MCDM successfully launched its heroic fantasy RPG, Draw Steel, which, yes, I'm still trying to get a group of players together for (though I'm up to three and will play with four! Scheduling is the next challenge,) and made news when lead designer James Introcaso moved from continuing to develop Draw Steel to the company's next original RPG: Crows.
Draw Steel, famously (though maybe not as famously as their "everything hits" philosophy,) eschews monetary rewards - you have a wealth value, but it's not meant to be the primary motivator, and you're assumed to be able to afford an inn, replace equipment, etc., with "treasure" being limited to magic items that can give you a significant boost.
The idea that Matt Colville presented when pitching Draw Steel was that there was a lot of vestigial stuff in D&D from when it was first designed to be a survival-horror dungeon crawler, but that over the past half-century, the game has come to, well, mean a lot of things to a lot of people, but broadly, the way most players approach it is to tell stories of heroic figures saving the world. Colville felt that a lot of the game's continued reliance on tracking inventory and such weighs down the goal of game meant to make you feel more like epic heroes, and so they pushed to cut that out from Draw Steel.
Crows goes the opposite direction.
Crows will work a little like Draw Steel in the sense that its central mechanic is the Power Roll - rolling 2d10, adding the appropriate statistic (though these are boiled down to just three - Strength, Agility, and Mind) and checking to see if your result is 11 or lower, 12-16, or 17+. A lot of it is different though.
The intent here is for a world that's post-apocalyptic (though I think still in a medieval fantasy sense), gritty, and desperate. You're scrounging for whatever wealth you can find in dangerous old ruins, and so the way in which you earn experience is the value of the stuff you pull up out of there. Fighting monsters might be necessary, but if you can avoid them, it's probably for the best, as you don't get anything for killing them, and they can certainly kill you - part of the design philosophy is that the monsters aren't scaled to the players. (As a side note, I hear a lot of DMs talking about building campaigns like this, which usually implies it's going to be deadlier and with fewer guard rails, but I would say that if you're going to do that, you need to also make it go the other way - if the world doesn't limit its difficulty for low-level players, then it also should not rise to meet high-level ones).
Unlike Draw Steel, Crows will be all about inventory management, and will involve such trade-offs as wearing lighter armor so that you can carry more stuff with you. Equipment can get damaged and broken, and your character's abilities are more about what kind of stuff you can use than what you can do on your own - a spellcaster character, for example, might be able to make use of magic spellbooks found in these ruins, but they won't have magic that they can just use innately.
It'll be interesting to see how this turns out: I think the intent of this sort of game, a bit like Blades in the Dark (and its variants) is for shorter-term stories, unlike the long and epic campaigns you get with D&D or Draw Steel.
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