Draw Steel and the Delian Tomb

 Draw Steel is officially out!

Between the 2024 revamp to 5E, Daggerheart, and now this, there's a lot of new fantasy TTRPG rules for me to internalize. Having now played D&D for almost ten years, there's a certain inertia that a popular RPG system creates - you spend so much time learning the system that people (even me!) are resistant to figuring out and trying out a new one. Even D&D 5.5, which is a fairly modest update to the existing system that is compatible with older content, is something I've had trouble coaxing some of my friends to try.

Both Daggerheart and Draw Steel are quite different from 5E - neither even uses a d20 as its central die!

And so, while I've seen several D&D Starter Sets come around and never been particularly curious to try them simply because I already know how to play and run 5E (though some have good adventures, like Lost Mines of Phandelver,) I'm really struck by how the folks at MCDM have built their starting adventure.

The Delian Tomb is a simple dungeon. Goblins led by the villainous Queen Bargnot have broken into it in an effort to recover a magical artifact that they believe will turn them into super-soldiers, and have kidnapped the local blacksmith's daughter to use her as a sacrifice in a ritual meant to open one of the magical barriers in the tomb. This draws the attention of the heroes, who go to rescue the young woman and put a stop to this plot.

What's remarkable is how the adventure is structured to tutorialize the game's systems.

Each Pregen character (which are given classes, subclasses, ancestries, etc., but are not given names so that players can pick their own vibe and personalities) has a character sheet that is broken up into phases.

The first combat, against a group of a single kind of goblin outside the tomb's entrance, gives the players only the very most basic abilities: just their Signature Abilities, which don't require any resources to use. Here, the combat simply shows the players the fundamentals of combat: the Power Roll, the way that movement and maneuvers can work, and the basic passive elements of each class (while they don't spend resources, they do generate it because some classes, like Nulls and Furies, get passive bonuses as their resources get higher.)

Once into the tomb, they get a bigger fight, and more of their character sheet unlocks: Heroic Abilities now become available (these being the ones that spend resources,) but also, the Director now gets some greater complexity as well: they now have two groups of minions, which are built so that you can use a huge number of them. Also, they now start generating Malice, the Director's "Villainous Resource," which monsters can spend on more powerful abilities. Also, the idea of Potency is introduced (the mechanic where your abilities might impose a condition on creatures whose characteristic the potency targets is lower than the potency).

There's then a non-combat moment that reinforces the idea of checks, with a trap to disarm.

Then, combat three unlocks 5-resource heroic abilities (which at level 1 are essentially your "ultimates") while also introducing a fight where there's a kind of "alternate win condition," involving a large sigil on the floor that can be destroyed to immediately de-animate the undead monsters attacking the party.

The final combat of part 1 is more of a summation, adding very little other than the potential to surprise the foes.

The adventure continues, but these four encounters are expected to be your first session (depending on how quickly your players grasp the ideas and the pace at which they like to play).

Notably, the adventure also gives a lot of guidance for the Director, suggesting tactics the monsters might use (like which abilities to spend Malice on, and how Vorgosh, the bugbear who serves as the adventure's first mini-boss, might use her abilities to drag foes onto the harmful barrier over the stairs down into the tomb).

This kind of gradual build-up of a character's abilities feels like a good, tried-and-true method of tutorializing a game's mechanics - it's something we see all the time in video games (thinking back to Expedition 33, you don't get Gradient Attacks until you get Monoco, which is a pretty serious chunk into the game).

If there's one thing that makes TTRPGs daunting, it's that there tend to be a ton of mechanics to internalize. In a video game, most of them would be automated, but here you need to be aware of every last detail.

I'd initially wanted to try out Draw Steel with my own original adventure, but honestly? This feels like a really solid choice for how to familiarize your players with the game while also getting a sense of how to run it. There's a pre-gen character for every class in the Heroes book (sadly, the Summoner didn't make the cut, but will probably come out in some later supplement,) so players who are excited about one concept or the other should have an opportunity to try it out.