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The Devil is in the Details: On Abstraction & Design

Hey hey it’s Willy! I’m gonna set a couple of axioms for this post so everyone needs to get really coolfor a hot second.Design is the communication of ideas between two parties.Design is evaluated on:The speed in which the ideas communicated by the first party reach the second partyThe clarity o...

Draw Steel Playtest July 2024

UPDATE: The survey is now closed. Thank you for all your feedback!UPDATE:The survey for the playtest is now available!UPDATE:The documents have been updated as of 7/28/2024 at 8:30AM Pacific US time to give some clarity on the generation and retention of Insight, Focus, and Piety as well as the Fury...

July Livestream POSTPONED until August 8th

Hey Patrons! It's James with a quick update. Normally we'd have a Patreon stream tomorrow, but we're over here getting ready for Gen Con and the next Patreon Packet (coming very soon). Since the whole team is busy, we decided to postpone this month's stream until August 8th at 4PM Pa...

Ancestry: Polder

I think this might be IN the packet you'll get "soon?" So it's a little redundant including it here, but I didn't want to leave you folks on a downer, for reasons that shall become clear.Polder are our version of hobbits. We could have made an original fantasy setting without any...

Ancestry: The Dragon Knights

You folks are going to get a bunch of ancestries in the upcoming packet. You'll get all the Universal Donor ancestries; humans, high elves, wode elves, dwarves, orcs, and maybe polder (our hobbits). But there are other ancestries in the game! Ancestries we feel aren't'standard for all fa...

A quick post from Grace! Painting Chainmail

Grace is one of our senior artists responsible for a not-inconsiderable amount of the Dope Art people associate with MCDM. She was kind enough to write this up and we thought it would be fun to share with y'all.Grace enjoys drawing a lot of armored fantasy heroes, and that often means drawing LO...

Writing Ancestries

Hey folks! Matt Colville here. I just finished writing up some more Ancestries and thought it would be fun to talk about the process and how we got here. Later this week or next week, you may get some more actual write-ups. 😀We decided very early on that Orden & the Timescape would be the default...

What Does a Producer Do?

Gertz here! I am the new Executive Producer here at MCDM, and we figured it would be a good time to tell you all a little about what that means.It's been 3 months now since I've joined the awesome MCDM team and MCDM community and while I have been somewhat silent, aside from showing up in a ...

Orden & The Timescape

You folks already know this, but our game uses the Timescape, a collection of worlds including Orden, a classic medieval fantasyland, as its default setting. So the book should probably explain what all that is, right? :DWell that's what James thought! So he gave me the task of writing up a brie...

June 2024 Q&A is LIVE

Hey Folks! It's James. Dael, Djordi, and I are taking your questions about monsters and classes in the MCDM RPG RIGHT NOW. We already had a LOT asked over on the announcement postfor this stream, but we'll also be answering them in chat. We'll get to as many as we can, and if we don'...

June Q&A

It's time for another Live Q&A with Djordi and me (James), hosted by Dael Kingsmill!The stream will start at 4pm Pacific US Time on Thursday, June 27th!We'll post the link here on Patreon when we go live. It is for MDCM Plus Patrons only.This Q&A is going to be focused on monsters! We've...

PUSH IT!

I want to create a melee ability that breaks through an enemy’s defense. My first thought is Auron’s Armor Break skill from Final Fantasy X, where he runs up and swings his sword at the enemy and their defense goes down. It’s a cool and useful move! Now if you were to bring it into a tabletop ...

Designing a Class: The Tactician

Hey folks! Matt here regaling you with tales from the Game Dev mines. We’ve left R&D behind and are now well and truly in production, we’ve hired two more full-time designers and a new Executive Producer, so the game is reallygetting done now!R&D allowed us to prove out the basic concepts. Each ...

Monster Energy

“So, we’re all agreed that the monster book for our RPG will use all the same principles as Flee, Mortals!” This is what we said at the end of a meeting when we were planning the BackerKit campaign for the MCDM RPG before we had even finalized the layout for Flee, Mortals, our fifth edition mo...

The VTT

Hey everyone,Geoff, General Manager of MCDM here. Last year MCDM and DMHub started working together to build a set of digital tools that we have so far been referring to as “The VTT.” We know it needs a cooler name than that, because it really is turning into more than just a Virtual Tabletop. I...

Pillars of Creation

BEHOLD!My name is Djordi, a Senior Designer here at MCDM. This is my first Patreon post and possibly the second time you have encountered me in an official capacity, if you watched the Patreon Q&A last month.Treasure Type DJIf encountered in his lair, a Djordi will cook good food for you and play bo...

May MCDM RPG Q&A is Live!

Hey Folks! It's James. Dael, Djordi, and I are taking your questions about classes in the MCDM RPG RIGHT NOW. We already had a LOT asked over on the announcement postfor this stream, but we'll also be answering them in chat. We'll get to as many as we can, and if we don't get to your...

May Q&A

It's time for another Live Q&A with Robert "Djordi" Djordjevich, our newest designer, and me (James), hosted by Dael Kingsmill!The stream will start at 4pm Pacific US Time on Thursday, May 30th!We'll post the link here on Patreon when we go live.This Q&A is going to be focused on the...

Character Creation: Career

A few weeks ago, I showed off the culture rulesfor the RPG. But you don’t just pick ancestry and class and build a culture to make your character. You also get to pick a career!(It’s James.) What exactly is a career? Well, your ancestry and culture describe your hero’s birth circumstances. You...

d10s!

First it was funky dice. Then it was six-siders. Now, the d10 reigns supreme as the core die of the MCDM RPG.It’s James here with a quick update. Honestly, what I’m about to talk about SEEMS like a much bigger change that it actually is. We’re still keeping the power roll with three tiers of o...

Ancestry: Memonek

I said you’d get another update from me soon!We think, we HOPE, there’ll be 12 ancestries in the Heroes book. Most of these are ancestries everyone’s already familiar with. We didn’t invent humans or elves or dwarves, even though we have our own ideas about how all these classic ancestries w...

Encounters vs Monsters

Hey folkses, Matt Colville here! James just sent out a new packet to our testers, and I thought this was a good time to talk about our current thinking on monsters. Specifically, how we represent their stats in combat.To give you some context, here’s how Goblins are presented in the newest packet....

Character Creation: Culture

Sure, your character is a dwarf, but does that mean they know how to make armor and tell a thousand different types of stone apart? What if they were raised in a forest by elves? What if they were raised by human monks who found a dwarf baby left on the steps of their monastery? What if they sailed ...

Kobold Legionary

Nick just shared this cool Kobold art by Lucas Torquatowith the team, so we decided we should share it with all of you!

Better Monster Roles

Working on better monster roles, to make it easier and more fun for Directors to run encounters.

Wealf, Innit?

One of the incredible privileges of working on this project is getting to look at all our assumptions (or, as many as we’re aware of at least), everything we inherit from our history as roleplayers and ask “why do we do it this way?” “What other ways are there to do this?” And “What is t...

The Return of the Resistance Roll

Hey hey. Ho ho. We’ve got resistances to roll. It’s me, James, here to update you all about the state of effect resistances (ya know, the stuff that lets you not be dazed when someone tries to daze you)!When last we updated our intrepid Patrons, we had noted in our first round of Patreon playtes...

Negotiation v3 Revised New Use This One

You might remember that a couple months ago I showed off the new version of motivations and pitfalls in negotiation. A lot of you were asking, “Okay but how does the REST of the system work?” Before I could dive into that, we had to describe the power rollcore mechanic and how tests and skillswo...

Montage Tests

A few of you noticed that in last week’s post that the tests document I posted made reference to montage tests. A bunch of folks on our Discord have been asking what the rules for montage tests look like, so I figured we should show them off.It’s me—the James. Back in November, I showed off th...