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

Hey Folks!

It’s James, the Lead Game Designer of Draw Steel. I wanted to thank you all so much for supporting our RPG. I know many of you have read the rules and ran some games using the latest playtest packet! It’s been awesome seeing the chatter discussed on Discord and the Draw Steel subreddit. Now we have the BEST way to give us feedback, this survey:

This survey is the best way to get us your feedback on the packet. It's a long survey, but very few of the questions are required, and most are simply rating your satisfaction with the game on a scale of 1 to 5. If that's all you do, the survey should only take about 20 minutes, and that's if you don't skip any sections. You don't need to fill out the open-ended questions or leave comments, but they're there in case you want to elaborate on your ratings. Even just providing the rating is SUPER helpful, so thank you!

If you played the game with folks who didn't back the campaign on Backerkit or aren't current MCDM Patreon members, please feel free to send them a link to this survey so we can also get their feedback.

Note that the comments sections have character limits to help us make our way through the feedback. To help make your comments shorter, you don’t need to give us suggestions of what to fix, just tell us what you don’t like, and we can take it from there! (If you tell us the fixes, odds are it’s something we already tried, so giving us the problem and letting us find the solution yields the best feedback.)

Also, don't worry about typos and grammatical mistakes or the leaves-much-to-be-desired layout in the packet. You don't need to report those to us. There is much editing to come!

Thank you all so much for taking the time to play the game and give us your feedback. It’s going to help us make a much better RPG for you all to enjoy.

Keep On Rolling,

James