Episode 2025.7 Published on 3 April 2025

New Burrowing Rules, The Delian Tomb Adventure, and the Vampire Crowdfunder | March Roundup

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Intro

It's the silence before the storm. News about Draw Steel is sparse. MCDM is working on new products, but they've barely made into testing. Some more exciting news is the new third party crowdfunder that just launched, for a vampire class. And, of course, I have some highlights from the community creations.

I'm Jon de Nor and this is Goblin Points.

Burrowing Conundrum

First, let's cover the little stuff I have on Draw Steel.

After playtesting with the Arrix, which is the new name for the Ankheg, the design team were not happy with how burrowing rules are working. They felt too clunky and didn't deliver a satisfying feeling in combat.

They've already gone through a couple of iterations, and it looks like they've landed on a system that works as follows: it takes a maneuver to burrow one body length under ground. If you're a size one creature, a maneuver brings you underground. If you're a size two creature, like the Arrix, you also get underground with a single maneuver, even though you're moving twice as far.

While underground, you leave a trail on the ground above, which shows where you're going. You've seen this in movies and cartoons with moles or other creatures, where they leave a small mound trail after them. This trail allows creatures above ground to still target the burrowing creature, preventing burrowing from being too powerful.

There are also rules for pulling creatures down with you. Thankfully the rules make it difficult to bring them further down than just below the surface. The creature that's dragged down, have the opportunity to break free and crawl back onto the surface.

The Delian Tomb

The Delian Tomb has been sent to playtesters. James, who's writing the adventure, says it would be nice to have it ready for the release of the game, but that's not guaranteed. The launch of the game is not going to be delayed because of the adventure.

Currently, there's four and a half pages of rules to read before you get started playing. Players can then make their way through the whole first part of the adventure, which basically serves as a tutorial, before being asked to read the rest of the rules included. The combats in the tutorial section are a bit more laid back and not as intense as they get when you get into the game proper.

The adventure takes place in a farming village. While the tomb will feature heavily in the adventure, there will also be other problems to solve outside of the tomb. James has mentioned bandits on the road, threatening wolves, and other monsters putting the townsfolk in danger.

The tomb will be unlocked in sections where the heroes delve down, return to the town, get resources that enable them to delve even deeper into the tomb. It sounds like there's going to be a race between the heroes and Queen Bargknot of the goblins for the treasure in the tomb.

The adventure comes prepared with pregenerated characters for the players. And there are more pregens than players, to give everyone a choice. For the director, there'll be pre-filled sheets for combat encounters, negotiations, and montage tests.

James also wants to use the simplified alternative to box text, which they used in Where Evil Lives. Instead of a big block of text to read, there's instead shorter bullet points with the vital information for that room.

James estimates that it'll take between twelve and 20 hours to get through. He hopes to have a version for patrons to test in maybe May.

The Beastheart

They've been prototyping the Beastheart. They've already gone through a few iterations on how the beastheart and the companion work together, especially when it comes to stamina. They did try to give them a common stamina pool, but that didn't work. For example when they're both hit by area attacks, and basically take double damage. They do have shared recoveries though, but when either the beastheart or the companion spend a recovery, the other also gets a bit of healing.

While the beastheart and their companion get to move independently, they share an action and a maneuver on their turn. But a lot of the abilities currenly reference both of them: "you and your beastheart, do blah-blah-blah".

Warfare Rules

People are of course curious about older MCDM products being ported to Draw Steel. The warfare rules, as seen in Kingdoms & Warfare, are one of the rule sets they're currently working on. While they initially thought they could reuse most of the rules from the 5e version, they've come up against the same problem as with the 5e version: the warfare rules are great for 1v1 play, but if there are multiple people on a side, it's a lot of waiting.

According to the most recent update, they've basically scrapped most of those rules altogether. Matt said that instead of warfare being a separate game you play beside the RPG, the new rules are much more part of the game you're already playing.

As you might know, I also develop Stawl, a digital toolset for Draw Steel. I recently launched support for homebrew monsters. You can now create your own custom monsters and use them in the combat tracker.

Stawl also has a negotiation tracker, the full list of official monsters, and a glossary for quick rule lookup. If you're playing in a game, Stawl also has character sheets with built-in tracking of stamina, recoveries, surges, heroic resources, victories and more.

Check it all out at Stawl.app. That's S-T-A-W-L dot app.

Codex

I did a big update on the Codex in last month's roundup, which also includes pricing details. For this month, there's not much to report, apart from the fact that people at MCDM are now actively contributing to the implementation of the Draw Steel rules. By the sound of it, Djordi is working mostly on the Codex at this point.

Djordice Are Shipping

Speaking of Djordi: The Djordice has started shipping, but the general manager at MCDM did say that there has been a small delay with shipping in Europe. Partly because it's the first time shipping from there. But they hope that's only for a short period, and expect shipping to start soon there too.

Creator Spotlight

If you're listening to this, you probably already know that Goblin Points and I were featured on the MCDM Patreon in March. It was a huge honor to be featured by them. And thank you to everyone who contacted me with congratulations. It's honestly very touching to hear all your kind words.

It sounds like MCDM were happy with the response and Matt has hinted that they want to do it again. I will gladly pass the baton on.

Derelict

Moving on to something not Draw Steel related. It looks like Derelict is being worked on. Matt has mentioned it multiple times in the last year, but it seems he and Jason are putting more and more time into it. Most recently Matt mentioned that Derelict should probably be done this year. Note that doesn't mean it's released by the end of the year, just that the design is done.

Derelict, which I have mentioned a few times before, is a new game being developed by MCDM. It's not an RPG, but a board game dungeon crawler. It's a bit like Gloomhaven, but in a futuristic sci-fi/space fantasy setting. You play as scavengers, looting derelict space ships, looking for big treasure. Once you've explored a space ship you head back to "town" to sell what you've found, and to buy upgrades.

The game will lead you through a narrative, and makes you pick a pregen character to play as. You customize them through the choices you make as you play, to make them your own. As you amass equipment and accolades, what started as a pregen, becomes something unique.

Matt has long wanted to make a game that uses a proper action point economy, and Derelict may be the game where he finally gets to do that. Everything comes down to the action points. Move one square; one action point. Stab with knife; one action point. Fire big sniper rifle; five action points. Reload big sniper rifle; three action points.

MCDM doesn't want to put all their eggs in the Draw Steel basket, and Derelict is the first step on that journey.

Scions of Blood and Shadows

And now onto, non-MCDM stuff. The second crowdfunder for a third party Draw Steel product is live right now. This time it's Triglav Games running a BackerKit campaign for their Vampire class.

They've already produced an impressive piece of art for their iconic vampire, Irina, they've started playtesting by contracting Pesto Enthusiast who's also done testing for MCDM, and they're sharing the first four levels of the class as part of the campaign.

They're trying to reach a goal of €2,500 by May fifth, with a scheduled release of the final product in Q4 of this year.

From the Community

Now. Here are some highlights from the community from the last month.

If a full class-worth of vampire is a bit much, you might want to check out the vampire ancestry by Sam McGurran of Don't Shout Mimic. The vampire ancestry works a bit like the revenant, where you combine the ancestry with another ancestry from your previous life. Combine traits from the two ancestries, or select ones that makes you feel more like a vampire; like the ability to sense nearby heartbeats.

TNT has created a pack of monsters called Uurms. To quote the subtitle of the pack: "Imagine a silkworm, but bigger. And less vegetarian". The pack contains five level one monsters with different roles, including a leader with villain actions. There's also two general malice features for the Uurms.

At the beginning of March, Aestus published an interview with James. The interview covers how James got started in TTRPGs and what he did before coming to work at MCDM. it covers how James got started publishing creations for D&D on the DM's Guild, how he got started with podcasting, and how he ended up working on products for Wizards of the Coast. It's a great listen if you're an aspiring designer or creator.

The Dice Society published a video on how to get your friends into Draw Steel. He shares some tips based on the experience he's had introducing fresh players to the game. He has a list of tips that he goes through, and he's also made some simplified character sheets to make it less daunting to get started. There's also a new episode of the podcast out. This episode goes in-depth on the Codex.

Speaking of the Codex. Vex has published a couple of videos featuring the Codex. One is on how to direct games using the Codex, while the other shows off the update that makes heroic resources work. They now generate automatically and gets spent appropriately.

And speaking of VTTs, Joseph Meehan has published the first version of a Draw Steel system for Foundry VTT. A system is an implementation of rules for a game in Foundry. This is very early days, so there's not much implemented yet. I really hope Meehan keeps it up, hopefully with support from the community. I'm sure any help is appreciated.

Links to all of these can be found in the links section, in addition to even more creations from the community.

From Around the Web

I've also included some links to MCDM being mentioned outside the community. I especially want to highlight av video by Matthew Perkins in which he's converted the negotiation system from Draw Steel to D&D 5e. And he's also made a handy tracker sheet.

Outro

And that's it for March. I feel like this is becoming a bad recurring joke, but, I think we're in lull. People are waiting for the game to come out, and I expect we'll see an explosion of stuff when that finally happens.

If you want to be featured on Goblin Points, or know of someone else who should be, leave a comment on YouTube or Spotify, or send me an e-mail on [email protected].

Links to the MCDM Discord server, the subreddits for MCDM and Draw Steel, the YouTube channels of Matt and MCDM, the complete link section, and this script is in the show notes. It's also on goblinpoints.com.

Next episode is on the 20th. This time I'm having Ananam of Triglav Games on. Ananam is the lead designer on the vampire class I mentioned. Paying patrons can submit questions for me to ask, and if you listen to this episode as it releases, submissions are still open. Link is in the show notes.

See you next time. Snakkes.

Links

MCDM

Scions of Blood and Shadows

From the Community

Draw Steel Homebrew

Draw Steel Media

Draw Steel Tools

From Around the Web