I'm finally joined by Jonas Tintenseher. They've recently published a shadow subclass, is currently working on an epic adventure for Triglav, and you can find traces of Jonas' work all over the third party supplements being published for Draw Steel. And I ask what makes Draw Steel so nice to design for.
Listen on [GoblinPoints.com/2615](https://goblinpoints.com/2615).
Okay this will probably be my last major update to documents during the Alpha, so I figured I'd put everything in one place:
Digital Resources
Physical Resources
Let me know if you find any errors and I'll fix them ASAP.
Fortune or Death!
Does anyone know where the spellbooks are listed? I rolled up an Acolyte of the Gardener. They get spellbooks: fire hands, minor healing, spark. I've found casting rules on pages 6-7 and 23-28 of the Rules document, but I can't find the spells themselves in the playtest packet.
After playing last night and having to roll up a few new characters very quickly indeed, it occurred to me that while it's very quick to do that, it could be even quicker. Presenting: background cards!
This print-and-play file has all thirty-six backgrounds from the playtest on individual cards, containing their stat bonuses, Stamina, skills, equipment (including the equipment every PC gets), and their starting trait. This means when someone needs a character in a hurry because the last one got eaten by awful blood ball things, they can just draw a card from the deck and start pulling the relevant equipment.
Let me know if you find them useful, and also let me know if you find any typos!
Okay, this is not an important question, but bear with me... How do the little towns in Crows feed themselves? The Miasma corrupts anyone that's out in it for very long so how would you farm? People huddle in these little ruins to stay safe and people who go out too long turn bad... real bad. How does farming happen now? You don't have much land to farm in a little castle ruin. Growing your little town over time is an aspect of Crows but with the Miasma everywhere I am having trouble envisioning any kind of sustainable food for the population that grows to any size.
I whipped up a quick video with some music and a timer for my game tonight, and if anyone else wants to use it it's here. Starts with a highly melodic introductory piece before settling into more ambient drones, then climaxes with a tension-building final minute and a final toll of the bell to seal the PCs' fates!
I'm excited to play Crows soon, especially because one of my players got so excited reading the playtest packet that he decided he's going to run it for our group. This gave me a break from my normal game master duties and so I decided to try and streamline character creation as much as possible for my virtual group (especially since we may go through multiple characters in a night).
This started with the idea of making an editable character sheet, but then I realized it'd be nice to be able to snap in the starting perks too... and then I thought about how nice it would be to be able to do the same thing with the inventory cards...
Long story short, these documents now exist:
Hopefully these help you with your playtests as well!
Fortune or Death!
After my last post I decided to keep going and created a sheet for tracking the party's village with a second page containing all institutions currently in the game:
There's no automation and everything is set to level 1 to keep things as clean as possible. Hopefully this helps some of you out there with your games!
Has anyone run the sample module yet? If so, are you allowing players to roll for a test if they don’t have ranks in a particular skill?
Examples:
Monster Lore test (pg. 3)
Magic Lore test for the Locked Cabinet (pg. 4)
Pick Lock Skill (pg. 4)
I know, I know - it’s “Guidelines not Handcuffs” with these rules but I wanted to see how others handled these scenarios. On the one hand you can let anyone try, but they won’t get a bonus for the skill. On the other, if you let anyone try any test with only a slightly less chance of making the roll it makes those skills less special — however, having fewer people who can even attempt a particular test may make certain challenges unsolvable if the one PC with the needed skill fails. To keep things rolling I’m thinking I’ll let anyone attempt most checks even if they don’t have the needed skill. The one exception would be Magic as that seems like very specialized knowledge to certain backgrounds that had previous experience with Magic.
I've not run a table with players yet, but I went ahead and played Solo to test out the game, especially the Blood Library. I love how quick character creation is and how simple it is to play. However, I am unsure how I feel about the Dice mechanics of using 2d10 in place of d20. I get that 2d10 has the bell curve plus modifiers where it can get to the mid numbers rather than the swinginess of d20. For some reason, 2d10 feels wonky to me. It's the physical act of reading two separate dice and assembling the number in my head. With a d20, the entire number is read on one face and it's ready to go, which is much faster. Figuring out 2d10 slows down the game for me somewhat, but that's just me. How about you guys?