Draw Steel and Fantasy Settings

The print books for Draw Steel, the roleplaying game from MCDM, are out and they are amazing. It’s fun to play, the art is so stunning it’s immensely enjoyable just to flip through the pages gawking at it. It’s one of the best organized rulebooks I’ve seen, which might not seem like a big deal, but if you’ve ever looked for a rule clarification in the middle of an RPG session not wanting to interrupt the flow and the fun… you’ll appreciate the thought and care that’s clearly gone into organizing this.

The thing I want to talk about in this post, the thing that surprised me, is how intrigued I am by the setting.

Most often I don’t care much about the setting when I get a fantasy RPG because most often I’m going to make my own anyway. There are exceptions. When I first played D&D as a kid, we played in their world, or our version of their world. Though usually these were just unconnected places in whichever module we’d brought home from the game store that week. When Fifth Edition D&D came out, I ran a few campaigns in the Sword Coast out of nostalgia. The Middle Earth Roleplaying Game as the name implies was set in Middle Earth which was the reason for playing it. But I never played Rolemaster in that game’s world… I can’t even remember if Rolemaster had a built in setting. Same with GURPS Fantasy or Fantasy Hero, someone would run a campaign and we’d play, but it was always the DM’s custom world we played in.

With Draw Steel I’m intrigued enough by the setting that I’m eager to explore the world that comes with the books. For the first time since I was in grade school and had the map of Greyhawk on the wall in my bedroom, I am eager to play in a published setting.

One reason for this eagerness is that the game is less generic than a lot of other fantasy roleplaying games, the ancestries are built for the game instead of dumping generic groups from an assortment of stories into a random fantasy medieval setting. This video covers a lot of the lore and is super intriguing. For one thing it suggests that a large part of why this setting is so developed is that it’s been pieced together over decades.

Another thing that I think makes the setting compelling is that the game design, and especially the part of the game spent out of combat, gives the character so many things to do that make them a part of the world. Having downtime projects that affect the world you’re in is huge. Using montages to do tests adds to the cinematic feel. Seeing one’s character affect the setting one is in makes the setting feel more real, more important, and more compelling.

And there are different types of campaigns I want to run in this setting. After reading the description of the city of Capital in the Heroes book, running an espionage campaign set in the greatest city that ever was or will be top of my list. But I also want to run a swashbuckling pirate or musketeer campaign. And that doesn’t even include the likely scores of traditional Tolkiensque, Howardesque , or Moorcockesque campaigns to run. A game where the characters are explicitly heroes is perfect for these sorts of adventures.

This isn’t to say that the game won’t work for original settings. I’m certain I’ll eventually make one or more of my own. But even then the notion of a Timescape implies that anything can be connected, and my temptation to link a campaign to such a robust set of settings to draw from would be huge.

I just can’t wait to get started and spend as much time as possible in this other world.