Everyone at MCDM is buzzing thanks to all your support of Crows. The campaign has come to an end, but it went on 7 hours past its deadline thanks to a heroic group of last-minute backers who kept the backer train moving down the tracks. On behalf of everyone here at MCDM, we're grateful for your support and love of games! You  smashed the stretch goal, so the CROWDEX cometh.

What's next? The Crows playtest is still ongoing. You have until Tuesday, September 29th at 6AM Pacific Time to fill out the survey! Then we should have another round of playtesting in October. Expect more dungeons, monsters, and items as well as a rules update based on your feedback. We'll do another backer update when that next playtest is ready to rock. After that playtest, it'll be editing, layout, proofreading, and printing.

We're going to keep working to make Crows the best game we can. If you want more frequent Crows news, I do a weekly progress update on Twitch and we regularly post videos on the MCDM YouTube channel. I just put out a video a couple weeks ago talking about how villages work in the game.

If you want to find groups to play with or you want to discuss the rules or share your experiences with Crows, you should check out the Crows subreddit, the MCDM Discord, or the new MCDM forums.

Thank you again. You put your faith in us, and now we're gonna deliver.

Fortune or death!

This murder rate is growing, and we’ve got you to thank!

I am so pleased that you all have decided to back Crows: Fortune or Death! We’ve made our funding goal, which means we are making this game! I want to give a special shoutout to Mystic Arts, for making this video about Crows. We sponsored it, but the ideas and words are all from them. They’ve put out a lot of great RPG content, and we wanted to support that work. You can too by subscribing to the Mystic Arts YouTube channel.

While we’re showing stuff off, how about art of another blood creature? This is from Joseba Alexander. Give him a hand. (Get it?)

Now that we’re funded, let’s talk a little bit about what’s to come.

We’re steadily making our way towards our stretch goal. If we raise $1.25 million, we will be able to develop a Crows module for the Draw Steel Codex from our partners at DMHub. If you already have the Draw Steel Codex and opt into devbeta, you can access the current version of the Crowdex module. It rules! Here’s a look at how it works.

We’ll be able to make a complete and fully operational module if we hit this stretch goal. If that’s something you want, go ahead and share the Crows BackerKit campaign with your friends. You can also check out a web-based version of the playtest that the DMHub team put together here. It also rules!

We’re already hard at work finishing the development and art for the game. I’m finishing up the equipment list, Nick is working on angels, and we’re hoping to have all of that in the next playtest packet, which you should see sometime in October. If you haven’t already checked out the current Crows playtest, please do! When you’re done, please fill out the survey!

In the meantime, we’re also continuing to work on the game’s graphic design. We’re finalizing all the logistics of printing and manufacturing.

Once all the writing, playtesting, and art wraps up, we enter a months-long process of editing all the books and cards. Then we layout that final text with the art. Only after that are we ready to print, which takes several weeks. All the books, cards, and other pieces of the game then come together in a warehouse, and we have to pack it up and ship it all to you. That puts us delivering around September of 2027, and likely a few months after that for the Limited and the Goat Editions.

If this is your first MCDM crowdfunding campaign, then you probably don’t know that we tend to do fewer updates on BackerKit than you might be used to with other companies’ projects. We know that most of our audience doesn’t follow along with every BackerKit update and that too many can cause folks to miss the important information we want them to have, like when it’s time to charge for shipping or when the next playtest drops. Updates here on BackerKit are best when limited to important, MUST-KNOW information, which only happens occasionally. If you want the minute-by-minute updates, read on. We got you covered like a quilt.

We do a TON of updating in our community spaces. I do a weekly progress update on Twitch and we regularly post videos on the MCDM YouTube channel. If you want to find groups to play with or you want to discuss the rules or share your experiences with Crows, you should check out the Crows subreddit (where folks are sharing their amazing fan-made creations and tools for the game) or the MCDM Discord.

If you want to get super, knitty-gritty behind the scenes previews, I also do dev updates on Patreon, but most of the content on there tends to be for Draw Steel. Playtest for the core rules of Crows will continue to be free and publicly available on Patreon (meaning you can access them without an account).

Thank you so much for making Crows a reality!

Fortune or Death,

James Introcaso

Crows Game Director