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Heroic Tests
🕑 Added 2025-08-21 16:27:16 +0000 UTCIt's time ... to climb!
Hey folks, James here! In December we'll be launching our next crowdfunding campaign for a few different products, one of which is Draw Steel: Encounters. This is a book of drop-in pieces of game play you can use with minimal prep for your Draw Steel games. It's broken up into four sections:
Dungeon Delves: Three-room dungeons with three encounters, including a battle against the dungeon's boss monster!
Montage Tests: A bunch of montage tests that you can drop right into your game. We plan to cover a variety of useful, common scenarios like a rooftop chase, getting information at a party, and performing a ritual to summon a devil.
Negotiations: A whole bunch of NPCs and negotiations you can use. We're looking to cover common scenarios here too, stuff like negotiating with a dragon for a treasure from their hoard, negotiating with a conduit to bring someone back from the dead, and negotiating with a hag to undo a curse.
Heroic Tests: Drop-in tests that you can use in your adventures. The plan is to include at least one easy, medium, and hard test associated with each of the 57 skills in the book.
For this post, I show off a preview of the Heroic Tests section. Like the montage tests and negotiations, we want the tests we provide to fit common obstacles the heroes overcome during a campaign. You can use these tests not just as written but also to get an idea of where the line is between easy, medium, hard, and needing to call for a test at all. This will help Directors make their own judgements about what constitutes a test's difficulty and give them ideas about the sorts of consequences and rewards they can hand out.
Attached to the bottom of this post is a rough preview for the first set of these heroic tests centered around the Climb skill! Take a look! This still has to go through testing and editing and all that jazz.
By the way, if you're wondering, "Will Patrons need to contribute to the campaign to get Draw Steel: Encounters?" check out this post where Matt breaks down which Patrons get PDF copies of Draw Steel products when they're complete.
—James
Comments
Levi Mote
Thank you! One of my favorite parts of the 4E Monster Manual was the Suggested Encounters for each listing. Looking forward to something akin to that for DS Monsters.
ranch_big
this book sounds exactly like what I wanted from this game. super excited to see what else you guys are cooking up to help on-board new directors
Ben Fisher
This sounds great, and I do love me some examples. Tests are actually my least favorite part of the game; though they are fine they just aren't as great compared to many other aspects which are. I think mostly I miss the possibility of more degrees of result, particularly with the reward/boon being very infrequent and never happening alongside failure. That's probably just my love of Edge coming out though. In any case this sounds like a great product!
Isaac Remnant
One part of TTRPGs that should never be muted is the expression the participants provide to the story. The deciding factor for it's use will be how modular are the scenarios. If all I need to do is plug in my BBEGs name and flavor of badassery then I will be impressed.
