Dungeon crawls should be terrifying. You should survive them by luck and your wits, not your stats alone. Tracking arrows, torches, and rations should be a tense game of life or death, not an accounting exercise.

From MCDM, the makers of Draw Steel, The Illrigger, Stronghold & Followers, Flee Mortals! and more, comes a brand-new survival horror RPG for dungeon crawls, wilderness travel, and base building.

Built from the ground up, Crows gives you everything to run and play the best challenging and immersive dungeon crawls.

A fantasy RPG where PCs are adventurers brave or foolish enough to make a living (and a dying) by diving into monster-infested ruins for treasure. It uses the power roll mechanic from Draw Steel, but this is far from heroic fantasy.

Crows doesn’t care how powerful the adventurers are. What’s inside the dungeon is what’s inside the dungeon, and that doesn’t magically change based on the power level of the PCs. If they decide to poke a demon with a stick, that’s on them. If the characters enter a dungeon with a plan to run up to every threat and bash those baddies, the players will have to roll up new PCs right quick. This game’s math hasn’t been balanced to ensure players win most of the time. The monsters don’t plan to fight fair, so the players should do whatever they can to prepare for or avoid combat to survive. You need to use your WITS to survive!

Dungeon crawling in Crows is lethal and fun with straightforward rules. Tracking inventory, wounds, and light is actually tense and interesting. It doesn't feel like accounting. Your survival depends on it!

Some of you are thinking, "Yeah, yeah. Gimme the rules!" We've got a playtest with two dungeons and everything else you need to start playing the game tonight. The materials are part of the game's ongoing playtest, and the rules are subject to change. Details on how to give us feedback are in the playtest packet!

After months of internal and public tests, we know the game is working and folks are having a blast playing it! For the next several months, we'll continue playtesting and tweaking rules to make the best dungeon-crawling game we can. We want the game to be fun to play AND fun to run.

If you want someone else's opinion, come to our Discord or the Crows subreddit to join in on the conversation.

Every monster, hazard, and trap in Crows has the potential to end a PC's life. Even if the characters and monsters are evenly matched, combat is a grisly affair. Side initiative that changes each round means the monsters might end up taking two turns in a row!

As an adventure goes on, a PC’s health pools dwindle, making it hard to survive long stretches of dungeon delving without some clever thinking. Start taking wounds, and you'll start losing your equipment slots ... and you already have precious few!

Monsters in Crows are built to bring shock. It doesn't have traditional d20 fantasy monsters. You won't find a plain old skeleton or zombie here. It has stuff that makes the players say, “What the *$#% is that?!” Like the first time you saw a licker in Resident Evil 2 or when those two dudes from the newspaper fused together to make a flesh monster in Stranger Things 3. We don't name these creatures, but rather refer to them by a classification and letter in the rules (such as undead A) and let the players in your game be the ones to come up with what to call these things. Original monsters means each one is going to need some art ... illustrated by some of the best creature artists out there. All monsters are presented as cards so you can share the art with your players easily.

Once you enter a dungeon and start exploring, the game takes place in increments of 30 minutes of real time called Dungeon Turns. At the end of each Dungeon Turn, the Ref rolls a check for a random encounter (which may or may not occur) and players roll usage dice for light sources and other effects. This adds an time pressure on the players and gives the Ref a good reminder and pacing to add some surprises to the crawl. At the end of each Dungeon Turn, monsters could show or your torch could go out or both could happen at the same time!

In many fantasy RPGs, characters get their abilities to do cool stuff like cast spells or turn into animals from a class or special feat or other feature, and their equipment enhances those abilities, like a wand giving a spellcaster access to more spells per day or a belt allowing a barbarian’s battle rage to last longer.

In Crows, the opposite is true. Anyone who has a bone capture spellbook can attempt to cast the bone capture spell, but some PCs have characteristics, expertises, or traits that allow them to cast the most effective version. Others might be better suited to swinging a sword, using a set of lockpicks, or casting a spell of a different discipline. The character options you take in Crows enhance what your equipment does and not the other way around.

Crows is about looting dungeons. You're more incentivized to put your character in harm’s way to get some goodies. Not only does loot make you more powerful. It expands what your character can do. Want to increase the number of spells you can cast? Head into a dangerous dungeon so you can find more spellbooks or gather the coins you need to buy them.

Crows embraces a character advancement idea that’s as old as TTRPGs. PCs gain experience points not by slaying monsters or completing quests but by calculating the value of the treasure they bring back to town after exiting a dungeon and dividing it among the PCs. That number equals the amount of XP each PC earns. You don’t need to kill every monster in a dungeon to reap XP … you just need to get the gold and get out.

You can never quite carry everything you want to have on hand in the dungeon, so you need to make some decisions about what to take with you before you enter the Hall of Angels. How many arrows should you take? What about rations, potions, and spellbooks? What about armor? It affords nice protection, but takes up a lot of space in your inventory. Deciding what you bring with you determines what you can do in the dungeon, so choose carefully!

Each character has two hand item slots (and anything in them is equipped), four belt item slots, and ten backpack item slots. During dangerous situations, like combat or a trap going off, a character can freely swap between the items on their belt and the items in their hands, but if they want to grab an item from their backpack, they have to roll 1d10. If the result of the roll is equal to or higher than the item’s slot, they can draw the item from their backpack. Otherwise they can rearrange their backpack slots, but can’t take anything out of it. The order of stuff in your backpack matters.

If you’re constantly rearranging things on a character sheet by erasing and rewriting slots, things are going to go messy, so we use cards for inventory management.

Here are some inventory cards:

The cards make rearranging your character’s equipment a snap and also make it easy to award treasure and trade equipment with allies. “I want to use this magic sword, but it means I need to drop my old one … Anyone want a sword?” is a common question that players ask during as they hold up an item card and offer it to their friends. Someone takes it, and the game keeps moving. No stopping to look up stats in a book and write them down because it’s all on the card.

Getting from your hometown to a dungeon and back isn’t all fancy free and breezy. Those monsters that are in dungeons come out and wander the wilderness, plus the very air itself is infused with mind-altering magic. You don’t want to get lost on your way to an ancient ruin (but you sure can). Otherwise you might show up with less food and more wounds than you planned and have to turn back after only a short stint … or you could push your luck. What are the odds you’d get lost on your way back to town anyway?

Crows has robust rules for overland travel, including navigation, travel pace, tons of wilderness encounters, and each character taking the role of guide, scout, tracker, or supporter along the way.

Crows isn’t all dungeon crawling. The PCs have a town that’s their home base where their friends and family dwell. It’s a place where they can rest (to heal their many wounds), buy new equipment, craft new gear, sell treasure, and invest gold in the town. Investing in the town gives the PCs another reason to bring back loot from the ruins scattered around the world of Crows, because building a better town attracts more merchants, which allows them to purchase better gear, research new spells, and imbue items with more powerful enchantments. When a PC dies, they can be entombed in the town’s crypt, where they grant a small boon to another adventurer who visits their eternal resting place before going out on a delve. Those PCs who survive enough dungeon runs to become powerful adventurers can retire to the town before their number comes up. These high-level PCs become NPCs and give the town big boons that allow the next crew of crows to start off better than their predecessors. Characters will come and go, but the town remains and is the thing that benefits most from all these dungeon crawls.

We have loads of stuff to write, test, rewrite, edit, proofread, layout, illustrate, and manufacture. Let's take a look!

First, we're going to make a starter set, called The Sanguine Athenaeum, that provides pregenerated characters, quickstart rules, and a dungeon to delve! The digital version of this starter set comes with every pledge level of this campaign.

The core game of Crows comes with the following stuff:

Depending on the pledge level your choose, you will get these books and cards as PDFs or in print. The books are available in softcover and hardcover.

We're also making dice, a Ref screen, monster tokens, a "dead" stamp for marking the sheets of fallen characters, a Dungeon Turn timer, and a notebook for tracking your campaign called the Ledger of Death.

Check out the pledge levels for more info on how to get what you want from this campaign.

Check out the pledge levels of our Crows campaign!

Want to follow along and get updates without a big commitment? This is the pledge level for you! You get digital version of the Crows starter set, The Sanguine Athenaeum. The digital version of this starter set comes with every pledge level of this campaign and can be upgraded to a print version as an add-on.

Digital Crows includes the PDF versions of all four books, the equipment and monster decks, and the starter set.

Softcover Crows is each book printed with a glossy cover and staple bound along with PDF versions of the books, card decks, and starter set.

Hardcover Crows is each book printed in a journal-style notebook with plenty of extra pages for you to write down your house rules, notes, and observations, plus PDF versions of the books, card decks, and starter set.

The Limited Edition includes hardcover, journal-style versions of each book, the equipment deck, the monster deck, and a set of dice (2d10 and 2d6) together in one fancy tin, plus all the PDFs books, card decks, and starter set.

The Goat Edition includes the PDFs and tin from the Limited Edition, plus two more tins that include four softcover Characters books and four additional sets of dice (a total of 10d10 and 10d6), a Ref screen, a timer for Dungeon Turns, monster tokens, a "Dead" stamp for marking the sheets of fallen characters, and the Ledger of Death for all your notes. The timer, stamp, and ledger are exclusive to this level of the campaign!

You can customize your order of Crows with add-ons. It's the only way to upgrade your starter set to print or grab the Crows T-shirt and sticker. Plus you can add a bag of dice, a Ref screen, extra equipment or monster decks, extra softcover copies of the Characters book, and Steam keys for the Draw Steel Codex.

The Crowdex is a bespoke Crows module for the Draw Steel Codex.

We think a virtual tabletop that allows you to play Crows remotely is critical to letting people play how and when they want. If you have been following us for a while, you know that MCDM has developed a bespoke VTT for Draw Steel that you can check out on Steam or learn more from Zee Bashew. If we manage to reach $1.25m in funding, we will develop a Crows module for the Draw Steel Codex.  Software development is risky and fraught with perils, but we already have a working prototype!

If we reach that stretch goal, everyone in the Limited Edition and Goat Tiers will receive a Steam code as part of their pledge. For everyone else, we have included an add-on for Draw Steel Codex at a discounted price.

MCDM has done a LOT of crowd funders over the years and we've gotten better at giving reasonable estimates, but the future is uncertain, so things could change. We think it will take us about 12 months to finish development on Crows. That puts us delivering around September of 2027 for the finished game, and likely a few months after that for the Limited and the Goat Editions.

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 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.

Grace Cheung - Art Director

James Introcaso - Game Director

Jason Hasenauer - Executive Art Director

Jerod M. Bennett - Technology

Josh Gertz - Production

Lars Bakke - Development and Production

Matthew Colville - Writing and Design

Nick De Spain - Art Director and Game Designer
Paul Hughes - Lead Game Designer

Robert "Djordi" Djordjevich - Senior Game Designer

Willy - Muse, Debonair, Scamp, and Senior Game Designer

Many illustrations in Crows, including the work you see on this page, was done by Joseba Alexander and Konstantin Vavilov.

Dungeon maps will be created by The MAD Cartographer, who you can support on Patreon to get tons of awesome maps.

The folks at DMHub make the Draw Steel Codex and the Crowdex module!

We are happy to say that the layout and graphic design of Crows has been carried out by Caesar Ink, the award winning creators of Doomsong. Their body of work includes Doomsong: Lord Have Mercy Upon Us (best Roleplay Adventure at the UK Games Expo), Jim Henson's Labyrinth: The Adventure Game (winner of 2 ENNIES), Jim Henson's Dark Crystal: The Adventure Game (nominated for Prix Rôliste awards) and Tails of Equestria: The My Little Pony Storytelling Game range (best Roleplaying Expansion at the UK Games Expo). The team has a meticulous eye for product design and game-first graphic design, which made them a perfect fit for Crows.