Callum Grier

Good adventure design is so hard to get right and seeing all the bad laid out as "what we don't want to do" and listing their guidelines is so helpful to formalise my own feelings on running the game and being concious of making something better for my players.

It feels so cathartic reading through the latest MCDM Patreon post and feeling like they are directly responding to my online group's bad experience with the previous Adventure Path we ran, even though I know its not.

Draw Steel Ability Cards Create and customise ability cards for your Draw Steel Character

New card design has been released. Go check it out!

cards.heroic.tools

#DrawSteel

My Censor player felt like he was directly countered by a Fossil Cryptic. He was being challenged.

Once the party had given it damage weakness, pinged it for acting three time in a round and kept it constantly bleeding, the censor said “oh, I get it”

The MCDM RPG: Draw Steel Project Update: Draw Steel: Shipping Address Verification Hey Folks, We've started shipping books, a process that will take several months depending on what you ordered and where you live in the world, but we wanted to send out a...

MCDM putting out books thick enough to have the "MCDM" on the spine horizontal 🔥
www.backerkit.com/c/projects/m...

New Draw Steel Ability Cards design, shown using Entropic Bolt as an example. The design is much more similar to the way abilities are presented in the book, while making it clearer what values on the ability can be customised with the influence of hero kits and characteristics.

Got the new card design for Draw Steel Ability Cards (cards.heroic.tools) implemented.

A long while off from having it ready for release, but I thought I'd share how it looks!

I can personally attest to these models being fantastic!

Go back the Kickstarter.
www.kickstarter.com/projects/263...
#drawsteel

I don’t think Bulbasaur can play, for the same reason.

Draw Steel Ability Cards Create and customise ability cards for your Draw Steel Character

I'm so happy seeing the positive response to our recent work on cards.heroic.tools

Not sure how healthy it is, but I absolutely live for the positive stories of people using these to play with their kids or onboard players to Draw Steel.
So keen to get the new card design and colour themes out!

Draw Steel Ability Cards Create and customise ability cards for your Draw Steel Character

Draw Steel Ability Cards has been updated and has a new url:
cards.heroic.tools

A lot of new features, but most importantly we now have every ability from the core rules!

a cartoon character says he 's just standing there while holding a phone ALT: a cartoon character says he 's just standing there while holding a phone

These are cool! Do you want me to update heroic.tools with one of them. The current image is you staring me down from across the table, menacingly.

This is a great idea!

I’m sitting here doing my monthly planning, journaling for the month of September.
Only halfway through realised how pointless it was to write out “ of September” after every date

Some terrain painting tonight! I’m very proud of my river tile

Tonight we are continuing our big battle from last week against a pair of Wyverns who have nested near the Heroes stronghold.
The Wyverns have been hampering repair efforts that they need to make before Sir Pelliton arrives at their doorstep with an army.

YouTube video by Dungeons & Discourse The Matt Colville D&D Scandal Gets Worse

Ignore the video title and thumbnail, it's really just a good review of Draw Steel 😂
www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XVH...

I knew that Dungeons and Discourse couldn’t make a Draw Steel review without making it clickbait. What a great glowing review!

As fun as last night’s Draw Steel combat was, my favourite part was after. The heroes were negotiating with the righthand-man of the big bad of the town.

They uncovered that he had become the head enforcer to *protect* the people of the town (a bit misguided). They used that to end the hostilities.

The great combat of Whitehill has concluded! The heroes faced Vaz the Blackhanded and his minions.

In the end, Vaz fell and Brock was left alone, still intending to fight and holding a hostage.

The heroes saw that Brock hadn’t killed anyone and found peace with him through negotiation.

For reference, this is a hard encounter for THREE level 1 characters.

An overview of the battlemap. It is a hand-drawn map using whiteboard markers and depicts the centre of a medium sized town. There are various tokens across the board. From left to right, we see - a group of 8 blue tokens representing rotting zombies - Vaz (reskinned storm mage), surrounded by four of his undead minions (reskinned human apprentices) - The three heroes, a censor, an elementalist, and a talent - a Death cultist and a group of death acolytes, who are down a side street - Brock (human brawler) and his guards (raiders) approaching a large crowd of civilians led by a priest

A close up of Vaz. He wears skeletal armour and has (should have) a black hand held up (but it’s not painted)

A view of the heroes facing down Vaz and his minions

A shot of the opposing view, showing the trouble brewing and the civilians that are in immediate danger if the heroes only focus on Vaz.

All set up and ready for tomorrow’s Draw Steel game!

The heroes face Vaz the Blackhanded. Just as their betrayal of the tyrant has been revealed he has summoned an army of minions to fight by his side.

Meanwhile, Brock and his men move to subdue Chaplain Haul, who is giving a sermon of rebellion!

Draw Steel really is a game the most heroic game to run RAW.

I like running close to RAW for most games; it makes the triumphs more real. Rule of cool is always welcome, but if you're doing cool shit while being totally constrained to what's "allowed" by the game, that's so much cooler to me.

Then, of course, the start of the next round begins—which is the real trigger of bringing back their Performance, as a Revitalising Limerick plays and the Fury and the Troubadour finish off the Villain together, while getting to heal each turn.

So if I'm running a Heroic✨ game, the villain should take their turn, get their Critical Hit against the last standing Fury.
But as they turn around they see the Troubadour standing there.
They are breathing heavily (Catch Breath), they say a one-liner (ofc), then leap immediately back into action!

BUT THE RULES DON'T SAY THAT DO THEY?

Dying/Dead at no point say you fall prone. Drama doesn't say "you wake up with a gasp on the ground, prone".

You could say, "Oh, but the rule for Unconscious says you're prone", but the rule for unconscious lays out an option for dead that's not dead!

But then I was sad that you'd have to use a Maneuver to Stand Up, so you'd probably have to have your Dramatic Return turn just be standing and breathing (still better than the previous state, but disappointing)

The Troubadour could Stand Up, take a breath, then say a oneliner. Still cool, but eh.

Specific example:

I was thinking about the Troubadour after returning to life from hitting 30 Drama, and remembered that 1 Stamina in this game is *not* 1 HP of dead again, and that you could Catch Breath.

It's amazing the amount of carry-over rulings that slip into Draw Steel from other games.

I, as much as everyone else, really need to look at how I'm running the game and ask "do the rules really say that?" and **not** fill in blanks left in the rules with assumptions from less-heroic games!

I’m putting together my usual session notes into written prose—it’s a fun activity, highly recommended it—but I’ve just had the fun thought of having “Director’s commentary” for my ‘meta notes’ throughout the prose, to contextualise what I thought would happen and how the players always surprise me.

Today I had an absolutely fantastic session at Draw Steel.

My Monday session was almost enough to make a drop everything, but this session today will be going for months!

Way too much cool shit happened for me to post here, but it was great.