Finishing Up Core Rules and What's Next

This week has been full of meetings at MCDM, but they’re the good kind. Right now we’re in this magical period that happens every two years or so here. A lot of the staff, including the design team, is starting to work part time on a project that was all of their time previously—in this case it’s the Draw Steel core rulebooks. That means we have the time to start up other projects.

This week, I wanted to give you all a status update about the core rules and future projects. Right now we’re at a stage where both require a lot of coordination and collaboration, so that means meetings, meetings, meetings. (Hey, it’s James.) 

Editing and Layout

Here’s where things stand with the core rules. The core rulebook that details all your character options and rules of the game, is in editing … mostly. There are a few sections that we’re touching up in design first—we’re reviewing some of the ancestry lore to make sure stuff that was written over a year ago matches what we think now, there are some names that require a review, and I’ve still got a foreword to write. However, about 90% of the book is under review by editors, and that other 10% will be there within a week. The design team has been meeting a lot with our lead editor, Scott Fitzgerald Gray, to talk about the book’s overall style. Scott’s a pro who has been in RPGs for decades, and I’m super grateful for his expertise. He’s also just a nice dude, so meetings with him are fun. We have a really crackerjack edit team that’s working with him. It’s all familiar names who have spun the straw of MCDM’s words into gold—Ashley Michaela Lawson, Amber Litke, and Sadie Lowry. All incredible and amazing folks.

We’re also exploring the layout of the core rulebook. We’ve already got a great graphic design and template created, and now we’re going through it to make sure that it serves the evolving needs of the book. We’re looking at it asking things like, “Oh crap, we eliminated that level of header. Is that going to screw things up?” or “Will this table design FIT the largest table we have in the book?” Those sorts of questions get hashed out in meetings with the folks who are responsible for taking that graphic design and laying it all out and our art team. All of that communication is done in meetings where someone shares a screen and we all look at the data and talk about things like letting and kerning and font sizes. The books look pretty spectacular from my point of view, and it took a lot of hard work to get there. Hopefully we will have some sample pages to show you all soon, so you can see the results of these meetings.

Monster Book Update

The monster book is also almost ready for edit. There are a few things we’re still waiting for—a lot of it just final review of different pieces of lore and such. We can only review so many things at a time, and we prioritized the core rulebook because our monster book is still in testing. Well, most of it is out of testing, but Willy read all your feedback about solo creatures and had a really good idea about how to balance them out. Many of you thought solos were punching above their weight in the last playtest packet (which I guess means we solved the problem of solos being too easy that many other games have by creating a new one). But not all of you thought that, so we wanted to test a fix to the solo action economy that we THINK will work. Since we don’t do much on guesswork here at MCDM, Willy said we should test it, and our coordinator team is doing just that. They’ll wrap up in a few days. At that point all the other stuff for the monster book will be reviewed. Then we can send that puppy into edit as well.

Like the core rulebook, the monster book has a very good graphic design. The stat blocks look really cool, and we spent a long time figuring out how to make them work. So once the book is locked, it’ll be Editown, USA and then off to Layoutsville. I’m sure we’ll share some finished pages here as soon as we have them.

Summoning the Summoner

I’ve already outlined what we got coming down the pike after the core rulebook and one of those things is the summoner class! Since Willy is waiting for folks to review stuff on the monster book, they raised their hand first to take on that project. We got together and had a kickoff meeting with the whole design team.

Matt typically leads these meetings as the design director, and he gave us a pretty bold design goal. At 1st level could the summoner have and control up to twelve minions on the field without disrupting play and being overpowered. Matt felt that if we could deliver that, then we’re delivering on the fantasy of the summoner as a hero who can bring forth multiple creatures at once.

Twelve minions is ambitious, and the whole design team recognizes that it may not work! It could lead to the summoner’s turns taking way too long or them having way too much defensive or offensive power. However, we’ve faced challenges like this before and made it work well. There’s no harm in giving it a shot. We’d rather start ambitious and fall than not attempt great heights at all. After Matt spoke, we asked Willy, who is tasked with actually writing the dang thing, if it seemed feasible. Willy said that they had many ideas brewing, and so we were off to the races.

A couple days later Willy had written out just the first level and one subclass of the summoner—the necromancer. We don’t write entire classes at once before we get into review and testing, because otherwise we’ll end up throwing out a lot of work and make the process take exponentially longer. Imagine if we had designed an entire tactician class around a feature gained at 1st level, and then that feature was cut or overhauled. We’d have to remake so many other class features that were based around that one feature.

The design team then looked it over, and suggested some tweaks, but I gotta say … I think Willy nailed this first attempt. I have no idea if this will resemble anything close to the final product, but it’s an amazing starting point. From both a game math perspective and the idea of the summoner not taking up too much time on a turn, I think what we have now is going to work better than a lot of our other ambitious first drafts. We’ll find out today though, because we’re running our first summoner playtest!

(Willy said I had to include this image.)

The Delian Outline

Then we had a kickoff for our first official Draw Steel adventure, The Delian Tomb. This is an expanded version of the dungeon designed by Matt. We discussed what this adventure would like if the titular tomb were one setpiece in a larger sandbox adventure that revolved around Queen Bargnot terrorizing a village of farmers in Dalrath. I’m the author of this adventure, so I’m on the hook to fill out the details in an outline and present it to the team. I’ve been working on it in fits and starts among our other meetings (and writing this Patreon post). It’s a lot of fun! I’ve been doing a lot of research into what life was like in a medieval village and what sorts of things these folks would normally be concerned about. Then I add monsters and the magic happens!

I’m hoping to have more stuff to show off from this adventure soon.

The Codex

Our good friends at DMHub are hard at work on the Codex, and Djordi is leading the charge on the design side to coordinate with them in getting the functionality of both core rulebooks into the table. It’s a massive amount of work that Djordi is stepping into fully now that a lot of his work on the core design has wrapped.

There will be more updates on the Codex to come, but right now the team is focused on implementing our core rules (since the design has settled) and working on the user interface. The DMHub folks have already done a lot of brilliant work on the Codex, and they just had an in-person test with it. Beautiful stuff.

Even More Coming

Our kickoff meetings aren’t done. The day this is published, we had a beastheart kickoff (and it went great). Next Monday we’re talking about playing goblins. We’ve also got to talk Fall of Blackbottom and have a fair number of new rules expansions that we’re planning on getting underway ASAP.

I guess I better go finish that outline! See ya next week at a Q&A (details to come).

—James