Fortunes Below Dev Diary 1: Laying the Foundation

Hello everyone! If this is the first time we've met, I'm Chris Rendon, I am a writer, actor, director, and game designer from Los Angeles, and I have been playing TTRPGs for about a decade. I consider myself a storyteller at heart, so many of my RPG campaigns have been homebrew narratives. Since the release of Draw Steel by MCDM Productions, I've realized that this game is what I've always wanted from a heroic fantasy TTRPG, and decided to marry my two passions together and attempt to publish a TTRPG adventure. Earlier this year I released The Violet Heart, a 1st Level Quest for Draw Steel. It was my first foray into independent RPG design and publishing. I also contributed to Hooked on Crafting by the Dice Society, which contains quest hooks for every item prerequisite in Draw Steel. I made the Hulking Gunk for that one!

While working on the Violet Heart, I was quietly toiling away for months. Writing, designing, editing, rewriting, learning layout, getting art, all myself. I ran limited playtests, and never showed the text to anyone before it was complete.

I am immensely proud of that product, but I think I could do better. A lot better. I discovered the Draw Steel Brewery through one of my playtesters and there are some amazing game designers in that community, all working on tons of different projects. Since completing the Violet Heart I have been involved in playtests with MCDM and the Draw Steel Brewery, and realized the vital importance of getting feedback on content that is not final in order to make the final product that much better. I discovered a much better workflow to apply to my future adventure designs. Which brings us to now.

I am spinning up production on the next adventure: Fortunes Below, a 2nd Level Adventure for Draw Steel. I am going to be doing something different from my previous work with the Violet Heart: I am going to try some open development for this adventure, through a series of development diaries, this one being the first. I have two primary goals: The first is to walk through the design process, decisions, and dead ends. I want to document this journey for any aspiring game designers that wish to make adventure. The second is to get more feedback on parts of this adventure as they become ready. I might show off some monsters, dynamic terrain objects, or creative writing processes in some of these blog posts as I finish them. In the meantime, I will be working on the adventure and running private playtests. Once a small chapter or adventure site is ready, I will post its current iteration here. These previews will only be the text and some rough maps; there will be no art, fancy layout, and it will not be edited. In these posts with adventure previews, I will also include a feedback form.

Some posts might be short, some might be long! I am going to attempt to have a cadence of posting updates at least twice a month. We'll see if I can meet that goal – no promises. The other thing to note is that while this first blog post is available to the public, you must be a subscriber to read further.

On with the show.

What is this adventure?

I have a ton of one line ideas in a document about Draw Steel adventure concepts, and most of them came from browsing through the monster book, reading their lore and abilities, and wanting to find ways to make an adventure centered around that particular monster. The second adventure I wanted to make originally featured dwarves, but I decided to put that one on the backburner while I focused on another idea: an adventure that featured the fossil cryptic monster and a rival party of greedy treasure seekers.

I was originally planning for this project to be the size of a quest, 6-8 Victories or so, but as I began the brainstorming process, I realized that in order to do this idea justice, it needed to expand significantly. So I began working with the idea of a three act structure with a timer, much like the Fall of Blackbottom adventure.

The Violet Heart was a very linear adventure, an idea that I really don't have a problem with, especially with the size that it was. But with an adventure with potentially enough Victories inside to level up, I needed to rethink the way that I structured the adventure. I wanted to make player choices and the order in which they tackle encounters matter. I wanted the ticking clock to change the ultimate outcome of the adventure. More on that later!

That being said, I think the total number of Victories in this adventure can advance the heroes a full level, but you don't have to visit the major adventure sites to progress, you might only need to visit two or three. You might not even want to visit all the adventure sites, because while the heroes are helping out in the local area, the villains are continuing their plans. The clock is always ticking. And to that end, depending the countdown, some locations and encounters will change over time.

The next major thing I began to think about was how to frame this adventure narratively. I really enjoy that a core thesis of Draw Steel is that the heroes are the bulwark standing between villainy and the common people. Classic superhero stuff. Especially at level 2, I wanted the threat to be human, grounded, relatable. When I thought about greedy treasure hunters, I was reminded of AI data centers draining water supplies, fracking for oil, and climate change negatively impacting crops and animal life. I decided that a major threat to the common people was natural disasters or environmental changes that made life much harder. The villainy did not come from tyrants seeking to subject the populace. It's about how avarice drives people to push harder and further to sate their hunger, other people be damned. The heroes must step in to protect the people from the fallout of huge ambition.

The next problem I faced is the concept of enemies. I knew what the two major villains were: the party of rival treasure seekers were the primary antagonists, and the fossil cryptic might be a creature the heroes fight, depending on their actions in the adventure. I also decided that the treasure seekers are hiring help from other humanoids, so the heroes get to fight more than just one monster band. However, if there was no throughline of common enemies, I don't think the adventure would have a strong identity. So the more I thought about the fossil cryptic and some other preliminary ideas about magical guardians of the adventure sites, I decided the commonality through this adventure would be elementals as enemies.

This presented a new challenge: There are few elemental statblocks in Draw Steel, all of them are elites, and none are of level 2. And I wanted some combat encounters to purely be against elementals of a particular element or combination of elements – for example, a combat against variations of rot, void, and rot/void elementals, each with different monster roles. This significantly increased the scope of this adventure, because it will essentially include a new monster band's worth of elementals, which means a lot more to test. Not to worry, defining scope is much easier early in the project than later. The idea of elemental guardians of magical tombs also played nicely into the local area full of natural resources and thriving crops. But all that starts to go to shit once the elementals are awakened from their slumber.

By the end of the "pre production" process, I had many of the pieces in place. I brainstormed for weeks attempting to crack these issues, then slowly built out my outline. So here's the pitch for Fortunes Below.

Fortunes Below starts with the heroes in a prosperous Vaslorian market town celebrating a harvest festival when the earth cracks open and elementals pour out of the earth. Heroes defend the town and learn that the town is built atop the tomb of a saint whose treasures are interred inside, but it is locked. They must travel around the local area, solving problems brought about by a party of treasure seekers attempting to open up this tomb and gain the keys to get inside the tomb. By the end, depending on how much time the heroes spent, they might have to face the treasure seekers inside the tomb or face the fossil cryptic guardian when it awakens and puts the town at risk.

(Side note: I did not intend that my first two adventures are about power hungry villains delving into ancient tombs attempting to claim treasure and the heroes attempting to stop them. It just worked out that way. I got more creative ideas in the future, I promise.)

Hopefully that sounds fun! I'm really excited to continue working on it. Next time we'll talk about defining scope and the process of creating the outline.

Until next time!