The Delian Tomb Post Mortem

My gaming group and I recently played through the entirety of Draw Steel's starter adventure: The Delian Tomb. We all had an absolute blast, and I'm so excited to tell you all about it.

A little background: I have been following the development of Draw Steel since its inception, and I believe it's the perfect game for my play style. No sacred cows, a setting I love, over the top heroic action, and very tactical, gamified systems for combat, negotiation, skill challenges (which they call montage tests), and downtime. It's sort of what I always wanted 5E to be.

One of my players was really excited to play Draw Steel at the beginning of 2026, and at the time, we were on break with the primary game I'm GMing currently: Curse of Strahd. I told him that I think it may be a little dangerous to start Draw Steel because when we return to Strahd to finish that campaign, I think some of the players might be soured on 5E's weirdness after playing, in my opinion, a game that is just more fun. Not just to play, but to run too! At the very least, I knew I was going to miss Draw Steel.

I said, what the hell? I can't wait to finish Curse of Strahd to introduce these players to Draw Steel, let's just do it now. And so after 13 sessions, we finished the Delian Tomb. I'll be referencing rules, locations, and encounters from the Delian Tomb and Draw Steel in this post as if you are familiar with the adventure and the game. Here's how it went...

Session 1:

I began this session by giving a lot of context on what Draw Steel is, and most of what I said you can find in the introduction and the definitions of Heroic, Tactical, Cinematic, Fantasy. After getting our bearings about what kind of game Draw Steel is, my players each picked a pre generated character included in the Delian Tomb.

We ended up with the following heroes: Sir Jonathan, a human Censor with the Paragon Order (he/him); Taran Torla, a human Null with the Metakinetic Tradition (he/him); Belladonna Flintwhistle, a polder Elementalist with the Fire Elemental Specialization (she/her); and Morgan Ardlet, a human Talent with the Telepath Tradition (he/him). They all know each other already, and are in the Feather Bed Inn in the village of Broadhurst.

A woman bursts in: Ashleigh, the village blacksmith, reporting that goblins took her daughter! Mercenaries in the tavern refuse to help her, and she goes to the heroes instead. Ashleigh fills them in on details, and they go to the tomb, and have the first encounter with goblins outside the tomb.

Over the course of this first session, I was really pleased to see that the players enjoyed leaning into that Cinematic keyword. Throughout each hero's introduction and the combat encounter we played, they were describing flavorful, action packed, epic stuff their characters were doing.

Session 2:

This session was a really short one due to real life circumstances. The heroes descend into the tomb and fight the second combat encounter, against !!20!! goblins. Madness!

My players were, again, loving how the tactical combat worked, and because they all got access to their second encounter abilities, and really leaning into the cinematic aspects of epic combat maneuvers.

After the goblins used their Swamp Stink Malice ability, Sir Jonathan described his "My Life for Yours" ability as burning away the cloud of toxin surrounding Morgan, curing him. Taran was using tons of forced movement to kill multiple minions in a single action. And they got some loot at the end, which means I got to tease how downtime works, which is one of my favorite aspects of Draw Steel.

Session 3:

The heroes descend deeper into the tomb. When they come across a dead goblin body, Taran activates a scythe trap he did not spot, and then the heroes talk about how to disable it. Taran intentionally activates the trap, and while the blade comes out of the wall, Morgan telekinetically rips it out, breaking the trap. Super cool idea, I had them roll and got a high enough result that it just worked, but Taran did take a little damage from the first trap activation.

The next room is an undead encounter that Sir Jonathan triggers after attempting to rip open a sarcophagus and reading the inscription on the wall: "When this fails, the battle is lost." This causes the undead to rise... Draw Steel!

The coolest thing in this encounter was Morgan showing off his new ability to Flashback, which is a Talent maneuver that allows him to redo another hero's heroic ability on his turn. It completely changed the fight, and then it got my players gears turning about how such a epic ability is just a maneuver.

After finding a mechanism to reveal a hidden door behind a statue in this room, the heroes descend into the final room of the first level of the Delian Tomb. Several goblins chant while a bugbear leads a ritual that is draining Violet's (the blacksmith's daughter) life energy to destroy a magical ward that prevents ingress deeper into the tomb. Draw Steel!

Sir Jonathan, on the first turn, uses his Judge ability to pull the bugbear closer, which reveals that anyone moved into the force field takes damage and is teleported somewhere else. I ruled that the person doing the forced movement into the magic field chooses the destination space of the teleport. This became a huge tactical advantage to the players, because so many people in this party have abilities that force move opponents. A lot of damage against their enemies was dealt using forced movement.

After the combat was over, they save Violet and finish the first level of the Delian Tomb, which rewards them with loot the bugbear was carrying and Taran (who reduced the bugbear to 0 Stamina) receives the "Violet's Savior" title.

With that, they return to town and Ashleigh offers her services as an Artisan Follower, and Abbot Loric approaches and gives them all the story hooks for Part 2. Afterwards, they take a Respite.

While Taran and Belladonna craft and Sir Jonathan sanctifies his weapon, Morgan's player was delighted to find that Draw Steel has a fishing minigame, and he immediately got a crit, which gave him a breakthrough on Taran's project.

The combat encounters in this session were super fun, and the players loved having something on the battlefield that became a central part of the tactics. Getting through part 1 also meant that the players all had full access to their character sheets and all their abilities. Draw Steel is a complex game and each hero has a full suite of abilities even at level 1, in contrast to many other heroic fantasy RPGs where you start pretty close to a commoner. The Delian Tomb's system of slowly introducing new abilities over the first few combat encounters was a huge success in letting people get acquainted with the rules gradually, so they had a solid grasp of the mechanics by the time part 2 rolled around.

One of the (many) things I love about Draw Steel is how downtime projects have mechanics, but they are so simple and straightforward. We were running late during this session, and I wish I ended it with the heroes returning to Broadhurst, and then started the next session with a Respite and Abbot Loric since it was a little overwhelming to the players to get so much new stuff right at the end of a long session. I got excited, okay?!

Session 4:

The first quest lead the heroes pursue is to speak to Orson the charcoal burner who specifically asked for the heroes. Arriving, this crazy man tells them about a big bug that stole an amulet of his that depicts "the sky fire". He asks them to retrieve it, and that another farm was attacked by this same bug.

Ellory's pig farm contains a huge hole that leads to an underground tunnel network that the heroes must navigate to find the bug's nest. Thus begins the first Montage Test we did. After setting the scene, I asked the players what they wanted to do, but my descriptions left the players quite confused about what they could and couldn't do, or what their goals were in the montage test. After watching MCDM's James Introcaso run this part of the Delian Tomb for some inspiration, I discovered his method of running montage tests is to set the scene narratively, then put out a bunch of sheets of paper or cards that clearly state each of the obstacles in the montage test, but NOT how to overcome them! I used this for future montage tests throughout the adventure, and this method worked out great.

Arriving in the nest, the heroes confront the bug and fight it. There was a hiccup about how illuminated this place is and if the heroes need to bring light, but we quickly rectified that issue, as Draw Steel does not worry much about those sorts of details. The fight against the Arrix was our first solo monster encounter! Solo monsters are an amazing part of Draw Steel, and ever since I started running big boss monsters in TTRPGs I wanted some clear design on how to make a tough and meaningful combat encounter where a whole party of heroes beats up a single combatant. Draw Steel's solo monsters have a lot of Stamina, take two turns a round, and have a variety of maneuvers, triggered actions, villain actions, and Malice abilities they can use off their turn to challenge the heroes.

My players had a blast with this encounter, and it was in large part due to the interactive battlefield. The arrix's nest is full of sharpened bones from its previous prey lodged into the dirt walls and pock marked with holes the heroes and the arrix could fall into. The heroes' party composition being what it is, a huge amount of damage dealt to the arixx was via forced movement. The one thing I screwed up that may have allowed this encounter to have a lot more teeth is directly related to the forced movement tactics: I entirely forgot about the monster's stability, which is a statistic that reduces forced movement in squares equal to the stability score. Huge mistake on my end, made the fight easier than I intended, but they still had a ton of fun.

After the heroes slay the arixx, Sir Jonathan receives the Monster Bane title, they find Orson's amulet which they discover is an Amulet of the Delian Order, they return to Ellory and she makes good on her promise of bacon for life! When they return to Orson, he drops the "crazy old kook" act and reveals he is a former adventurer belonging to an organization called the Coursers and invites them to join. Morgan and Belladonna, the two heroes without titles yet, join and gain the Courser: Chanterelle title.

Titles in Draw Steel are just one of many non monetary rewards the heroes can gain over the course of their adventures. I think each one is basically the equivalent of a 5E feat, and many have multiple benefits associated with each of them, which allowed Morgan and Belladonna, who both got the same title, to get different benefits from the same title. I really like this system for non monetary or magic item rewards, but I do get worried about title bloat in a long term campaign based on how often a Director might hand out titles, because as far as I understand in the core rules, there is no limit to the amount of title benefits one hero can receive at a time.

Session 5:

This session, the heroes talk to Mikael and Tansy and follow their rumors of a huge wolf south of town hiding in a riverside cave. After talking with these villagers, the heroes correctly deduce that the monster is a werewolf, and Mikael is cursed with lycanthropy after he was bitten by it.

Arriving at the cave by the river, the heroes find a shepherd outside, shaking with fear and surrounded by slaughtered sheep, looking into the cave. The shepherd, Yerris, tells them that a huge wolf came out of the cave, killed his sheep, then dragged his brother Oleq into the cave. They assure him they will get him back, and they descend deeper in.

When the heroes arrive at a glowing river, the magically inclined heroes and those with the Timescape skill recognize this area as an area of bilocation with Quintessence, the plane of all elements. I absolutely love the blending of space fantasy and medieval fantasy in the original setting of Draw Steel, and to get that point across, I used language Matt Colville uses to describe all of the otherworldly, Timescape related aspects of his setting; that being, psuedo-scientific/math jargon rather than fantasy magic jargon. The river is full of wolf-like water elementals that jump from the water and attack. Draw Steel!

On paper, this encounter was a lot more difficult to parse than others. The wolves have a lot of movement options and I never felt like I was playing them super optimally, but in Draw Steel, as long as you are using their statblocks correctly, your players will think you are tactical genius because their abilities sort of do the work for you. Each encounter in the Delian Tomb is in a separate PDF file that details starting positions, stat blocks used, and number/types of enemies. It also includes, in each encounter, a heading titled "Tactics" to tell you how these monsters interact with the heroes, each other, and the environment. I basically ignored the tactics section for each encounter, to varying degrees of success (I'll get to that in a second). They are good baselines, but don't feel beholden to them.

After the heroes dispatch the water elementals, they move further into the cave and find Oleq being cornered by the werewolf. Sir Jonathan calls out "HALT" when the werewolf approaches to bite Oleq. Draw Steel!

This is one of those encounters I feel like you can ignore the Tactics section on. The tactics section says that the werewolf entirely focuses on cursing Oleq with lycanthropy, which requires two attacks on him, burning the werewolf's first round of combat because it is a solo creature that can take two turns a round. That made this fight significantly easier since the heroes could just wail on the werewolf in the first round without any repercussions. I suppose the intent is that using pull abilities, the heroes could save Oleq from being cursed, but it would still focus all of its energies on hurting Oleq until he is cursed. If the idea is that the heroes must engage with a "Find a Cure" downtime project in order to cure lycanthropy, then having the werewolf bite Oleq before initiative is rolled, you will have a more fun dynamic combat encounter. I never got to use the werewolf's third villain action because it was taking so much damage in the first round (and then got critted later).

After killing the werewolf, the heroes return Oleq to his brother Yerris and escort them back to town. They bring the body of the werewolf to Orson for safe keeping until they take a Respite and attempt to find a cure for Mikael and Oleq. They then revisit the Delian Tomb to see if anyone has broken the ward inside. Thankfully, the magic is still intact, but there is evidence of other people moving about this chamber.

They visit the Feather Bed Inn and meet the full Gilded Hand, the mercenaries they saw in the first session: Mara, a human elementalist; Targon, a human Tactician; Gorek, a dwarf Fury; Illwyth, a wode elf Shadow; and Boddorff Buckfeather, a polder Conduit (though he hides his holy symbol). Boddorff leads the conversation, very interested in the tomb, and Belladonna intuits that the footprints found in the tomb match the size and weight of each of the members of the Gilded Hand. Illwyth, however, seems uncomfortable with the group and fiddles with an emerald ring.

Session 6:

This session, the heroes speak to Vaughn, the woodcutter, who is paranoid because he discovered bandits out in the Silver Wood. He and his son have been guarding their home and not doing their job of supplying Broadhurst with wood. They are exhausted, starving, and at the end of their rope. The heroes travel north and find a fortified ruin on a lake, discover a trapped boat, and sail it to the island. They dispatch of every bandit inside, including the chief Alvira and her Null second-in-command.

Afterwards, the heroes speak to another bandit who was attempting to get out of his current lifestyle named Thurston. It is possible to negotiate with Thurston, to have the bandits leave the fort so the heroes could dispatch of Alvira alone, but I decided to make this a standard roleplaying encounter with no negotiation because the heroes had already killed Alvira! Thurston still wants a pardon from the reeve Rosamund, which the heroes provide for him as well as turning in Brune the butcher because he was working for the Forsaken Wraiths bandits.

This quest was okay, but I think the Alvira encounter really suffered because she only has one lackey at her command. Alvira uses the bandit chief statblock, which is a leader that makes use of all the other combatants that she has in her command. Without a lot of enemies in the encounter, it fell flat. However, as best as I could tell, there is no guidance for if the alarms are raised, Alvira comes into the fray in the courtyard of the fort. I think that was a missed opportunity, and when I run this again, I am definitely including Alvira in the courtyard encounter if the alarm is raised.

Afterwards, the heroes return to Broadhurst and take a respite. Belladonna's renown, a score measuring heroic fame and one of the primary rewards in Draw Steel, increases enough that she gains Abbot Loric as a sage follower. Again, the renown system is simple, functional, and gets out of the way. The only thing I wish was different about Renown and Wealth is more uses and maybe a few more levels, maybe things to spend them on so they decrement? Wealth has an optional rule for that in the core rules, but it's probably something that is fairly easy to homebrew.

The heroes collectively finish the cure for lycanthropy, and I deployed a, admittedly not well thought out, downtime project event. A downtime project event is something that might happen while the heroes are in the middle of a respite to spice up the narrative surrounding these long term projects. I rolled and the event was this:

"Before the roll, a rumor arises that the project is being worked on in service to an evil entity. People start showing up to the hero’s place of respite, demanding that they repent their wicked ways. If the rumors aren’t disproved, locals form a mob to stop the project." Draw Steel Heroes, pp. 304.

I interpreted this as the villagers believing the heroes working on this alchemical/magical cure was misunderstood. The villagers believed the heroes were working to curse the town! And so what followed was a fantastic roleplaying scene where the heroes demonstrated their curing of Oleq and Mikael from their lycanthropy in front of all the villagers in the town square, displaying benevolence. Throughout all this, Illwyth watches from the Feather Bed Inn.

The project events are all worded similarly, with no real mechanical guidance or effects, just really interesting prompts. In previous posts on this blog, I have said that I think of myself as much more of a writer style GM than an improv style GM, and so I would plan out these project events using the guidance in the core rules. I would still roll and randomly generate them, but I would keep those results secret, expand them in prep notes, and narratively weave them into the respites. Depending on the roll and my ideas for how they interact with the project event, I might have encounters, tests, montage tests, negotiations, or whatever else inspires me as part of the event. Or maybe not and they are just roleplaying interludes!

Session 7:

This session, the heroes talk to almost everyone in Broadhurst to tie up loose ends. They speak to Tansy and Mikael about the werewolf issue, and as a reward they give the heroes the materials and components for a Red Color Cloak. They speak to Vaughn and his son Percy about dealing with the bandits, and Vaughn is thankful he can get back to work.

The heroes speak to Saberna, a young woman working the smokehouse about stolen food, but with the Forsaken Wraiths plotline resolved and Brune taken in as a thief, who was exploiting Saberna, they avoided that plotline and montage test in which Saberna would be chased through Broadhurst. They speak to Robin and Sarah, the two millers working the granary, and learn that someone has been stealing grain. They find a pocket knife with a carved "P" on the handle, and Belladonna suspects it's Percy's, but they do not inquire further. Yet.

Finally, they look into the problems with the merchants in town. The cobbler Harem is missing a leather shipment from a carter named Forbin, who never arrived in town. The dwarf stone mason Dunquat is preparing to leave Broadhurst because her work is drying up: the stone merchant Murkik is refusing to sell her stone unless she gives him a magical bag she owns. The heroes tell her they will speak to Murkik.

They go to the Feather Bed Inn and have their first negotiation with Murkik. I explained how the negotiation system in Draw Steel worked, but our first use of the system was rough. The heroes learn that a mage and his ogre minions kidnapped his dwarf friends on the road to Broadhurst and demands magical treasures to give them back. The heroes increase Murkik's interest to 4, which made him take the original deal with Dunquat and the heroes swear to save his friends.

The negotiation system in Draw Steel is a fantastic system but because it is a new framework for roleplaying that my players are not used to, this first one was basically a tutorial on how it worked. Some of my players did not like negotiation at all. They felt stressed out because of the stakes and pressure put on a social encounter (something they feel like they already have to deal with in their day-to-day life). For those same reasons, I love the negotiation system. I had to explain it at the table but I really recommend players and Directors read that chapter in full. My players made long, roundabout arguments that hit on several different points, including motivations and pitfalls in the same argument. They also began looking at it way more mechanically than narratively.

Here's what I learned about running negotiations from the Delian Tomb. First, I think everyone should read the motivations and pitfalls section to get a feel for what an argument might look like. Think of making an argument like a single action in a combat encounter, not a huge speech to win over someone in one fell swoop, like other games would with a single die roll. Each argument will sway the NPC (or not!) a little at a time. Secondly, throughout the Delian Tomb I have been very transparent about mechanics. With negotiation, I revealed Interest and Patience scores, as well as argument test difficulties, which made my players treat it a lot more like a game to win than a person they are negotiating with. In the future, I am going to try telling the players when they are entering a negotiation, but not explicitly reveal Interest or Patience scores, or tell them exactly what the motivation or pitfall they may uncover is, as well as keeping test difficulties hidden. I think in that sense, hiding some aspects of the system would allow them to get way more into the roleplay without attempting to game the system by brute forcing it (even though it is, ultimately, a game. You know what I mean).

The negotiation with Illwyth, on the other hand, went swimmingly. The players got their sea legs a little bit more underneath them and were able to convince Illwyth to join them as a retainer. She also reveals to them the location of the Jagged Edge's hideout: an old Caelian ruin, Castle Andreas.

Session 8:

This session I had the absolute delight to introduce another player to my Draw Steel group, a sibling of one of my players that was visiting from out of town. The heroes decide to follow the lead of the missing merchants and kidnapped dwarves to the mage tower, where outside they find a new dwarf hero that joined us for this session: Orik.

Orik is a dwarf Fury who knows the dwarves inside the tower and has gotten word they were kidnapped (I didn't spend too much on this narrative, I just wanted to get into the action quickly and this player choosing dwarf Fury worked really easily). They discover the extradimensional space of the tower and when they attempt to ascend to the second story, seven glowing orbs descend and transform into glass spiders. Draw Steel!

This combat encounter has some puzzle elements. Each glass spider is tied to a mirror mounted on the walls based on colors, and if you destroy a mirror before it transforms into a glass spider, the glass spider associated with that color does not enter the combat. This encounter became a race to destroy the mirrors while also putting pressure on the glass spiders so that the heroes' Stamina was not drained entirely. Whenever a hero uncovered the tarp hiding the mirror's color, I had them randomly generate it using a die, but if when I run this adventure again, I would probably set the mirror colors in a clockwise order on the battle map, so the players could figure out the sequence and destroy the mirrors without having to actually go over to them and uncover them. If they knew that the north position was a red mirror and the one to its right is an orange mirror, they could intuit that the violet spider would be to the left of the red mirror.

I learn throughout this combat encounter that Orik's player (who I had never played with before) is someone who thinks very tactically and I breathed an internal sigh of relief. People come to RPGs for many different reasons. There are some players that come for narrative heavy games that might roll their eyes at a tactically heavy game. I was worried about throwing a new player into the deep end of Draw Steel not knowing their tastes, but they immediately "got it", and were offering tactical advice TO THE OTHER PLAYERS within their first combat encounter! They also reported that for a long time they have been attempting to implement homebrew rules in their D&D 5E game to add circumstantial tactical advantages to the combat, while in Draw Steel things like flanking and high ground are natively in the system.

Ascending the tower, the heroes find a group of hostages that Orik sends down to the ground floor. The hostages tell them there are others that were brought above and have not come back. Then, descending the stairs, an ogre appears that calls for his friend and announces there are intruders. Draw Steel!

The ogre fight in my game only featured the two ogres on the second level of the tower, rather than them fighting alongside a bunch of mohler minions (a sort of hairy pig like animal that fight alongside orcs in Draw Steel). I wish I did a little more work to put some more combatants in this encounter or draw the mohlers down to the second story, because the heroes smoked these ogres fast. They are elites and their statblocks are really fun, but I think for future encounters in which I deploy ogres, I would have them reinforce other combatants so they could take the spotlight. In MCDM's playthrough of the Delian Tomb, James deployed two ogres at Castle Andreas to support the horde of goblins there.

Dispatching of the ogres, the heroes ascend through the third level, where the ogres made their home, looted material components for treasures as well as the mage Vurkor's journal, then move to the final, top level of the tower.

Session 9:

The heroes immediately engage the orc mage in combat, while avoiding the dwarf he was conversing with. They dispatch him quickly and easily, but due to my players cinematic description of Vurkor's death, they do not have a chance to avoid the tower's crumbling after they loot his pendant. Montage Test to escape the crumbling tower!

The dwarf Bassa provides a little assistance on the montage test, but because last week Orik's exit was escorting the prisoners back to town by destroying the tower's interior wall from the inside (impossible in the adventure but I thought it was neat), I ruled any obstacles related to helping out the hostages that were assumed to be with the heroes were not available. Even so, they make it out with a total success.

Orik departs from the heroes and they return to Broadhurst, but the square seems oddly quiet. Suddenly, the Gilded Hand emerges from the shadows, Boddorff reveals his holy symbol of Pentalion the Paladin, a saint of Nikros. Draw Steel!

I have four players but having Illwyth join the party makes five heroes according to encounter building rules, but Illwyth does not contribute to Malice generation with Victories. There was a lot of factors here that made this fight hard to balance, but I think I nailed it on the first run. The heroes were stacked with the Victories they received from the mage tower and had Illwyth with them, so they were a force to be reckoned with. I decided to throw the full Gilded Hand at them, with Targon showing up in a later round, with Mara and Gorek's Stamina reduced by 20 each. This fight came down to the wire, and my players had an absolute blast using the well in the town square to trap the Gilded Hand inside. But the villains were also doing this! The fight became a brawl to get the other side into the well using all sorts of forced movement combos. Might be my favorite combat in the entire adventure, but I am interested to deploy 5 rivals against 5 heroes at level 2, which is the minimum level of rivals.

Gorek is the last surviving member of the Gilded Hand and he surrenders, and tells the heroes he will return to Kal Kalavar, the Hanging City. The heroes take another respite, and advance to level 2!

Session 10:

We begin this session by doing the respite activities we didn't do last time, and Morgan successfully fishes for the first time this adventure, giving Jonathan a hearty meal. Morgan's player absolutely loved the fishing minigame, I think mostly for its novelty, but if you manage to get a critical success, some crazy stuff can happen during fishing. No spoilers, read the table for yourself in the Heroes book!

Next, the heroes descend to the second level of the Delian Tomb. Some fairly standard combat encounters followed. I followed the encounter book guidelines and found no issues. Side note: Draw Steel undead are just so fun. I'm definitely going to be writing some adventures that heavily feature undead in them.

In the first chamber a fire trap went off which burned one of the heroes after they got a Tier 1 result to avoid it. Belladonna, knowing she has fire immunity equal to the most damage dealt by that trap, simply walks through the fire. I thought this player's idea was great and a creative use of the character sheet, so I let them pass that obstacle without another die roll needed.

In one of the chambers, the heroes must solve a puzzle involving equipping knights present at a long forgotten battle with helmet and weapons. I have never been someone that really got into these word riddles and rarely deploy them at the table, but I was pleased to learn this particular group of players really enjoyed working it out on their own, and asked for no hints. This group only formed roughly a year ago at the beginning of my Curse of Strahd campaign, and contains players I've played with before, but never this specific permutation of people. It's always really exciting to learn what aspects of the game grab every player in your group's attention. I think this group really enjoys mechanics and they all lock in when there was a puzzle or combat on the board; which in Draw Steel, happens a LOT! It seems like an obvious bit of advice, but pay attention to the stuff your players engage with. Now you know what to do to hook them when attention starts flagging.

The Wallmaster monster found in the Delian Tomb is really fun, it starts each combat round by drastically changing the battlefield and then uses those changes to damage the heroes. Super cool, I can't wait to use that monster in other combat encounters.

When the heroes complete all the other chambers and gain the two halves of the Delian shield that will unlock the final room of this level, they descend. Upon entering, they see the boss of the first level: the tomb horror! A mass of undead flesh and corrupted vegetation!

Session 11:

Draw Steel! Super cool combat encounter, no complaints, lessons or changes. Great monsters, lot of fun.

Behind the tomb horror chamber, the heroes discover a treasury of trophies the Delian Order once gathered. Among them they find the magic axe Heelcutter, vials of fire giant blood, and a chalice that is not the Cup of Iulius but Sir Jonathan figures out to place Illwyth's Caelian Knight Ring into the cup to access the third and final level of the Tomb.

On the stairway down, Taran detects and avoids the traps on the stairs, and as the heroes move onto a series of twisting corridors, traps spring to life and it's a montage test to get to the other side.

When the heroes emerge out of the trapped hallway, slimes approach and we call it for the night.

Session 12:

Draw Steel against slimes! The gummy balls have really fun mechanics where if they start moving in a direction, using their own movement or they are force moved, they continue moving in that direction until they reach an obstruction, but that never really came up in this encounter. Another slime allowed the Director to generate more Malice equal to the number of those combatants on the field, which was really fun and as I told my players that, they immediately prioritized killing those slimes.

Prior to running this combat encounter, I played in a playtest of MCDM's third Draw Steel core rulebook: Encounters. This playtest was a delve (basically a three room dungeon of combat encounters) which heavily featured oozes. So I got to play against MCDM oozes before running them in this session, and I was introduced to a mechanic of theirs when they take damage, they can split, creating two new slimes each with half the hit points of the original slime. That was easy enough to do in a VTT that we were playing in, because it effectively boiled down to the Director copying and pasting a combatant on the VTT, then adjusting Stamina values accordingly. But that sort of mechanic is one I have despised ever since I started running games because I typically run at the table in person, and there is so much busywork involved in splitting oozes.

That is, until I realized I could just use tokens and wet erase markers. Throughout running this adventure, I picked up these tokens from my friendly local game store and I used them often for my minions, color coding them for each squad. I realized I could just write in wet erase marker an indicator for which creature it was. For example, I used green tokens for the gummy balls, and wrote the number it was on each gummy ball: 1A, 2A, etc. When gummy ball 1A split, I now had gummy ball 1A and 1B, both with half as much Stamina as before splitting. To run this, I prepared Stawl with a bunch of backup slimes in reserve so I could quickly add them to the combat encounter, mark down which slime it was. It was super easy to do! The plastic tokens are easy to wipe wet erase marker off of, whereas I would be worried about screwing up the paint job on nicely painted minis. This worked like a charm, with super little friction as opposed to other games that have splitting mechanics. This wasn't something Draw Steel did to improve this mechanic, but my own solution to this problem of splitting combatants. Try it out!

Side note: Stawl is a must have when running Draw Steel, and Forge Steel is a must have if you are playing Draw Steel. Both are community created companions to make players and Director's lives easier. Highly recommend checking out both of them.

During this combat encounter, traps kept going off in the room, and down a narrow hallway the heroes could hear the pulling of levers. Belladonna slips down the hallway and blasts the room on the far side with magic, and finds at the end a charred crawling claw, the operator of the traps. Players got a good laugh out of that one. They also find a silver key that they discover unlocks the door at the bottom of the final staircase to the boss of the Delian Tomb and guardian of the Cup of Iulius: Dame Cornelia.

Dame Cornelia was locked down by Sir Jonathan a majority of this fight, so I did not get to do a lot of really cool abilities, but that's the job of the Censor class: find the biggest, baddest enemy in the encounter, and make them have a really bad day. Still, the amount of combatants in this encounter meant that the heroes, especially the front line, felt like they were always in danger. That mattered little when enemies swarmed Taran the Null, who handily thinned their numbers with many burst abilities.

With Dame Cornelia dead, the heroes claim the Cup of Iulius and exit the tomb, earning the Revenger's Wrap treasure and the Delian Delvers title. However, outside they find a goblin scout watching the tomb, and Morgan captures him using his telekinesis. The goblin spills lots of information, but I primarily wanted this goblin to convey that Queen Bargnot is a smart, competent leader, and is willing to negotiate. The heroes let the goblin go and return to Broadhurst for a respite, discussing what approach they should take against Queen Bargnot.

Morgan and Taran go fishing, and he rolls another fishing event. This time, he reels in a bottle that contains a contract written in Anjali, the language of contract law spoken in the Seven Cities of Hell. The script is in Caelian, so he can speak the words, and as he does, a devil appears and offers his fishing to be improved significantly in exchange for his soul.

Now, this event can be found in the fishing events table in Draw Steel: Heroes. And I decided I wanted this to be a roleplay encounter with a devil of the Timescape. As written, simply speaking aloud the contract binds your soul to the devil. Though my player was tempted by the deal, he ultimately did not take it. I realize now I should have ran it by the book. This is an RPG, and that just means that if he unintentionally sold his soul, it's another adventure hook! He can certainly get it back, look at what Baldur's Gate 3 did with the Raphael questline.

The heroes take two respites back to back because the goblin informed them Queen Bargnot would attack Broadhurst after three respites. During that time they take two respites and complete several consumable treasures. Taran also gains the Angler title for excellent fishing, then the heroes travel to the ruins of Castle Andreas.

Session 13:

Before leaving Broadhurst, Belladonna speaks to Percy, Vaughn's son, who she believes was the grain thief. He admits to his thievery, and his father volunteers to face whatever punishment is set for Percy, but Belladonna tells him they will not turn him in. As thanks, Vaughn gives Belladonna some consumable invigorating flowers - three Snapdragons.

Led by Illwyth, the heroes travel to Castle Andreas. Sir Jonathan calls out to the guards, saying he wants an audience with the Queen. Shortly thereafter, a bugbear named Cravard exits the castle and escorts them to the top level, where Queen Bargnot argues with her advisors. The heroes, face to face with Queen Bargnot, draw their swords, and a fight breaks out!

Draw Steel! With Queen Bargnot and Cravard both present, the heroes sustained a lot of damage in the first round, but by the end of the second round, the Queen was dead, and all the goblins in the castle scatter into the wilderness. The heroes have won the day, and Broadhurst is safe once more.

They return to the village and speak to Orson about where their next adventures lie, and they decide to travel south to the port city of Blackbottom.

And that's where our story came to an end!

Closing Thoughts:

Running Draw Steel for my friends has been some of the most fun I have had running RPGs since I began in this hobby roughly 10 years ago. They all had a blast with the mechanics, and I think those are where Draw Steel is strongest. The designers have said so: they sought out to make a very fun, playable game first and foremost, and succeeded in spades.

Even before we finished this campaign, one of my players was hooked on running the Condemned for us, an upcoming Draw Steel adventure heavily inspired by the Suicide Squad. The last time I introduced a new RPG to people that inspired them enough to run was starting 5E way back in the day, so Draw Steel must be doing something right!

I spoke to my players after we concluded our final session, and they thought that combat and respites were their favorite parts of the game. I love having concrete, but simple and straightforward rules for advancing projects in the heroes' downtime. Combat was always fun for all the reasons you have probably already heard about online. My players also quickly got the gameplay loop where the heroes are constantly torn between gaining more Victories or running out of Recoveries after the first 2 sessions.

I think the Montage Test system is the standout for me in terms of mechanics that doesn't get the spotlight that combat does. I have been trying to make some kind of skill challenge mini game function in 5E over the years I have run it, and Draw Steel cracked that problem, especially when you clearly lay out the obstacles that must be overcome. And the system itself is fairly easy to import to any other fantasy RPG you might be running. The time limit, success, and failure limit are all system agnostic. If an RPG you are playing has a binary pass/fail core die mechanic, you will have to homebrew a little in order to get partial or mixed success results, but that's a fairly easy thing to implement.

While running Draw Steel, I think being unambiguous and clear about the mechanics and the result of players interaction with those mechanics is going to take you far.

The part of the game my players did not enjoy is the Negotiation system. I think we all need more experience with it under our belt to get it, but this is one of those things where I would opt to hide some of the mechanics, especially Patience, Interest, and instead speaking about motivations and pitfalls in natural language rather than giving it out as a list as I was doing in this adventure.

I want to see more mechanically significant uses for Wealth and Renown, as well as some type of base building or organization mechanics. With MCDM's history of the Strongholds and Followers followed by Kingdoms and Warfare supplements for 5E, I think that is a natural step for them to take, and if they don't think that's a evolution they want for the game, I am really excited to see what the community might come up to fill those gaps.

(Side note: While editing, a community member already homebrewed a new system for Strongholds in Draw Steel. Check it out here!)

MCDM, under the design direction of Matt Colville and leadership of James Introcaso, has made the game I always wanted a heroic fantasy RPG to be. The combat is fun, the abilities make you feel like an epic badass superhero, and there are clear, significant mechanics for negotiation, downtime, and skill challenges. It has quickly become my favorite RPG of all time, and once my current campaign finishes up, this will be my main game for the foreseeable future.

Thanks for reading, until next time!