For the Director

In film and TV, the director collaborates with writers, actors, designers, and the many other people working together on a collective story, then makes that story shine. That's also what the Director in Draw Steel does! If you plan on being the Director of a Draw Steel session or campaign, this chapter of the book focuses on your role in the game.

Before we dive into helpful advice for Directors, we want to make you aware of the Running the Game series of videos on Matthew Colville's YouTube channel. Hey, we know that guy! He's the Design Director of this game! Most of these videos reference the world's oldest roleplaying game, but their advice is universal to folks running tabletop RPGs everywhere.

What's a Campaign?

A campaign is the entire story of a group of heroes told while playing the game. It starts with a campaign pitch from the Director to the other players. During the pitch, the Director tells the players about the setting where the game takes place and what kinds of stories the heroes will undertake.

If the players like the pitch, they create heroes and then the game begins! The Director prepares and runs adventures which are played out over a series of game sessions. During these sessions, the heroes play out scenes that include combat encounters, negotiations, montage tests, investigations, downtime projects, and more.

The best way to think of a campaign is to compare it to a film saga, a series of novels, or an epic television show. Each adventure that makes up a campaign is one film, book, or season of television in that series. Each game session is then an act of the adventure's film, a chapter of its book, or an episode in its TV season. Adventures might be tied together by an overarching villain who the heroes face in a thrilling final encounter. Or they might have connected goals, such as the heroes hunting and destroying evil artifacts, that tie them together in a campaign. These ties between adventures aren't necessary, but many players are drawn in by a cohesive campaign story.

Some campaigns are short, spanning only a single adventure or even just one session of play. Most last a good while longer than that, and contain multiple adventures. The longest campaigns feature many adventures and take the heroes from 1st to 10th level.

You're Not Being Tested

You don't need to memorize every single rule and exception before you start running Draw Steel. This is a big book, and you're allowed to use it while you play! Whenever a question comes up at the table, you can tell the other players, "Let me reference the old texts," and find the right answer.

You absolutely don't need to know every ability or feature that the heroes have access to. Let the players be the experts on their characters. And if a player is ever unsure of how an ability works, have them read it out loud so you can talk it through, or you can look up the answer together.

The Director's Role

The Director has a number of key jobs in this game, which we'll go over in this chapter:

• Before a campaign starts, the Director pitches the idea of their campaign to the players.
• Before each game, the Director prepares the adventure by building scenes that include encounters, negotiations, and downtime activities.
• During the game, the Director presents the scenes they've prepared to the players.
• During the game, the Director is responsible for how the NPCs and the environment react to the actions of the heroes. This includes changing and skipping prepared scenes and running new scenes on the fly.
• During the game, the Director acts as a referee, adjudicating the rules. If something isn't covered by the rules, the Director decides how to determine what happens next in the game.
• After the game, the Director makes or reviews notes covering what happened during the game, then starts planning for the next game session.

First Time Running a Game

If this is your first time ever running a Draw Steel game, good for you! Directing a game is a super rewarding experience that allows you to lead your friends in group storytelling. It's also a lot of work, but that work is fun for folks who enjoy creative activities. You're running a game for your friends. They want to have fun, but they also want to see you succeed. Remember that this is a collaborative experience—it's not all on you.

This chapter covers the basics of running a Draw Steel game. While you're learning to run the game, or if you're playing with new players, don't be afraid to start small and easy. A low-level adventure pitting the heroes against bandits will not only be exciting and fun, it'll give you the experience you need to eventually play a world-crossing, branching-scenario, multilevel campaign in the future.

Of course, if the other players in your gaming group all like to jump right into the deep end and learn as they go, then have at it! Either way, at the end of each session, take a few minutes for everyone to talk about the highlights of your game, and the things you and they would like to see more of in the next session. It won't take long, and it'll quickly help you to improve your campaigns.

Campaign Pitch

Before you start running or even preparing adventures, you need to find a group of people who want to play this game with you. You probably already have a group of friends in mind, so prepare a quick campaign pitch for them.

A campaign pitch is a document or a quick spiel you give to your players to make sure they're interested in the campaign you want to play. This helps them understand the sort of game you're planning on running and what's in store for them as players. If something in your pitch doesn't appeal to a player or if they have questions, you can address those concerns much more easily before you all start playing.

The pitch is all about communication. Nothing halts everyone's enjoyment of a campaign faster than a player not having a good time, so let them know what kind of game you want to run and what you're expecting of them. A campaign pitch allows a player to discuss any reservations they have, or even to gracefully bow out of the campaign before it starts.

If you can, present your pitch to the players before the first session, so they can be fully on board and thinking about the hero they want to create before it's time to put pencil to character sheet. Otherwise, present your pitch during your first session

Opening Overview

A campaign pitch starts with a few paragraphs of information that provides an overview of your campaign's theme, settings, and conflicts. Your initial overview should answer these questions:

• Where does the campaign take place?
• What major events important to the campaign's plot have occurred before the campaign starts?
• What kinds of adventures might the heroes have over the course of this campaign?

This overview doesn't give away any of the campaign's secrets—for example, that the key to defeating the boss villain is destroying the artifact known as the Mortal Coil. It doesn't spoil surprises such as the Baron of Dalrath secretly being a lich. Rather, the overview gives the players an idea of how their story starts and what kinds of adventures they'll go on. The best pitches leave players wanting to know more and ready to dive into the action.

Here's an example of an opening overview that Matthew Colville created for his gaming group.

Overview: Wards of the Last Emperor

Long before the time of Good King Omund, the lands of Vasloria and all of Orden belonged to the Caelian Empire. The last emperor, Marcus Octavius, held near-omnipotent power, which he used to protect his citizens and extend the borders of the empire. But his greatest general, Actius Vispania, betrayed him and schemed to usurp the throne.

Knowing he had discovered this betrayal too late to stop it, Octavius took his knowledge and his weapons and spread them across Orden, sealing them behind powerful wards. All this was done in secret. Even his closest allies did not know the location of the wards, the number of which is now lost to the mists of time. Were there seven? Nine? Legends differ.

The rebellion against Ajax begins here. Surely the wards of the emperor contain the power to stop the Overlord. The heroes must travel across the world and brave many dangers to find and unlock the last emperor's wards. Whoever does will wield the lost empire's power.

As you can see, this opening overview introduces the setting—Vasloria (see Orden and the Timescape in Chapter 1: The Basics). It also gives just enough history and background information for the players to understand their heroes' goal—to recover the knowledge and weapons of the last emperor, sealed behind powerful wards, in order to stop the tyrant Ajax.

Personal Problems at the Table

Sometimes a player might talk over others. Sometimes a player makes a snarky comment that hurts someone else's feelings. Sometimes a player might cheat on their dice rolls. When personal problems pop up at the table, it's best to talk about those issues at the player level rather than try to solve them by punishing a player's hero.

If the problem is serious enough, you can stop play and talk to anyone who needs it. If the problem is just an annoyance, you might wait until your game session ends. It's best to have these conversations with just the players involved to get their perspectives, rather than in front of everyone and increasing the chance of someone getting embarrassed and defensive. Most of the time, a person doesn't even realize they were creating a problem for the other players. Once the issue has been talked out, they get a chance to change their behavior and solve the problem.

Gameplay Breakdown

After your opening overview, you should break down roughly how much time you think the players will spend engaged in various types of challenges and scenes.

Gameplay Categories

You can break down your game into the following categories:

• Combat: How often are the heroes using violence to overcome challenges?
• Exploration: How often are the heroes exploring new environments that are difficult to traverse? How often do you expect the heroes to make tests using skills from the exploration skill group?
• Interpersonal: How often are the heroes using negotiation and conversing with NPCs to overcome challenges? How often do you expect the heroes to make tests using skills from the interpersonal skill group?
• Intrigue: How often are the heroes solving mysteries, finding double agents, and skulking about the shadows to achieve their goals? How embroiled will they get in the politics of competing people and factions? How often do you expect the heroes to make tests using skills from the intrigue skill group?

These are the primary types of scenes found in many campaigns, but you could also add your own. For instance, if you want to run a campaign full of diabolical brain teasers and traps, you could add a "Puzzles" category to your campaign pitch document.

Category Frequency

Give each category a rating to show the players how often you expect them to experience scenes in the campaign that involve that type of gameplay.

• High: If a category has a high rating, you expect the heroes to experience multiple scenes involving this type of gameplay during each session.
• Medium: If a category has a medium rating, you expect the heroes to experience at least one scene involving this type of gameplay every session or so.
• Low: If a category has a low rating, you expect the heroes to experience a scene involving this type of gameplay less than once per session.

Category frequencies aren't hard and fast rules. They're simply meant to give the players an idea of what kinds of scenes you'd most like to run for them. There might be a session or two where you skip a category type you marked as high or medium because the heroes do something unexpected, or because you and the other players are all having fun playing out the story in a different way.

Breakdown: Wards of the Last Emperor

The Wards of the Last Emperor campaign pitch has the following gameplay breakdown:

• Combat: Medium. The heroes might tussle with the forces of Ajax, guardians of the lost wards, and other factions who desire the last emperor's treasures.
• Exploration: High. The heroes must traverse Vasloria's most remote locations to find the wards.
• Interpersonal: Low. Heroes will likely interact with other NPCs as they track down leads on wards, but won't have frequent conversations or negotiations with them.
• Intrigue: Medium. Heroes will regularly contend with all the other entities who want the prizes hidden behind the wards, engaging in counterintelligence and sabotage.

Player Buy-In

After the gameplay breakdown, tell the players what's expected of them so that the group gets the most enjoyment out of the game. Let them know details such as how often you expect the characters to be traveling from one place to another, the types of rewards or accolades they might be earning, and what kinds of adventures they're about to go on.

You want to be upfront about what kind of buy-in you need from the players. So it's a good idea to let them know, "Hey, in order to get the most out of this game, you'll need to enjoy diving into ancient ruins." Or tell them, "This game has some horror themes. If you're not interested in playing heroes who have fears they need to face, we should do something else."

Buy-In: Wards of the Last Emperor

Visiting lots of different locations and cultures has to sound cool. You won't start in a town and eventually become the heroes of the barony, but will instead become legendary heroes across multiple realms. You'll constantly be leaving the people you've met behind, but you'll eventually have a base you return to after completing each quest. You'll have allies and enemies all across the world!

The buy-in tells the players that their heroes are going to travel to far-flung locations, and that it might take them a while to find a home. If a player is looking for a different experience, such as a game that takes place entirely in the city of Capital, they now know that your game isn't for them!

Player Option Restrictions

Some campaigns include restrictions on the character options players can choose. For example, a Director might be interested in running a game where the heroes are all memonek and time raiders who have come to Vasloria searching for a secret incursion of voiceless talkers. In this case, the Director might restrict all ancestries (see Chapter 3) except those two. A campaign about citizens forming a rebellion to take on a tyrannical leader might restrict career options (see Chapter 4) so that no one can take Aristocrat or Politician.

Put any restrictions your campaign has into your pitch!

Presenting Multiple Pitches

If you have multiple ideas for campaigns that you want to run, put together a pitch for each of them and ask the players to decide which sounds the most interesting. It's a good idea to have the players rank each pitch and tell you which ones they love, which ones aren't their favorites but they'd still enjoy playing, and which ones they definitely have no interest in. That way, if most people love two of your pitches but one of those favorites makes one player say, "No way!", you know which one to pick.

Discussing the Pitch

Once you give a pitch to the players, ask them to give you their honest opinions. If someone doesn't like an aspect of your pitch, don't get defensive. Hear them out. You might be able to accommodate them. You might be willing to tweak your gameplay breakdown or buy-in to play a game with your friends. You might be willing to lift one of your restrictions for a single player to add some spice to your campaign. For instance, an aristocrat who joins a group of farmers in a rebellion is an interesting plot point!

It's also okay if, after hearing out potential players, you're not interested in running the kind of game they want to play. This happens, and it's why we recommend that you pitch your campaign. There's no harm in having different interests, but there is in forcing people to play a game together that won't be fun for everyone. If you can't see eye-to-eye with a player, it's okay to agree that they or you should find a different group.

Pitching a Published Campaign

Writing your own campaign setting and adventures takes time! Maybe you want to save yourself some of that work and instead run a campaign in an official MCDM setting such as Vasloria, using our published adventures that take place in that setting. We also allow third-party publishers to make their own Draw Steel settings and adventures, so you might want to use one of those instead.

If you want to run a campaign built on published material, give that material a read, think about anything you'd like to change, and then pitch it as you would any campaign you create yourself. When you're running published material, you're still the Director. You can change anything you don't like or that you think isn't a good fit for your group.

If your players participate in other games of Draw Steel, it's a good idea to ask them if they're familiar with published adventures when you pitch them. Sometimes it's okay for a player to experience an adventure twice, but most adventures involve some sort of mystery or plot twist. It's best to run something new for your players, so it's good to know what else they've played before you pitch.

House Rules

You can always change the rules of the game to fit your campaign and taste! Maybe it better suits the pace of the campaign to have a respite last 8 hours, or perhaps a respite should take a week. You might prefer if critical hits are super rare and happen only on a natural 20. You could allow heroes to spend hero tokens to reduce the amount of Malice you have (see Draw Steel: Monsters). You might decide that all heroes have a free +1 bonus to any characteristic of their choice at 1st level.

The rules you create or modify to suit your group are called house rules. You can have as many house rules as you like, but you should discuss these rule changes with the players before implementing them. If you decide that critical hits only occur on a natural 20, the worst time for a player to find that out is right after they roll a natural 19 in combat.

Talk to the players about the house rules you want to use in your campaign, and discuss any ideas they bring to you for house rules during your first session.

Building the Campaign

After your players agree to your pitch, it's time to start building the setting where your game takes place.

Reading a Published Setting

If your campaign takes place in a published campaign setting, read the material that pertains to the campaign you've pitched. You shouldn't feel as though you need to read the entirety of the setting if it isn't pertinent to your campaign. For instance, if you're building a campaign that takes place entirely in the Barony of Dalrath, you probably don't need to read about the city of Blackbottom many miles beyond Dalrath's borders.

As you read, make notes on anything interesting in the setting that you might want to incorporate in your campaign, as well as anything you want to change.

Your top priority should be the campaign's starting location. In which district of Capital do the players start their first adventure? Which world of the timescape will be the first the heroes visit? What settlement in Vasloria holds their first adventure? Answer that question and get familiar with that place first. You'll have plenty of time to read further as you plan out your games.

Building Your Own Setting

If you plan on building your own campaign setting, the work of worldbuilding can be overwhelming. But don't worry! You don't have to build the whole thing before the campaign starts. Your world is more likely to feel layered, interesting, and authentic if you start small and build out the locations, people, and organizations within it as you go.

Start Small

If you're planning on making your own campaign setting, start small. Instead of detailing every settlement on every continent on every planet in a universe, build a starting town or an initial district in a city, then work up the surrounding area in which the first adventure takes place. Use the following steps as a guide:

Locations: Make a list of any important locations in the campaign starting point, such as an inn or house where the heroes are staying, merchants they might want to visit, and the headquarters of organizations that might be important to them.

• NPCS: Write the name, ancestry, age, gender, and a brief note on personality for each NPC the characters might interact with in the locations you've created.
• Adventure Sites: Repeat the above two steps for any adventure sites the heroes might visit during their first adventure. Detail the sites, as well as any important NPCs and villains the heroes might interact with.
• Organizations: You can also detail the laws and function of organizations the heroes might interact with during their first adventure. What governments, churches, and guilds could they come across? How might these organizations interact with the characters? You don't need to write up every bylaw in a pirate code, but it would be good to know how the pirates react to adventurers asking to sail the seas on their ship.
• Map: Make a map of the starting area. It doesn't need to be good! Just a few clearly labeled dots and squiggles showing the setup of city neighborhoods or the locations of forests, deserts, mountains, bodies of water, and other landforms should be plenty.

Each time you need a new location or adventure site for an upcoming adventure, detail it in a similar way and add it to your map!

Keep Things Vague

There might be other details of your campaign you'll want to establish before your first adventure. For example, you might want to know the nearest settlement to the heroes' starting town or the name of the monarch who rules over the country where that town is found. Go ahead and sketch out the names of any places you know will be an important part of your campaign, along with a single sentence or so of detail. You'll be able to add more detail to these items as needed while preparing the campaign.

The main reason you shouldn't overprepare for the future is that you can't know how the players' choices and the characters' actions might change the world. Those actions should matter and have consequences. That's what makes the game fun and authentic. When what happens during a session surprises you, it should be a moment of delight—not a moment of grumbling because you just lost a lot of preparation work.

Overpreparing means you'll end up doing work that you'll later throw out. So do the minimum you need to do to be comfortable running the game and no more.

Campaign Styles

You can run many different types of campaigns in Draw Steel, with some of the most common types discussed below. Any of the following concepts can be modified as you see fit to work for your campaign.

Long Arc

The long arc is a campaign model in which one villain or organization is behind almost every threat the heroes face. If every adventure sees the heroes battle the forces of Ajax or the vampire Count Rhodar von Glaur before eventually facing this main villain in their final adventure, then you've got yourself a long-arc campaign. Long arcs allow the heroes to learn of and even meet the villain several times before the final showdown, allowing for the creation of personal drama with the main antagonist and their underlings.

If you're planning on running a long-arc campaign, you might want to make sure the villain's threat is quieter at certain times. Doing so gives the heroes a chance to take a respite now and then and work on their downtime projects.

Adventure of the Week

An adventure-of-the-week campaign lets the heroes face an entirely new threat each time a new adventure kicks off. During their first adventure, they might face cultists bringing an undead horde to life. In the next, they battle a band of pirates hell-bent on taking control of a peaceful island. Then it's a race to catch a group of time raiders before they disappear across the timescape with their kidnapped victims.

Adventure-of-the-week campaigns can give the heroes plenty of downtime between adventures, since the quests aren't connected. However, they often lack the personal drama that comes from a campaign with recurring threats and villains.

Looming Threat

A looming-threat campaign is a combination of the long-arc and adventure-of-the-week-types of campaigns. Although many adventures in the campaign contain individual threats, a few have events orchestrated by a recurring villain who the heroes face at the end of the campaign. The villain's forces might make brief appearances to harass the heroes in adventures that otherwise have nothing to do with them.

A looming-threat campaign allows the heroes to create personal drama with the main campaign's villain, while experiencing the variety of an adventure-of-the-week campaign.

Multiple Fronts

In a multiple-fronts campaign, several villains threaten people or locations the characters are bound to protect, with the heroes forced to prioritize the threats they face. While the heroes deal with one of their foes, the other adversaries advance their plans, growing in power and resources.

Multiple-front campaigns make the world feel authentic and alive, but they require more preparation, since you're juggling multiple villains and storylines at the same time.

Echelon Outline

As part of your worldbuilding, you can create an outline of the events that might occur in each echelon of your campaign. The farther these events get from the start of the campaign, the vaguer you can leave the details. The actions of the heroes should matter and influence the course of events, so don't plan too much. Otherwise, you might end up throwing out earlier preparation to make player and character decisions matter.

Your outline should include the plans of the villains in your campaign. Review Echelons of Play in Chapter 1: The Basics to get an idea of the threat level and stories the heroes should be experiencing at each stage of the campaign. An echelon outline might look like this:

• 1st Echelon: The heroes protect the village of Gravesford in the Barony of Bedegar from the forces of Lord Saxton, an usurper and tyrant loyal to Ajax. Eventually, they must bring the fight to Lord Saxton's keep in Bedegar City.
• 2nd Echelon: After toppling Saxton's keep, the heroes find a letter from Ajax detailing plans to amass powerful treasures from throughout Vasloria. The heroes can race to these locations to claim the treasures before Ajax's forces do.
• 3rd Echelon: With some or all of the treasures secure, it's only a matter of time before Ajax's army seeks out the heroes. The characters can build a coalition of allies to face Ajax, but those allies first require help getting out from under the rule of the Iron Saint.
• 4th Echelon: Ajax brings the fight to the heroes. If the Iron Saint loses, he retreats to his sanctum, where the heroes can follow if they dare.

Complications and Campaigns

If the heroes in your game took complications during character creation (see Complications), you should think about how the story of their complications might factor into the campaign. Complications aren't just a chance to add a benefit and a drawback to a hero. They're narrative hooks you can use to further draw the players into the campaign story.

Discuss the details of a hero's complication with that hero's player. Complications are intentionally vague, and any of their narrative details can be modified to make the hero's personal story fit into the campaign. With the details worked out, ask the player how the hero feels about the complication? Does the hero think the benefit is worth having the drawback? Are they actively trying to find a way to rid themself of the drawback but keep the benefit? Or maybe they want to be rid of the entire complication, benefit be damned!

Echelon Complication Outline

Once you understand a hero's desires for their complication, you can create an echelon outline for the complication to give the hero's backstory some narrative teeth throughout the campaign. Consider the following example.

Matt, playing Linn the talent, has the Elemental Inside complication. After discussing the details with the Director, Matt decides that years ago, Linn threw herself in front of a spell cast by Sorin the Brown, an evil earth elementalist. Sorin wanted to abduct Linn's talent mentor, a dwarf who was a perfect subject for her next deadly experiment. In taking decisive action, Linn saved her mentor but absorbed an angry force of earth named Bruulv. Sorin escaped and desires the return of her pet elemental. Meanwhile Linn is tougher thanks to the elemental within, but whenever she is dying, Bruulv takes control of her body and goes on a violent rampage.

Matt tells the Director that Linn enjoys the extra protection afforded to her by Bruulv, since it makes her a tougher hero, and she would like to find a way to keep her benefit while losing the drawback. The Director comes up with an echelon outline for Linn that will enrich the talent's story and have ties to the main campaign (which happens to be the example campaign in the echelon outline above).

• 1st Echelon: After the heroes start riling up Lord Saxton's forces, Sorin offers her services to the tyrant for a chance to face Linn. During the heroes' assault on the keep, Sorin attacks.
• 2nd Echelon: Assuming Sorin's defeat, Bruulv becomes even angrier, and can now try to wrestle control away from Linn whenever she is winded in addition to when she is dying. Linn finds a Crown of Elements, a special magic treasure that allows her to force Bruulv back to a "takes control only while dying" state as long as she wears it. The crown has other elemental powers too—and is one of the items desired by Ajax.
• 3rd Echelon: As Linn and the other heroes build a coalition, an elderly high elf named Leaves of the Autumn Wind offers to enhance the crown, allowing the talent to speak directly to Bruulv. The catch is that Leaves needs a magic fire opal from the lair of a fire giant to enhance the crown.
• 4th Echelon: With the crown enhanced, Linn can speak directly to Bruulv. By learning the elemental's history and desires through negotiation, she can see that Bruulv mostly wants to return to the City of Brass so they might once again see the raw elemental powers come together. If Linn can visit this city that is literally worlds away, she earns Bruulv's trust and the elemental stops taking over her form.

At each echelon, you should revisit your complication echelon outlines, since the actions of the players could change your plans. In the example

outline above, if Sorin gets away after the battle with Saxton during the 1st echelon, the elementalist is likely to return and try to free Bruulv once again!

Creating Adventures

A lot of Directors prefer to make their own adventures rather than use published ones. Creating your own adventures lets you tailor the story to perfectly fit the motivations of the heroes in your game, thus maximizing the fun for the players.

Every good adventure includes villains, a task to accomplish, NPCs, and interesting locations and adventure sites.

Player Ambition Writes Adventures

Players have ambition driven by their characters' complications, personal stories, and desires for titles, supernatural treasures, and other rewards. Indulge these desires! If a hero wants to go on a quest to gain a Blade of Quintessence, let them know where they can find one (after they put in the proper research or questing time, of course). You can then plan an adventure, even just a short one, around the weapon's retrieval!

Villain

Every good adventure has a villain behind the trouble the heroes are trying to solve. This is a game about fighting monsters, after all, so give the heroes something to fight!

Villain Sins

You probably know the old idiom, "Actions speak louder than words." This applies to heroes and villains alike. The thing that primarily makes a villain a force of evil the heroes—and players—will stop at nothing to defeat? The villain's actions.

The best way to let the players know that your villain must be defeated is to have the villain do some unquestionably evil stuff! Before the heroes even meet the villain, they should find the corpses left behind, witness the burning villages, or be harrowed by the accounts of those lucky enough to survive the villain's wrath. The outcomes of the villain's actions let the players fully understand the depth of the evil they face. Villains don't hesitate to take or ruin the lives of others to get what they want, and most have no qualms against collateral damage.

The two most important things that make your adventure's villain worth the heroes' time is what they've done—and what they're planning to do. What they've done shows that they're not just evil but capable. What they plan to do is worse than what they've done, and by golly, someone needs to stop it.

Give your villain a history of evil that the heroes can uncover. It might be a short history. Maybe the villain just performed the first in a series of murders a few hours before the heroes come to town. Or it could cover years spent as a warlord, tyrant, or entity of destruction leaving behind entire worlds reduced to rubble. Let the sins of the villain be what hooks the heroes into the adventure—and remember that there's no motivation stronger than the players deciding they must stop the villain before being asked to. A self-inspired goal works better than having an NPC beg or pay the heroes to get the job done. Still, what starts out as a job often becomes a personal mission, so don't be afraid to start there if doing so feels like the best idea.

Once a villain discovers that the heroes are meddling in their plans, they don't sit idly by and wait for the fight to come to them. No! Great villains are proactive, sending lackeys to battle the heroes, frame them for crimes, capture their loved ones, or burn their hometowns.

Villain Goals

Many villains don't see themselves as evil. In fact, most heroes and villains have similar motivations—ambition, revenge, and even protecting others and saving the world. The difference is that villains believe their personal goals are more important than anything else, and they are willing to sacrifice the well-being and lives of others to get what they want.

Any of the following options make a great quick villain goal, or can serve as inspiration for goals of your own:

• The villain has a deadly personal vendetta against another person or group of people who wronged them.
• The villain believes that rulership is theirs by birthright, or because they see themself as the most qualified.
• The villain wants to live forever to protect their people, possessions, land, or legacy.
• The villain knows of a great threat, and they require ultimate power to defeat it.

Instead of achieving their goals through diplomacy and heroics, villains take what they require to achieve their goals, and destroy anyone and anything in their way.

Of course, some villains want to cause violence and mayhem just for the sake of it! These villains can be fun to throw into an adventure from time to time, but many are the type of folks who are typically being manipulated by villains with even greater motivation. As such, they shouldn't be the focus of every adventure in every campaign.

Stealing is Encouraged

When you're coming up with ideas for campaigns, adventures, and scenes, you should feel free to steal plots, action set pieces, characters, and anything else you want from your favorite movies, television shows, novels, comic books, and podcasts. You can then modify a few cosmetic details to make things your own. Borrowing a character who's a human man in your favorite novel to make an NPC? Make the NPC a dwarf woman with a new name and no one is the wiser. Got an idea for an encounter based on a battle scene from your favorite science fiction flick? Make those invading aliens gnolls instead! Let your favorite stories inspire you, especially when you're looking for new ideas.

Adventure Goal

Every adventure should give the heroes a clear goal to accomplish. While most every goal can be boiled down to "stop the villain from doing a bad thing," it helps if the heroes have a specific idea of how to stop or minimize the consequences of the villain's plans. Ideally, they'll be able to accomplish this goal in more than one way.

The heroes' ultimate adventure goal should be one that stops or prevents the total achievement of the villain's goal. If the heroes live under the oppressive rule of a tyrant who usurped a lordship and imprisons any who question his authority, they could fight to help the rightful heir regain the lordship. They might engage in political intrigue to get close to the tyrant before deposing him. They could lead others in a wide rebellion that creates a new form of government. "Depose the tyrant and install better leadership" is the heroes' ultimate adventure goal, though they have many ways to accomplish that goal.

An adventure's goal doesn't always result in a total failure for the villain. Sometimes the heroes need to simply prevent as much destruction as they can while surviving to fight another day. For example, if Ajax the Invincible attacks the port city of Blackbottom to force its leaders to bend the knee, a group of 1st-level heroes lacks the resources and power to stand directly against the siege and stop it. As such, the adventure's goal might be to escape the city leading as many innocent folk as possible to safety—and staying alive to face the villain later. The heroes are still heroes for saving people, even if they can't stop the villain's plans.

Discovering the Goal

An adventure's goal isn't always clear to the players at the start, but the heroes should always have a good idea of how to keep pursuing the story. Gameplay and fun can grind to a halt if the players don't have any idea what their characters should do to further their goals.

Every adventure should have an inciting incident that either sees the heroes discovering the adventure's goal, or that puts them on the path to discovering it. If the characters start an adventure by finding the freshly murdered body of a noble in the streets of Capital, they're likely to look for clues that could lead them to catching a murderer—a solid, straightforward adventure goal. Or it could be that the murder leads them to uncovering a grand conspiracy in which one of Capital's Great Houses is planning a coordinated and violent takeover of the city. The heroes must stop those plots—an adventure goal that might take them several scenes to fully uncover. But each of those scenes should lead directly to the next without leaving the players wondering, "What should we do?"

Complications and Adventures

If the heroes in your campaign have taken complications (see Complications and Campaigns above), it's a good idea to have at least one complication make trouble for a hero during an adventure, or play some other part in the adventure's story. Rotate the hero whose complication is highlighted each time, so that every player gets a chance to be at the center of the story.

Creating NPCs

The heroes and the fell monsters they slay shouldn't be the only folks in an adventure. A few friendly (or at least nonhostile) NPCs can supply the characters with information, equipment, and—most importantly—a good reason for putting their lives on the line. If all the people the characters come across are villainous, apathetic, or selfish, the players won't feel very motivated to get their heroics on.

The NPCs the heroes meet during their adventures should be complex people. They have personal motivations for helping the heroes, personality and behavioral quirks, and character flaws. An adventure typically features at least three or four NPCs you'll want to flesh out, depending on how many scenes you plan to play out and how many NPCs each scene requires.

When you create an NPC, quickly jot down the following information about them.

Personal Details

What's this NPC's name? What do they do for a living?

Features

What's notable about the NPC's appearance? Do they have distinguishing features such as a streak of gray or color in their hair, a bushy beard, a tattoo of a snake skull, or a scar over one eye? Do they have a specific scent (good or bad)?

Voice

When the NPC speaks, how does their voice sound? You don't have to put on a character voice every time you speak as the NPC, but telling the players, "This elf talks like a pirate," or "This dwarf has a high-pitched voice that keeps cracking," helps them remember and differentiate that NPC from others.

Behavior

What noticeable behavior does the NPC have? Maybe they maintain constant, unbreaking eye contact, or maybe they rarely look up from their feet. They could pick their nose, repeat a catch phrase, talk to themself, bite their nails, whisper whenever they say something profound (or profane!), or constantly clear their throat. Giving an NPC just one distinct behavior helps cement them in the players' minds and makes them more authentic.

Flaw

What character flaw does this NPC have? They might be selfish when it comes to wealth, ignore their personal hygiene, lie to cover up their insecurities, or act cowardly in the face of threats. A single flaw does the trick. Too many flaws, and your NPC will go from authentic to authentically unlikable fast.

Helping the Heroes

Why would this NPC want to help the heroes during this adventure? They don't have to be fully on board with helping the characters at first. It might take some convincing, in the form of a test, a negotiation, or a task the heroes need to accomplish to win the NPC's help. But there should be at least a kernel of motivation in the NPC already—or they have no reason to help. It could be that they don't want the villain to succeed, they see a profitable opportunity in working with the heroes, or they feel they owe the heroes a favor thanks to a previous adventure.

Denying Aid

What would prevent this NPC from helping the heroes? It's possible that the answer is "nothing," but most people have something or someone they're not willing to risk even if the fate of the world hangs in the balance. What could the villain threaten that makes the NPC think twice about helping out the heroes? It might be a loved one, a meaningful location, or a valuable treasure.

Interesting Locations

A good adventure has interesting locations for the heroes to visit. Such locations don't need to be fantastic to be interesting (though it doesn't hurt to throw in one or two fantastic locations in any adventure). A small farming village can be an interesting location if it's home to engaging events and intrigue. Even small-time drama such as who has been poisoning farmer Yelena's crops or who Jon the shepherd seeks to marry can make a location engaging.

Make a list of the different locations the heroes might visit during the adventure, including both general locations and specific adventure sites.

General Locations

A general location is a settlement or a defined wilderness region that the heroes visit during the adventure.

If the adventure takes place in a giant, sprawling metropolis like Capital, then different city districts and large landmarks such as catacombs and parks count as general locations. If the adventure takes place in and around a regional area larger than a city but no bigger than a planet, then full settlements and biomes such as deserts and forests count as general locations. If the adventure takes place across the timescape (or in a similar milieu of many worlds), then a general location could be an entire world and any specific settlements or biomes the heroes visit in that world.

You don't have to define everything about these general locations, because you'll develop more in-depth information about the specific sites the heroes might visit in any location later. You can use the following questions about each general location as a starting point for what you'll want to cover (and you might already have done some of this when creating a starting area during your campaign preparation):

• Mood: What is the mood of this location? Is it safe and peaceful? Dire and gloomy? Tense and dangerous? Do the hairs on the back of your neck stand up when you're here, or is it the kind of place where you can relax?
• Senses: What are the first things you notice about this location with your senses? What do you see, hear, or smell? What does the air taste like? How does it feel on your skin? Which of the things you observe stand out or are unique?
• Creatures: What nonhostile creatures can be encountered here? This might include passersby, street merchants, animals, or unknown somethings moving in the shadows.

Having these details will help you set the scene as the heroes travel through these general locations to get from one specific site to another.

Specific Sites

A specific site is a location where an adventure scene takes place. It could be a building, a complex of buildings, a city street or square, a forest clearing, an oasis, a bridge, or the like. Combat encounters and noncombat scenes in an adventure happen in specific sites.

When you create a specific site, ask the following questions in addition to the questions you would ask about any general location:

• Why would the heroes come here during the adventure?
• What types of scenes might play out at this site?
• Which NPCs who the heroes might interact with are found here?
• What information, items, or confrontations might the heroes discover here that will help them advance the story of the adventure?

Plan Scenes

Once you have your villain, your adventure goal, your NPCs, and your general locations and specific sites, it's time to start stitching those elements together to create scenes. Your adventure will have combat encounters, montage tests, negotiations, respites, and scenes of exploration and social interaction. Creating Scenes below has more information about detailing the scenes in your adventures, but planning out those scenes is the first step.

When you're thinking about scenes, write down which sites and NPCs are tied to those scenes, then try to arrange the scenes in an order that makes sense for the story. It might be that after your inciting incident, certain scenes can be tackled in any order. For example, if the adventure goal is to recover three pieces of an ancient staff before the villain does, the heroes might be able to explore the three sites where the pieces are hidden in any order they choose. Their choice might even have consequences. It might be that the first site they choose has none of the villain's lackeys investigating it yet, the second site features a showdown with those lackeys, and the third site has already been cleaned out by the villain by the time the characters get there! Other scenes might have to happen more linearly. An investigation typically includes a trail of clues that takes the heroes from one scene to the next, but the players can surprise you.

Don't get married to the order in which you plan your scenes. If the heroes have terrible luck with dice in a couple of combat encounters, they might stop to take a respite and regain their Stamina and Recoveries before you anticipated they would. If the heroes are unraveling a mystery, they might make unexpected deductions or good guesses that allow them to skip a scene altogether! This is part of the fun of the game. The dice and the players will surprise you.

Embrace this unpredictability by keeping an open mind as you plan out your scenes and allowing yourself to be flexible. Odds are that a combat encounter the characters skipped over during one session can be tweaked and moved to another session, so don't sweat it. The game is most rewarding for you and the other players if you let the heroes' choices and actions mean something and affect the game.

Once you have all your scenes planned, it's time to put together the adventure outline.

Adventure Outline

Your adventure outline is a document you can use to run your game sessions. It contains information about the villain, the adventure goal, NPCs, locations and sites, and scenes. You can format this outline however you like, whether as fully written sentences, bullet points, a plotting web, or anything else that makes sense to you.

A standard adventure outline contains a bit of overview information regarding the adventure's villain, goal, and NPCs. It then contains a list of locations and sites, with specific sites breaking out the details of each scene that occurs there. The outline then wraps up with a conclusion section discussing the impact the heroes' actions have on the overall campaign and the game world.

Creating Scenes

When you're preparing scenes for an adventure, keep in mind that you cannot and should not try to control how the heroes interact with the challenges set forth in a scene. As a Director, much of the fun of the game comes from seeing the players creatively solve the challenges you set forth with their own ingenuity and their heroes' abilities and features. You want to plan obstacles for the characters even while knowing that they'll think of solutions you haven't. So let them try those solutions and see where the story goes!

It's best to set up scenes along the lines of: "Here's the situation when the heroes arrive." The game world is an authentic setting. Whether or not the heroes show up, bandits still pillage and plunder, politicians still plot and backstab, and vast sandstorms still sweep across the desert. Each scene should thus start with the question: "What's happening when the heroes arrive?"

After setting up your scene, make a list of the narrative elements the heroes can discover or achieve in that scene that can advance the story of the adventure. When running the game, you'll allow the players to approach how they discover or achieve those elements in their own way. However, you might have ideas as to how they could accomplish those goals, such as which tests they might make to find clues leading to a murderer, or a possible negotiation to secure safe passage across the sea. Note these possible solutions and any rules you need to prepare to make use of them as you set up your scenes.

Not everything the heroes do is worthy of a scene, and you don't need to play out adventures in real time. If the characters want to walk from a farm to a castle, don't turn the walk into a scene unless doing so is fun for you and the players, or if something significant happens along the way (for instance, a bandit attack or the discovery of a dead body). You don't need to narrate every shopping trip or boat journey if they're just going to be a bore. It's a game! Run the scenes that are fun for you and that move the campaign story along, and your games will be better for it.

Director Sheets

Director sheets are a resource you can use to prepare and track the progress of characters during combat encounters, negotiations, and montage tests. These sheets allow you to track the objectives and numbers relevant to the challenge, such as the Stamina of enemies, NPC interest and patience, and the number of successes and failures in a montage test. Each sheet has an optional second page you can use to track narrative details, potential rewards, and supporting NPCs in the scene. You can download these sheets at https://mcdm.gg/DS-Resources.

Creating and Running Combat

There's a lot to be said about building and preparing great combat encounters for Draw Steel. So much so that we had to put that advice in another book—the one with all the monsters and other stuff you need to build combat encounters. Go check it out in Draw Steel: Monsters.

One tip that we will note here (and it's also in the other book because it bears repeating) is that combat encounters should hold narrative weight. Draw Steel isn't a game of attrition, where a few small, trivial combat encounters are meant to weaken the heroes, winnowing down their resources to make the final, important, epic clash with the villain more of a struggle. A quick combat encounter with two bumbling guards at a gate is likely over in a matter of less than a round and shouldn't award the heroes a Victory. These can be fun scenes to roleplay, but they aren't going to make full use of the characters' features and should occur infrequently. Most of the time when combat takes place, the stakes for the heroes and the story should be high!

Creating and Running Exploration

Exploration scenes are narrative-driven moments where the heroes investigate their surroundings to advance the story or uncover rewards. Any such setup, from searching a murder scene for clues, to scouring ancient ruins for a portal to Axiom, the Plane of Uttermost Law, is an exploration scene.

When running exploration, your job is to set the scene, listen to the players describe their heroes' actions, and then respond with how those actions affect the environment.

Necessary and Unnecessary Information

When preparing an exploration scene, you'll want to come up with answers to the following questions:

• What information or objects do the heroes need to recover in this scene that will help them advance the story?
• What bonus pieces of information and other rewards can they earn during this scene if they explore fully and successfully?

Information or objects the heroes need to obtain from an exploration scene to advance the story should have some way of being found without a test. Simply by entering a monarch's private chambers, the heroes learn that the king is dead and has been slain by a knife, because his body and the murder weapon are plainly visible. They should also automatically notice that the knife bears the crest of a noble house, providing an obvious path to continue the adventure. Other details in the room might help speed along their investigation of who killed the king, but they can find the bare minimum of what they need to continue for free.

It's okay for a test to be the best way to get necessary information or objects. But if the heroes fail or don't make the test, make sure there's another way—likely a more difficult way—for the story to continue. When searching a necromancer's tower for a book that will help stop a ritual, characters might miss all the clues pointing to the book. But they can later run into the necromancer's apprentices, who know where the book is—and who aren't willing to give up that information without a difficult fight.

Other information and rewards the heroes can earn in an exploration scene can be hidden behind tests that can be failed or missed. If heroes don't think to check under the dead king's desk, they don't find the chalice that rolled under there. If they do find the chalice but fail a Reason test to examine it, they don't learn that the chalice carries the residue of a rare poison, potentially leading them to a nearby alchemist who sells it. They can still solve the mystery without this information,

but it'll take them a little longer. However, the longer it takes them, the more time the assassin has to prepare for their arrival, so missing those details has consequences!

Once you have your list of information and objects the heroes can find, make a list of where those things can be found, and how. Some reveals might require a test. Some might simply require a player to say that their hero performs a certain action, such as searching a bookshelf or desk. But as you note what's required to find information or objects, don't try to cover every option. Even if you do so, the players with their multiple brains will think of other options that you never would have, and you'll have to adjudicate their choices on the spot. Knowing where and how information and objects are hidden or guarded from the heroes is more important than knowing how they're going to obtain those things. If you can think of at least one option and are open to other possibilities, the heroes have a fair shot.

Setting the Scene

When an exploration scene starts, tell the heroes what they notice around them. Opening with what sighted heroes can see is a good idea, but all characters have other senses. Mention what they can smell, hear, and feel in the environment if it's applicable to what they're investigating. These little details can help the players better imagine the scene, and can lead them to important narrative beats within it. Before you run the scene, write these details down so you can give them to the players right at the start, rather than trying to think them up off the cuff.

You don't need to list every single detail of an environment. That can lead to players spending a lot of time having their characters interact with details you included just for flavor, and can have you saying things like, "Yes, I know I described the tapestries for 5 minutes, but there's really not much more to them. Now, the pile of bones at the center of the floor, on the other hand …" Many players will also zone out if you provide too much environmental detail, even if you're giving an Oscar-worthy narration. Instead, stick to the pieces of the environment that are worthy of the characters' notice.

As an example, if the heroes are exploring an abandoned bandit hideout in a cave for information about where the criminals relocated, you might describe a refuse pile in a corner of the cave, a mud-covered floor, and the smoking remains of a doused fire. Why point these things out? Because the refuse pile holds a torn-up map to the bandits' new hideout that the heroes can assemble, the muddy floor means the bandits left tracks that can be followed, and the smoking fire means that at least a few of the bandits left not long ago and might still be en route to the hideout. You've given the characters and players three important elements to interact with, each of which gives them information they can use to advance the story or get an idea of events to come. You don't need to describe the stalactites hanging from the ceiling, or the sound of the wind blowing through the entrance to the cave, or the wood pile next to the campfire, or the slugs crawling on that wood. Though one or two such details can be atmospheric, too many will distract folks and pull them out of the game. Instead, fill in those secondary details as the players ask questions while their characters explore.

Heroes Investigate

After you've set up your exploration scene, let each player ask questions about the environment and describe how their hero is interacting with it. If a player asks a question their hero wouldn't know the answer to, you can encourage them to explore more. For instance, if a player whose character is standing at the cave mouth asks, "What can I see in the refuse pile?", you might answer, "From where you're standing, it looks like mostly scraps of cloth and old bones, but there might be

more if you dig through it." This encourages players to be more active in the process of searching.

Allow the heroes' investigation to drive the action. In an exploration scene, you take on the role of the environment, reacting to the characters' and players' choices. Don't tell the players what their heroes do. Instead, describe the consequences of their actions. If characters take the time to carefully search the bandit hideout for traps, they should have a chance of finding any traps you've set up there. But if a hero runs into the cave and triggers a hidden trap because they didn't move into hostile territory carefully, that's on them! It's an important lesson the player can learn for next time.

The Players Will Surprise You

Even the best-prepared adventures rarely survive first contact with the heroes. Your session notes expect the players to have their characters enter the bandit hideout from a secret back entrance, but one player has the bright idea of entering through a crack in the cave roof. It's perfectly fine to go off script and adapt to the players' plans if doing so is fun for everyone.

This isn't to say that it's okay for the heroes to ignore the bandit hideout entirely and go looking for cultists somewhere else. But as long as the players are participating in the spirit of the adventure, rolling with the unexpected is some of the most fun you'll have running the game.

When to Call for a Test

The heroes can usually obtain basic information just by interacting with their environment. If a player asks, "Does it look like the muddy floor of the cave would cling to someone's boots?", getting confirmation doesn't require a test. However, following the tracks that lead out of the cave toward the bandits' new hideout does require a test, because that's a harder task whose failure gives the bandits extra time to prepare an ambush for when the heroes arrive! If a character wants to meticulously dig through the refuse pile and examine each piece of trash, no test is required to find the torn-up pieces of the map unless they're under serious time pressure to do so. However, a character piecing the map back together needs to succeed on a Reason test to do so, because failing that task means the heroes obtain only incomplete information as they continue their search.

Chapter 9: Tests explains tests in detail and provides examples of different difficulties of tests. A lot of other fantasy games reflexively ask for a roll of the dice anytime a hero attempts a task. However, Draw Steel is built around the idea that the Director calls for tests only when failure would make the story more interesting for the heroes and not grind the game to a halt. You might end up asking for fewer tests than you're used to—and that's the way the game is meant to be played!

Additionally, if a player has a particularly clever and plausible idea for attempting to overcome a challenge, you can have them automatically succeed on a task even if failure would make the story more interesting. It's important to reward clever thinking with success once in a while, so that the players are encouraged to think outside the box and create memorable moments!

By contrast, sometimes a player will propose what they think is a plausible or clever idea, but you'll think there's no way it could ever succeed. It's fine for you to tell the player, "That's not going to work." You're under no obligation to allow a player to attempt a test that should automatically fail.

Test Difficulty

Tests in Draw Steel have three levels of outcome, and all players know those outcomes and the dice rolls that generate them. Making a test always means something because every test comes with risks and stakes! Before you call for a test, you need to set a difficulty for the test of easy, moderate, or hard.

A hero always succeeds on an easy test. It's just a question of whether they might incur a consequence or earn a reward alongside success. For this reason, you should use easy tests sparingly in your adventures.

A hero who has a modifier of +1 or more on a test will likely succeed on a moderate test. Success with a consequence is common for heroes if their bonus to the test is lower than +4, so they're succeeding at a cost. Odds are that most of the tests you'll call for in your games will be moderate tests. They give most heroes a decent chance of success without it being a sure thing, and the story gets interesting whenever consequences are involved.

Hard tests do exactly what it says on the tin. Success on a hard test requires a roll of 17 or higher, which means a hero has better than a 50 percent chance of success only if they have a +6 or higher bonus on the test. At 1st level, that means a character using their highest characteristic, using a skill, and having an edge on the test. Failure on a hard test often means consequences beyond failing, making hard tests really risky! You likely find that hard tests aren't as common as moderate tests in your game, but they're used more than easy tests.

Setting Difficulty During Play

When you call for a test, you can tell the player making the test the difficulty. Saying "Make a hard Reason test" can create a dramatic moment at the table as everyone holds their collective breath to see whether the outcome is success, failure, or failure with an additional consequence.

On the other hand, not sharing the difficulty of every test with the players lets you do a little fudging of those difficulties if you want to. You might call for a test and then realize that a test really wasn't necessary even as the player makes the roll. It's easy to simply say, "Hey, sorry. I shouldn't have asked for a test. You just do the thing." But if you want to play it cool, remember that every level of an easy test is a success. It's simply a matter of whether a consequence or reward comes with it. If a hero gets an 11 or lower on a test and you think they should still succeed, then the test was easy difficulty.

Test Outcomes

After a hero makes a test, it's up to you to narrate and decide the outcome, keeping some basic guidelines in mind.

If a test is a failure with a consequence, the hero doesn't just fail—they make things worse. This might mean drawing the attention of nearby foes, setting off a hazard or trap, taking damage or causing an ally to take damage, taking a bane on a future test, losing a mundane item, making a friendly NPC angry, or even earning you a little future Malice. The consequence is up to you!

If a test is a failure, the hero doesn't do what they set out to do. But even though they don't incur a formal consequence, negative effects can still accompany a failed test depending on circumstances. If a hero attempts to move silently past a group of guards, a failure on the test might draw the guards' attention, but the character should have a chance to react before the alarm is raised. But if the character had incurred a failure with a consequence, they would be spotted immediately as the shouting guards rush to the attack.

If a test is a success with a consequence, the hero succeeds but suffers a significant negative effect. They might sneak past the guards successfully but lose their belt pouch in the process, forcing them to decide whether to return for it or move on.

If a test is a success, the hero does what they set out to do! You can even let a player narrate the outcome of a successful test by asking them, "How did you pull this off ?"

If the test is a success with a reward, the hero does what they set out to do—and then some. A reward might grant another character who needs to make the same test an automatic success, grant a boon on a future test for the hero, reveal a hidden treasure the hero wasn't looking for, inspire a nearby NPC to come forth and offer aid, or earn the group a hero token. A reward on a test is yours to choose.

Sample consequences and rewards for tests are detailed in Chapter 9: Tests.

Creating and Running Hazards

Hazards include traps, natural dangers such as quicksand and avalanches, and supernatural dangers such as magic-irradiated ruins or floating clouds of unstable psionic energy. Hazards can appear in combat and exploration scenes as dangers the heroes need to contend with as they solve other problems. An elaborate hazard can be a scene all on its own as well, whether tackled in a montage test or run round by round as if it were a combat scenario.

A good hazard presents a real threat to the heroes and stands in the way of something they want. Crossing a pool of lava isn't much of an issue if the heroes can simply walk around it. But if the pool is too big to walk around, or if the treasure the party seeks is at the bottom of it, it becomes something they can't easily ignore.

The hazards you'll create and use in your adventures come in one of three types:

• Activated Perpetual: An activated perpetual hazard might be triggered by a tripwire, a loud noise, a pressure plate, or some other mechanism that responds to the heroes' actions. The hazard then remains active until it's dealt with, such as a pendulum scythe trap that's activated by a tripwire and then swings indefinitely across a bridge.
• Activated One-Time: An activated one-time hazard is triggered and then creates one instance of danger. Sometimes that danger ends almost as soon as it begins, such as a trap that fires a single poison dart. Other times, that one instance of danger can create other lasting problems the heroes must deal with, such as a cave-in that deals damage, then leaves the party trapped in an abandoned mine.
• Obstruction: Obstructions are hazards the heroes must find their way over or around, such as pools of acid, chasms, and rivers of lava. Since obstruction hazards are typically static, a hero takes damage or suffers other effects from an obstruction only as the result of a failed test made to traverse the hazard.

Terrain as Hazards

Some of the best hazards are the terrain options found in Draw Steel: Monsters. These dynamic options work great in combat encounters, but you can also use many of them as hazards the heroes must cross (such as acid pools and lava) or contend with (such as the arcane object known as the black obelisk) as they travel from one destination to another. You can use these hazards as is, or rework them to match your story. For example, you might convert an acid pool to a pool of toxic sludge by having it deal poison damage instead of acid damage.

Activated Hazard Triggers

All activated hazards have some kind of trigger, and the heroes should be allowed to make tests—typically Reason or Intuition tests—to notice and then disable that trigger. The deadlier the hazard, the harder the test.

If a hero doesn't think to search for a trigger before stumbling into a hazard, you can still call for a test to let them notice the trigger when the hazard is about to activate, provided it makes sense to do so. If a hero is about to cross over a tripwire that triggers a trap, you might call for an Intuition test to notice the wire at the point when it can be clearly seen. On a failed test, the character walks into the tripwire and activates the trap.

Once a trigger is noticed, the heroes might get a chance to disarm it if that's possible. There's probably nothing to be done short of renovating an old mine to stop it from collapsing when anyone damages its walls, but the characters can try to disable a magic rune in a corridor that teleports any creature moving over it into the middle of an ocean. Just remember that trying and failing to disarm a trigger might trigger the hazard!

Hazard Damage

The damage dealt by a hazard depends on two factors. First, how deadly would you like the hazard to be? Do you want it to leave the heroes just a little banged up, or should it cost them a Recovery or two? Second, is the hazard a perpetual hazard or a one-time hazard? If it's an obstruction, answer this question by asking whether you expect a creature to be able to take damage from the obstruction more than once? If the answer is yes, treat it as a perpetual hazard in terms of damage. If not, it's a one-time hazard.

A hero might get a chance to mitigate damage from a hazard, such as by making an Agility test to outrun or dodge an avalanche, or making a Reason test to resist the psychic damage of a psionic cloud. You can decide what sort of test needs to be made based on the circumstances.

The One-Time Hazard Deadliness and Perpetual Hazard Deadliness tables show the damage dealt by hazards. Hazards are organized by level, indicating their relative threat compared to the level of the heroes. Each entry features three damage expressions for a tier 1, tier 2, and tier 3 outcome on the test made to mitigate the hazard's damage. The worse the test outcome, the higher the damage.

One-Time Hazard Deadliness Table

Level	Not Deadly	Little Bit Deadly	Very Deadly
1	7/5/3	9/7/5	11/9/7
2	10/7/4	12/9/6	15/12/9
3	11/8/5	14/11/8	17/14/11
4	12/9/5	16/13/9	19/16/12
5	13/10/6	17/14/10	21/18/14
6	14/11/6	19/16/11	23/20/15
7	15/12/7	21/18/13	25/22/17
8	16/13/7	23/20/14	27/24/18
9	17/13/8	25/21/16	29/25/20
10	18/14/9	27/22/18	31/27/22

Perpetual Hazard Deadliness Table

Level	Not Deadly	Little Bit Deadly	Very Deadly
1	5/4/2	7/6/4	9/8/6
2	6/4/3	8/6/5	10/8/7
3	7/5/3	9/7/5	11/9/7
4	8/6/4	11/9/7	14/12/10
5	9/7/4	12/10/7	15/13/10
6	10/8/5	13/11/8	16/14/11
7	11/9/5	15/13/9	19/17/13
8	12/9/6	16/13/10	20/17/14
9	13/10/6	17/14/10	21/18/14
10	14/11/7	19/16/12	24/21/17

Hazard Effects

Some hazards deal effects in addition to or instead of damage. A hazard that is part of a combat encounter can impose just about any effect, including conditions, and can have a real impact on the story. However, if the heroes are facing a hazard outside of combat, you want any effects it imposes to be something more impactful and lasting. The following effects each reflect the interesting and lasting consequences a noncombat hazard should have:

• A character loses a Recovery.
• A curse leaves a character with a demonic-sounding voice that imposes a bane on Presence tests.
• A character receives a gaping wound that causes them to take 1d10 damage whenever they roll a natural 2 before they next finish a respite.
• A character is teleported into the middle of a nearby body of water.

But although lasting and interesting consequences are fun, make sure they don't derail your story to the point where the whole game becomes about solving the problems created by a hazard—unless your group thinks that's fun!

Creating and Running Interaction

Interaction scenes are similar to exploration scenes, except that the heroes obtain the information and objects they need by talking to one or more NPCs instead of exploring an area. Just like with an exploration encounter, you make a list of necessary information that the NPCs can offer to the heroes freely. NPCs might then have other information or objects they can be convinced to give to the heroes if they make a persuasive argument, do something kind for the NPC, or succeed on a test.

Interaction scenes aren't full negotiations, which are reserved for adventure-changing conversations. Still, keep in mind that different NPCs react differently to various forms of persuasion. A coward might be easy to intimidate, while a battle-hardened soldier might be impossible to awe with displays of ferocity. A bribe might work for a corrupt noble, but a goodly queen who already has wealth beyond measure likely has no interest in whatever riches the heroes possess.

Refer to the details you wrote down for your NPCs while you roleplay them. Keep in mind any distinct behaviors or attitudes you can throw in to help make the scene fun. You don't have to be a great actor to create a memorable interaction scene! Simply describing how an NPC looks, sounds, and acts goes a long way even without doing funny voices. If you want to put on a character voice, go for it—but there's no obligation to.

Creating and Running Negotiations

When you're preparing for a negotiation (see Chapter 11: Negotiation), you'll want to pick an NPC and give them their negotiation stats—a starting interest and patience, motivations and pitfalls, and an Impression score. The Starting Attitudes table in the Negotiation chapter should give you an idea of where to start with some of these stats, but you should feel free to adjust the numbers as you see fit.

When assigning negotiation stats, keep the following guidelines in mind:

• The higher an NPC's starting interest, the more likely the heroes are to end the negotiation with everything they want—and then some—from the NPC.
• The higher an NPC's starting patience, the longer the negotiation and the more chances the heroes have to make arguments. If you want a long, rich negotiation, give your NPC a higher patience score.
• The more motivations an NPC has, the more likely the heroes are to make easier tests while engaging the NPC.
• The more pitfalls an NPC has, the more likely the heroes are to stumble into a topic that turns negotiation sour. However, too many pitfalls can feel like a "Gotcha!" setup to players, especially if they don't have time to do a little research or reconnaissance on the NPC before going into the negotiation.

Plan the Outcomes

It helps to know the various outcomes an NPC might offer during a negotiation ahead of time. An adventure or campaign continuing should never hinge entirely on the outcome of a negotiation. You don't want the story to come grinding to a halt if the heroes fail to secure information, treasure, or help from an NPC. A failed negotiation might mean the adventure gets a lot harder, but should always provide options for continuing when the characters' negotiation skills fail them.

A negotiation has six possible outcomes, but two of those are predetermined. If a negotiation ends with the NPC at interest 4, then the heroes get what they want. If the heroes end the negotiation at interest 1, the NPC can't offer them anything. Even with four options left wide open, however, setting up outcomes actually requires less prep work than you might think.

Multiple NPCs

The negotiation rules are built around the idea of the heroes facing off against a single dominant NPC—a powerful leader, a ranking diplomat, a warlord, a key villain, and so forth. But this isn't to say that you can't run a negotiation with the heroes interacting with a group of NPCs, each with their own slightly different take on wheeling and dealing.

If you set up a negotiation using more than one NPC, you don't give each NPC their own negotiation stats, motivations, and pitfalls. Rather, you assign stats to the group as a whole, then have different NPCs step to the fore in the negotiation when a particular motivation or pitfall is in play. For example, if you assign the greed pitfall to a group of knights, the well-dressed captain of that group might appear as though they're open to being bribed by the heroes. But when the dour sergeant-atarms who resents the captain's flamboyant lifestyle angrily rejects the characters' offer, the captain must go along with it to keep the peace among their followers.

If a negotiation ends with the NPC's interest at 2 or 5, you need to know what the NPC might offer the heroes instead of or in addition to their main ask. It's also a good idea to have a list of two favors, items, pieces of information, or other help the NPC can offer the heroes, so that you aren't scrambling to think of something if these results come up.

Likewise, if the NPC's interest hits 3, they'll ask the heroes for a favor in exchange for what's being asked of them. The heroes might also directly ask the NPC what they can offer to cinch the negotiation. In this case, it helps to have in mind two favors, items, pieces of information, or other help the NPC could ask for from the heroes.

Finally, if the heroes really offend the NPC and end the negotiation with their interest at 0, have some idea of what the NPC might do to try to punish the heroes. If you don't have this ready, though, don't sweat it. Revenge is a dish best served cold—and maybe a few sessions from now—so you've got time to plan.

Hero Negotiation Stats

Many heroes have class features, titles, or other character options that make them better in negotiation. When you're preparing a negotiation, it helps if you know each hero's Renown score and any features they have that might impact a negotiation, such as the troubadour's Scene Partner feature. Ask your players to tell you if any of their character options influence negotiation at the start of a campaign, and ask again whenever they gain a new level.

Heroes Must Initiate

A negotiation should always be initiated by the heroes, and the character (as with people in general) can't be forced to negotiate for something they don't want. As you prepare your negotiation, remember that the players might decide to gain what the characters need from the NPC in some other way—calling in a favor from someone else who has the means to help them, stealing what they need from the NPC, simply pushing forward without the NPC's help, and so on.

Framework for Roleplaying

New Directors and players might feel a bit overwhelmed by negotiation, wondering if they need the rules at all for roleplaying a quid pro quo discussion. If you'd rather play without the negotiation rules, go for it! The Draw Steel designers aren't going to come to your house and take your books if you do so. However, the negotiation rules exist to provide you with robust mechanics that create an exciting back and forth between two parties, with high stakes and drama.

An NPC's interest helps you determine their attitude toward the party's proposals, while their patience indicates how much time they're willing to give the heroes. In the same way that Stamina tells you when a monster is done with a fight, patience tells you when an NPC is done talking and is ready to deal. The negotiation rules mean you never have to just roleplay a conversation until you and the players become bored with the scene, then someone makes a single test to see what happens. The negotiation rules let you roleplay with structure, risks, and rewards!

The most important thing to remember when it comes to negotiation is that the rules are meant to work with you—not against you. They're flexible on purpose. If a hero makes an excellent argument that you think should work without a test, then it does. If a hero makes an unfortunate argument that should fail no matter what, then they're out of luck. You're empowered to run negotiation in whatever way will be the most fun for you and your players.

If players are having trouble roleplaying during a negotiation, try running your next negotiation without announcing that the characters are now in a negotiation. Simply ask them for tests when appropriate and have the NPC respond based on the test outcomes and their motivations and pitfalls. This approach might help your players shake off focusing on the rules to simply roleplay as you track interest and patience on the side.

Research and Reconnaissance

If the players want to negotiate with an NPC and the heroes have some time before the conversation starts, they might think to do a bit of research and reconnaissance into the NPC, hoping to discover their motivations and pitfalls. Characters have multiple ways to tackle this. They might do research into the NPC as a downtime project, they could employ a montage test to gather rumors and grease a few palms, or they might attempt to do favors for people close to the NPC and earn information in exchange.

It's always a good idea to let the heroes do a little recon before jumping into a negotiation. Doing so makes for a richer story and can help the players better engage with the negotiation system, since they'll feel more prepared for it.

Roleplaying Negotiators

When it comes time for you to roleplay an NPC during a negotiation, remember that the NPC, like all sapient creatures, is complex. Every NPC has their own way of approaching negotiation. Some might be full of bluster. Others might say everything with a smile even while rejecting the heroes. One NPC might be verbose, while yet another says as little as possible to keep the heroes guessing as to their real desires. As a starting point to figuring out how a specific NPC might negotiate, you can refer to the notes on the NPC that you created while preparing the adventure, reviewing their voice, behavior, and flaw, in addition to any motivations for helping or denying characters in need.

One important decision you should make ahead of time is how upfront the NPC will be regarding what they want from the heroes. A straightforward NPC can make for a faster negotiation if the heroes are willing to give the NPC whatever they need. An unreadable NPC can be a puzzle for the heroes to figure out, and can be more difficult to roleplay. If it's your first time using the negotiation rules, you should start out with a more straightforward NPC before playing a coy customer.

During negotiation, let the players talk freely about their strategy if that fits their playstyle and sense of fun. You can intervene if an argument crops up, but otherwise, let the players plot, scheme, and guess while you play it cool.

Once a negotiation starts, the players and characters can obtain information about the NPC involved only by making tests, using their characters' features, or through engaging in conversation with the NPC. Whenever the NPC makes an offer to the heroes after a test, make it clear what the terms of the offer are. While some NPCs might speak cryptically, it's best for the players to understand what they're getting their heroes into. It can be fun to trick the heroes, but many players don't feel the fun when they get tricked instead.

Sharing Interest and Patience

It's up to you as the Director to decide whether to share an NPC's interest or patience during a negotiation. Sometimes sharing this information can make an encounter more dramatic, with the players watching their progress rise and fall in real time. Other groups might find negotiation more fun and immersive if those exact numbers are hidden from the players, just as some groups like knowing the Stamina of every creature in a battle and others prefer to keep that information secret. Talk to your players about what they'd prefer.

Sample Negotiators

This section contains a number of sample NPCs you can use for negotiation, sorted by their Impression scores. Each of these NPCs is an archetype that you can easily adapt to specific situations. For example, the bandit chief could be the leader of a brigand gang, a pirate captain, or a rebel who redistributes wealth by stealing from corrupt nobles and giving the booty to those less fortunate.

Each archetype includes a list of motivations and pitfalls an NPC could have. You should pick at least two from each list for any NPC you create using the archetype. Feel free to change the wording on motivations and pitfalls and adjust numbers as you see fit.

Bandit Chief

Impression Score: 1

The bandit chief is a bully and a braggart, typically negotiating using intimidation and bluster before softening.

The bandit chief archetype can be used for any other local big shot, such as the privileged child of a local lord, an arrogant tavern darts champion, or any bully.

Motivations

The bandit chief has the following possible motivations:

• Freedom: No one tells me what to do—not if they want to keep their head on their shoulders. And no one tells my toughs what to do except me!
• Greed: Gold! I love the feel of shining, clinking coins running between my fingers. I never found anything to spend it on that I like as much as just having gold.
• Power: I want a stronger hideout, more toughs, and a bigger share of the loot. Get me that, and I'll do your dirty work for you.
• Revelry: If you don't get drunk after a raid, then why have a raid?

Pitfalls

The bandit chief has the following possible pitfalls:

• Higher Authority: By order of the baron? You can keep your fancy titles and lands. I give the orders around here!
• Justice: Only the weak whine for justice. The strong make their own rules.
• Legacy: Listen, I don't care what happens when I'm gone. I want my followers shouting my name now, not in a hundred years.
• Peace: In times of peace, if you pick up a silver coin that's not yours, the sheriff comes knocking on your door. In war, whole caravans disappear and nobody blinks. Give me war.

Knight

Impression Score: 2

Although not always an idealist, the knight is a loyal servant of their liege and a stickler for duty. A knight knows their place in a regimented society, and believes that everyone else should keep to their own place.

The knight archetype can be used for any other local authority, such as a village elder, town guard officer, or academic professor.

Motivations

The knight has the following possible motivations:

• Higher Authority: That's above my pay grade. If my superiors sign off on it, then so do I.
• Justice: Thank you for bringing this to my attention. I agree, this must be put right. The only question is how.
• Peace: People like us, we fight so that the common folk don't have to. If I must, I'll draw my sword again to keep the peace.
• Revelry: Every agreement should be sealed with a toast. Huzzah!

Pitfalls

The knight has the following possible pitfalls:

• Benevolence: These people don't need charity, they need order. Let them go to the town hall and they'll get a full belly in exchange for an honest day's work.
• Freedom: None of us are free, from the lowliest servant on up. Even a monarch has a duty to their people.
• Power: My power comes to me through my lawful oath, not by some dirty deal made in secret.
• Vengeance: I believe in law, not vengeance, and law is decided by higher courts. I'm just a functionary.

Guildmaster

Impression Score: 3

The guildmaster knows the value of a coin, but understands that knowledge—inside information and trade secrets alike—is the most valuable currency. They bargain accordingly.

The guildmaster archetype can be used for any other local information broker, such as a cult leader, hag, or spy.

Motivations

The guildmaster has the following possible motivations:

• Benevolence: The people can't take care of themselves. Somebody's got to look after them, the poor lambs.
• Discovery: It would be highly unethical for you to show me those schematics you obtained from a rival guild. Likewise, it would be highly unethical for me to slide you this bag of gold.
• Power: Who do you think will be in charge in the next age? The nobles? Pah! They still count their wealth in cows. Whoever controls information will rule the world—and I intend for that to be us.
• Protection: We have rivals—hungry opportunists who will stop at nothing. If I want to protect my guild, I've got to do unto them before they do unto us.

Pitfalls

The guildmaster has the following possible pitfalls:

• Higher Authority: My loyalty is to the guild—not the burgomaster, not the king, not Ajax himself. But don't tell them I said that.
• Justice: We're reshaping the world here. Of course, some people who can't adapt are going to find themselves on the bottom. But why should anyone blame us for that?
• Peace: Conflict isn't bad in and of itself. It drives innovation. The key is to not be on the losing side.
• Revelry: I don't have time for this foolishness. Come talk to me again when you have something of value to show me.

The warlord has raised their banner and troops flock to their cause. Some say a warlord never negotiates, but that's not true. They're happy to listen to terms of surrender.

The warlord archetype can be used for any other local-level threat, such as a vampire, hobgoblin bloodlord, or rebellious noble.

Motivations

The warlord has the following possible motivations:

• Freedom: I'm not paying a single coin to some weakling liege lord for the privilege of being told what to do. I've raised my banner. I defy anyone to pull it down.
• Legacy: Did you see that young captain out there putting the fear of the gods into her troops? That's my kid, but she earned her title. Someday, this will all be hers.
• Peace: Look around you. Everywhere you look—weakness, corruption, waste. Peace is a noble goal, but we won't have peace until the current regime is swept away.
• Vengeance: Have you suffered as I have at the hands of that accursed villain? If so, then I'll gladly call you friend.

Pitfalls

The warlord has the following possible pitfalls:

• Benevolence: Go back to your street corner and beg for alms if that's what you're after. You'll get nothing from me.
• Discovery: What does that have to do with me? I'm a soldier, not a scholar.
• Justice: You dare call me unjust? I make the laws here. Justice is mine to give or take away!
• Protection: I'm not some sniveling coward who begs for protection, and neither are my troops. Anyone who asks for safety doesn't deserve it.

Burgomaster

Impression Score: 5

The burgomaster's power comes from their constituents, and for the most part, they aim to serve their people. Most burgomasters are experienced negotiators, never giving up any more than they mean to.

The burgomaster archetype can be used for any other local ruler, such as a baron, governor, or a watch captain in a metropolis.

Motivations

The burgomaster has the following possible motivations:

• Greed: Keep talking. I'm sure we can come to an agreement that benefits all parties. A rising tide and all that.
• Higher Authority: No one can accuse me of being disloyal. What my duty demands, I do—but let's determine the most sensible way to go about it.
• Justice: The rule of law must be preserved. If you have evidence of crimes, those responsible must be punished.
• Protection: The weak, the helpless—they depend upon me. And, to a lesser extent, civic-minded heroes like yourselves. Together, we'll make sure the people come to no harm.

Pitfalls

The burgomaster has the following possible pitfalls:

• Discovery: Trust me. No good is going to come from poking that particular beehive.
• Freedom: Freedom, eh? What's next, freedom from taxes? No one is born free except the gods, and only fools believe otherwise.
• Revelry: Put that bottle away. I'm a public figure! I can't be seen carousing and gallivanting and who knows what else.
• Vengeance: In politics, you have to have a short memory. Your enemy today might be your ally tomorrow. There's no need to make things personal.

Virtuoso

Impression Score: 6

The virtuoso is the preeminent musician in the land—perhaps a celebrated opera singer or composer. If you need a cause popularized or an enemy's name tarnished, you come to them.

The virtuoso archetype can be used for any other local celebrity, such as a master crafter, inspired artist, famous gladiator, or world champion.

Motivations

The virtuoso has the following possible motivations:

• Freedom: I follow my muse, my only master. Who would dare put handcuffs on art?
• Legacy: Castles will crumble. Empires will fall. But if only I can produce a work worthy of my talents, my name will live forever.
• Peace: In war, bronze statues are melted down for armor. Money is wasted on ballistae instead of ballads. War is a crime against the god of art.
• Revelry: Yes, tonight let us celebrate! Inspiration looks down kindly on those who drink life to the dregs.

Pitfalls

The virtuoso has the following possible pitfalls:

• Greed: You offer me money? Money comes to geniuses—it is our due. I can get it from a thousand admirers.
• Power: I have no ambitions beyond this opera house. For me to leave this place, even for a palace or a throne … it would be an exile for me.
• Protection: I'm not afraid. The god of music will look after her own.
• Vengeance: Perhaps there are some who hate me—those who think I stand in their way, or whose accomplishments I have eclipsed. But I hate no one and am jealous of no one.

High Priest

Impression Score: 7

The high priest might be a high-ranking member of their faith, but as they are quick to tell you, that doesn't make them free to act as they wish. The commands of their deity must be paramount.

The high priest archetype can be used for any other national authority, such as a count, judge, or general.

Motivations

The high priest has the following possible motivations:

• Benevolence: We are agreed on this matter. If this threat puts people in danger, we must come to their rescue.
• Discovery: Why, yes … I would be interested in looking at that document further. Surely no harm can come from being aware of the snares and dangers in the world.
• Higher Authority: Indeed, my appointed duty is to serve all folk whether it be my deity, my liege, or the poorest person crying out in need.
• Justice: Rest assured, the good will receive their just reward and the evil will be punished. I will see to it.

Pitfalls

The high priest has the following possible pitfalls:

• Greed: Don't offer that to me. Donate it to the faith if you have no need of it.
• Legacy: Me? I am no one. Any good deeds I might have accomplished are to my deity's credit, not my own.
• Power: My current responsibilities are quite enough. I have no desire for more.
• Revelry: For shame! Do you boast of doing evil and expect me to join you in it?

Duke

Impression Score: 8

As the duke gestures you to join them at their card table, spies whisper in their ear. The duke never plays a game or enters a negotiation unless they think they can gain the high card.

The duke archetype can be used for any other royal counselor, such as an archmage, spymaster, vizier, or even a beloved jester.

Motivations

The duke has the following possible motivations:

• Discovery: My agents have brought me many whispers, but this is news to me. Who else knows of this?
• Higher Authority: I must do as my liege commands. So tell me how you seek to serve them as well.
• Peace: We must have stability. I will sacrifice anything—and anyone—for this.
• Vengeance: There is one—I will not speak their name—who thinks I have forgotten what they did to me. Someday they will discover that I have a long memory.

Pitfalls

The duke has the following possible pitfalls:

• Benevolence: Do you think I act because I love my fellow people? Half of them are worthless, and the other half are villains. But without them, I'd be the Duke of Nothing, so I must preserve them.
• Greed: Put away your gold. I'm far too busy to spend it.
• Justice: Right and wrong? There is no right except what strengthens the kingdom, and there is no wrong except what hurts it.
• Protection: I don't care about saving lives. We're all doomed to die. The question is, what will live on after us?

Dragon

Impression Score: 9

The dragon's tremendous might is overshadowed only by their boundless ambition and pride.

The dragon archetype can be used for any other kingdom-level threat, such as a fire giant chief, a contender for a throne, or the dread synliroi Lord Syuul.

Motivations

The dragon has the following possible motivations:

• Freedom: Yes, my ambitions have been bound to the earth for far too long. It's time I took flight.
• Greed: Bring me tribute now, and when I rule, I will not forget you.
• Protection: My people have been mistreated for centuries. It ends now!
• Vengeance: This land, these people, their treasures, all rightfully mine. Stolen from me!

Pitfalls

The dragon has the following possible pitfalls:

• Legacy: No heir will outlive me, no legend will remember my past glory … for I shall never die!
• Peace: You want to make peace? When there are still things in the world that are not yet mine?
• Power: How can you possibly offer me power?
• Revelry: My pleasures are as far beyond your comprehension as yours are to a worm.

Monarch

Impression Score: 10

Whether they're good or evil, a monarch is accustomed to authority and wants to keep it. They respond better to pleas than to demands.

The monarch archetype can be used for any other kingdom-level ruler, such as a tyrant, a theocracy's archpriest, or a republic's consul.

Motivations

The monarch has the following possible motivations:

• Benevolence: It's not for nothing I'm called "the Good."
• Greed: Your offer intrigues me. In truth, our coffers are not as full as I should like.
• Justice: Ah, do the villains ignore my laws? They must be punished!
• Legacy: If I should die, promise me this: You will serve my heir as loyally as you have served me.

Pitfalls

The monarch has the following possible pitfalls:

• Discovery: Keep your secrets to yourself. I'm a monarch, not a spymaster.
• Freedom: Freedom? Some of my disloyal subjects speak that word a little too often for my liking. I hope you're not one of them.
• Higher Authority: You dare give orders to me? Never forget, no matter who sent you, I rule here!
• Vengeance: Revenge is an exciting sport. Sadly, it's one I've had to give up. It's policy, not revenge, that rules here.

Lich

Impression Score: 11

The lich spent centuries alone, studying and building their power … but now the time for studying is over.

The lich is willing to negotiate with strong heroes who might make loyal lieutenants—or powerful undead servants if the talks don't go well.

The lich archetype can be used for any other world-shaking threat, such as a would-be emperor or the vampire lord Count Rhodar von Glauer.

Motivations

The lich has the following possible motivations:

• Discovery: Give me that book at once! Your very touch corrupts it.
• Power: Yes … yes … power! Ahahahaha! Bring me this power and you will be rewarded.
• Revelry: Join my court for the coming feast! We shall know such entertainments as were never seen in this world before.
• Vengeance: The world despised me … banished me … forgot me. The world shall regret it.

Pitfalls

The lich has the following possible pitfalls:

• Benevolence: Do you ask the farmer to pity the wheat before it's harvested?
• Legacy: I don't care what the common people think of me. The less they think of me, the better—as long as they obey my commands.
• Peace: Yes, yes, peace will come … but not now.
• Protection: If you're so intent on saving lives, then save your own by bowing down before me! No harm will come to my servants.

Deity

Impression Score: 12

The deity will listen to your prayers—and might perhaps answer them as well, if the mood strikes them.

The deity archetype can be used for any other world-transcending power, such as the legendary time dragon Cthrion Uroniziir, or the dread pharaoh Khorsekef the Infinite.

Motivations

The deity has the following possible motivations:

• Benevolence: Worry not, for I have sent champions to save the world. Perhaps these champions … are closer than you think.
• Legacy: When that blessed day arrives, all shall come before me to pray, and I shall offer my blessings to the world!
• Power: Although I am all-powerful on the spiritual realm, my hands are bound in such worldly matters. But if you act for me, I can offer a little assistance.
• Protection: Have faith, little one … none will be forgotten or left behind.

Pitfalls

The deity has the following possible pitfalls:

• Discovery: Mortal, what can you tell me that I do not know?
• Freedom: True freedom lies in service to me. Surrender your freedom and I shall raise you up high.
• Greed: Fool! Do you seek to offer me what is already mine?
• Higher Authority: Who do you speak of ? Who is beyond me, who is above me? Who will live to see me die, and who drew breath before I gave it? Let them come forth and say their name!

Create and Run Montage Tests

You can use montage tests to play out chases, escapes, investigations, wilderness travel, attempts to track other creatures, and any other exciting moments in a story that can be told by transitioning or cutting back and forth among the heroes.

Preparing Montage Tests

When you prepare a montage test, you'll want to write down some key information.

First, make a list of potential challenges the heroes can face during the montage test. This list should be at least as long as the number of successes the heroes must achieve to earn a total success. You might also prepare a list of consequences and rewards that could come up for individual tests made during the montage test, but since you can't predict what approaches the players will take to their characters' tests, don't worry about covering every scenario. You can always fall back on earning Malice and giving out hero tokens as a default consequence and reward (see Test Outcomes in Chapter 9: Tests).

You'll then need to create the three outcomes of the montage: total success, partial success, and total failure. With a total success, the heroes should accomplish whatever they set out to do. With a partial success, they should accomplish their goal at a cost, create a new problem for themselves after doing what they set out to do, or not quite accomplish their full goal. With a total failure, the characters fail to do whatever they set out to do, but this result should not grind the story to a halt. Maybe they lose track of the fleeing lackeys they were pursuing, but they know they can now raid a mage's tower to find that information. Even if failure costs the characters dearly, they should still have options for continuing the adventure.

Running Montage Tests

When you run a montage test, start by setting the scene for the players and listing the various challenges the heroes must overcome. Allow the players to strategize about the order in which they'll tackle these challenges and make tests.

When you adjudicate individual tests as part of a montage test, do so as you would any other test (see Adjudicating Tests in Chapter 9). Individual tests should have rewards and consequences when appropriate. In addition to the usual options for rewards or consequences, you can choose to have those outcomes grant an edge or impose a bane on a test made later as part of the montage test. Do whatever makes sense for the heroes' actions in the narrative.

After each test, narrate the hero's failure or success in such a way that the other players can understand if and how the challenge has been overcome. Your description might even spark some new ideas for what the characters can do next.

If a hero decides to tackle a problem using an ability, trait, or other feature instead of a test and it makes sense for them to do so, allow it. In a lot of cases, you can treat that approach as an automatic success that allows the group to overcome one of the challenges of the montage test, but you could decide that the success incurs a consequence. Alternatively, maybe the use of an ability or trait is beneficial enough to provide an edge on a future test, or maybe it's so effective that it counts for multiple successes or solves the entire montage test in one fell swoop! Always reward the clever actions of the players.

At the end of a montage test, narrate the outcome for the players as you describe the overall success or failure and any consequences. Then let them know the montage test is done!

Montage Twist!

You can break up the individual tests within a montage test by introducing a quick combat encounter, negotiation, or trap into the scene, or by adding more challenges to overcome. Keep track of the heroes' successes and failures, and decide how many tests they must attempt before introducing your twist. A single twist in a montage test can often be introduced at the end of the first montage test round.

When a twist is introduced, make sure the players understand that the montage test has been paused but isn't over. Then when the twist has been established and dealt with, continue the montage test.

Example Montage Tests

You can use any of the following montage tests in your game, or as inspiration that you can modify to your heart's content.

Fight Fire

Fire has broken out in the town! The heroes must prevent the conflagration from spreading while saving as many townsfolk as possible. Their efforts might be made more difficult if the cause of the fire—such as a marauding dragon or an invading army—is still around causing trouble.

Setting the Scene

Fire blazes in several buildings whose occupants need to be rescued. Elsewhere, some townsfolk flee while others throw water on the fire with no organization or plan. Without leadership and a way to stop its spread, the fire could easily consume everything. In a nearby stable, horses are panicking as their hay smolders. Burning rubble blocks pathways everywhere.

Montage Challenges

The following challenges can be part of the montage test:

• Bucket Brigades: Characters can organize the would-be firefighters into disciplined bucket brigades, or can fight the fire directly in some other way. Suggested Characteristics: Presence, Reason. Suggested Skills: Architecture, Intimidate, Lead.
• Clearing a Firebreak: Preventing the fire from spreading might involve clearing the ground of flammable materials, either by moving it or burning it away under controlled conditions. Suggested Characteristics: Might, Reason. Suggested Skills and Abilities: Endurance, Lift; abilities that deal fire damage. Special: A creature loses a Recovery if they incur a consequence on the test for this challenge.
• Evacuating Buildings: Characters must save people trapped in burning buildings. Suggested Characteristics: Might, Presence. Suggested Skills: Climb, Endurance, Persuade. Special: A creature who doesn't have fire immunity loses a Recovery if they incur a consequence on the test for this challenge. The heroes can attempt this challenge twice during the montage test.
• Find More Firefighters: By finding groups that aren't fighting the fire, such as fleeing civilians, characters can convince them to help. Suggested Characteristic: Presence. Suggested Skills: Intimidate, Lead, Persuade.
• Free the Horses: Characters can loose the stabled horses threatened by the fire and lead them to safety. Suggested Characteristics: Might, Presence. Suggested Skills: Handle Animals, Lift, Ride.
• Move Burning Rubble: Shifting burning debris blocking doorways can allow people to escape the blaze. Suggested Characteristic: Might. Suggested Skills: Endurance, Lift. Special: A creature who doesn't have fire immunity loses a Recovery if they incur a consequence on the test for this challenge.
• Use the Freed Horses (if the Free the Horses challenge was successful): Characters can put the horses to work clearing rubble or bringing people to safety. Suggested Characteristics: Reason, Presence. Suggested Skills: Drive, Handle Animals, Ride.

Optional Twists

At the end of the first montage test round, an emergency crops up. One or more heroes, selected by the players, must deal with the situation before the end of the round. If the heroes successfully deal with the twist, they earn a success for the montage test. Otherwise, they earn a failure.

• Building Collapse: While a hero is in or near a blazing building, it starts to collapse. The hero must escape before the building crumbles. Suggested Characteristics: Agility, Intuition. Suggested Skills: Climb, Gymnastics, Jump.
• Cause of the Fire: At the end of the first round of the montage test, the hostile cause of the fire appears—a squad of an invading army, a dragon, a team of arsonists, and so forth. The characters must engage in a standard or hard encounter with this threat.
• Help! Townsfolk are about to run into a burning building to save a trapped relative. This twist requires two tests, each of which nets a success or a failure for the montage test. One hero can try to prevent the townspeople from entering the burning building while another rescues the relative. Suggested Characteristics: Might, Presence. Suggested Skills: Lift, Persuade.

Montage Test Outcomes

One of the following outcomes ends the montage test:

• Total Success: The fire is extinguished. Buildings are damaged but no lives were lost. Each character earns 2 Victories if the montage test was hard, or 1 Victory if it was easy or moderate, in addition to any Victories earned from combat during the montage test.
• Partial Success: The fire is quenched, although many buildings burned and a few lives were lost. Each character earns 1 Victory if the montage test was moderate or hard, in addition to any Victories earned from combat during the montage test.
• Total Failure: When the fire finally burns out, the town lies in ruins. Townsfolk mourn their dead or grimly prepare to find a new home. Characters earn no Victories from the montage test, but might earn Victories from combat undertaken during the montage test.

Infiltrate the Palace

Whether the heroes are trying to reach a tyrant's throne room, pull off a daring art heist, or rescue royalty from captivity, they're somewhere they're not supposed to be—and they'd prefer to keep their presence a secret.

Setting the Scene

The palace is well defended, with exterior patrols always on the alert. The few obvious entrances are locked and guarded, and once the party is inside, no one knows the way to the goal. Guards patrol the interior of the site as well, forcing the characters to sneak or bluff their way past them.

Montage Challenges

Half the work of any successful infiltration is done before setting foot in the target site. The players can choose to have the heroes make individual tests as part of the montage test before they attempt to enter the palace. One round of tests can be made this way, and those tests don't affect the alarm level within the palace (see below).

The following challenges can be part of this initial preparation:

• Bribe Guards: The heroes can pay off the guards outside the palace to look the other way. If successful, one or more heroes' Wealth is lowered by 1. Suggested Characteristic: Presence. Suggested Skills: Criminal Underworld, Flirt, Persuade.
• Find Blueprints: Researching secret entrances and little-known passageways can be undertaken in forgotten libraries or well-guarded town halls. Suggested Characteristics: Agility, Reason. Suggested Skills: Architecture, History, Sneak.
• Identify Unguarded Entrances: Scouting around or consulting contacts can reveal a forgotten back door or accessible window. Suggested Characteristics: Agility, Intuition. Suggested Skills: Alertness, Architecture, Criminal Underworld.
• Learn Guard Schedules: By keeping their ears and eyes open, characters can learn when guards go off duty. Suggested Characteristics: Intuition, Reason. Suggested Skills: Alertness, Eavesdrop, Track.
• Use False Identities: By procuring forged documents or badges, characters can prepare to walk into the palace in plain sight. Suggested Characteristics: Presence, Reason. Suggested Skills: Disguise, Forgery, Lie.

When the heroes start their infiltration, the alarm level of the palace starts at 0. While they infiltrate the site, whenever any hero fails a test as part of the montage test, the alarm level increases by 1, to a maximum of 2. Each time the heroes succeed on such a test, the alarm level decreases, to a minimum of 0. While the alarm level is 1, tests made inside the palace by the characters as part of the montage test take a bane. While the alarm level is 2, such tests have a double bane.

The first time any hero fails a test made as part of the montage test while the alarm level is 2, they encounter guards and must engage in a hard combat encounter. The second time any hero fails such a test while the alarm level is 2, the montage test is a total failure.

The following challenges can be part of the heroes' infiltration:

• Aerial Route: Characters can follow a path that leads along catwalks or high ledges. Suggested Characteristics: Agility, Might. Suggested Skills: Climb, Gymnastics, Jump.
• Avoid Traffic: By finding the dustiest, least-traveled areas and sticking to them, characters can avoid notice. Suggested Characteristics: Intuition, Reason. Suggested Skills: Navigate, Search, Track.
• Lie Low: Once while the alarm level is greater than 0, the heroes can find a place to hide for a bit, reducing the alarm level by 1. This activity doesn't require a test or generate a success or failure.
• Make a Diversion: After causing a ruckus, the characters quickly go the other way. Suggested Characteristics: Might, Presence. Suggested Skills: Alchemy, Perform, Sabotage.
• Pose as Guards: Using stolen or specially prepared uniforms can let the characters move freely through the palace. The test for this challenge gains an edge if the characters prepared disguises in advance (including succeeding on the Use False Identities challenge) or defeated guards during their infiltration. Suggested Characteristics: Intuition, Presence. Suggested Skills: Disguise, Lie, Search.
• Skulk in the Shadows: Keeping out of sight is the simplest way for characters to move through the palace. Suggested Characteristic: Agility. Suggested Skills: Hide, Sneak. Special: The heroes can attempt this challenge twice during the montage test.

Optional Twist

At any time during the infiltration section of the montage test, immediately after one hero's turn, the characters run into another group breaking into the palace at the same time, and possibly after the same prize. The characters can choose to fight or negotiate with the other party, or simply let them pass—in which case they might meet them again when they reach their final goal.

Montage Test Outcomes

One of the following outcomes ends the montage test:

• Total Success: The heroes reach their goal and secure an escape route that lets them leave the palace safely. Each character earns 2 Victories if the montage test was hard, or 1 Victory if it was easy or moderate, in addition to any Victories earned from combat during the montage test.
• Partial Success: The heroes reach their goal, but they need to fight a standard combat encounter to escape the palace. Each character earns 1 Victory if the montage test was moderate or hard, in addition to any Victories earned from combat during the montage test.
• Total Failure: The palace is locked down and the heroes' goal is out of reach. The characters need to fight a hard combat encounter to escape. Characters earn no Victories from the montage test, but might earn Victories from combat undertaken during the montage test.

Prepare For Battle

Whether it's a village threatened by bandits or a great city preparing for a siege, enemies are on their way and ready to attack. The heroes have a limited time to fortify the settlement's defenses and bolster its troops.

Setting the Scene

The walls or palisades around the settlement (if any) are in poor shape. Roads or rivers through the area give the invaders free access to the settlement unless barricades, traps, or ambushes can be set up. Supplies of food, weapons, and ammunition are too low to survive a long siege. The area is home to few experienced fighters compared to the numbers of the invaders, and the local militia is poorly equipped and untrained.

Montage Challenges

The following challenges can be part of the montage test:

• Arms and Armor: Crafting or repairing weapons and armor of all kinds can help rebuild the defenders' stores. Suggested Characteristics: Might, Reason. Suggested Skills: Alchemy, Blacksmithing, Fletching.
• Evacuation: Heroes can help get noncombatants to safety before the invaders arrive. Suggested Characteristics: Intuition, Presence. Suggested Skills: Handle Animals, Lead, Persuade.
• Fortification: Characters can help build or repair walls and other defensive structures. Suggested Characteristics: Might, Reason. Suggested Skills: Architecture, Endurance, Lift.
• Inspiration: Improving morale with rousing speeches or performances can help prepare the locals for the fight to come. Suggested Characteristics: Intuition, Presence. Suggested Skills: Brag, Lead, Perform.
• Propaganda: Characters can attempt to sow confusion or rebellion in the ranks of the approaching army. Suggested Characteristics: Agility, Presence. Suggested Skills: Disguise, Forgery, Lie.
• Stockpiling: Characters can hunt, forage, or supernaturally conjure food or water to augment the settlement's supplies. Suggested Characteristics: Agility, Reason. Suggested Skills: Nature, Sneak, Track.
• Training: Heroes can help to train the settlement's defenders. Suggested Characteristics: Might, Presence. Suggested Skills: Endurance, Intimidate, Lead.
• Trapmaking: Digging concealed pits, placing hindrances, and setting up ambushes will make it harder for the invaders to approach the settlement. Suggested Characteristics: Might, Reason. Suggested Skills: Conceal Object, Endurance, Mechanics.

Optional Twist

At the end of the first round of the montage test, a fast-moving enemy vanguard attacks before the settlement's defenders are ready. The heroes must engage in an easy combat encounter.

Montage Test Outcomes

One of the following outcomes ends the montage test:

• Total Success: The settlement is fully fortified, and even if the heroes don't fight in its defense, the settlement and its people survive. If the heroes wish, they can leave the settlement and fight a standard combat encounter against the leader of the invaders and their lackeys, possibly killing or capturing the leader. Each character earns 2 Victories if the montage test was hard, or 1 Victory if it was easy or moderate, in addition to any Victories earned from combat during the montage test.
• Partial Success: The settlement's fortifications are improved, but the settlement will still fall unless the heroes fight in its defense. To save the settlement, the heroes must triumph in a hard combat encounter against the leader of the invaders and their lackeys. If the heroes lose the encounter, the settlement falls. Each character earns 1 Victory if the montage test was moderate or hard, in addition to any Victories earned from combat during the montage test.
• Total Failure: The heroes each lose a Recovery from their failed efforts to defend the settlement, which is taken over by the invaders. If the players wish, the characters can fight two hard combat encounters against waves of invaders to allow some of the settlement's inhabitants to retreat to safety. Characters earn no Victories from the montage test, but might earn Victories from combat undertaken during the montage test.

Track the Fugitive

The heroes are on the trail of someone. An escaped criminal? A dangerous beast? A lost or kidnapped child? The difficulties of the chase depend on whether the quarry knows they're being pursued and whether they want to be found.

Setting the Scene

The fugitive's route is easy to follow, but could they be setting a false trail? Did anyone see them pass by, and is there any sense of where they might be headed? The goal is for the characters to do whatever they can to find and stay on the fugitive's trail.

Montage Challenges

The following challenges can be part of the montage test:

• Ask Around: Characters can gather clues from locals or bystanders—or if they have access to the proper magic, from animals or the dead. Suggested Characteristics: Intuition, Presence. Suggested Skills: Interrogate, Persuade, Rumors.
• Follow the Trail: Looking for tracks or other signs of the fugitive's passage can lead the characters on. Suggested Characteristic: Intuition. Suggested Skills: Alertness, Search, Track. Special: The heroes can attempt this challenge twice during the montage test.
• Obtain a Good View: Characters can climb up high to get the big picture of where the fugitive might have gone. Suggested Characteristics: Agility, Might. Suggested Skills: Climb, Gymnastics, Jump.
• Predict the Next Move: The heroes might have an idea where the quarry is headed. A character gains an edge on the test for this challenge if they know the quarry well. Suggested Characteristics: Intuition, Reason. Suggested Skills: Navigate, Read Person, an appropriate skill from the lore skill group (Nature to follow an animal, Criminal Underworld to follow a criminal, and so forth).
• Push Ahead: While the quarry is resting, the heroes have a chance to close in. Suggested Characteristic: Might. Suggested Skills: Drive, Endurance, Navigate, Ride. Special: The hero making the test for this challenge loses a Recovery.

Optional Twist

At the end of the first round of the montage test, the heroes stumble upon a trap set by the quarry or a problem they left behind. This might include such things as a pit trap set with poison spikes, a mob of angry locals who've been told the characters are criminals, or an intentionally set fire. The heroes must deal with the trap or problem before they continue the montage test.

Montage Test Outcomes

One of the following outcomes ends the montage test:

• Total Success: The heroes catch their quarry before the fugitive reaches their destination, or before a lost or kidnapped creature comes to harm. Each character earns 2 Victories if the montage test was hard, or 1 Victory if it was easy or moderate, in addition to any Victories earned from combat during the montage test.
• Partial Success: If the quarry was trying to evade capture, they reach their destination. They find allies and a fortified position from which to defend themselves, or they might have time to cause more harm. If the quarry was lost or kidnapped, they are grievously injured when found. Each character earns 1 Victory if the montage test was moderate or hard, in addition to any Victories earned from combat during the montage test.
• Total Failure: The trail has gone cold, and the heroes will need to seek fresh clues or a different approach before they can resume the hunt. Characters earn no Victories from the montage test, but might earn Victories from combat undertaken during the montage test.

Wilderness Race

The heroes must cross trackless wilderness, perhaps to reach a besieged city before it falls or seek the site where a curse is about to be activated. Getting there fast is a priority—but so is getting there alive.

Setting the Scene

The wilds hold unknown dangers. Characters need to figure out the best route while maintaining a good pace, watching out for hazards, and avoiding predatory monsters.

Montage Challenges

The following challenges can be part of the montage test:

• Avoid Hazards: Characters can determine ways to overcome the natural hazards of the wilderness, such as finding insect-repelling herbs in a swamp or making snowshoes to cross tundra. Suggested Characteristics: Intuition, Reason. Suggested Skills: Heal, Nature, appropriate skill from the crafting skill group (such as Alchemy to make bug repellent).
• Carry Baggage: By carrying supplies for weaker party members, characters can increase the whole party's speed. Suggested Characteristic: Might. Suggested Skills: Endurance, Lift.
• Find the Path: Avoiding getting lost is a major challenge for the characters. Suggested Characteristics: Intuition, Reason. Suggested Skills: Alertness, Nature, Navigate.
• Keep Up Spirits: Characters can keep up the party's morale during a forced march with cheer and song. Suggested Characteristic: Presence. Suggested Skills: Lead, Music, Perform.
• Keep Watch: Characters must be on constant guard against danger. Suggested Characteristic: Intuition. Suggested Skills: Alertness, Eavesdrop, Track.
• Push On: Characters must be ready to pick up the pace and push past their fatigue. Suggested Characteristics: Might. Suggested Skills: Endurance, Lead; Drive, Handle Animals, or Ride if the party has mounts or vehicles.
• Scout Ahead: Investigating the path ahead lets the characters avoid dead-ends and arduous terrain. Suggested Characteristics: Agility, Intuition. Suggested Skills: Alertness, Navigate, Sneak.

Optional Twist

At the end of the first round of the montage test, the characters' journey is interrupted by one of the following threats:

Predatory Monster: The characters stumble into or are stalked by a monstrous predator, and must engage in a standard combat encounter to overcome the threat or drive it off. If any character has obtained a success on the Scout Ahead challenge, you can let the characters make a group test to sneak past or set an ambush for the monster.

Unexpected Hazard: A natural hazard such as an avalanche, rockslide, or wildfire interrupts the journey. Each hero must make a test of your choice to avoid the hazard, losing a Recovery on a failure.

Montage Test Outcomes

One of the following outcomes ends the montage test:

• Total Success: The heroes reach their goal in time. Each character earns 2 Victories if the montage test was hard, or 1 Victory if it was easy or moderate, in addition to any Victories earned from combat during the montage test.
• Partial Success: To reach their goal in time, the heroes must sprint over the last leg of the journey, with each character spending 2 Recoveries to do so. (If even one character doesn't have 2 Recoveries remaining, the characters instead earn a total failure for the montage test.) Each character earns 1 Victory if the montage test was moderate or hard, in addition to any Victories earned from combat during the montage test.
• Total Failure: The heroes don't arrive in time to avert catastrophe. Characters earn no Victories from the montage test, but might earn Victories from combat undertaken during the montage test.

Running Respites

When the heroes decide to take a respite (see Respite in Chapter 1: The Basics), your role as Director changes a bit. Most of the heroes' activities during respites revolve around downtime projects, which are typically self-directed. However, you still have levers you can pull to make the story interesting.

Safe Place

Heroes can't take a respite unless they're in a safe place. This typically means a place with a bed and four walls and a roof around them, where they're unlikely to get stabbed in their sleep. Characters aren't going to find 24 hours of peace to take a respite in a villain's lair, even if they barricade a door. However, this can become more of a gray area if the heroes attempt to take a respite while traveling in the wild.

"Why can't we camp in this seemingly peaceful wode for a day?" is the kind of thing you might decide is fine if you want the characters to be able to regain Stamina and Recoveries. Alternatively, you might want them to work harder for those resources, marking the wode as a dangerous place in the story. If the players want the heroes to take a respite in a place you deem unsafe, let them know it's impossible to get any meaningful rest or make progress on projects in that place while remaining constantly on guard for danger.

Too Many Respites?

It's up to the players how many respites the heroes take in a row. Characters eager to take a long series of respites to undertake downtime projects (Chapter 12) is fine, but they should always feel pressure to get back to the fight. Remember that villains don't stop plotting and conquering while the heroes rest. Their plans continue! If the characters are taking their sweet time with respites so they can create as many Healing Potions as possible, have them get wind of the latest evil actions that nearby villains are taking. Heroes wanting to defend the people and values they love had better stop respiting and start adventuring.

If you prefer a campaign that has few respites, you might want to deploy artisans, sages, and readily available project sources to allow the heroes a chance to craft useful items and do research, since their available time to do so will be limited.

Project Events

Downtime project events are a Director's time to shine during downtime. Remember that these events (detailed in Chapter 12) are optional, and you can use them as frequently as you like. In general, more than one or two events per respite can be disruptive to the overall campaign. It's also fine to have no events if you just want to keep the campaign's main story rolling along.

When you're running downtime events, be sure to rotate which heroes are in the spotlight of the action. Don't focus on the same hero over and over again. You can also do a little preparation for events before you play them out, reading the event prompt and fleshing it out into a scene. Prompts are intentionally vaguely written so you can modify them as you see fit or easily create your own.

Respites Between Sessions

If your play time is limited, you can have the players do everything they need to do during a respite between your game sessions, provided they end a game session by taking a respite. Doing so lets you run any events over email or through a chat app. Then when folks return for the next session, they'll be ready to go with project rolls completed, XP tallied, and Stamina and Recoveries restored.

How Many Respites?

There's no right number of respites that works for every group. If you want the characters to be able to craft and research, you'll want to give them more downtime to do so. If you prefer to hand out all the treasure and secrets through adventuring, then they'll need fewer respites. A good pace for many games sees the heroes taking between ten and twenty respites during each level of play, with many of those respites strung together.

Victories and Respites

Ultimately, the players, not the Director, decide when the heroes take a respite. So even though you adjudicate whether the conditions are safe enough for a respite, this part of the pacing is effectively out of your hands. Typically, most heroes want to rest after every 4 to 6 Victories they earn, depending on how many Victories were earned in combat encounters.

Optional Rule: Average Roll

When the heroes take a long series of respites, it might not be fun for the players to do a ton of die rolling covering many projects. Instead of rolling, you can calculate the progress for each respite as if a hero had rolled a natural 11 on their progress roll, then adding appropriate bonuses. Although rolling lots of dice and hoping for breakthroughs can be a lot of fun, taking the average of the 2d10 roll allows players to get through a lot of downtime with minimal math.

Optional Rule: Easier Crafting

Every crafting project requires that a hero obtain the project's item prerequisite and a project source in a specific language before the project can be started. These requirements exist so you can control the pace at which heroes can craft an arsenal of treasures to defeat their foes.

That said, you can make it easier to craft treasures and other items by changing the rules to require either the item prerequisite or the project source but not both, or by removing the language restrictions on project sources. This works well in campaigns that don't have a lot of respites. Just keep in mind that removing these barriers can lead to the heroes crafting more items and unbalancing the game in their favor.

Granting Rewards

You should have as much fun giving out treasure, Renown, wealth, and titles to the characters as the players have earning those rewards (see Chapter 13: Rewards). But what's the right amount of treasure to give out without turning the heroes into total badasses who can simply cut down every dragon they meet? How often do the rules of the game expect a hero to earn Renown? What about titles? This section has answers for you!

Granting Treasures

Whenever you're planning on awarding treasures to the heroes, focus on items that are useful. Finding a magic bow isn't likely to excite a group that doesn't have a hero who loves ranged weapon combat. The players might even tell you (or you can ask) which treasures their heroes most desire.

Once you have treasures in mind, you can use the following progression as a baseline for the heroes to earn those treasures:

• A party should earn two leveled treasures per hero by 10th level. Some heroes need only one leveled treasure to be happy, though, so if you feel as if giving out another leveled treasure wouldn't actually help a character, you can swap that item out for a trinket of the character's current echelon.
• A party should earn one trinket per hero per echelon. Any trinket earned should be of a character's current echelon or lower.
• A party should also earn one to three consumables of their current echelon or lower each level.

You don't have to award the full complement of treasure to heroes especially those using their downtime to craft things! You can spread out the pace at which characters earn treasures by having them find the project sources and item prerequisites for crafting an item instead of finding an item outright.

When you're planning an adventure, put the treasures and crafting materials the heroes can earn into your adventure outline (see Creating Adventures earlier in this chapter). Enemies who have access to treasures that can help them against the heroes don't keep those treasures hidden away. They use them in battle, after which victorious characters can claim them!

Treasures Above 1st Level

For a campaign in which the heroes start at 2nd level or higher, you can give those heroes the following starting treasures:

• At 1st echelon, each hero starts with a 1st-echelon trinket.
• At 2nd echelon, each hero starts with a leveled treasure and a 1st-echelon trinket.
• At 3rd echelon, each hero starts with two leveled treasures, a 1st-echelon trinket, and a 2nd-echelon trinket.
• At 4th echelon, each hero starts with two leveled treasures, a 1st-echelon trinket, a 2nd-echelon trinket, and a 3rd-echelon trinket.

The players can choose their hero's treasures, and can replace any leveled treasure or trinket for a consumable treasure of the hero's echelon or lower.

Making New Treasures

You can easily create new types of leveled treasures for heroes to find using the enhancements from the Imbue Treasure project in Chapter 12: Downtime Projects.

You can also take any of the treasures in this book and easily reskin them. Do you wish Gecko Gloves were actually boots? Just change the description and the Hands keywords and you're good to go. Do you want the Icemaker Maul to be a dagger that creates pools of acid instead of an ice field? Change the Heavy Weapon keyword and swap the damage types, and you're ready to rock! Simply changing keywords, damage, and descriptions for treasures isn't going to break the game.

Awarding Titles

You don't need to grant heroes every title they qualify for. In fact, you probably shouldn't, lest they become too powerful too fast. As a general guideline, a hero should gain a new title about every other level, which you can accomplish using either of the following options:

• You can grant a hero a title during a significant moment in a campaign, such as after defeating a villain. The heroes are each awarded a title they earned that is chosen by you.
• You can allow a hero to choose a title they've earned from the titles available at their echelon each time they achieve an even-numbered level.

You should check in with your players occasionally to see if they have any specific titles they want to earn, then give them a chance to earn those titles. Doing so gets the players more involved in the campaign and gets the characters more driven to adventure.

Awarding Renown

The heroes earn Renown whenever they do something of significance, such as saving a town or … well, saving the world! As a general guideline, heroes should earn 1 Renown per level.

If you want the characters to be less famous than in a standard heroic tale, you can adjust this to give out Renown every other level. Alternatively, you can award Renown after each adventure if you want the heroes to become power players in the world more quickly.

How Many Retainers?

You can set limits on the number of retainers the heroes can have in their service. For a large group of heroes, having too many retainers can make combat complex, long, and unwieldy. Likewise, retainers are a great way to help a smaller group of heroes stand up to larger challenges. In general, it's a good idea to use retainers to help the heroes get the size of their party up to four but no larger than seven.

Granting Wealth

The heroes increase their wealth whenever they score a big payday or recover a huge hoard of treasure. Characters should earn 1 wealth every second level.

Awarding Hero Tokens

You can award hero tokens to the players for taking risks with their heroes beyond what the game typically expects of them. For instance, battling a group of monsters is part of the game and doesn't earn a hero token. However, the following activities might:

• A hero stands alone against a group of enemies to allow their comrades to escape.
• A hero willingly jumps into quicksand, into lava, off a cliff, or into similar peril to save another character.
• The group is presented with an easy way out of a difficult situation that involves lying, cheating, stealing, or the like, but they take the more arduous and honorable path.
• A hero gives away an important resource, such as a Healing Potion, to help another creature in need.

Awarding Victories

Use the following guidelines for awarding Victories to the heroes, increasing these values as desired for notably difficult challenges.

Combat Encounters

A successful combat encounter in which the party's objectives are achieved earns each hero 1 Victory. Particularly difficult encounters are worth 2 Victories when completed successfully. Draw Steel: Monsters has more information about Victories and combat difficulty.

Montage Tests

Each hero earns 1 Victory when they achieve total success on an easy or moderate montage test, and 2 Victories for total success on a hard montage test. They earn 1 Victory if they achieve a partial success on a moderate or hard montage test.

Negotiation

Each hero earns 1 Victory if the party ends a Negotiation with an NPC's interest at 3 or higher, with that interest 2 or more higher than it started, and with agreement on a deal.

Hazards and Traps

If the heroes overcome a complicated hazard or trap that required multiple tests to detect and survive, each earns 1 Victory.

Puzzles

If the heroes solve a complicated puzzle that feels to you as if it would take most people at least 10 minutes to complete, each earns 1 Victory.

Story Goals

If the heroes achieve a major story goal that accomplishes a quest, such as saving a prince trapped by an evil baron or stopping a necromancer from performing a world-ending ritual, each earns 1 Victory.

Clever Thinking

If the heroes use clever thinking to easily and surprisingly overcome or bypass a combat encounter, a negotiation, a montage test, a trap, a puzzle, or some other challenge that would have awarded them 1 or more Victories in a more difficult fashion, award each character the Victories they would have earned had they faced and overcome the problem head on.

Campaign: First Session

Ah, that new-campaign smell! The first session of any new long-term campaign is all about getting the players excited, comfortable, and ready to play. The first session of a campaign is sometimes referred to as "session 0" because of its focus on setup and character building—but when character building is done, you want to make sure your first session kicks off with maximum excitement!

First, Business

At the start of your first session, you'll want to get some business out of the way before you dive into the fun of making characters.

Schedule

Talk to your players about the game's schedule. Determine with the group how often you'll play, what you plan to do when one or more players can't make it, and how you plan to communicate about the game when not playing.

Handling Disputes

Talk over and decide how you're going to settle rules disputes. We recommend that you make a ruling in the moment and then look up the rule after the session to keep the flow of play going.

Safety Tools

Talk about the safety tools you plan to use at the table. For more information about safety tools and a safety tool checklist you can use for your games, check out the MCDM Tabletop Safety Toolkit at mcdm.gg/SafetyToolkit.

Campaign Pitch

Go over your campaign pitch again (see the start of this chapter), and answer any questions the players have about it.

Player Suggestions

Ask the players what they'd like to see in the campaign and make notes around their responses. This can include anything from, "I'd love to play out some chase scenes!" to "I want to explore themes of loss and grief." These suggestions should be starting points for a conversation. If not all players are comfortable with certain themes or content requested by other players, this is a great time to discuss that (looping back to your safety tools discussion as appropriate), and to come to a consensus about what everyone wants out of the game.

House Rules

Go over any house rules you have with the players, and ask them if they have any house rules they'd like to add. House rules should always be discussed with the players, but ultimately, you get to decide which house rules are used in the campaign.

Make Heroes

During the first session of a new campaign, the players will likely spend most of their time building heroes. While they do so, it's a good idea for you to be available to answer any questions they have about the campaign and the setting. They might ask about everything from the name of the town where their first adventure starts, important organizations in the game, or if a specific language or skill will be useful in the campaign.

As your players make their heroes, you can take notes. It's a good idea to record each hero's name, ancestry, background, class, and complication (if any). Also record any important backstory details a player shares with you, such as their character's hometown, the names of rivals, loved ones, or enemies, and any organizations with which they have history.

Start With a Bang

When all else is done, it's a great idea to play an opening scene during your first session—ideally a scene that includes a combat encounter. This first encounter should give the players a taste of the delicious campaign you're cooking up for them and leave them eager for the next session.

Your opening encounter should introduce or hint at the villain the heroes face during their first adventure. You can use any of the following encounter ideas to get you started:

• While traveling to the settlement where their first adventure takes place, the heroes and their caravan or ship are attacked by brigands.
• The heroes enter a new town to find war dogs (see Draw Steel: Monsters) ready to publicly execute a noble who refused to bend the knee to the brutal tyrant Ajax.
• The heroes are at a tavern enjoying a night off when a band of gnoll raiders attacks and lights the place on fire.
• The heroes are camped in a swamp when undead emerge from the muck and surround them.
• While watching a theatrical performance, an actor (perhaps by accident) performs a ritual that opens a portal to the Abyssal Wasteland and summons a horde of demons.

The encounter you craft should be connected to the first adventure you plan to run. Keep this first encounter simple, and let each player get used to running their hero. You can always have a couple of villainous reinforcements arrive if the encounter is too easy!

If you've got still more time, you can keep playing a little longer, either by expanding the combat encounter or adding some exploration or travel. Otherwise, wrap the combat up, thank the players for a great first session, and start planning your next session.

"Life's like a movie

Write your own ending

Keep believing

Keep pretending

We did just what we set out to do

Thanks to the lovers, the dreamers, and you."

Kermit T. Frog