new, official version of The Delian Tomb is out! Holy crap! The original adventure I designed on YouTube 9 years ago (!) has been wrapped up inside a whole starter adventure (or rather, a “Start Here” adventure) written by James that actually teaches you the rules AS you play. You don’t need to know anything, either as a player or a director, we walk you though the first few encounters, step-by-step and pretty soon you’re just playing normally because you’ve got all the basics figured out.

This is huge for us. Draw Steel is certainly the biggest thing MCDM has ever done and probably the thing I, personally, am the proudest of in 30 years (!) of being a game developer. There’s no real way, in text, to capture the enormity of feeling associated with this, but let’s give it a shot. 😀

You folks are our patrons, so I think you all already know this, but we didn’t all just work on Draw Steel, we all believed in it. A lot. We didn’t just make a game, we made the game we wanted to make. There was no publisher above us telling us to do it faster or cheaper or make the art more “appealing.” This game represents our vision. And it is our vision, it’s not “my” game. The process of making Draw Steel was hugely collaborative, and I think it shows.

MCDM made its bones working in the 5E DLC mines and after years of this and several successful products…we just thought a better game was possible. We thought players deserved a game that was fun, Directors deserved a game that respected their time and the burden all GM’s shoulder, and just worked. 

Draw Steel is that game. MCDM will go on to make other games! Including even other RPGs! But Draw Steel is our flagship game. As you all know, we have TONS of content already in development, and tons more planned. If we’re lucky, we’ll still be making cool new Draw Steel products years from now. 

As you get older, you look back on experiences you had years ago and you think “I wish I had appreciated that while it was happening.” Well I’m here to tell you folks; I loved working on Draw Steel. I loved working with everyone here, I loved all the meetings and iteration and watching folks test the game and report back, watching the art develop, seeing folks’ responses to it. When I was going to bed, when I woke up in the morning, I thought “I’m so lucky I get to work on this.” 

On behalf of everyone at MCDM and all our creative and production partners…thank you for your support. Thank you for believing. When you see the finished books, I think you’ll be able to see where all the work went.

The PDFs and You

I realize we’ve never clearly explained our policy regarding Patrons getting the finished digital versions of Draw Steel products. So let’s talk about that!

I should say up front; we view the patreon as a platform which gives us the chance to try different things. Right now the patreon is $8 a month with some older legacy tiers, and this post is going to talk about what that $8 gets you, but it didn’t always work that way! And we may add tiers in the future or try other stuff! We have no plans to do that right now, I just think it’s important to say; we might try new stuff in the future.

But right now and for the foreseeable future, the patreon is $8 a month. Let’s talk about what that gets you.

The Digital Goods

Our current policy is: any Draw Steel PDF product? Long-standing patrons will get free based on how long they’ve been a patron. You figure this out by dividing the cost of the PDF by 8. You’re paying $8 a month, so if the finished PDF is $40, that means you will get it automatically if you’ve been a patron for the last 5 months (40/8=5).

If you left the patreon a while ago, and just rejoined today, you will not automatically get the Draw Steel Core Rules. It has to be consecutive months before the release date.

This is just for Draw Steel and only PDFs. If we make…a board game or a card game? Or something for Draw Steel that isn’t a PDF? Then you gotta buy it in the store.

As a result, if you’ve been a patron for the last 5 months, you will be getting an email soon explaining how to download the core rules.  If you’ve been a patron for the last 2 months, you get The Delian Tomb! 

Dev Diaries?

I’m not sure there’s going to be a whole host of Dev Diaries in the future? You’ve probably noticed this but when the core rules were being invented? Tons of updates! Once we knew how the game worked and everything settled down? Not so many updates.

I think that’s normal, there’s just not that much to talk about. The game is done, the rules are done, now we just make more stuff for it. There are no new special lessons to be learned, no breakthroughs. There may be more dev diaries! But they’ll happen whenever we have a thorny design problem we cracked in a satisfying way.

We’ll keep doing the monthly Q&As! I think those are a pretty good way to keep the lines of communication open and they’re fun!

Testing

You folks will always be part of the testing process. Everything we make for Draw Steel, if there’s gameplay or lore associated with it, you’ll get a chance to take it for a test drive.

But the reality is, now that the game is finished, most folks seem content to wait for the finished versions. Back when the only version of Draw Steel was a highly speculative prototype, we got LOTS of responses to every survey. Now that people can just play the game? We get way fewer responses to testing surveys.

But not none! It’s still valuable, but we may start doing open betas? We may lean more on our internal testers. But you folks don’t have to worry about it. I think there will always be at least one Playtest Packet for every Draw Steel product.

Future Products

This is as good a place and time as any to update you folks on everything currently in production for Draw Steel. Ah, there’s a lot!

The Summoner

I think we’re almost done with testing for the Summoner?? I’m not sure how close to release it is, there may yet be art and tons of other stuff to do, but you folks already have the playtest version! 

The Summoner is a unique challenge, as far as I know, no other TTRPG has delivered on that Necromancer Fantasy where a single first-level character controls a HORDE of skeletons or demons or whatever.

But as soon as we had minions, I thought “This is how you do a necromancer.” Thanks to an enormous amount of work and real design insight from Willy, that fantasy is now real! Right out of the gate, first thing that happens, boom you get a bunch of minions. Next round? Wow! Another bunch of minions show up! And they are yours to command!

Lots of games let you summon One Skeleton or One Ghoul or whatever, but that’s not a horde, that’s a pal.

Speaking of pals….

The Beastheart

The Beastheart is also in the pike, well into development. You folks should get a playtest version “soon.”

You all know what the Beastheart is, it’s our pet class originally created for 5E. It’s been super popular and we think the Draw Steel version will be even more fun!

Six New Ancestries

We originally thought this might be its own product? 36-42 pages long? But more and more we’re thinking we might bundle these ancestries AND the Summoner and the Beastheart into one product for print purposes. Maybe you’ll be able to buy them as three different digital products on our site? We’re still thinking about that. We’ll let you know when we know more.

But we are well into development, including tons of dope ART much of which you’ve already seen, on six new ancestries for your Draw Steel Game.

Gnomes, Shadow Elves, Goblins, Radenwights, Faeries and…a sixth ancestry not based on anything that already exists and which we shall not reveal right now. 

These are going to be beefier writeups than what you got in the Heroes book. As you probably know, you could make an entire 256-page hardcover book on JUST dwarves or JUST orcs. But for the heroes book we felt like a single two-page spread was about right.

But then there’s also the gods and saints in the back of the Heroes book? We intend to include those for every ancestry along with stuff like unique titles and treasures. We’re probably talking about six pages for every ancestry in this book. We may yet see an entire hardcover just on one ancestry! But that would require Draw Steel to become enormously popular.

We’re also working on three NEW adventures! 

The Dark Heart of the Wood

This is a short, bite-sized adventure for 2nd-level heroes. Maybe 6 victories total? A third of a level? Internally we call these Quests. We don’t like the idea that the minimum adventure size is a whole level. No way. You should be able to finish an adventure, beginning-middle-end in just a handful of encounters.

Like, three combat encounters, one of which is hard so that’s 4 victories, plus a negotiation and a montage? That’s six victories! That way the story of a single level can be a whole variety of unrelated adventures and that seems healthy.

The Dark Heart of the Wood is about a town plagued by a thorn dragon who nests in the local forest. You know what you do? You go in there and fight it! You’re heroes! 

It’s our job to wrap that in some drama, some fun NPCs to meet, some tension. But we think we can do all that in a short adventure.

The Gnoll Adventure

It’ll get a real title eventually. 😀

This is another 2nd-level quest in which the heroes arrive at a town they were looking forward to resting or trading or researching at, only to find the town is entirely destroyed. Razed to the ground! Blood and bodies everywhere. No survivors. Only a trail of blood leading…to a much larger town.

A horde of gnolls is rampaging through the area, and you have to stop them. I don’t want to spoil anything but there’s a lot of cool beats baked into this adventure. Short and punchy does not mean boring!

THE CONDEMNED

This is a full, 3rd level adventure. Meaning if you start playing it just after you reach 3rd level, you will be at least 4th level by the time you’re done.

This…this is a more ambitious adventure in a lot of ways. For one, you make new heroes for this! You start as prisoners in the great city of Capital! You are a criminal, condemned to death! It’s up to you to decide; why were you arrested? Are you guilty? Accused of a crime you didn’t commit? Were you set up? Framed? Are you a political prisoner? Or an unrepentant criminal? Whatever the answer, you’re due to be hanged in just a few days.

Then Knight-commander Ottavio de Caserta, spymaster for House Vorona makes you an offer. A single mission which, if you accept? Will earn you your freedom, your record cleared. The catch?

It’s suicide!

Somewhere inside the Crysopolis, Ajax’s floating city-fortress, there is an item Ajax’s agents stole from House Vorona. An item which, if Ajax can master it, will grant him the power he needs to finish his conquest of Higara, and the rest of Orden, easily.

You must retrieve this item, or die trying!

All these adventures are currently in the outline phase, none of them are very long? 32 to 64 pages? We think? We would like to have them all finished by this December, but there’s a lot of moving parts and it may not all be possible. We’ll see!

We’re also working on a couple of Draw Steel products to bring to crowdfunding in December.

The Encounters Book 

A hardcover book full of ready-made encounters and tests you can quickly and easily drop into your game. There are four kinds of encounters in this book.

Delves are small, 3-room dungeons, one for every level, you can use whenever you need something quick and you don’t have anything else ready, or your players do something unexpected and you need some rails to throw in front of them. Ready made, just drop one in front of your players!

Negotiations are 10 or 20 pre-made NPCs with their own unique motivations and pitfalls you can grab whenever you need one.

We made a big list of what kinds of things might a Director need a negotiation for? That includes low-level stuff, high-level stuff, mundane stuff, high fantasy stuff, everything in between. 

Then we make a unique NPC for each of them with a name, art, personality, and their own negotiation stats. For instance, we figure the players might need to convince the Captain of the Guard to let them talk to the queen. So here’s Captain Merrek! He’s a specific dude with art, a personality, his own motivations and pitfalls. All ready to go.

It’s a specific dude, but a pretty generic negotiation. Meaning the director can easily replace “talk to the queen” with anything a Captain of the Guard might be able to help you with! So, the person is specific, the goal is generic so you can easily use this guy for a variety of negotiations.

Montages! Yeah let’s have a bunch of these! We give you another 10 or 20 unique montages. Each is a specific montage with a generic use-case. 

For instance, we give you the “Navigating the Sunless Bog” montage test with specific challenges, unique to this one swamp. It’s a specific swamp. There might be more than ONE “navigate a swamp” montages in the book! Each a different swamp with different challenges, different character.

But it’s up to you why the heroes need to get through this place. It’s your adventure! But once you know you need a swamp montage, we’ve got one ready for you. All you have to do is swamp out the name!

Finally, we’re including a whole bunch of what we’re calling Heroic Tests. As you know, any skill test in Draw Steel uses one of three charts, depending on the difficulty of the test. Easy, medium, and hard, each with three tiers of success, so that’s nine possible outcomes for one skill.

Well, what if we MADE unique tests for every skill in the book, at every difficulty? So if you’re wondering “What exactly is an easy climb check and what are the possible results?” We got you covered. Here’s “Climbing a Crumbling Tower” an easy climb checks with unique results for all three tiers.

And then here’s Clibing a Giant Spider’s Web a medium test, and Climbing The Outer Hull of an Airship, a haaaard test! 

We think this has enormous value. Once you see the easy climb test, you now have a specific tool you can turn into a generic template for any easy climb test. You know, maybe your players aren’t trying to climb a crumbling tower? But the example we’ve given shows you how an easy climb test CAN work, making it way easier for you to adapt it to your needs.

This book is already in development and we have examples of each of these already done. Meanwhile…

Crack The Sun

Crack the Sun is the first official epic campaign for Draw Steel. Five acts, each act should grant one level to the players. 

If you’re familiar with DUSK, the 4E game I streamed on twitch, that whole livestream is Act One of Crack the Sun.

We’re still in the outlining phase on this one, and we don’t yet know everything that’s going to happen, but we’re pretty sure it ends with your players fighting on the surface of the sun, in an attempt to stop an alliance of hobgoblins and shadow elves from freeing the ancient evil trapped within that glowing lumineferous world. 

Omund’s Land

Aka the Vasloria Boxed Set. This might not be part of the next crowdfunder? We’re working on the outline now and it’s probably just not possible to get this, Crack the Sun, and the Encounters Book all done at the same time,

But we’ll be working on Omund’s Land while we’re working on everything else! It just might get its own crowdfunder later? We’ll see! We want to make sure everything gets a chance to be the best version of itself and a campaign setting can have a pretty broad scope, so we need to make sure we’re not promising something we don’t have time to deliver on.

Oh and don't forget...

The Codex

Is happening! That's right! We're developing our own Virtual Tabletop solution with our partners at DMHub! A custom-built VTT just for Draw Steel, it is already pretty functional!

If you join the DMHub discord, and sign up to be a tester, you MAY get chosen to help them test it, and lots of people have already done so! Someone on reddit said "It's probably the best VTT experience I've had from any VTT RPG system I've used."

But we don't think it'll be ready for release until probably this time next year? We hope to get you folks a build to play with by the end of the year. We'll see!

That’s everything we’re working on! I think! Meanwhile…

The Community

You folks may already know this? But there’s an ENORMOUS amount of community-made content out there already and more happening all the time.

There’s literally too much stuff to summarize here, check out this thread on the Draw Steel subreddit!

https://old.reddit.com/r/drawsteel/comments/1m89bml/thirdpartycommunity_resources_supplements_for/

It seems as though there’s a lot of people who already love this game and love making stuff for it. The future is uncertain, none of us know what kind of audience Draw Steel will find, but from our point of view? It’s already doing better than we ever hoped.

And that’s thanks in no small part to you folks. You’re going to do incredible things with Draw Steel. Right now, thousands of people are looking at the core rules for the first time, and trying to digest everything, and everyone’s going to be talking about our work. What we did, that they like or didn’t like.

But for us, all that is in the past. The game is yours now. What matters is what you do with it! You are going to have some AMAZING adventures! You’re going to meet heroes, villains, whole worlds we know nothing about!

Eventually, your players are going to stop talking about how cool Draw Steel is, and all they’ll be talking about is how cool their adventures are. Not the stuff MCDM did, the stuff they did. The stuff YOU did.

That’s why we made this game. So you can take it and do things with it we’ve never imagined.

The Discord

On the off chance you haven’t done this yet, you can link your Patreon account to Discord and there’s a whole channel JUST for patrons! And there’s a ton of other Draw Steel channels with lots of discussion all the time. Don’t be shy, there are folks there literally waiting for you to come by and ask questions or talk about whatever you’re doing with the game.

Thanks for being here folks. Until next time…

Peace! OUT!!