The Kiln is a third-party player class for Draw Steel. The kiln is a shaman-like martial warrior who gains power by burning special, hand-crafted wooden talismans. Mechanically, the class is designed to focus on mobility, command, and buffing your allies so they can do big damage. The class lets you use a martial kit, but features a lot of magic abilities. You can play it for yourself right now using the Level 1 pre-generated character sheet in the link below.
cover art by Jaspinplanet (@jaspinplanet.bsky.social)
The product features:
The Kiln class
Kiln perks
Kiln retainers
Kiln rivals
Backers will also receive the Forge Steel sourcebook with all the levels and the retainers and rivals. Levels 1-3 of the kiln are in Forge Steel right now for preview! Just tick the "Look Out Behind You Studios" checkbox under third party sourcebooks.
The first add-on is Seeking the Secret Flame, a 2nd-level quest. Spoilers ahead!
It's harvest time and the whole of the town of Frome is in the fields reaping the wheat. Or they would be, but huge portions of the fields have flattened and weaved together like a quilt, making the grain unusable, or at least much more labor intensive to harvest. Many farmers have simply given up, spending their days in the tavern instead of under the autumn sun. Meanwhile, the basement of the church sees an incursion of huge roots that grow wild, the forests around town start to develop strange, straight breaks in the tree line, and a huge humanoid figure is sometimes spotted on a distant hill... You meet a kiln looking for someone from their past and you discover a strange ritual of fire!
cover art by G.O.A.T. (@godofallthings.bsky.social)
The second add-on is Look Out Behind You Studios' back catalogue. This includes:
A Theory of Mapping (a methodology and workbook for making combat encounter maps in DS)
Theory of Mapping Map Pack (VTT-usable maps and their editable files)
Dread Abbey (a spooky 2nd-level one-shot)
Raiders of Ivywatch (a heroic 1st-level adventure)
MacGraw Hideaway (a familiar 1st-level quest)
Echoes Under Fort Thunder (two 1st-echelon plug-and-play combat encounters)
Fight on the Beaches (two 1st-echelon plug-and-play combat encounters)
All of which normally amounts to $30 in total. All products are designed for use solely in Draw Steel.
The third add-on is a donated copy of The Kiln PDF, the Forge Steel sourcebook, and the Delian Tomb-style pregen to a member of the Draw Steel community! When the backers are fulfilled, we'll host a raffle (probably both on the drawsteel subreddit and the mcdm discord) and randomly select participants to receive their free kiln package.
The fourth add-on... simply put, this add-on is just if you're doing really well financially and feel like you want to send even more of that toward the kiln. The price of this add-on is approximately the cost of one small piece of art in the product. You can only choose this add-on as an Inferno-tier backer. You donate FOUR copies to the community and you will be featured in the credits as a Cataclysm-tier! You are an epic resource to the project!
The final add-ons are payment processor offsets. Backerkit and the various payment processors (e.g. Stripe) each take a cut of the money you pay to back, and these add-ons help offset that cut. Not the sexiest add-ons, but very much appreciated!
We do not personally profit from this product, as 100% of the funds gathered will go towards making The Kiln the best product it can be. If we fund more than we know what to do with, we'll figure something out, but it's all going into the Kiln.
As a class, the product needs testing! Though most of this will be done with volunteers and LFG, I'd also like to hire a professional to get it across the finish line once it's close.
The kiln is a fairly niche fantasy. The product needs to have a bunch of art showing a ton of different kilns! Maybe these ones don't resonate with you, but you turn the page and BOOM holy shit you have to play THAT kiln NOW! Art is where the large majority of the funding will be devoted.
The Kiln is also going to get some amazing layout! The Level 1 pregen is a taste, and you'll see the Delian Tomb-style pregen upon backing, but also here is a preview of the work-in-progress interior of the class PDF.
layout by Jaspinplanet (@jaspinplanet.bsky.social)
There's only one goal (so far), but it covers multiple things. $3200:
Trinkets and Leveled Treasures - A handful of treasures to be ambitious for later that you can't get (or at least doesn't work as well) with any other class. Maybe it ties into your class abilities and features in special ways, extra role-playing elements, some treasures for non-kilns that let them get a little kiln juice or play even better with a kiln friend, etc. All the treasures will be included in the Forge Steel sourcebook as well.
Big Character Art and Fiction - A full page spread of a single kiln, with a little vignette story supporting that character. Each character art shows a radically different instantiation of the class. (Like we have on the section headers here! In fact maybe we expand one or more of these?) The cover shows a character, you get it, but woah! you never thought about this other character being one way to play a kiln. We're only committing to one of these at this goal, but for every $500 beyond the goal, to some reasonable limit (that'd be a nice problem to have), we'd like to do another!
VTT Tokens and Codex Implementation (maybe) - We're going to make some tokens of the various kilns in the product, as well as the things kilns can summon (e.g. Smoldering Sword). And we're going to look into implementing the kiln in the Draw Steel Codex. No guarantees on that.
We don't have a professional tester lined up yet, but I'm on the search!
Look Out Behind You Studios is my (GubDM's) company. You can find the company's project page over on itch.io, where I publish everything. (It's all Draw Steel! For now!)
