#MCDM Productions

[haaaaaaaaaaaave-you-met-ted]

Draw Steel RPG - A Sea of Suns by Rodrigo Clark

[rpgsandbox]

MCDM’s first original game, a new Heroic Fantasy RPG from the folks who brought you;

Strongholds & Followers

Kingdoms & Warfare

The Illrigger

The Beastheart

The Talent

Flee, Mortals!

Where Evil Lives

Comes a brand new game, built from the ground up to give you a better system for running a better game.

Xorannox, The Tyract Lord Syuul

A Fantasy RPG where your character starts, at level 1, already a hero. Maybe even locally famous! You might meet in a tavern, or start in the middle of the action! 

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.”

Lady Morgant Lord Saxton

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.

full resolution - What is this game?

full resolution - Building A Heroic Narrative

full resolution - Tactician

full resolution - Dwarves

full resolution - Revenants

full resolution - Forced Movement

full resolution - Kits

full resolution - Necromancer

We are funding two books!

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.

Lord Kenway Pinna

Backerkit campaign ends: Jan 5, 2024 at 8:01am GMT

Website: [MCDM Productions] [facebook] [twitter] [instagram] [youtube] [discord]

[grimseverity]

Judge, Tiefling Illrigger from the Chain of Acheron MCDM 5e Actual Play :) art by me

[vivsemporium]

Commission complete: Three gemstone dragons for one of my lovely dnd party members <33 - Ruby dragon - Topaz wyrmling - Young Emerald dragon These are from Stronghold & Followers from MCDM productions

[the-d12rose]

The death of Blood Drinker Vrin from the absolutely stellar DUSK, MCDM's 4e liveplay. You can watch/listen to the whole thing on YouTube, and I highly recommend it. My favorite actual play!

[smiteworks]

🏰 Build your legend with big discounts this spring!

The Spring Sale 2025 is here!🌸 Save on select titles from MCDM for Fantasy Grounds VTT. On sale March 13 – 20, 10 AM PT!

[justicekylar]

Hello Friend!

You might be interested in the ttrpg being made by MCDM then! It has the classic "get stronger, get successes" vibe as DnD, but with less weird holdovers from the 80s. They designed this game with the attributes of "Tactical Heroic Cinematic Fantasy"

It's not out yet (they are still in testing), so you can't buy it quite yet, but check out some of their other products to see if you like their style. Personally, I use Flee Mortals! As my monster book

Some thoughts about TTRPGs, and the ubiquity of DnD.

As someone who does not *love* DnD… it is still the only game I’ve tried with that particular vibe. And I don’t mean “medieval fantasy”.

I mean, an achievement fantasy underscored by mechanics built around an individual success-and-improvement narrative, with a large social component. (You win as a team, but you improve and grow as individual characters.)

This is mechanical, independent of what your DM may or may not put in the game.

Let me list it out.

DnD has no standard mechanics for detriments.

As much as there are possibilities for certain monsters and afflictions to permanently harm or alter a character against the player’s will, a DM has to actively choose to put those in their game, and even then there are typically ways to heal or fix them. In a typical game, there are no permanent, mechanically enforced negatives for your dude; no lingering injuries, no madness, no disabilities, etc.

Recovery mechanics are also simple and accessible (looking at you, Long Rest) and resources are not really set up to be scarce and/or a slog to track and ration.

(Mind you: I’m talking about mechanics that impose a permanent debuff or handicap on your character against your will as a feature of the game, not about playing a disabled character as your own choice.)

Simple, straightforward ability growth as a central mechanic.

DnD is almost entirely designed around characters becoming cooler and stronger over time. This ability growth is straightforward: no complicated skill tree system where you can get screwed over by your own suboptimal choices.

There is also no standard mechanic to lose abilities you’ve gained, nor is your degree of improvement every level left to chance. (The closest DnD comes to a chance mechanic in this area is rolling for HP, and even that’ll let you take average if you roll below). The game is set up to reward your character with ability growth just for continuing to play it.

Success narrative dominates.

The primary completion path in all DnD modules is “the characters win the day”. That’s what the game is about. And as much as some modules may try to subvert that with little bits of flavour text here and there, they’re doing so for show. The very manner a DM has to set up sessions is all about making the challenges appropriately levelled for the players to overcome. If you’re playing, you’re *supposed* to overcome the challenge. A game where everyone dies is not considered expected or desirable. And while a creative DM may occasionally set up an encounter the characters are expected to flee from… if it’s not telegraphed properly, the odds are they WILL die. Because the game is not set up for players to expect unbeatable challenges.

Significant character agency where it matters.

Agency is about more than just being able to make choices in-game. In DnD, you have the ability to make choices that feel situationally impactful. You’ll rarely have a situation where you consistently do everything “right”, roll well, and yet the enemy is entirely unaffected. Your abilities aren’t vague in power level or usefulness -even if you aren’t a particularly creative player, the stuff that’s on your character sheet that you can do is going to be at least moderately useful in most situations a typical game throws at you, even if applied with little finesse.

…

Like I said, I don’t *love* DnD. I’m not super sold on medieval fantasy to begin with, I’m pretty bad at basic number math (I have dyscalculia so this shit is hard for me), and I like supporting indie and less popular titles on principle.

But holy shit.

Can somebody tell TTRPG designers to please make a game that just lets me be cool and win at something?

I want to play a badass vampire! But in Vampire: The Masquerade, that’s kinda… Not Great. I want to be a faux-Victorian era paranormal investigator! But, ehm, Call of Cthulhu? Having my character die or go insane kinda sucks. I like scifi! But everything from Cyberpunk RED to the various iterations of Warhammer 40k RPG is bleak as fuck.

Mörk Borg? Dark and bleak. Candela Obscura? Dark and bleak. The Laundry? Dark and bleak.

(I’m not counting Pathfinder, as it’s basically just DnD with more math and a less straightforward character builder.)

I know I’m only scratching the very top surface of less ubiquitous TTRPGs here, but still. All these relatively well known and oft recommended titles completely fail to capture what makes DnD appealing to me -and I suspect, to many others.

In TTRPG spaces I often see people ask “Why modify and reskin DnD to be (insert aesthetic) if you can play (game designed in that aesthetic)?” And my answer is always the same. Because I want to have the DnD-style success experience, only with (cool aesthetic thing).

I want to play other games! I’m not hung up on medieval fantasy or the d20 system or spell slots or anything! I just… don’t want to play some bottom-feeding cannon fodder character in a Misery Simulator, engage with complex ethics as a game mechanic, run a one-person accountancy department to keep track of tons of scarce resources, have the other players as my de-facto opponents, be faced with challenges my character can’t do anything to overcome, invest hours into building a dude who gets offed in the first encounter, put my time in a game that progressively stacks detriments onto my character to shrink their success chances while the stakes keeps growing, etcetera etcetera.

Just, none of that edgy shit. Life’s plenty edgy already, I just want some easy escapism.

Anyway.

If anyone has recommendations for a TTRPG that sort of matches my list of requirements… I’m all ears. I like most stuff aesthetically tho I’m not super into either pirates or contemporary military as a theme. I also prefer games that don’t employ a gimmick (like jenga blocks, an hourglass, burning candles, etc).

[thydungeongal]

Do you think there's a game that would be better for actual play shows to play than 5e that would better match the style of play they're creating? Or are they too curated/divorced from actual gameplay for it to matter?

It ultimately depends on the show in question and what the arc of the given season is. There are games I think are better for producing conventional narratives without a lot of GM expertise and having to effectively fight against the system, and I think showcasing those systems would be doing people a lot of favors in terms of actually showcasing how different games can support collaborative narrative differently. Ultimately a lot of actual plays end up using D&D because it's popular, without actually leveraging the strengths of the game or leaning into the type of play it textually supports.

Incidentally, since I've been hearing about the Critical Role produced fantasy RPG Daggerheart recently I mused about it out loud, like whether the game could actually better support the type of heroic, conventional narrative that Critical Role is very much about, and one reply I got was basically "Yeah it actually does, as a game, better support narratives in the house style of Critical Role, but watching their playtest streams I noticed that they keep on falling back on the habits they've learned from their D&D campaigns even when the game itself explicitly advises against that style of play (like unnecessary rolling)."

Anyway, ultimately the choice to use D&D or whatever for actual plays has very little to do with playing to the strengths of the game, it has everything to do with D&D bringing the views. So even if something like Fate or QuestWorlds or the upcoming MCDM game or Daggerheart would better support that style of play, I do feel it's ultimately a moot point. I don't think the medium of actual play is entirely resistant to the idea of playing games in a way that plays to the strengths of the medium, like there are lots of smaller scale actual plays that actually showcase what the medium has to offer in terms of storytelling potential without it relying entirely on a GM-authored curated narrative, but ultimately it's not a good fit for the larger scale actual play productions.

I don't know if that makes sense. But like, let's be fair, a D&D actual play that actually plays to the strengths of D&D might not actually be all that entertaining to listen to, because as cool as dungeon-crawling and overcoming obstacles with carefully selected abilities might be to play, it can lack a lot of the personal stakes and narrative framing that people look for in conventional narratives.

[xochilexart]

Was invited to play D&D which is very exciting as someone who largely DMs. Anyway I decided to revisit this wintery wizard character I had as an NPC in an old game, turning her into a full character.

I want to really flesh out her look but for now I am liking this vibe.

Also I'm using the Order of Hibernation subclass from MCDM's Arcadia!

You can also join their Patreon to get all the Arcadia issues. Plugging them because I think they're cool!!

[infinitemachine]

Post-OGL Debacle D&D 5e Alternatives Round Up

After Wizards of the Coast screwed the pooch by trying to rescind the OGL several designers, youtubers, and TTRPG streamers decided to make their own D&D-adjacent games. Let's have a look at them! (These are not reviews, and I have not played or read many of these. Just an overview of the field for future reference. Please let me know if I've skipped any entries I should have included.)

Tales of the Valiant by Kobold Press is to D&D 5e as Pathfinder 1e was to D&D 3.5. It's basically the same experience as D&D, updated and tweaked, but recognizably still the same game. Like Paizo back in the day, Kobold Press is a highly rated third party D&D publisher, and this has a good chance of getting continued development and support. If you like 2014 5e but want some quality of life updates and don't want to support Wizards of the Coast, this is a great option for you. On the other hand, if you have the 2014 5e books and just want to keep playing them...no one's stopping you, and this may feel redundant. It's already available.

Draw Steel by MCDM is the RPG from Matthew Colville's company, announced very quickly after the OGL dooblydoo. This is not a 5e or D&D clone, but a new cinematic heroic fantasy RPG. While D&D is kind of locked into supporting several different directions and styles, Draw Steel purposefully eschews "zero-to-hero" character development and dungeon crawling. The characters start as powerful, competent heroes. If that's the style of play you want, this could be a good option! If you're interested in a steeper leveling experience or OSR rat-catching, maybe it's not the one? Draw Steel is still in development.

Daggerheart by Darrington Press is Critical Role's long-form fantasy RPG. Like Draw Steel, it is not a 5e clone, but an entirely new fantasy RPG system. Unlike Draw Steel (from what I've seen, correct me if I'm wrong) Daggerheart does not appear to require/support tactical miniature combat, so if that's your jam in D&D (and, honestly it kind of *is* for me) this may not scratch that itch. I wasn't really impressed with Candela Obscura, Darrington Press' previous RPG, but I'm still willing to give this a fair look when it's finished (if only to understand what's going on when the Critical Role team inevitably play it on stream). Daggerheart is still in development.

DC20 by The Dungeon Coach. Of the RPGs on this list this probably has my least favorite title, if only because it's based on a pun which itself requires knowledge of D&D mechanics to understand. I've heard the rules described as "5e and Pathfinder 2e's lovechild". The game itself seems to be a collection of often interesting homebrew rules; it's as if the author looked at each part of D&D, took it out, thought of something they liked better (maybe from PF2?), and replaced it with that. That means it could be a good game to try if you like D&D but want something a bit "more", or could be good resource for homebrew ideas to plug into your own "actual D&D" game. Available now.

Nimble by Nimble Co, like DC20, is an attempt to take the 5e rules and improve and streamline them, in a fairly modular way that would be easy to cross-pollinate into existing D&D games (according to the KS page, it's fully compatible with existing 5e adventure modules, monster books, and supplements). This one does seem a little more polished than DC20, at least in terms of production values. But ultimately, like DC20, whether you want to play the game as-is or how helpful as a resource it will be will depend on how much you like the adjustments to base-5e that they've made -- YMMV. Still in development.

Vagabond by Land of the Blind is an RPG by youtuber Indestructoboy (aka Taron Pounds). It appears to be more generally "D&D"-like rather than specifically 5e-like, if that makes sense. As such, it does advertise some compatibility with previous D&D editions, as well some more modern rules design ideas cross-pollinated from elsewhere (e.g., the monsters don't roll for attacks!). Like both DC20 and especially Nimble, it boasts a streamlined experience, particularly during combat. It's still in development.

[goatnokama]

I am so in love with this, I f you like Draw Steel, this homebrew class is really really good, there is even a free preview of the class mechanics!

[rpgbot]

New DnD Class Guide for MCDM's Illrigger

Recently added to DnDBeyond, the Illrigger is a capable martial character fueled by the powers of hell. It has an exciting, edgy theme, with lots of fun mechanics. I've enjoyed MCDM's work for years, but hadn't read the Illrigger until I sat down to write this guide, and the revised version of the class is absolutely fantastic.

While I have you: Today's my Birthday. If I could use that as an excuse to point you to the RPGBOT.Newsletter, I would love to have some new folks sign up. I still have a couple more giftable items for 5e that I'm sharing in the newsletter, plus I have a very sneak secret project that I'm going to preview in the newsletter which I think you'll love.

[ultraflavour]

The MCDM RPG crowdfunder started this morning, and I watched it pretty much all the way up until I had to start work.

I watched the number go up and up and up. First, it was “Holy shit this thing is going to fund within the hour” which ended up being 1 hour and 15 minutes, still a huge deal.

Then it was “Holy shit the most expensive backer reward sold out in 1 and a half hours.” Then it was “Holy shit they’re going to crack $1M in 2 hours.” Then it was “Holy shit, they’re about to cross their first stretch goal threshold in less than 6 hours.”

It may have seemed like the built-in cynicism of D&D fans about the tabletop hobby might prevent this, but for the first time in a long time, it feels safe to get excited about what’s coming next.

One of the interesting things about this campaign was that Colville himself was very adamant that they were trying to keep their expectations in check. Being pessimistic about games not called “D&D” is part of the fandom’s DNA, after all. He told everyone during a stream that his plan was to sleep for the first day of the crowdfunder, and if something really crazy happened like “We fund in less than 3 hours,” then he’d celebrate.

Well, the game had already cleared their initial funding goal, $800k USD, in about an hour and change. So, we’ve crossed the crazy threshold.

There were reasons to be cautious.

- They were funding on BackerKit, which doesn’t have the same built-in userbase that Kickstarter does.

- They weren’t making 5th Edition content. How much of their audience would follow them into the unknown like this?

- Their asking price was higher than anything they’d done in the past.

But, in my research and anecdotally, I have seen that there is a ton of enthusiasm on the ground for something new but still in the “D&D genre.” I think most people still want to play D&D… But they are flexible about what they consider to be “D&D.”

A lot of people also associate Matt Colville and MCDM with D&D. So when MCDM says “We think we can do D&D better,” all you have to do to know they’re not full of shit is to look at their past successes. Flee Mortals and the Talent both came out this calendar year, and to my knowledge, no single 5th Edition product had a bigger positive reaction than Flee Mortals.

There are of course going to be skeptics. Some people have opinions about Matt Colville outside of his game design. Some are turned off by the initial design choices.

But skepticism can be overcome. With the early runaway success of the crowdfunding campaign, one major concern was alleviated: That there wouldn’t be enough enthusiasm for this game to ensure its viability. The game is viable. It will have to be reckoned with.

There’s still a lot we don’t know: How many people who aren't backers are going to see this game as a safe alternative to D&D? Will streamers begin to adopt this new system? What will third-party support for this game look like?

We’re in uncharted territory for the time being, but at the very least it feels more exciting to be a D&D fan now than it did at the start of the year, even before the OGL controversy. It felt like the only meaningful changes we were going to see in the genre in 2024 were going to be whatever came out in the Revised D&D Core Rulebooks. There would be new games of course, but the D&D rules refresh would be hard to compete with.

Now, along with Daggerheart and Tales of the Valiant, there’s competition. Even if none of these games have a chance at bringing down the “Empire,” it has enough of a footing that it won’t just go away. History is littered with “Fantasy Heartbreakers” gathering dust on the local hobby store’s RPG book shelf. But this doesn’t feel the same.

Colville believes that he can make a better game, and based on what I’ve read, what I’ve heard and what I’ve seen in this crowdfunder, I believe he can do it. And there are precious few things to get really excited about right now, so I choose to be excited rather than pessimistic about the future of fantasy RPGs outside of D&D, for once.

[syni-gin-ryn]

Whaddaya think about Daggerheart, then?

Meh. Feels like a heartbreaker rpg.

It does a lot of things adequately, but for everything it does adequately, there's a system out there that does it wayyy better. Icon, Monster Of The Week, Unnamed MCDM RPG*, and Nobilis, to list a few.

Also, not a storytelling game. There's no rules for anything you'd expect from a storytelling rpg**. The rules' prinary focus is on combat (like 5e), and the combat is the weakest part of the system.

I did like separating the ancestries and communities (though I feel like if you're going to do that, you might as well take it all the way and remove any kind of mechanic related to ancestry). Some of the ancestry art was really cool, too.

The only thing I really dislike about the system is that they added "tactical" to the description of it. I think it is almost deceitful to try and pass this game off as any form of tactical - the rules do not facilitate (or even really allow) any form of tactical combat whatsoever. I don't even know if a tactical game is even possible with theater-of-the-mind. If it is, Daggerheart certainly doesn't accomplish it. Also, combat just feels bad in this system. It's not fun.

But yeah, pretty much what I've come to expect of CR's TTRPG products.

*Unnamed as I'm writing this. I know they have a name for it, they just haven't announced it.

**it has decent-to-good character and relationship generation, but it has no rules for story beat/character arc/settings/tone/thing/plot generation, which is stuff you'd expect for a game whose focus is actually on collaborative story telling! (At least, not that I could find.)

[worldanvil]

Magic Systems in Worldbuilding with Keith Baker, Celeste Conowitch & Shane Hensley

Welcome to a special Bonus Season! Enjoy these sessions from this year's Worldbuilding Con!  Our panel of experts is ready to bring the magic! Join us as we think through the mechanics of magic systems. Consider how different magic systems affect combat balance and action economy in gaming. Learn how different styles of magic can contribute to your fictional world’s overall theme and premise.

Where do you start with creating a magic system?

What are the essential elements of a magic system?

How can you balance your magic system?

How to explain your magic system to your RPG players?

Best magic system examples

🎙️Speakers: Keith Baker is a game designer and fantasy novel author. In addition to working with Wizards of the Coast on the creation of Eberron, he has also contributed material for Goodman Games, Paizo Publishing and Green Ronin Publishing.

Celeste Conowitch is a game designer based out of Seattle. She is the producer, GM, and editor of the 5th Edition actual play podcast Venture Maidens. When not plotting behind the screen, she works as a senior game designer at Kobold Press and has freelanced with companies like Wizards of the Coast, 2CGaming, and MCDM Productions. To keep up with Celeste, follow her on Twitter @cconowitch.

Shane Hensley is the president of Pinnacle Entertainment Group, and a former designer, writer, and Executive Producer on several triple-A video games. He has a MA in military history, was a long-time freelance game designer, novelist, and writer for TSR, West End Games, and many others, and is the creator of the Deadlands intellectual property, the Great Rail Wars miniatures game, and the Savage Worlds roleplaying game system. He lives in Arizona, USA.

grab the latest podcast episode 👉

[lawfulgoodness]

That is gorgeous. I hadn't ever heard of Arcadia before. It's a D&D 5e resource zine with some absolutely sumptuous artwork.

My artworks for Arcadia 17 by MCDM!! I love working on more stylised stuff