Whether you’re a group of local heroes sent to investigate mysterious goings-on in the nearby haunted wood, or famous mercenaries plotting and scheming in the big city, the MCDM RPG makes building adventures and fighting monsters fun.
Whether you’re a group of local heroes sent to investigate mysterious goings-on in the nearby haunted wood, or famous mercenaries plotting and scheming in the big city, the MCDM RPG makes building adventures and fighting monsters fun.
Basically, any adventure or story you’re running in your current Fantasy RPG, you can do that in this game. Just, in a more straightforward and fun way, unburdened by sacred cows from the 1970s.
You can absolutely run epic games with heroes exploring dungeons, but this game is not about dungeoncrawling. You don’t track torches or rations or worry about running out of light.
You can plunge, heedless of danger, into a dark and haunted forest, but this game is not about exploration. No hexes to explore.
By focusing on the core fantasy of epic heroes fighting monsters and tyranny, we think we can deliver a better experience for your friends and your table.
Fighting monsters in this game is a dynamic, action-oriented blast. Heroes and monsters often have abilities that knock their opponents into walls, through doors, into each other.
Every hero has a small array of cool, thematic abilities they can use every round. You gain resources in this game as you play, so battles get more epic as they go. No slog.
The game uses 2d6, plus a handful of d4s and d8s. When you attack, you roll 2d6, add one of your attributes, and that is how much damage you do. Your attack roll IS your damage roll.
You cannot miss. No more wasted turns, no more burning resources on spells only for your target to “save.”
We love fighting monsters! But there’s more to the game than that!
Certain NPCs can be negotiated with to get them to change their allegiance or reconsider their actions. (Technically, ANY npc can be negotiated with but there’s usually only one per adventure) These NPCs have stats like Patience and Interest.
We also plan on rules for Research & Crafting to let players unlock ancient secrets and build wonderous marvels.
We have ideas for how to make language fluency relevant, better rules for wealth, renown. But it’s unknown how much of that we can fit in a 400 page rulebook.
Heroes Basically, The Rulebook. Approximately 400 pages of rules for making characters, character customization, advancement. There’ll be ancestries (classic and new!), classes, skills, rules for combat, negotiation, research & crafting, and more!
We really like customizing characters and giving players lots of options. Even two heroes of the same class and ancestry can be very different in this game.
Monsters A monster book! Basically, Flee, Mortals! without the Villain Parties or Environments. MOST of the monsters in our 5E monster book, plus all the stuff we had to cut, and a bunch of new stuff!
You’ll also get rules for building balanced (or deliberately unbalanced depending on how much trouble your players have gotten into) encounters
We’ve been testing and developing this game internally for almost a year now, but that was just the folks at the office and our friends. The first packet went to our Contract Testers back in August and have been pounding on it ever since.
The game is already working and it’s already fun! For the next 18 months we’ll be adding more classes, ancestries, progression, customization, and rewards.
We take testing very seriously. We want to make books that are fun to read, full of great ideas for your world and your game, and fun to play and that takes time. Polish, iteration, and lots of testing.
You do not need to take our work for it, come to the Discord and talk to them directly, or join a future playtest.
We think we can get these two PDFs finished by June of 2025, but we don’t think you’ll have to wait that long to play it.
If things go well, we intend to get you, our backers, a playtest packet sometime next year, hopefully by Q2 2024.
We intend to publish this game under an open license, probably something like the Shadowdark license, because we want you, and anyone who wants to, to make, share, publish their own work using these rules and set in this world.
We hope, by the time the PDF exists, folks will not only have been playing this game for months, they’ll be making, sharing, selling their own original works using this material.
Heroes PDF - $40 The Heroes book, which includes all the core mechanics and character creation rules, is $40 in PDF. Full color, fully-illustrated, like everything we’ve done so far!
Heroes & Monsters PDF - $65 We want to give folks a break during this crowdfunder if you buy both books, so both books, in PDF, $65. That price will probably go up after the crowdfunding campaign wraps!
No, there isn’t a “Just Monsters Please” pledge level, although you will be able to add books to your pledge a la carte later on.
Heroes Hardcover - $70 $70 for the main rulebook in hardcover. That’s a lot of money, but it’s 400 pages of rules! A lifetime of play!
Heroes Limited Edition Hardcover - $125 The same as the main rulebook in hardcover, but with a gold-embossed cover and color dustjacket.
Both Heroes & Monsters Hardcover - $135 Slight discount if you buy both books in Hardcover. We’d love to give a steeper discount, but charging less would mean making a smaller book or using cheaper artists and we think the quality of our books speak for themselves.
Heroes & Monsters Limited Edition Hardcover - $250 Both books with gold-embossed covers and color dustjacket WITH a cool slipcase! Your books get a little house! 😀
Work in Progress
Work in Progress
An epic fantasy game needs an epic fantasy villain and Ajax, called Invincible, the Iron Saint is one of our epic villains.
Designed by Cook & Becker, the Ajax Edition comes with both Heroes & Monsters Limited Edition books and…
A cloth map of Vasloria, our default setting, designed and illustrated by Kyle Latino aka MapCrow!
Dice! All the dice our game uses, 2d6, some d4s and d8s.
An exclusive AJAX mini! His stats will be in the Monsters book!
A custom coin you can use to clearly indicate whether you’ve taken your turn this round.
Director’s Screen! The director’s side has all the charts and advice you need to run the game, the players’ side has new dope art!
All in an incredible slick case with amazing presentation.
We’ve always wanted to make something like this, but we never had a project beefy enough to warrant it. Well, this project is plenty beefy! 😀
We think a Virtual Tabletop that lets you play this game with folks remotely, especially in this day and age, is critical to letting people play how and when they want. We believe very strongly that a custom-designed VTT built from the ground up to work with our game is the best solution because it means we can custom tailor the user experience for our community.
Therefore, should we hit $1.5m, we will pay someone to work on this. We can’t promise it will exist! Software development is risky and fraught with perils, but we already have a working prototype! Now all we want to do is spend some money to get it done.
We didn’t feel like we could include a stretch goal like this unless we really believed we could do it, and finding someone to partner with was critical there. Happily that process has already started and we’ve already got a working prototype.
Insourcing this project means we believe we can save you the experience of having to buy your books twice. We envision a platform where folks can make, share, sell their own custom content in this software. It’s a lofty ambition but we really believe in empowering people to create new stuff.
Map by Kyle Latino
Map by Kyle Latino
Vasloria is MCDM’s Medieval European Analog, it is one region in the larger world of Orden. Vasloria includes several different nations, factions, its own history, culture, points of interest. If you’ve bought any MCDM products, if you’ve watched The Chain of Acheron or DUSK, if you’ve read Matt’s novels, you’ve already been to Vasloria!
Should we reach $2m in funding, we will pay someone to manage the development of this product and, hopefully, future products set in Vasloria. A Line Developer.
Our goal with this box is to include a couple of 128-page staple-bound softcover booklets, one a high level overview of the whole region, the other a more detailed look at Aendrim, some of which you can already see in the Kingdoms & Warfare map.
The box should include “several” short (32-64 pages) adventures each with their own villains, for a real sandbox experience. Along with lots of handouts that make good and immersive props.
We would like this box set to come with a revised version of our Warfare rules, specific to Vasloria but easy to adapt to any sufficiently classic fantasy setting.
Now, as with the VTT, we cannot say this product will definitely exist. We can only promise that should we hit this funding level, we will spend the money on it and cross our fingers. 😀
We don’t know how much shipping the physical goods will cost, but we know it will be expensive, because shipping is expensive now. We do everything we can to get costs down, but we do not own a logistics or shipping company. We can, and do, shop around and try to ‘game the system’ to get you the lowest prices, but shipping, especially international shipping, shot way up during 2020-2022 and while it has settled down a little it is still expensive.
We will wait as long as reasonable to charge you for shipping and taxes to make sure we get an accurate price. Yes, we do collect taxes where we are required to by law.
The biggest risks we know about right now are time and money. The more money we raise, the more people we can pay or even hire to help us and the better the product is.
The MCDM Dev Team have worked on lots of games, including TTRPGs, including building new TTRPGs from scratch. And MCDM has made lots of books! 4 BIG hardcovers!
So we think getting this product done is relatively low risk? The risk is just: how long will it take? When will the Backers get a Playtest Packet? Well, we think we know the answers to these questions (described above under The Schedule) but we do not know the future. If we barely squeak past our funding goal? Getting this game done on time will be a bigger challenge than if we blaze past it.
Whatever else is true, presuming we fund, you will be able to see where the money went in the final product.
The next biggest risk is just expectations. It was easy back when the game was just an idea, for lots of people to imagine our game as their perfect game. That’s why we spend so much time in the video talking about the core rules: about classes and heroic resources, about Negotiation, about Victories & Recoveries, and your attack roll IS your damage roll. Stuff that’s already working and unlikely to change.
We want people to be excited about this game, not some hypothetical perfect RPG.
So, we’re sure there will be things in this game that annoy you. There are things in every game we’ve loved (well, games more complex than, say, Bang! or Codenames) that annoy us, but that’s just the normal process of game development. This is our Flagship RPG, it will have a lot of rules, surely something in here will annoy you. It just probably won’t be the same thing that annoys another player. 😀
We would love nothing more than to make adventures, setting books, more player options, more options for the Director, for years. But that all depends on how many people want this product. Whether the audience for it grows over time.
We think, if enough people believe in this, this will be the beginning of something special, something that grows organically, with high-quality products coming from MCDM and tons of amazing content from our community.
We want to give you cool new stuff to look forward to. We want to give folks an excuse to get back to the table and game together.
