"We watched Cthrion Uroniziir try to reduce the timescape into one singular universe, wiping out reality as we know it. She was defeated, and we see her cage every day."
This crowdfunder is about the future of Draw Steel. Does it HAVE a future? Well thatâs what this crowdfunder will tell us. But we wanted to show you; we are serious about this game and not only Draw Steel the rules, but Draw Steel as a line of products.
There are seven new products in this crowdfunder, all of which will be delivered (digitally!) in 2026. All are described in more detail below, but hereâs an overview.
Encounters, the third core rulebook! Literally just a ton of pre-made encounters for your game. We want to make it easier for you to run tonight! Or, you know, whenever you get your book. đ
Between Sun and Shadow, eight (!) new ancestries for your game! This brings the total number of official ancestries up to 20!
The Beastheart, a whole new class for players! Now you can be a stealthy, ferocious hunter with your own pet buddy!
Four new adventures!
The Red Road, a short, 2nd level quest (5-6 victories) in which the heroes must stop a rampaging horde of gnolls!
The Dark Heart of the Wood, another 2nd level quest and an ancient evil lurking in the local wood.
THE CONDEMNED! An exhilarating, high octane 3rd level adventure (~16 victories) for a party of new anti-heroes! Comes with new pregens, ready to play!
And the main eventâŚCrack the Sun!
Crack the Sun is the first official epic campaign for Draw Steel. Five acts, each act is one whole levelâs worth of adventure, so 16 victories. Designed to really show folks what Draw Steel can do, and give everyone a tour through the worlds of Orden and the Timescape. The Timescape contains a lot of Metal Hurlant nonsense, sure. But it also contains classic fantasy nonsense. What better way to illustrate that, than an adventure that starts with rescuing hapless villagers, defeating an army of hobgoblins, then pursuing your enemy across two worlds? Thatâs Draw Steel!
If youâre one of these first who believe, and you back this campaign, we are going to do our level best to make the coolest stuff we know how to make. Thatâs the promise, the last campaign raised a lot more money than we asked for, and we put it all into the work and into new initiatives like our Draw Steel VTT, The Codex, which our patrons seem to really like!
More backers means we get to make more, better stuff for you and your table!
Sure, you could just go buy the core rules, and many people do! But we really recommend starting with the Delian Tomb. It is purpose-built to walk you through all the big ideas inside Draw Steel, be you a player or a director. It introduces you to the main concepts one encounter at a time. And itâs super fun! Only $10! Itâs a steal!
The third core rulebook! ~350 pages, in hardcover with dozens of new, pre-made encounters ready to use in your game immediately. Our goal with this book is to reduce your prep time, and give directors dozens of examples of negotiations, montage tests, and skill tests. And thatâs not all!
Encounters is broken up into five sections.
Delves are 20 different â3-room encountersâ ready to drop into your game. These are not boss fights, theyâre bite-sized scenarios useful for whenever you need an eveningâs worth of heroism but donât have anything prepared. There are two delves included for every level in the game, 1-10!
Negotiations gives you 20 new, unique NPCS to negotiate with, complete with their own motivations and pitfalls. Why your players need to negotiate with the Captain of the Guard is up to you, but if we do a good job, then these NPCs will be useful anytime the players need toâŚnegotiate with a guard captain for instance.
Similarly, Montage Tests gives you 20 new cinematic montages tests. Each montage test presents a specific scenario designed to be used however you see fit. Your players need to navigate a treacherous swamp. Why? We have no idea! Thatâs up to you! But we give you a specific swamp to navigate with its own challenges.
But thatâs not all! Heroic Tests give you over 170 new, specific skills tests for your game, three new tests for all 57 skills in Draw Steel!
Every skill test in Draw Steel has three difficulties: easy, medium, and hard. And each difficulty has three results! Tier one, tier two, tier three.
Heroic tests imagine unique skill tests for every skill in the game, at every difficulty, with unique results for all three tiers. Everyone knows how the Climb skill works, but what exactly is the difference between an easy climb test and a medium climb test? Well this book comes with specific examples for every skill!
Even if you donât need to climb a crumbling tower, the description and outcomes can be easily adapted to whatever your players are trying to climb.
If this was all the Encounters book had, we think it would be well worth the price, but thereâs one more section!
Dastards! These are named variations of existing monsters with new unique abilitiesâincluding new malice abilitiesâfor your encounters. Dastards arenât leaders or solo monsters, theyâre just normal goblins, kobolds, orcs, etcâŚ. But each dastard is unique!
They just make building combat encounters a lot more fun, without drastically changing the difficulty level. Theyâre a quick, easy, fun way to spruce up a combat encounter.
Thatâs it! Thatâs whatâs in the Encounters book, and thatâs just one product!
You can download a free preview of the Encounters book right now! It includes examples of all of the above, except the dastards because we came up with that idea too late to include in the preview.
Eight new ancestries for Draw Steel! These ancestries come from a variety of backgrounds but generally focus on those people youâll meet in Crack the Sun. Each entry contains more information than you got about the 12 ancestries in the core rules, including brief sections on culture and history, gods and religion. All that good stuff.
Youâll also get new complications, treasures, retainers, even monster entries for new species like the Skarjj!
This book will exist in PDF AND print! It will be a short book, so itâll be perfect bound. Within these covers you will meet and learn aboutâŚ!
Radenwights
Mousefolk! Or ratfolk theyâre not picky about what you call them. Like devils and revenants, we think this is a good, classic Urban Fantasy ancestry but thereâs radenwights all over Orden. These are not nasty disease-ridden critters, they are fun swashbuckling adventurers. If you check the Monsters book youâll see, even the bad guy ratfolk are pretty heroic.
Gnomes in Draw Steel are ONE of the native ancestries of Equinox. Weâll learn more about Equinox later, but itâs another world and gnomes live there. Theyâwe thinkâhave the ability to create little pocket universes. Thatâs how they stay safe and thrive in a world as dangerous as Equinox. Each gnome clan has their own pocket world, only about as big as a small apartment but thatâs pretty big when youâre four inches tall.
They are inherently magical, lorewise and crafty and just very cool and now you can play one!
We named the product Between Sun and Shadow for two reasons, one of which is, there are a lot of ancestries in here native to Equinox, a dying elf world wrapped in perpetual twilight. Never noon nor midnight on that dusk world. We decided to include a bunch of ancestries from Equinox because you go to Equinox in Crack the Sun.
So letâs talk about the dominant ancestry on EquinoxâŚ
Shadow Elves
Like all elves, the shadow elves have their own glamour (âLit by an Invisible Sunâ) and unique abilities.
The shadow elves think of themselves as the rulers of Equinox, but there is one place in that world of eternal twilight where the shadow elves have no sway. THE SKY. The sky of equinox is the domain ofâŚ
The Skarjj
Yeah! Dragonfly folk! These are normal human-size people. Man Jason killed it with this design. Skarjj are the lords of the sky, our Air Superiority ancestry. Other ancestries can fly, sure, these guys are like jet fighters. They are the daring chivalric knights of the air.
Originally that was going to be all the ancestries in this book, but given the content of Crack the Sun, we realized we needed to add two more ancestriesâŚ
Gol
These are humans, but not homo sapiens. They are native to Orden, youâre probably going to meet some in Crack the Sun, and they are like Neanderthals. A second species of human, sharing the world with homo sapiens.
Whereas the default human ancestry in the core rules are subtly anti-chaos themed, the gol are explicitly pro chaos! They (typically) loathe civilization and cities and tend to align themselves more with the intelligent species of the wilderness.
Last new ancestry? This is the SUN part of Between Sun and Shadow, theâŚ
Heliox!
This is just some early concept work, but the Heliox are the native denizens ofâŚTHE SUN!
Thatâs right, in the timescape, the Sun is just another world you can walk around on, but itâs a glowing world, The Blazing World. And these folks are in this product becauseâŚyou go there. In one of the adventures weâre going to talk about.
These folks are elemental in essence, which means each of them (we think) goes through phases called aspects, one for each of the seven elements. They are made (we think) of glass, their skin is covered in dark spots where the glass is cooling but between the dark spots you can see glowing colors that change with their aspect.
This is just a visual exploration, lots more work to do on these folks, but I am super excited, youâre gonna get some new kits in this product and since these folks are from one of the Upper Worlds, you will probably get some space fantasy kits, in case you want to play a heliox from the Sun and you donât want to walk around with a wooden crossbow like a primitive screwhead.
Between Sun And Shadow is going to be about 96 pages? Our goal is to give you more information about each of these species than you got about the 12 ancestries in the core book, because this is a dedicated ancestry book. So youâre going to learn a little about their history, culture, politics, religion, youâre gonna need some gods and saints or heroes or whatever they use. And weâre gonna write fiction for all of these. And new kits and titles and rewards, itâs a whole thing.
A whole new class! Complete with four subclasses and fourteen different animal companions!
The beastheart lets you play a stealthy, ferocious hunter complete with a cool animal companion! Each companion has their own stat block which improves at every echelon. The PDF includesâŚ
Four subclasses!
Guardians are the fearless defenders of their pack.
Prowlers are stealthy ambushers who strikes from the shadows.
Punishers use brute force to overwhelm anyone unwise enough to earn their wrath.
The Sparkâs connection with nature imbues them and their companion with the raging magic of the elements! Flame, frost, and lightning crackle from their hands and claws.
And fourteen different animal companions. You can have a petâŚ
Bear, boar, wolf, panther, or condor! Or a big spider! Not huge but like man-sized, thatâs plenty big. Or a dinosaur! Everyone loves dinos!
And thereâs a bunch of supernatural companions like you might have a little mushroom buddy, a sporling. Or a lightbender, a hellhound, a drake! Like a little dragon pal. Or an elemental spark, or a basilisk! Classic.
You might even have a pet Gelatinous BALL.
The Beastheart began life as an original class for 5th edition and we originally though it might be in the core rules for Draw Steel! But companions are simplified versions of monsters, so we needed to know a lot more about how monsters work. And now we do!
Four subclasses, new treasures, new PERKS. Itâs a lot, itâs going to be like 60 pages probably. No print version, only digital for now, but if we ever do a Heroes II book then the Beastheart will probably be in there.
So thatâs technically TWO new classes, the Beastheart and the Summoner, except the Summoner is already out and you can just buy it now. The Beastheart has already gone to testing! Itâll be doneâŚpretty soon actually!
Four new adventures join The Delian Tomb and The Fall of Blackbottom. Those are two 1st level adventures, so itâs time for a few higher-level scenarios!
Dark Heart of the Wood
A 2nd level quest, meaning a short adventure of about 5 or 6 victories. Quests are short and to the point. Go here, and stop this thing. In this case the thing youâre stopping is a unique, named, thorn dragon that is nesting over a local shrine to the green.
Written by MCDM stalwart Sam Mannell, from an outline we all worked on together, Dark Heart of the Wood shows you a little about how we view the elements in Orden, the idea that there could be a Shrine that caps some naturally occurring source of Green. We stole a little of the plot of Tremours in the beginning I think. I dunno if it all made it through testing, weâll see.
Sure, your campaign setting probably doesnât have âgreenâ as a fundamental element of creation, but it probably has shrines!
You know, a town, a dragon; kill the dragon, save the townâŚobvious, to the point, easy to prep. Super fun. I think a good product line NEEDS really short and punchy quests like this, along with other options no spoilers.
The second quest? Another 2nd level adventure, short, five or six victoriesâŚ
The Red Road
The heroes arrive expecting to find a small town, but the town has been completely obliterated! It is a smoking ruin. Leading away from the town is a trail, a bloody trail left behind by whoever killed all these people, and itâs headed toward a densely populated elf forest.
The town was obliterated by a rampaging horde of gnolls! You have to stop them before they wipe out the elves. The elves can help! But their leader does not like relying on adventurers! OrâŚanyone, really. So thereâs some tension there!
What happens next? Well, depends on what your players do!
These two adventures are bite sized and designed to fit into most fantasy campaigns. Well, this next adventure is not generic fantasy there is nothing generic about this next adventure.
The Condemned
Arguably one of the coolest things weâve ever done (assuming it all works and survives testing!), The Condemned is a full adventure for 3rd level heroes, so 16 victories, but thereâs a catch.
This is not an adventure for your existing party, the heroes your players are already playing. You make new characters just for this adventure. Because uniquely, in this adventure, you play an anti-hero.
Because the condemned in question are five characters on death row. You are jailed within the Cauldron, a prison in the great city of Capital designed to house inmates with extraordinary abilities.
Why are you in the Cauldron? Thatâs up to you. Maybe you were framed, maybe youâre a political prisoner or a rebel leader. Or maybeâŚyou are guilty as hell, and you have no remorse. Maybe..youâre an unrepentant villain, a criminal mastermind!
You are due to be hanged tomorrow, but you are taken out of your cell a day early, fitted with a collar that looks an awful lot like a war dog collar, and taken to meet a mysterious figure. Not the warden, someone new.
He offers you a deal. Undertake a top secret mission in exchange for your freedom. Your record, even your identity deleted if thatâs what you want. The only catch? ITâS SUICIDE.
Misbehave? And youâll find out what those collars do.
We donât want to spoil the plot for everyone reading this, but it is very closely tied into both the world of Orden and the current metaplot. For instance, thereâs a whole lot of War Dogs in this adventure! Some crazy EPIC SHIT happens in this adventure way outside the scope of any classic fantasy nonsense. To me, this adventure feels modern, and it shows off what Draw Steel CAN do.
All right, thatâs three adventures, thatâs a lot. But thereâs one more thing. The big thing. The reason we needed to go to crowdfunding. A hugely ambitious adventure that takes you across five levels from the start of 3rd level all the way to the beginning of 8th levelâŚ
Crack the Sun is a mega adventure in five acts, where each act is a whole adventure with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Itâs set in Vasloria, our version of medieval fantasyland. Hereâs the pitch.
An army of hobgoblins is marching on the city of Dalrath. They have an alliance with the shadow elves of Equinox and between the two groups, they intend to terraform Orden making it inhospitable for humans.
Weâd love to explain everything we know about this adventure, but that would make this crowdfunder page almost as long as the adventure!
So! What we did wasâŚwe wrote a whole massive post on our Patreon months ago when we first started working on this, describing the WHOLE campaign, all five acts, AND we talked a lot about WHY we wanted to do this. And our attitude and approach to adventure design.
Crack the Sun patreon pitch. Warning! Itâs super long! We go into a lot of detail about our approach to adventure design.
Like everything else in this crowdfunder, we are already working on this. Acts one and two have been outlined and assigned to writers. Weâre staggering the development to avoid that feeling of five acts that donât feel like one coherentâŚwhole. But weâve already done a ton of work JUST on the outline and that will help make it all feel natural and related.
Weâre really lucky to work with Teos Abadia. Teos is a pro, an industry vet, heâs done a lot of work for us before, he wrote the adventure in Kingdoms & Warfare which people really liked!
Teos is the managing director for Crack the Sun. It's his job to get the adventure written. He reached out and hired a bunch of writers. Including Andy Dempz, Paige Leitman and Ben Heisler, Alan Patrick, Will Doyle, Stacey Allan! They are already working!
If we can pull off even HALF of this, itâs going to be extraordinary. Weâve never done anything like this before. This is hugely experimental for us, we may find all kinds of problems with these ideas as the writers write and the testers test. But we will iron those problems outâeven if it means cutting stuff we thought would workâto make a fun, playable superadventure for you.
So we canât promise any specific moment will work. But the high level stuffâgo places and fight peopleâwill absolutely work.
Crack the Sun is the reason weâre here today folks. So letâs talk about the physical goods.
This is the whole adventure and all the maps, bound into a single hardcover book. We included this as an option for folks because itâs the cheapest option that will get you the adventure in print.
Once the crowdfunder is over, this will be the only way to get the adventure in print.
Designed in collaboration with Cook & Becker, the same folks who worked with us on the Ajax edition of Draw Steel, this set includes individual portfolios for each of the five acts in Crack the Sun.
Each portfolio can include (we donât know exactly everything that will be in these yet) maps, handout, cardboard tokens for monsters. All sorts of goodies!
Breaking each act out into its own portfolio means youâre not carrying the entire adventure around with you when youâre only running this one slice of it. It is intended to be a more convenient form factor for the director.
Well, the Draw Steel deluxe edition was named after Ajax, so it seemed natural to name this one after the âvillainâ (sort of? You donât fight her, you stop her from escaping her prison!) of Crack the Sun: Cthrion Uroniziir, The Time Ender.
This edition includes the five portfolios (they are different than those in the limited edition) and an acrylic standee in each portfolio of that actâs main villain!
We just found that the overwhelming majority of our customers like the idea of minis, but gluing them together and painting them is a pain in the butt and sort of a hobby all on its own?
This solution lets us put an amazing looking piece of art on your table that you donât have to paint or anything. Just slot the monster into their base and youâre done! Your players will be blown away!
This box also comes with its own set of Draw Steel dice for the director. You get one d3 (a d6 numbered 1-3 twice) and 2 Djordice, the custom d20s Chessex makes for us, numbered 1-10 twice. There are other d20s like this, but they go from 0-9 which is fine but ours are better. đ
You also get a Crack the Sun Directorâs Screen! Making a directorâs screen just for this adventure gives us the opportunity to put things on the screen that are specific to the adventure. We donât know what those things will be yet, but we have ideas!
There may be one or two other geegaws or tchotchkes depending. No spoilers!
There are a couple of other things you can pick up during the crowdfunder.
Dice. Everyone loves dice! You can pick up a set of the Chessex Draw Steel dice, two d20s numbered 1-10 twice, and a d6 numbered 1-3 twice.
A Directorâs Screen. Yay! Finally a heroic Draw Steel screen for all directors! All the charts and rules you need on your side of the screen, and an amazing, epic illustration on the other!
A Crack the Sun SHIRT! This is just the coolest design, thanks to Jason our Art Director for cooking this up. Itâs so cool! (You can buy on our shop during December)
Thread Count Von Glauer modeling the Crack the Sun T-Shirt
We will have the Dice and Directors' Screen will be available on the MCDM.SHOP next year.
Thatâs it folks! We think the digital versions of all these products will come out in 2026, starting relatively soon?
If youâve backed an MCDM crowd funder, you know the drill. But if this is your first one and you made it all the way down here, amazing! Welcome!
There are risks with every crowdfunder. The one you should really think about before pledging is: almost any of this might change. None of these products are finished! All are in-development, meaning people are actively working on them. This means weâre pretty confident in all this! The various products have all had their outline work done, some of them are already in testing!
But testing, even editing and layout, can reveal problems that mean we have to cut or tweak things.
So while weâre confident that the high-level pitch for these products wonât change, the details absolutely could! Especially with the adventures. But if you read the Crack the Sun blog post, you can see which bits weâre excited about, but which are highly volatile and could end up changing a lot during testing.
Other risks include stuff that would be out of our control, mostly concerned with getting you the physical goods. Stuff like global supply chain issues. We deal with all kinds of distribution issues every time we try to fulfill a crowdfunder, and we mostly just handle them ourselves.
So anyone reading this should just be aware that, depending on what you order, and where in the world you live, it might be really expensive to ship you your order, and it might take a long time. Some of these things are heavy!
But otherwise we feel pretty confidant about all this! We can all imagine a future with different Draw Steel products, and we want to make all those. But for this first post-launch campaign, we thought it would be best to focus on stuff you need, like adventures and the Encounters book.
Hopefully, whether youâre a player or director, or even someone totally new to Draw Steel, there something in here that sounds cool to you!
Thanks for supporting us everyone. Below are the product details and delivery estimates.
As always, the future is uncertain and these are the dates based on what we know TODAY. But, because your support of our last crowd funder was so amazing, we now have Gertz to help us build a much more comprehensive schedule than we have had in the past. The schedule below is for digital rewards. DIGITAL REWARDS: First Quarter 2026 (January - March)
Dark Heart of the Wood ~32 Pages
The Red Road ~32 Pages
Second Quarter of 2026 (April - June)
The Beastheart ~64 Pages
The Condemned ~64 Pages
Third Quarter of 2026 (July - September)
Crack the Sun Act 1 ~64 Pages
Crack the Sun Act 2 ~64 Pages
Crack the Sun Act 3 ~64 Pages
Draw Steel: Encounters ~350 Pages
Between Sun and Shadow ~96 Pages
Fourth Quarter 2026 (October - December)
Crack the Sun Act 4 ~64 Pages
Crack the Sun Act 5 ~64 Pages
PHYSICAL REWARDS: We expect that Draw Steel: Encounters Hardcover, Adventure Pack softcovers, and Between Sun & Shadow softcover will ship in Q3-Q4 2026 and Crack the Sun Hardcover, Limited Edition, and Cthrion Edition will ship in 2027.
We donât know how much shipping the physical goods will cost, but we know it will be expensive, because 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 âgame the systemâ to get you the lowest prices, but shipping, especially international shipping, shot way up during 2020-2022 and while it has settled down a little it is still expensive and books are heavy.
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.
