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. You should be able to download the Draw Steel Heroes and Draw Steel Monsters PDFs…now! 😀

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 backers were the first who believed. Thanks to you, we had this enormous opportunity to make the game we believed in. 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 and we intend to support the hell out of it. 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.

Today marks the release of the PDFs, but what about the physical goods?!

Well as of today, July 31st, the books are being printed. Some in the USA, some in Italy. The process of printing and shipping is hugely complex with something like 13 different companies involved and at this point we have basically no control of when things happen.

We think the physical books will start shipping in the middle of September? But depending on where in the world you live, it may take many weeks before you see your books. If you live in Los Angeles? Shipping could be a couple of days! If you live in Perth, Australia, who knows? This is normal, it just takes a long time to ship things far away. 

All the bits of the Ajax Edition are getting made, but that is a much more complicated process, the Ajax Editions might not ship out until like November? But that’s not a surprise, it’s an ambitious set!

You will get further notifications about shipping via email based on what you ordered and where in the world you live. So make sure to whitelist [email protected] in gmail! Or whatever email program you use. 9 times out of 10 when someone asks us why they never received an email from us, the answer is: they did, but it got caught by their spam filter.

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!

We’re making TWO new classes for Draw Steel! And this one is almost done?? I’m not sure how close to release it is, there may yet be art and tons of other stuff to do, but our Patrons already have the playtest version! Our Patrons are basically our Alpha Testers so they get early prototypes of in-development content. And so far, it seems to be working great! Willy Abeel lead the design on this one and I think there’s a lot of brilliant design in here.

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….

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! Coming soon!

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 on six new ancestries for your Draw Steel Game,  including tons of dope ART…like the SHADOW ELVES!

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! 

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.

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!

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?

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 think these products will be PDF-only, unless we bundle some of them into a hardcover. But we’re just making these. They’ll be available on our store later this year. 

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

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 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. 

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...

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…

There is 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!

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 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 make 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.

Probably the best place to learn more or ask questions or just hang out with other players and directors is the MCDM Discord. It’s not the best solution for everything, it’s a live conversation, but at this point, any question you have about the rules? You are not the first person to ask that question and folks in the discord know the answer.

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. Thanks for literally making this happen. I think…I really believe, that if you liked the pitch in the original video we made back in December of 2023? If that game sounded cool to you? Well, I think we made that game.

The core mechanics changed? But only ever in service to that pitch. To playability. To balance. To fun. 

We’re all incredibly proud of this game, and we hope you like it, and get a ton of use out of it.

Until next time…

Peace! OUT!!

The PDFs:
The team is together here at MCDM HQ putting the final touches on book layout. Late last night we sent the Heroes book off to pre-flight at the printers. We started our review of the Monster book Release Candidate shortly after breakfast this morning and are still hard at work. With what we know today, we believe that we will be delivering the PDFs soon, likely in the next two weeks. We are aiming for July 31st.

The Hardcovers:
We are printing hardcovers in several locations to help ease freight and shipping costs. This means not everyone will be billed for add-ons, shipping, and taxes at the same time. The plans looks like this:

Preview of the Limited Edition Hardcovers:
The Limited Editions come inside a slipcase, but will NOT have individual dust covers. All the printers we talked to said the same thing; you CAN put books with dustjackets into a slipcase, but if you do that a LOT of them will get damaged when the books are inserted into the slipcase and you won't know which until folks get their books, so we decided to listen to them. If you had your heart set on duskjackets AND a slipcase, please email us at [email protected] and we'll happily refund your order.

Are there any “extra” Ajax Editions?
Over the course of the past year a few people have needed to change their pledge for various reasons, and this means that a very small number of Ajax Editions are still available. We are going to offer them as upgrades, BUT as we have a very limited quantity, we will be selecting names randomly from a list and contacting people individually. Sign up here if you want to get your name on that list. https://mcdm.gg/AjaxUpgrade

As always, if you need assistance, contact us at [email protected]

Folks, your enormous patience will soon pay off! 

Hey everybody, Matt Colville at your service. We’re getting close to the release of DRAW STEEL and we figured now was a good time for an update to give you some idea how things are going to go, and what state everything is in. Plus a little exclusive sneak peak of some art….

Draw Steel Heroes has been edited, Draw Steel Monsters will be out of editing soon. The layout has been designed and temp passes on each chapter are complete. This is a process whereby the layout artist drops the non-final version of the text into the finished layout template, and starts figuring out where all the art should go. Because the non-final text isn’t that different from the final text, when the final text is finished, the books can be reflowed quickly with only minor tweaks to make everything work.

That’s happening now! Which means we are very close to the end. Or, depending on how you view Draw Steel, very close to the beginning! 😀

Once both hardcovers have finished, edited text, and all art and text have been flowed into the layout, we have a Release Candidate (RC). The RC goes to the testers in June and they’re going to look over it and find all sorts of little bits of nonsense we missed. I can’t speak for others but in my experience with any sufficiently large project, the number of typos increases to fill however much time you spend looking for them.

So the testers and patrons will find all (not all) of the stuff we missed, we’ll fix those typos and then YOU will get the finished, polished, complete PDFs for both Draw Steel Heroes and Draw Steel Monsters. We are targeting July 17th for that release.

The physical books then go to preflight, which is just the process of ingesting the PDF for print and reviewing what it should look like in a preview before pressing the big red button at which point the books start printing! We already ordered the paper and ink!

That should happen in August. We do not know when those books will start shipping, it’s a complicated process, but we’ll know more when we get closer to the date. We’ll be printing books in both the US and Italy. Viva l’Italia! 

We’ll run any outstanding credit card charges for folks who backed only the PDFs when the PDFs are released. So for instance if your credit card failed, we try again, or if you preordered the PDFs after the backerkit campaign closed, all y’all will get charged when the PDFs drop on July 17th. (If you need help email [email protected].)

We will wait until the last possible moment (within reason) to charge for shipping & taxes because we want to avoid a scenario where shipping is $10 on the 1st of the month, we charge everyone, and when we go to ship on the 25th of the month, shipping is now more expensive! That may seem like a ridiculous scenario but it’s happened before!

So once the books are really well and truly ready to ship, then everyone gets charged for shipping & handling. We think that will happen around August, but it could be September. We’ll see!

If you ordered the Limited Edition or the AJAX EDITION, you’ll get the PDF at the same time as everyone else, but your physical order will ship after the normal hardcovers. We are doing everything in our power to get you your Cool Version of the books as fast as possible, but especially with the Ajax Edition, there are a lot of different companies working on this and they need to get all their cool stuff into the same warehouse at the same time so it can all be assembled and shipped to you.

Things can still slip, all kinds of problems could rear their ugly heads, but the fact that we got to this point and everything’s basically on time? Is a bit of a minor miracle I think. I’ll save my praise for when things actually go out, but a LOT of people worked incredibly hard just to get us to this point. Fingers crossed!

As always if you have ANY questions about any of this, we strongly urge you to contact us at [email protected]. You’ll get a personal email response pretty quickly, often in less than a day. Folks sometimes have an issue and they go into the comments somewhere to raise it, or jump in the community discord, but the actual, official, way to get a real answer is: email [email protected]. 

I think that’s it folks! As a thanks for your patience, here’s an exclusive look at the final covers for the books! :squee:

Cover Art by Nino Vecia and Polar Engine.

Hey Backers!

James here! Thanks to all of you for supporting Draw Steel. 

I wanted to give you a chance to fill out a survey to give us your feedback on the latest playtest packet that we sent on 12/20. There are the same surveys that are going to our Patrons, who have a larger packet. Take them here:

Monsters Survey: https://forms.gle/6bTWppRoAKbJ66kJ8

Heroes Survey: https://forms.gle/tVCFDrYVuTiCEYng6

You have until Monday January 13th at 6AM Pacific US time to get this survey back to us! Please only fill out the survey once.

Thanks so much and have a happy new year full of games!

—James

Hey folks! Want to play some Draw Steel?!

Click Here to Download Backer Packet 2

Thanks to your patience and support, we are happy to present to you…a huge chunk of the final game. It’s all the ancestries and classes but only the first three levels. It’s most of rest of the game, all the careers, six inciting incidents for each career, 100 optional complications, some titles, treasures, rules for negotiation, montage tests, research, respites, loads of monster statblocks, animals, rivals, the whole shebang so to speak. Whatever a shebang is.

The only part missing is levels 4-10 of the nine core classes and that’s because they’re not finished testing, plus some titles, treasures, and monsters! That’s what the patrons are going to spend the next couple of months pounding on. Everything else has been tested several times, or in the case of stuff like Complications and Treasures, several groups have read them and given feedback which is really all the testing stuff like that CAN get. You know, in many cases the whole point of a magic item is to temporarily and locally break the rules!

There are some other missing bits. Stuff like…example names for all the ancestries and we figure there’ll be a chart with like…average height, weight, lifespan. I’m sure there are other little bits and bobs we haven’t gotten to, but those things will get done early next year.

But these first three class levels have gone through internal testing, the contract testers pounded on it, the patrons got them in the last packet and now they’re ready for you folks. It’s a lot. It’s at least a couple months of play if you run once a week.

We’ll send out the survey and you’ll get the chance to log your feedback on this build. When you get your survey, you’ll have until 6AM Pacific US time on January 13th to fill it out.

There may be one more Backer Packet for you sometime next year? Or it may be the next packet you get…is the finished PDF! That depends on a lot of factors including the schedule and what kind of feedback we get from the Patrons. Basically, if they think levels 4-10 are a mess, we’ll revise based on their feedback and then send it to you folks. If they think levels 4–10 are basically working? Then we’ll polish based on feedback and the text will go into layout and the next thing you’ll see is the finished PDF.
Speaking of which, this is Yet Another Text Dump meaning you’re getting the raw text in a two-column format, no layout, no graphic design, no art. It is not easy reading and making characters but we have included an official form-fillable PDF! So that’s something. 😀

But yeah reading hundreds of pages of unformatted text is pretty brutal, if you want to wait for the finished PDF or the Hardcovers? We understand. But! The more of you pound on the game, the better the finished product will be!

You folks also get the updated license! Which means you are free to do…basically…whatever you want? With the text, the rules, the setting. As long as you abide by the terms of the license which are pretty straightforward. Folks sometimes email us and ask “Is it legal for me to….?” But, we’re not lawyers and you should not go to non-lawyers for real legal advice.

We actually spent a lot of time and money going back and forth with our lawyers to make sure the license was clear and easy to understand and based on the reaction to the previous packet and license…it worked! I suspect you’ll start seeing character generators/editors pretty soon from various community members. I hope!

Everyone at MCDM worked hard for many weeks and months to get the rules into this state but I want to personally add: as I was reviewing the text and seeing everything in the manuscript for the first time…I was amazed. I think this is an extraordinary game. I am enormously proud of the work everyone’s done, including our testers, our mods, and all of you, everyone who’s played Draw Steel and given feedback.

I specifically and personally want to thank our Lead Designer, James. Everyone at MCDM worked really hard to hit this deadline, there are many moving parts including the obvious work of a lead, but also working with the art team, working with the testers, managing the freelancers, reviewing their work. There are many tedious tasks in this process for which there is no solution except: James has to read and edit the whole thing.

I think we have produced something special and your testing and feedback will make it even better, but the fact that we’ve hit all our deadlines thusfar (as far as I know??) is principally the result of James’ hard work. And I should also call out Gertz! Our executive producer! It’s sort of impossible to overstate how much he’s helped us stay organized so we can hit these deadlines. So on behalf of everyone, thanks James and Gertz!

That’s it folks! We can’t wait to see what you think of this. DRAW STEEL!! 

Thanks for coming on this journey folks. Thanks for being the best community in gaming.
-Matt