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Continue ShoppingThe MCDM RPG
Whether you’re a group of local heroes sent to investigate mysterious goings-on in the nearby haunted wood, or famous mercenaries plotting and scheming in the big city, the MCDM RPG makes building adventures and fighting monsters fun.
Draw Steel:
Fighting monsters in this game is a dynamic, action-oriented blast. Heroes and monsters often have abilities that knock their opponents into walls, through doors, into each other.
Every hero has a small array of cool, thematic abilities they can use every round. You gain resources in this game as you play, so battles get more epic as they go. No slog.
The game uses 2d6, plus a handful of d4s and d8s. When you attack, you roll 2d6, add one of your attributes, and that is how much damage you do. Your attack roll IS your damage roll.
You cannot miss. No more wasted turns, no more burning resources on spells only for your target to “save.”
Negotiation:
We love fighting monsters! But there’s more to the game than that!
Certain NPCs can be negotiated with to get them to change their allegiance or reconsider their actions. (Technically, ANY npc can be negotiated with but there’s usually only one per adventure) These NPCs have stats like Patience and Interest.
We also plan on rules for Research & Crafting to let players unlock ancient secrets and build wonderous marvels.
We have ideas for how to make language fluency relevant, better rules for wealth, renown. But it’s unknown how much of that we can fit in a 400 page rulebook.
What we are making:
We are making two books!
Heroes
Basically, The Rulebook. Approximately 400 pages of rules for making characters, character customization, advancement. There’ll be ancestries (classic and new!), classes, skills, rules for combat, negotiation, research & crafting, and more!
Basically, The Rulebook. Approximately 400 pages of rules for making characters, character customization, advancement. There’ll be ancestries (classic and new!), classes, skills, rules for combat, negotiation, research & crafting, and more!
We really like customizing characters and giving players lots of options. Even two heroes of the same class and ancestry can be very different in this game.
Monsters
A monster book! Basically, Flee, Mortals! without the Villain Parties or Environments. MOST of the monsters in our 5E monster book, plus all the stuff we had to cut, and a bunch of new stuff!
A monster book! Basically, Flee, Mortals! without the Villain Parties or Environments. MOST of the monsters in our 5E monster book, plus all the stuff we had to cut, and a bunch of new stuff!
You’ll also get rules for building balanced (or deliberately unbalanced depending on how much trouble your players have gotten into) encounters.
Already in Testing:
We’ve been testing and developing this game internally for almost a year now, but that was just the folks at the office and our friends. The first packet went to our Contract Testers back in August and have been pounding on it ever since.
The game is already working and it’s already fun! For the next 18 months we’ll be adding more classes, ancestries, progression, customization, and rewards.
We take testing very seriously. We want to make books that are fun to read, full of great ideas for your world and your game, and fun to play and that takes time. Polish, iteration, and lots of testing.
You do not need to take our work for it, come to the Discord and talk to them directly, or join a future playtest.
You do not need to take our work for it, come to the Discord and talk to them directly, or join a future playtest.
The Schedule:
We think we can get these two PDFs finished by June of 2025, but we don’t think you’ll have to wait that long to play it.
If things go well, we intend to get you, our backers, a playtest packet sometime next year, hopefully by Q2 2024.
We intend to publish this game under an open license, probably something like the Shadowdark license, because we want you, and anyone who wants to, to make, share, publish their own work using these rules and set in this world.
We hope, by the time the PDF exists, folks will not only have been playing this game for months, they’ll be making, sharing, selling their own original works using this material.