Episode 2026.4 Published on 5 February 2026

News: Crows, the New RPG from MCDM, Jams of the Timescape, and the Stawl Supplement Index | January Roundup

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Intro

Jams of the Timescape Volume 2 has been a massive success, James is going all in on MCDM's new RPG Crows, Crack the Sun successfully funded at twice their goal and more!

I'm Goblin Points and this is Jon de Nor.

Jams of the Timescape

As announced in the previous news episode of Goblin Points, The Dice Society and I ran volume two of Jams of the Timescape. And I can't say anything else than it being a fantastic success.

We're quite overwhelmed with the response we got this time. Last time we had 39 entries and I remember thinking that It'd be nice to pass 50 entries this time. That should be some healthy growth no?

Well. This time we asked people to make ancestries, and we got over a hundred entries. 118 actually. We more than tripled the number of entries from last time! That's insane! I truly can't express how happy I am that so many wanted to participate. It's honestly... I don't know what to say...

Thank you so much to everyone who participated. So many fantastic creations. So many brilliant ideas. So many weird things to play as!

And also: thank you for being such a great community in the Discord server. There are over three times as many people in the Discord server now, but it's still a wonderful place to hang out. And it's a creative space to be. People brainstorming, giving critique and feedback. So fantastically wonderful.

We're now at the stage where the judges have to make their way through all the entries and rate each and every one of them. It's going to take a while, and I can't express how much appreciate these people showing up and be willing to spend quite a few hours over three weeks to do it.

On February 26, The Dice Society and I will release a video announcing the winners of the jam. So stay tuned!

Jam Review by Psiocratic Press

In the wake of the Jams of the Timescape, Psiocratic Press' Jacob has taken it upon himself to review the entries. He's been posting daily, where he looks through an entry and write a quite long post about each.

The reviews goes into detail about the choices that were made, both for the mechanical parts of the ancestry, but also a bit about the fiction. And at the end, Jacob imagines what kind of character he'd make using the ancestry.

Crack the Sun

It already feels like an age ago, but it's just been a month since the Crack the Sun crowdfunder closed. In the end 9,590 backers contributed 2.6 million freedom monetary units. Over twice the goal.

That means that Crack the Sun the big manifold jumping adventure is happening. Five acts, each worth an entire level of victories, where you travel from Orden, to Equinox and finally to the sun! On the way you'll meet some familiar ancestries and some you haven't met before.

While Crack the Sun was mainly a vehicle to fund the development of MCDM's biggest adventure yet, it was also an opportunity to pre-order products that are slated to be released in 2026. Most of these are already in production, and you don't have to wait for too long for the first things to release.

Here's a quick rundown of the release schedule for the products in the crowdfunder:

  • In the first quarter of 2026, meaning sometime in February or March, they'll release The Red Road and Dark Heart of the Wood. These are both short adventures, called quests, which will grant the heroes about six victories. The Red Road sees you chasing a group of gnolls intent on razing towns, and in Dark Heart of the Wood you're trying to remove an ill that has befallen a local forest.
  • In the second quarter, April through June, they'll release the Beastheart class and the Condemned adventure. The Beastheart has already received a public playtest (if you want to check it out), and is a pet/companion class. The Condemned is an adventure that's meant to take place separate to your regular campaign; it features "heroes", well villains, sentenced to death, but get an offer for a full pardon in exchange for going on a suicide mission.
  • The third quarter will start seeing parts of Crack the Sun release, with act one, two and three releasing between July and September. Also releasing in that same window is Encounters, the third core rule book full of director tools, and Between Sun and Shadow, which introduces eight new official ancestries.
  • Then, in the last quarter of 2026, from October through December, the last two acts of Crack the Sun releases.

Now. It's important to remember that all these dates are for the digital releases. The physical editions are not shipping the same time the digital versions are dropping. The plan is to start shipping Encounters, the adventure pack softcovers and Between Sun and Shadow softcover in the latter half of 2026, while none of the physical parts of Crack the Sun will start shipping until next year.

Crows

Now. As I've mentioned multiple times earlier, James has been working on a new TTRPG on and off for over a year. At the beginning of January he announced on Bluesky that he's officially moving over to working on that TTRPG full-time. He's no longer the lead designer on Draw Steel and will instead be working on Crows with Nick de Spain who's doing the art.

James followed this up with a massive post on the MCDM Patreon where he introduces what kind of game Crows is going to be. If you want to read the whole thing for yourself, you can do so. The post is open to read without a membership to the Patreon.

If you don't want to read the whole thing, here's a shorter summary of what Crows is about:

I think it's good to start the same place James does: this is not Draw Steel, but dungeon crawling. This is a completely separate game, set in a different setting and with completely different goals for how it is to play. The only real thing Crows shares with Draw Steel is that it'll use the Power Roll: 2d10 with three tiers of outcome.

And let's start there actually. While Crows uses the same tiers, even the same thresholds of eleven or less, twelve through 16 and 17+, their outcomes are different. A tier one is a failure, tier two is a partial success, and tier three is a success. In addition to the three tiers you can also crit on a natural 19 or 20 for a full success, and get doom by rolling a natural two or three.

This means Crows is a game where you not only can fail, but critically fail. Crows is intended to be a game that is dangerous for player characters. The characters in Crows go delving into dungeons, looking for treasure, weapons and other riches to bring back to town. They're the crows the game is named for.

Not only is the goal not to fight the monsters, but it's often a very bad idea. Crows makes no guarantee of level accurate monsters. If you head into a situation without preparing, you might end up facing down a demigod you have no hope of defeating. Your best bet is to stay out of monsters' way and be smart about where you go.

The monsters you meet will also not be your regular nasties. James and Nick intend for the monsters you meet to be new fear inducing monsters. They want to only include art for the monsters, but no name. Only referring to different monsters as Monster A, or Undead 1. It's up to the players to name the monsters they meet.

Crows is designed to be a class-less system. You're not defined by your inherent skills, but by the equipment you have. Anyone with a sword can swing it, anyone with a bow can shoot it, anyone with a spell book can cast it's spell. But by the choices you make when you advance your crow, you might be better at certain things. You might have a bonus to spell casting, or shooting with a bow, or swinging a sword.

And through the items you find and the choices you make, you'll get bonuses to your power rolls, improving your chance of succeeding and surviving. And unlike Draw Steel, there's no limit to how many bonuses you can stack. That means that proper planning and strategy will pay off big time, as all your preparation can lead to some hefty bonuses whenever you roll your dice.

You don't have infinite space for items, though. You can only cary one item in each hand, and you'll have two belt slots for quick storage, but the rest of your things go in the backpack. The backpack only has 10 storage slots, and bigger items take more than one slot, though smaller items can be stacked in a single slot.

Organizing your backpack is also important. If you want to get something from the pack while in combat or other situations that's stressful, you have to roll a d10 to determine whether you manage to find the thing you're looking for. You need to roll the number on the backpack slot or higher to be able to grab the item.

And to keep the stress up, the dungeon you're exploring is taking turns. Every 30 minutes of real time, the dungeon takes a turn. The Ref (the game master in Crows) rolls to see if you encounter anything in the dungeon. The players need to roll to see if their consumables are wearing off. Everything that has a duration have a number of usage dies associated with it. This is a number of d6s. Each dungeon turn the player rolls those d6s, and any dice that rolls a one or two is removed. Once there are no dice left, the duration has ended and the torch, or spell, or effect stops.

While exploring the dungeon, you'll also take damage, and as you take damage, you won't be able to carry as much. If you wear armor, it'll absorb damage first, but when it's depleted you start loosing stamina instead. Once your stamina is gone, you lose one backpack slot every time you take damage. If you lose all ten slots... You're dead.

But if you make it back to town, you can finally reap the riches of your hard earned booty. The gold and riches you find is converted to XP which you can spend on advancing your crow. You can also spend the gold on new equipment or upgrading the town. A nicer bigger town will attract more and better traders, which in turn hawk in better equipment.

And should your crow survive for long enough, they'll take up permanent lodging in the town and become an NPC, helping future crows and making the dangerous job of scrounging for useful things in dungeons a tad bit easier.

With the town building element, it sounds like Crows will almost have a level of meta-progression often seen in rogue-lites in the video game world. Where the character you play die, but some of the progress you made is preserved for the next iteration of character, making the journey a little bit easier.

James has been playtesting Crows for a while already, including at multiple conventions. Most recently at the Philadelphia Area Gaming Expo, PAGE, but back in October, Cameron of Rise Heroes Rise! got to play with James at a convention, and here's a quote he sent me about playing Crows:

Long story short: Crows is fun, fast-paced, and deadly! Inventory management is made interesting and fun, and combat is tight and has momentum.

Background: At this stage, you don’t have a class in Crows! Just a background: mine was a pyromancer! Your background gives you starting equipment, skills, defenses like Dodge, Fortitude, and Resolve, and a trait. As a pyromancer, I had the “Burn, Baby!” trait which gave me a damage bonus to fire spells. The whole background sheet was compact, whereas the inventory section was the meat and potatoes of your character.

Inventory: A full 9x11 page of slots you can arrange with your items. Two slots for your arms, two for your belt, and ten for your backpack. The items in your hands are the ones you can use without (relative) trouble in combat. If you need to access something in your backpack however, you [...] roll a d10 to see how deep you could dig! This means which slots you use really matters when combat rolls around. More on that later.

Combat: It’s fast! Like super fast! In a four hour session, we had five combats, and a bunch of exploration as well. Each combat took no more than ten minutes, which isn’t important, but I know some people think it is. When combat starts, and then again at the start of each round, initiative is rolled: a d6 where on a 1-3, the monsters go first, on a 4-6 the heroes go first. Instead of Draw Steel, where you alternate between a hero turn and a monster turn, all the actors on one side go, then all the actors on another side go. However, just because the heroes go doesn’t mean the monsters can’t fight back. That’s where counter attacks come in. The dice mechanic for the game is a 2d10 power roll, like Draw Steel. But that’s about all they have in common. On a tier one result, the enemy gets to counter attack! This is usually a flat number you take in damage. This means that on every attack, you might give the monsters the upper hand. After the session, James said this will need to be tweaked, as it was really powerful, but I liked it. It made combat super deadly.

Lethality: How deadly was it, really? Well, as a pyromancer, I only had 2 Stamina (based on a 1d6 + 1 roll at the start of the session). That’s not a lot in this game, especially with counter attacks. But my favorite part of the game was what happened after you hit zero stamina: you start dropping your equipment. Those ten inventory slots also act as wound slots! So even though I only had two stamina, I still had an extra ten wounds I could take before I would be permanently dead! (Which absolutely happened, by the way. Never trust a baby aboleth to take control of your brain.) This also gives more weight to where you put your important items! You only need your bedroll to rest, se you don’t need it in combat, but you also don’t want to drop it!

Final Thoughts: There are a bunch of things I didn’t mention like torches running out of light, Dungeon Turns, and traps! But this quote is already super long! I’ve never played a dungeon crawler before, so I don’t have anything to compare Crows to. But it was really fun! I’ve never played a game where your inventory was so important and fun to manage. The combat was fast, but more importantly, really fun and lethal! I can’t wait to playtest it from the GM side of things!

Now to round things off, MCDM has already launched a landing page on Backerkit for the crowdfunding of Crows. What the money in the crowdfunder is funding has not been announced yet. But I'm going to guess that it's going to cover some of the incredible amount of art they'll need, and physical print run of the rules.

I think they've summed up Crows pretty well in it's tag line: Fortune or Death!

Now, onto other things.

Nightmare Scenario

Nightmare Scenario successfully funded on BackerKit. This is a supplement that includes what you need to create dream and nightmare encounters. It's being made by Font of Victories, which consists of chaoticgoodra, Jonas Tintenseher, and Adventure Fourth/Onkeen. Names that are well-known in the community.

Nightmare scenario includes ten new second echelon monsters called vexations; a new ancestry called somari, psionic beings of dreams; the dream domain for conduits and censors; six new treasure; three new dynamic terrain and two dynamic arenas; and two new titles.

They've also included a sizable preview of the supplement in the campaign, showing off five of the monsters, the entire ancestry, the domain, one of the dynamic arenas, one of the treasures, and a title.

They're aiming for the final release in the third quarter of this year. If you missed out on backing, we'll have to hope they open for pre-orders.

The Vessel

And speaking of chaoticgoodra, he's released the Vessel class on Itch. To be a bit reductive, this is a Draw Steel implementation of the Warlock from D&D 5e. You've made a pact with a powerful magical entity, and they've granted you supernatural powers.

The class includes three subclasses, which determines the kind of patron you have. The patron also determines the type of damage you do with your powers:

  • Infernal: which has made a deal with a devil, and makes you do fire damage.
  • Undying: which has made a deal with an undying creature, such as a lich, and makes you do corruption damage.
  • Aberrant: which has made a deal with an incomprehensible, otherworldly being, and makes you do psychic damage.

I also like that the heroic resource is called fervor, which really underlines the relationship and the source of your power. Without the proper fervor, you won't be able to call forth the truly impressive powers of your patron. Nice!

The vessel also has an interesting mechanic where you can grant yourself a boon by sacrificing a bit of your stamina. By using the Bargain maneuver, you take 1d6 plus your level damage, but you gain a benefit for the rest of the combat. You get to choose between doing more damage, doubling your abilities' range or increasing the area of your area abilities, to name a few.

You can pick up the vessel class on Itch for $10, but the author recommends getting it on the cheap from the Patreon for only $5.

Doom of the Dragon Grafter

Leon Barillaro published Doom of the Dragon Grafter right before they started working at Wizards of the Coast. Leon has previously worked on The Workshop Watches from Arcadia, and The Fall of Blackbottom.

Doom of the Dragon Grafter is a ninth level adventure, and is balanced for three to six players. It takes place entirely in The World Below. And apparently works best if the heroes have already faced off against a few dragons. There are also suggested hooks for the heroes to have a personal stake in the story.

The adventure is played in three parts:

  • Part one has the heroes asking around, trying to figure out where to find Lord Pulposa, the titular dragon grafter.
  • Part two has the heroes find pieces of DNA to combine using Pulposa's equipment. Doing so takes them to the far reach of the world below.
  • Part three has the heroes face down Lord Pulposa, and take care of the bad he's wrought.

The adventure also includes a bit of fiction Leon wrote and battlemaps for most of the combats.

You can pick up Doom of the Dragon Grafter on Itch.io for pay-what-you-want.

Villains Vol. 1

Valued Dragon Design has published Villains Volume 1, a collection of three first echelon solos to use as villains. These are three human solos, but your encouraged to reflavor them using a table of signature traits for other humanoid ancestries.

The three villains cover the three levels of first echelon:

  • The first level solo is The Assassin, using sneaky tactics and hiding.
  • The second level solo is The Magician, using elemental abilities and magical beacons to control the battlefield.
  • The third level solo is The Champion, using melee and non-magical abilities.

You can pick up Villains Volume 1 for free on Valued Dragon Design's Ko-fi page.

Triglav Games Patreon

Triglav Games has launched their own Patreon. You can join for free to get access to the latest news they publish. If you sign up for the paid tiers, you'll get more out of the deal.

They've got two paid tiers:

  • The first tier gets you access to new Draw Steel content every month. Stuff like titles, ancestries, treasures, things of that size.
  • The second tier gets access to detailed design breakdowns and a deeper look into how they design their products.

They've got a sample of a post up already, which is completely open to read, without having to join the Patreon. It explains the design process of designing the Serpentfolk ancestry. The post shows the inspirations behind the ancestry, and a detailed breakdown on the design and decisions for every trait.

And as an extra treat, they also released a few winter/cold-themed treasures that's only open to paid members of the Patreon.

You can join the Patreon for free, at the cheapest tier which is $5 a month.

How to Play Batman/Spider-Man in Draw Steel

Cameron of Rise Heroes Rise! have started a new video series where he recreates well-known fictional characters as Draw Steel heroes. So far he's tackled Batman and Spider-Man, and he plans to do more.

He starts the videos by saying that he's not trying to recreate the characters exactly, for example Batman gets the dwarf ancestry and Spider-Man is a memonek, but he wants to capture the vibe and gameplay of the characters. The characters may not be 100 percent lore accurate, but I think he manages to capture the feel of those characters very well.

I hope he expands into other areas of fictional characters in the future, and not just comic book heroes. Actually. Cameron, if you're listening to this, here's a challenge: Try to create the third doctor from Doctor Who. The third doctor specifically; with his spectacular dress sense, gadgets and *judo chop!*s.

Made for Draw Steel

I started a new series in January too! I call it Made for Draw Steel. One of my main goals with Goblin Points has always been to put a highlight at the fantastic creations being made by the Draw Steel community. And while I do reach some with this podcast, I don't reach as many as I could.

That's why I've decided to stream once a month on YouTube and look through and talk about the creations I highlight in each news episode of Goblin Points. I'm not going to put a too strict schedule on it, but I want to make it happen within the first week of the episode dropping.

The first one in January was really fun! I had a nice number of people showing up in chat, including some of the designers of the things I was highlighting. They were able to add some input on their design decisions. Other members of the community who'd playtested or proofread some of the creations also chimed in with their favorite parts.

One could argue that I could just make a video version of this podcast, but I don't want to do that. I've been a listener to podcasts that transition to video and it's never been quite successful in my opinion. Sooner or later they end up catering to the video and make an inferior experience to the audio listeners. So I'm not going to do that!

So, I guess. Subscribe to Goblin Points on YouTube to get notified when the next Made for Draw Steel is happening. Or follow me on Bluesky, where I'll post about it. Or join the Discord server where I also announce everything. One of those!

Bluesky Feeds

And speaking of Bluesky. If you're one of the people that likes to follow strangers to see their random thought on the internet, you might be on Bluesky. It's a bit like twitter, but with a distinct lack of nazis and CSAM generators.

Bluesky had a feature where it lets basically anyone create their own feeds and share them with others. Which means users can create feeds including just the kind of posts they like.

I've created two such feeds on Bluesky:

  • The Draw Steel feed captures posts mentioning Draw Steel and Draw Steel related products. You basically get a feed with everyone talking about Draw Steel on Bluesky.
  • The Crows feed tries to capture posts about Crows, the TTRPG. It might come as no surprise that it's not easy to walk the line of including posts about Crows the game, and not crows the bird. But I have a system in place to make the filter pretty good.

I know some people are on Bluesky and only go there to read the Draw Steel feed. They're not really there for anything else. Might be something for you...

I've included links to the two feeds in the links sections, so you can easily add them to your Bluesky if you decide to join.

Stawl Supplement Index

Another effort I've made to better highlight all the fantastic stuff coming out of the Draw Steel community is to launch the Stawl Supplement Index.

This is a new page on Stawl that lists published supplements for Draw Steel. I keep the list manually updated regularly with all the stuff I find as I research for these news episodes. But if there is something I've missed, there is a way for you to submit links to supplements you think should be included.

There are already more than a hundred entires in the index and the list is growing every week.

So far we have supplements featuring ancestries, monsters, adventures, combat encounters, new rules, treasure, retainers and more. If you're looking for something to play after finishing The Delian Tomb, the Stawl Supplement Index has 24 supplements listed that include adventures. Some of them can be played in a few hours, while others will probably take a few sessions.

Check them out on Stawl.app/supplements.

Community Highlights

And speaking of community creations; here are some, rapid fire style:

  • The experiment of automated monsters in Codex by DMHub
  • A new crowdfunder called Weapons of Lore by Jeff Stevens Games
  • German Translation of the Draw Steel symbols font by MrMattDollar
  • The announcment of the crowdunder It's Complicated - Heroic Origins by Rise Heroes Rise!
  • Guildplay Rules for playing a West Marches inspired campaign by Sage Unwise
  • The first peak at Weaver Tormentor, Ungoli Impaler, and Flesh Weaver Blade Dancer by Shadowhand Gaming
  • The announcement of the crowdfunder Two-Soul — A Two-Person Class for Draw Steel by speep inc.
  • And the ancestry Chiaroscuro Elf by The Dice Society

Outro

What a start to the year! Big investment in Draw Steel from MCDM, a new TTRPG in the works and the Draw Steel community is gearing up to publish more fantastic stuff.

Again, I want to thank everyone who's participated in Jams of the Timescape Volume 2, both the entrants creating, and the judges voting. Thank you for making this such a fantastic time!

If you want to be featured on Goblin Points, or know of someone else who should be, leave a comment on YouTube or Spotify, or send me an e-mail on tips@goblinpoints.com.

Links to everything, including this script can be found in the show notes, and on goblinpoints.com.

If you want to support my work, you can become a Patreon member. As a paying member you can submit questions for upcoming guests. You also get access to premium features on Stawl. Stawl is digital tool set for playing and running Draw Steel: digital hero sheets, looking up monsters, or read the core rules. Go to Stawl.app. S-T-A-W-L-dot-app.

Next episode is on the 15th. That's going to be an interview with Cameron of Rise Heroes Rise!

See you next time. Snakkes.

Links

Jams of the Timescape

Jam Review by Psiocratic Press

From MCDM

Nightmare Scenario

The Vessel

Doom of the Dragon Grafter

Villains Vol. 1

Triglav Games Patreon

How to Play Batman/Spider-Man in Draw Steel

Made for Draw Steel

Bluesky Feeds

Stawl Supplement Index

Community Highlights

Draw Steel Homebrew

Draw Steel Media

Draw Steel Tools