Intro
I'm joined by Aestus and Ryan (a.ka. 4D Pixels) of Headwind Studios. They're making an adventure, potion crafting rules and a gazetteer for the swamp region, and the monsters that live there, of the Enshrined setting.
I'm Jon de Nor and this is Goblin Points.
Interview
Jon de Nor: Welcome to Goblin Points, Aestus and Ryan!
Aestus: Jon, thanks for having us.
Ryan: Awesome to be here.
Jon de Nor: So! Aestus, you've been on before, but still, it's always someone's first episode. So give us a short introduction of who you are and how you ended up in the Draw Steel community.
Aestus: Of course, yeah, awesome. Well, yeah. Thanks again. I'm delighted to be back to a Goblin Points interview. This interview series, this podcast, to me, is like an institution in the community. So thank you so much for running it, and thanks for having me back on. Introduction! Right, so I am Aestus, I go by Aestus online. I am a freelance designer who works primarily in Draw Steel. I'm also known for my YouTube channel, Aestus_RPG. I was pretty popular back when Baldur's Gate 3 was new. I covered Baldur's Gate 3 for years. The Pillars of Eternity series, people will know me from that. And now, of course, I make Draw Steel videos.
And, oh, you guys...a Draw Steel audience might know me from being one half of the Mythic Treasures product. Mythic Treasures was a successful Draw Steel crowdfunder treasure book. I think we were either third- or fourth-highest grossing Draw Steel crowdfunder. So thank you. I'm sure the interview you did with us was a big part of that, Jon, so thanks to your audience for supporting us. You guys will be happy to know we are wrapping design...we're on track to wrap design this month, and it goes to layout next month. So, yeah, that's Aestus.
Jon de Nor: Excellent. And Ryan?
Ryan: Hi, I'm Ryan, otherwise known online as 4D Pixels. I am an avid consumer and designer of games, whether...whatever form, shape, or type, they come in. And currently I have been working for the last few years as the lead designer for Enshrined. I'm very excited to get to talk a little bit more about the project that we've been working very passionately on for the last few years. So thanks for having us.
Jon de Nor: Yeah. I have to ask, Ryan, because you're mainly a 5e guy, as I understand it...how did you become aware of Draw Steel?
Ryan: Yeah, no, absolutely. Well, that's going to be through the amazing, praise and introduction from Aestus over here. He has some ties going back early with our team and very early development. And when I started on the project, actually a little later than him, it had been some time since he had worked with us. We moved on with a 5e project, and after solidifying our initial funding for it and our successful Kickstarter, we kind of took a step back to, you know, count our ducks and figure out how we wanted to go forward with development.
And that's when, we, you know, were able to talk to Aestus again for the first time and...you know, wanted to see if he wanted to help us out, as he had been some of the original brains behind the world board that we had originally kind of set down. I wanted to see if, you know, he was kind of back in country from being gone for a long time. And so I wanted to see if he wanted to help us with some of his original, like, ideas that he had laid forth that kind of became the foundation of Enshrined. And so, you know, we kind of got the ball rolling, talking about the 5e lore.
And then he kind of was like, "Hey, there's this other system that I've been really interested in," from his perspective. And like, you know, kind of we went back and talking forth about it, and he kind of started singing the praises of Draw Steel and what it brings to the table that, you know, 5e lacks in some ways. And I think that a lot of those bits kind of resonated with me and our, you know, project lead already. Things that we find that, you know, 5e could, you know, put a little more focus on in some ways. I know there's some rules in Draw Steel that, sometimes, our...the other people in the studio almost like, take for granted that 5e doesn't have, especially when it comes to combat.
And so it kind of just kind of felt natural to segue once we understood the Draw Steel system a little bit more like, "Hey, this brings a lot of stuff that, you know, 5e could spend a little more focus on." And we figured if we, you know, spent a little more time learning Draw Steel and getting into the system, it might actually help us design better encounters for 5e as well. So that kind of became part of our process is you know, some things 5e does in ways that we like and some things Draw Steel does. And let's see if we can kind of marry them in a way that makes both of them better.
Jon de Nor: You've already led directly into kind of what we're here for, in Enshrined: Red of Tooth and Claw. What's the elevator pitch for this?
Aestus: I'm so excited to talk about this product. It's extremely cool. So, yes, Red of Tooth and Claw is the book that we're going to be talking about in this interview. It will be going to crowdfunding soon. But it is part of the Enshrined setting/world. Enshrined is a primarily D&D 5e setting project done by Headwind Studios. Ryan is our lead designer on that project. It is a mythic horror setting book. So how would you describe mythic horror? Maybe you can take that part.
Ryan: Yeah, absolutely. Mythic horror, for me, lies somewhere adjacent to traditional horror and like eldritch and cosmic things. The touchstone that I always use, is The Witcher 3, sort of. Or even just the Witcher world in general, but specifically, I think the games stride more into mythic. And for me, that's really, while there's a lot of folklore inspiration there, a lot of the horror comes down to like somewhere between myths and otherworldly eldritch things. And it really comes back to the grounding of how the actual creatures of the world, the horrible monstrosities, how you interact with them.
In eldritch and cosmic horror things, like true Eldritch, you tend to stray towards things that almost are completely incomprehensible. And as such, like if you dig deeper into it, there isn't necessarily logic or reason behind it. Whereas, you know, in folk horror, it's, you know, in a similar vein, like a lot of it's just like, "And then because the witch cursed him, he is now a werewolf!" And that's scary. And so there's, you know, like one step of reason behind it, but it's, you know, scary bedtime stories on the folk horror side of things.
Mythic horror for me is somewhere with like, another step of reason behind it. It's the, "There's a horrible monster. These are the tracks it leaves behind. These are the potions that could help you against it. You know, these are the stories that people have told about it. And now I'm going to, you know, try and learn about my foe." And then you go to fight it. And it is some horrible, borderline eldritch abomination brought together by curses, magic, or the other. But then there's a layer of depth because it's not just some entity, it's an entity made of pieces. It has claws, it has tendons, it has weaknesses, it has things that it might be immune to.
And, you know, that kind of depth there is where I put mythic horror. It's not just the things that go bump in the night, it's the things that go bump in the night and do specific things and have specific tie-ins to the world, and people know about them. They can write them down. And that's where I tried to push Enshrined, partly from a design perspective, is that kind of depth of the world that, you know...we do have a lot of eldritch in our world. We do push towards eldritch as much as possible. But we don't want the whole world to be eldritch. If the whole world is eldritch, nothing is eldritch, because there's nothing alien about a world where everything is alien. So it starts at that base of like this mythic horror of, you know, grounded, sensible things. And then the deeper you go, the further it gets from reality, the more into the other you stride.
Aestus: Yeah, that's a great way to put it. I was going to say something like, if you're familiar with Lovecraftian horror, it's very similar to that feeling. But Lovecraft wrote in a time where scientific advancement and scientific discovery was a big theme of his writing. So it's a very early modern kind of horror, Lovecraftian horror. We take a lot of the Lovecraftian eldritchness, and we locate it in a more medieval and even earlier vibe, and sort of spirit and setting to it.
So, yeah, Red of Tooth and Claw is a mythic horror part of Enshrined, but in particular, this book focuses on a kind of jungle swamp biome. A big part of what we're offering here is a kind of ecosystem that you can plug into your Draw Steel world. We love designing environments, and we love environmental storytelling, and we're going to be doing more like this, but this one is like a jungle swamp setting.
And, like Ryan said, it is actually...a lot of it goes back to years and years ago, at the early parts of this project, writing that I submitted to the company, drawing from my experience of actually growing up in a tropical jungle country. And the kind of...yeah, I was trying to find eldritch fears from my childhood and put those into the stories. And now we built a D&D setting and a Draw Steel setting around it. And...yeah. That's not an elevator pitch! You said to give you an elevator pitch — (laughter)
Jon de Nor: (laughter)
Ryan: (laughter) Well, you know. I think we might've gotten a little excited.
Aestus: We're really excited about this.
Jon de Nor: I appreciate the deeper explanation, though, to kind of place it. Because I don't think it's a very well known, like, genre, if that's the right word. So even though it's a long elevator ride, I appreciated it. So this started life as a 5e setting, and it sounds like there's been previous products set in the setting for 5e, but that this new one is the first that does both, basically? Both Draw Steel and 5e.
Ryan: Yeah, that was generally...we started as a 5e project, and we had a successful Kickstarter about a year ago, now. That was our general sort of goal, originally when we set out, was to make this a full world compendium, essentially, for the world of Enshrined. And so, you know, that's everything down from the pantheon to the, you know, the world map, the adventures that are set in it, the ecosystems that live in the world, the peoples, the custom races.
And a core part of that, originally, was the biomes and the ecosystems. We wanted to build up our world to feel like these creatures live here. They exist. They eat each other, they get eaten. That became kind of a core part of our design philosophy was, you know, if we can build, you know, the environment up from the ground as something that's very, like has a lot of depth and believability, then the people kind of don't just feel like they're just placed on top of it. They become part of the world. And that, you know, through that, we can tell better stories. We can, you know, make something that you can kind of truly sink your teeth into.
And especially because, while we enjoy 5e as a system, it's not made for an eldritch horror game. It's definitely, there are other systems for that. But we thought that we could kind of bridge that gap in a way where if you believe, you know, if everything around you is believable and grounded in this, like, you know, from the ground up setting, then the horror kind of comes a little more naturally. If you're able to suspend disbelief, if the logic behind the horrible monstrosities doesn't set you up as a Saturday morning cartoon villain because the whole world believes it, then it's a little easier to kind of lose yourself into it.
That was kind of our core design there. And so when we took this kind of ground-up approach from the ecosystems, and we wanted to try and build up our world, we actually just started early on and decided that when we were set out to, start working on our crowdfunding goal of making this whole world ecosystem,instead of starting by just broad-scoping everything, we decided to just take a step back and start designing ecosystem by ecosystem and build them up as cohesive, essentially parts. And so we started with this sort of jungle-like swamp and said, okay, you know, like, what's the bottom of the food chain here? What's the environment look like? Let's build it up into this kind of whole system in and of itself.
And we decided that, hey, you know, this might work as its own kind of standalone, essentially. Like, if you could just take this and put it into your own world if you wanted to, while we're still working on the rest of Enshrined. So we decided, for our backers, let's just give them this section, this module of Enshrined, and then that kind of turned into, well, you know, maybe more people are interested. And we started getting kind of more and more people that would just kind of come by and just kind of be interested in what we were doing.
And so like, hey, what if we kind of take this and we take the Draw Steel expertise that Aestus kind of brought in early in our design experience, in our design process, and kind of package this as a, you know, a section of Enshrined that you can play at your table now for 5e and Draw Steel? Because like, you know, Aestus brought a lot of energy and excitement for Draw Steel and quickly infected us with it as well. And so, we thought that, hey, like, we don't see anything like this in the Draw Steel world. We have this sort of this module, this kind of chunk of Enshrined for this horrifying swamp that is, you know, kind of ready to go from a 5e perspective. Why don't we kind of bring it into the Draw Steel world? We think it's something that we don't see a lot of over there as far as this kind of setting in Draw Steel. And so we're hoping that, you know, other people can kind of see what we saw there and get excited about it, because we are.
Aestus: The original 5e Enshrined project was a crowdfunder, like Ryan said, about a year ago, very successful, that funded the entire setting book. But we have progressed by breaking that into smaller sections, which we are crowdfunding individually for those smaller sections. And the people that funded the overall book get those smaller sections already. They've already bought it as far as we're concerned. But we wanted each of the smaller projects to also get their own crowdfunding.
So the crowdfunder for Red of Tooth and Claw is one of the smaller ones. But I say small, it's actually going to include quite a bit. It has an adventure in there. It has lots of new monsters that you can fight, but also just like environmental...what we call "minor creatures" that give the ecosystem color and a logic to it. There is rules for crafting. There is a new subclass for the Fury that's going to be in here. And there's going to be some new titles that are more eldritch kind of titles that have to do with your psychology and mimicking that kind of Lovecraftian madness, psychological element. So yeah, there's going to be a lot in there.
Jon de Nor: Designing a product for both 5e and Draw Steel...I can see a lot of overlap. These are fantastic heroic fantasy games, but there are also very clear differences, I think. This having started, like its original DNA is from 5e, and now bringing in Draw Steel into that mix...is there something that has kind of rubbed off from Draw Steel into the design of the whole?
Aestus: Yeah, I think so. One of one of the really cool ways that we went about this project was particularly...we have a real focus on encounter design. This is something that we feel like, in 5e, can be pushed further. And then in Draw Steel, I guess we saw a palette with all of these tactical systems in Draw Steel, a color palette to construct really fun and interesting encounters. So we put a lot of effort into that. And for many of the encounters that will be in the adventure of this product, they actually began as a Draw Steel encounters.
So, me as the primary Draw Steel designer, I would take the notes for the adventure writer, turn those notes into a Draw Steel encounter, including a map, which I would draft myself, designed around the principles of Draw Steel, things like forced movement and height and flanking and stuff like that. Then, I would run that for Ryan, RD, the other design leadm in Draw Steel, we would test it in Draw Steel. And then they would convert that into 5e, and then I would take the 5e encounter that they made, and I would use that to tweak my Draw Steel.
So there was a lot of back and forth. I would say there's definitely some Draw Steel DNA, especially in the encounter design of the D&D product. And there's also, of course, a lot of D&D DNA in the Draw Steel conversion that you're going to be getting.
Jon de Nor: How's that been on your side, Ryan? Incorporating the influence from Draw Steel.
Ryan: Yeah, no, I think from the 5e side of things, it's in some ways been very helpful, because...it's an observation that I've always had while playing 5e for the past ten or so years, I've always kind of felt like some of the encounters and the maps...well, sometimes when running the game, I just say, "Oh, yeah, no, this looks like a 5e encounter." But then taking a step back to actually design them on myself, I always found that sometimes the maps and the way encounters are designed could have more depth to them.
And, a lot of our studio at Enshrined here have a background in video game development. It's where a lot of us met, actually, was, you know, a while ago, going to college for video game development, and a lot of us spent some time in the industry in our own right before eventually kind of coming back on this for the original inspiration for this Enshrined project. And taking our knowledge from video game development — and I definitely have a passion for level design — taking that into 5e, there's some things that just, as far as like...
You know, a big thing that Aestus mentioned is like the designing maps in the encounters around like pushing people, shoving people, breaking things down, elevation, flanking...things like this that sometimes you use in 5e, but it's not necessarily a given at any point. If you see that happen in 5e, it's more the exception. And that's like more player-driven more than anything. And so that was one thing where it's like, when we sat down to kind of...we really wanted these encounters to stand out. We wanted to bring our sort of passion for game design into this. And so that was something where, you know, at certain points, we almost felt like, you know, 5e was missing something or like there was a piece of the puzzle missing.
And so then when Aestus came in and introduced us to Draw Steel and this kind of more tactical approach to combat, to some degree, it kind of got the juices flowing on the 5e side of like, okay, let's...you know, the first two or so maps, when we set out to make about, you know, five or six encounters for this module. And the first two maps, Aestus started for us, and then we kind of saw what he had there and ran with it on our own side. And so we wanted all these maps and all these encounters set up to be unique, have their own interesting goals and objectives, and really take advantage of verticality and different movement paths for the players and enemies, and just the sort of dynamicism that 5e often — even the best-designed encounter might, you know, slow down into people standing around the monsters and slashing at them. Whereas Draw Steel just natively has a little bit more push and shove and movement around the field.
And so, that was something where I was just like, what can we do to not only make our maps sort of incentivize moving around and taking the high ground and pushing monsters off of ledge and into objects...but also just like, what can we do to make the players want to interact with the creatures in a different way? Something that Draw Steel sort of just supports a little more natively. Whereas on 5e, it might be up to the players' initiative to sort of instigate some of that. And that was sort of like our main thing, was the encounters of Draw Steel and how we can kind of bring that into 5e.
Jon de Nor: You mentioned before we started recording, a monster specifically that was originally designed for 5e, but that you, Aestus, had a bit of a struggle to convert it to Draw Steel. The umbral stalker, was that it? Prowler?
Aestus: Umbral prowler, close. Yeah, the umbral prowler, one of...I mean, there's so many cool monsters that are going to be in this book, but I think working on the umbral prowler was one of my favorite experiences. This is a monster that Ryan drafted in 5e. It's designed around a kind of hit-and-run encounter, where the umbral prowler attacks and it weakens its preys, and it runs away and kind of stalks them for the rest of the day. And if there's a moment where they're ever weak and it can get in there and take one of them to eat, it's going to do that.
I found, in some of my early drafts, our testers and reviewers on the Draw Steel side of things were feeling like this kind of design didn't fit into Draw Steel very much, because in Draw Steel, there's a very thick line between combat and non-combat, right? This one, it needs a thinner line, right? Because, you know, you initiate combat with this monster when you can maybe sense it tracking you, and then it attacks, but just for a round, and it's going to run away. And then it's going to go back to tracking you again. And it might enter in a completely separate encounter, right? You could be battling something else later. And if it sees that you're weak, it's going to try to get in there.
So yeah. But working on the umbral prowler was extremely cool. And actually it was a great moment of me seeing the virtues of the whole team at Headwind Studios and the Enshrined project. Because I actually ran a playtest for Ryan of the umbral prowler in Draw Steel, and after that playtest, he gave me probably the best design note I've ever gotten in my career as a designer, where he said, "This was fun, but right now the monster is feeling like a final boss, and it should just be trying to steal a snack."
Jon de Nor: (laughter)
Aestus: And I like wrote in bold in my notebook, like, steal a snack, like double underlined. I knew instantly how I had to change it. But yeah, I'm really happy with the product that we ended up with on the umbral prowler. There's still some things, maybe in clarity that I'd like to edit on it, but the flow of the combat is really, really cool. And I think it ended up translating into Draw Steel really well.
Jon de Nor: It sometimes feels like you could just take the 5e monster and kind of make the...add some pushes and slides to the abilities, and there you go. You got a Draw Steel monster. (laughter) But I think it speaks well about the design of the monster if it's actually kind of a challenge to migrate it over to Draw Steel. To me, that sounds like it's a fun monster in 5e, and maybe an even funner monster in Draw Steel. (laughter)
Aestus: Well, everything's more fun and Draw Steel, I gotta say. (laughter)
Jon de Nor: Of course, of course.
Aestus: Yeah. I mean, I think people will see, if you support the project and play it, a lot of love and effort went into designing this one. Yeah.
Jon de Nor: You did mention previously that you also have a focus on crafting. And the preview stuff you sent me also includes a bit about the what you're trying to capture with crafting. Yeah.
Aestus: So the crafting system was designed for 5e originally, and converting it into Draw Steel was something we weren't even originally sure we wanted to do, because Draw Steel already has a crafting system. You know, why make something that competes with it? But on the Draw Steel side of things, what we kind of landed on was, crafting in Draw Steel is very lock-and-key design, right? Where, if I want this potion, I kill this monster, harvest it, you know, that kind of thing, or I do this kind of quest.
But what I'm trying to say is, one ingredient outputs to one craftable thing, right? So if you get X ingredient, you can always make Y craft with that. And there's no branching or diverging from there. And we felt that actually kind of...to me, I'll just say it for myself. I think it's kind of a less heroic way to do crafting. Like if you build a Draw Steel character around crafting, I kind of felt like you should be a crafting genius, you know? You want that Tony Stark feeling where what you can do, no one else in the world can do. Because you're not just any normal alchemist, you're a heroic alchemist, right?
And to get that feeling, we wanted a system that incentivized a feel like, it portrayed a feeling of improvisation, creativity, innovation. And those were really the key words that we had going in. And yeah, Ryan was the one who really pushed for that. So, Ryan, can you describe the system more and the way it functions?
Ryan: And I think you kind of, you know, hit on a lot of the stuff that me and RD were talking about during the original concepting phase for our crafting system. Because it went through many different iterations of us trying to kind of hone in on exactly the feeling we were trying to capture, and we're pretty happy with where we got it, and looking forward to kind of incorporating it more into our own games, even outside of the world of Enshrined, because we designed it to kind of, you know, fit in into any world, if you want it to. So even in my own home games, I'm planning on using it in the future, because we've always had players, or DMs that kind of want to allow you to craft things, but the rules in Draw Steel and 5e both felt limiting in their own ways.
L3ong before we even began designing for Draw Steel, we had set out with a goal in mind to not make a crafting system where one ingredient makes one item. Where, you know, you don't get the basilisk tooth and turn it into the basilisk-tooth sword. Like that's just not what we wanted to do. We find that's, you know, internally, we always referred to it as just a different type of currency. Like it's not really crafting something interesting, it's just, you know, a different name for gold pieces that are required for the sword. And the gold piece happens to come from about the basilisk.
And so we set out, you know, before even getting into Draw Steel, to design something that was as far from that as we could reasonably go. And so then when we sat down to do the Draw Steel version of it, it was kind of like, "Huh, how are we gonna fit this together in here, how are we going to do that a little bit?" While we had some misgivings...not misgivings, but concerns at first about like, will it, you know, "Can we get this to fit into Draw Steel? Like, will it be worth it?" We decided to kind of push forward because, from the ground up, it kind of ties into our philosophy of the world of Enshrined a lot, which is, you know, this sort of believable ecosystem. And so a lot of our plants of the world, and our creatures, they're designed from the ground up with the anticipation of you trying to scavenge from them, trying to harvest from them. Everything in the world, fundamentally, is made out of components that you can use in the crafting system to make fundamentally anything you want.
And it's a very open-ended crafting system. You can go to some of our, you know, our trees and our plants and our animals, take parts of them and use them in ways — some of them more magical than others, some of them more abstracted and cursed than others, as...you know, if we built — even the tendons of our umbral prowler, for example, who has a mighty jump and such strong legs — if we built that with just a little bit of unsettlingness in even the root parts of them that you might want to use to craft your own stalking longbow, that kind of builds out the horror of the world that we were trying to create.
And so that was kind our driving force, is that this crafting system is kind of a core part of our world, as far as like...essentially more of a focus on survival and doing what you can, because the world is trying to eat you. And what are you going to do? You're going to survive it. You are going to take the pieces it gives you and turn it against the world. So we kind of broke it down into a material class system where different components in the crafting — like, so you get a component from killing a creature or harvesting a plant, and then that component can like...let's say, if you kill an umbral prowler, which is a very powerful and forceful beast in its own right, and it also has, you know, venom glands that it uses to weaken you. And so you might get some aspects of this creature that contain magical or even just, like, powerful mundane properties that could be used to fortify your body, much in the same way that it is a very strong creature. Or you might get some that might help you do some elemental damage, like, you know, acid, for example.
But you can take those and incorporate them to anything you want. You could put them in your armory, put them in your weapons. You can make potions out of them, because our crafting system is, you know, not limited to just alchemy for crafting items or crafting armor or crafting trinkets. It's like it's all, these components are used for crafting everything. And so whether you want to be an alchemist, whether you want to be just a local village medicine person, whether you want to be a heroic adventurer who's forged his entire armor set and armament from the slain foes of his enemies, you can.
But also just kind of tying it back to the world as well, it's like these are the same — like, if you go to a medicine person in the village, they're using roots from the local area. They're using the kidneys of lesser feathered pygmy wyverns to sort of, you know, craft their healing potions. And that's kind of like where we kind of built that up. And so we wanted to try and modify it to fit into the existing Draw Steel system in a way that helps the world still feel complete and like, kind of grounded in that way while still respecting the sort of heritage of the Draw Steel system that we, you know, weren't as like sure it would work originally. And I think Aestus did a really good job on that front of kind of making it, blending it with Draw Steel in a good way.
Aestus: Yeah, just a little note — the Draw Steel conversion is definitely more focused on alchemy rather than item crafting than the 5e rules are. I am working, actually, on more treasure crafting than consumables crafting, plugging that in. But for reasons, just because of the differences of the two system, it felt like the alchemy side of things needed more of an emphasis in the Draw Steel. So I just wanted to make sure everyone was aware of that.
But yeah, I think, if you're used to very crunchy rules in Draw Steel, this is more of a lighter touch. In a lot of ways, it's like help and guidelines for homebrewing a lot of your own stuff. And we felt like that was necessary to get that innovation and improvisation feel. But yeah, I'm really glad Ryan also emphasized this feeling of mastering your environment to us. That was really important. And I think there is a tendency for people to see survival as not being particularly heroic, but mastering your environment is heroic. That high level of competency where you're able to take and use the things around you, that is heroic to us, yeah.
Jon de Nor: What I wanted to ask you about is the art that's in the preview. That was in the thing that you sent me. Oh, it's named the vertical slice, actually, in the file name. Because especially some of the monsters in here look really good. Where's the inspiration for these creatures coming from, and also, who drew them? (laughter)
Aestus: Ryan, take it away on this.
Ryan: Yeah, I'd love to talk about that. The inspiration for sort of the feeling of them in many ways comes from the absolutely psychotic brains of our studio. And that is, you know, so our studio lead RD, he's sort of in charge of narrative design and direction. And at the end of the day, he makes the final decision on the art. And so, me and him will sit down when we first draft out a creature and kind of go over how it fits into the world, what it does, how you how you fight it, or how you don't fight it, and et cetera, and kind of build that up.
And then once we have an understanding of what this creature is — where it fits into the world and the ecosystem, where on the predator food chain it lies, essentially — and we're kind of comfortable from a narrative direction that where this creature fits into our book, we then go to our amazing artist Sabba, essentially give him an outline for the terrible things that we've come up with and say, "Hey, like, what do you think of this? Do you have any questions? Do you have any ideas?" And sometimes he'll ask us what our intent is for some of the stuff, but often he just kind of looks at our writeup and then comes back with like a handful of truly terrifying designs from the back of the psyche.
And we love him so much for it, because we can just kind of give him a vague outline of something we want, and he'll say, "I have an idea." Which often is concerning, because we don't feel we've given him enough information. And then he comes back with something that is like really awesome. And he's a really incredible artist that we've, you know, gotten to work with. All of us at the studio have a background in art to some degree. You'll notice from the file name, the vertical slice is because at one point we were all game design artists. And so that is, you know, kind of a core bit for us.
And so as a very artist-heavy studio — from one direction or another, I'm definitely more of a technical artist than some of the other people here, whereas, you know, Sabba is an amazing 2D artist, and the person who very meticulously named the files is more of a 2D designer — from the ground up, we really wanted the art to be a core part of our game. And that's, you know, something always strikes joy at our tables, when we're running the game, or playing the game, and you get to show cool art with the group. Whether it's the new monster that you get to fight and there's an awesome picture of it, whether it's the new environment that you step into and the DM has something, like a picture to immerse yourself in it. That's something that, whenever there's those little nuggets, and whenever I'm running a game, I'm always excited to share those bits with my players.
And so we really wanted to kind of make art a very important part of this book. Yeah, all this, all the creatures kind of go through this process of, you know, narrative design into 2D concept. We kind of document the whole 2D design and art process in our Discord server. So the community gets to see live, when we're coming up with the design for a new creature, and the various steps it goes through. And then before arriving on the final product, and that's kind of one of our things. Every creature in the book is going to have an illustration. And we try to the best of our ability to make them as impactful as possible. And that's kind of just one of our hard things. It's like, yeah, we don't...if there's going to be a creature, it's going to have something to represent it. And it also really builds out the world.
So there's, you know, probably...let's see, 20=some=odd illustrated...no, probably more than that, somewhere between — I don't remember the full count, but, off the top of my head, but somewhere between 20 and 30 illustrated creatures in Red of Tooth and Claw, to varying degrees. Some of those are what we call minor creatures, which just kind of build out the world a bit more. They have crafting elements to them. They are the prey that other things feed on. They are the things that might, you know, harm a party when they're not looking, but they're not inherently combat creatures. And then there's the other half of them is, you know, things like the prowler, things like the genius loci, which is one of our biggest and scariest. And yeah, all of those are, you know, we approach the art with about as much attention and love and care as we can, because it is very core to our studio philosophy.
Aestus: And I mean, to be frank, this — both the volume and the caliber of art that are in this project is something that you cannot get in a typical Draw Steel product without taking a loss, right? Draw Steel products just don't fund with enough money at this point. We're just too early on, our audience is too small. So it's a really — you can see it as one of the virtues of doing a product like this, which is both 5e and Draw Steel is, we can use...you know, if we make a monster in 5e and convert it to Draw Steel, we still have those art assets with the 5e budgets.
So it's really — and I mean, from a less like, practical money side of thing, I just got to say, it's one of the coolest parts about doing a project like this. I wrote a short story, you know, when I was an undergraduate, almost ten years ago now, that became the building block of this world. And to see an artist of Sabba's caliber, to see those words that I wrote ten years ago filter through his imagination, and you get the ashleaf tree, which is this — it's one of the core parts of our ecosystem, it's this tyrant canopy tree that blocks the light because it absorbs all that light and it turns into this bioluminescent sap. And there's so many more things that are like that. Yeah, Sabba is really cool. We should link, in the finished version of this video, we should link his Artstation or whatever his portfolio is, in the description.
Jon de Nor: Oh, yeah.
Aestus: Yeah, it's really cool to work with him. He's Italian, and I don't know if you are a history buff, but Italian artists are kind of a big deal. (laughter)
Jon de Nor: (laughter)
Ryan: Yeah. (laughter) Might have heard of a few of them.
Jon de Nor: I do also notice, at the end of the document there's a section about the crafting, and there's one — currently just a line illustration of a very enthusiastic kobold, I think. Holding a flask with something that's smoking. I wish that will be colored in the final product, because it's my favorite piece. (laughter)
Aestus: Oh, we got a request! We'll pass that on. No promises, but that would be really cool.
Jon de Nor: I don't know. There's just something about it that's just so...yeah. My favorite piece.
Ryan: Yeah, I'm glad. I think that's also...with some of those illustrations, especially just the kind of things that, you know, help build out the feeling of immersion in like the crafting system, for example. We kind of just let our artists at it and just say, hey, you know, here's what's on the page. Do whatever, you know, do whatever you're going to find fun here. And that's, you know, some of the stuff you came up with was stuff like that kobold. And I'm glad that you had as much fun with it as you did.
Jon de Nor: Yeah. (laughter) It just, I don't know, he just looks so happy and intrigued about what he's created.
Ryan: Yeah. (laughter)
Jon de Nor: There's also another piece, right? Just like a page earlier. It's like a traveling trunk, but it's like, lots of drawers and shelves and everything, and you kind of unpack it to get almost like a small apothecary.
Aestus: Yeah. I think of it like a tackle box, but for potions.
Jon de Nor: For alchemists. (laughter)
Ryan: Yeah, absolutely.
Jon de Nor: I'm really impressed with the art that's already in here, and...I can only imagine what the rest of the thing will look like.
Aestus: It's going to look fantastic, yeah. He's...I mean, that's a given with Sabba. And there are other talented artists that we work with. Our artist that does our battlemaps is really amazing as well. Yeah, I think you're going to see something that looks beautiful and is maybe a little different than a typical Draw Steel product.
Jon de Nor: I mean, after seeing what the Cave of Amber Tears product became, with its very distinct art style, I feel like there's space for something that looks a bit different. I have to ask, the cover image, which is...it kind of looks like a tree. Is that the tree that you spoke of, or is that something unrelated?
Ryan: Yes and no. I'll put it that way. It definitely shares some DNA, with the lightmass tree that...or, sorry, not the lightmass tree, the ashleaf tree. That was an early prototype name. (laughter) A little glimpse behind the curtain on that one. The ashleaf tree, it definitely shares some DNA. Specifically on the cover. That is a forest that has, sort of succumbed to the corruption of, the god Mung. So at that point, it is no longer just a naturally tree. It has sort of become a little more overgrown, a little more, let's say, infused with a bit of a savagery. Mung's the god that sort of features as part of this Red of Tooth and Claw module, because he is the god of the hunt and survival and finding the strength in yourself to overcome everything through force. =
And so, areas of his influence, the trees aren't as passive as they are in the rest of the world. They might overtake things a little more forcefully. As you can see, the cover is almost an idol of Mung, if you will. And the trees are even starting to overtake that, and sort of grasp out for things in the world, whether they be living or not.
Aestus: This might be a good time to talk about one of the themes of this particular product, the Red of Tooth and Claw book, which is kind of the idea of hunger and starvation as like a...exploring the kind of existential eldritch horror elements of hunger and starvation. And, yeah, so Mung, our in-universe god of the hunt and hunger and "eat or be eaten", those themes feature in this book quite a bit. And I mentioned earlier that there is a subclass for the Fury that we've designed for this product. And testing it has been really fun. And it is the Primal Maw fury. And so it channels — because in Draw Steel, Furies all channel some kind of primordial force. And this is the primordial force of "eat or be eaten". And it has a lot of animal themes to it, but it also has this, just the idea of hunger as a driving force is this theme we try to get in the subclass, and it's really the theme of the whole book.
Jon de Nor: We're closing in on the end, sadly, of the interview, and I always ask my guests to bring some kind of recommendation. So what have you brought us? We'll start with Aestus.
Aestus: Okay! I thought I'd talk about a game I've been playing. Because it's a small game, I'd love to see more people play it. It is an auto battler game called Flawed Tactics. I think it was designed by a solo designer. And it's their first game. I was shown it by a friend. I'm really big into auto battlers, like auto chess games? I'm pretty good at them. And so my friend wanted my insight into this game, and I got addicted. So yeah, Flawed Tactics. The core thing that makes it different from other auto battlers is it has a dynamic pricing system on the units that's kind of like a stock market. So the more times a unit gets used, the more expensive it will be to buy it in your game. And so there are some units that are really strong, but if everyone thinks they're strong, they might get too expensive and not worth investing in anymore. So it has like a stock market element to it, which is pretty cool. So yeah, Flawed Tactics. Check it out, guys, especially if you like auto battlers.
Jon de Nor: An interesting recommendation. Ryan, what have you brought?
Ryan: Yeah, no, absolutely. This one was hard for me because I get obsessed about so many different things. I'll say though, the list has almost changed daily. A few, a couple of things come to mind immediately. The first one is something that I've always had, enjoyment through for the world of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. games. But recently, you know, went through again because of something that we're working on for part of our world building in Enshrined is Roadside Picnic, the book that inspired the original world of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.. That's something that I can kind of like...the more I go through it, the more I've been kind of enjoying it and have been pulling parts of it to inspire the more eldritch sides of our world. And we almost — we had a talk with Aestus yesterday, and we kind of brought that up again. It's almost required reading for the next phases of development. And that's something that I've always had an appreciation for the world of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. And so kind of returning to the roots of Roadside Picnic has kind of sparked some new things in my imagination.
But I'd be remiss not to include, The Blood of Dawnwalker, the game that just came out last week, has been my obsession ever since it dropped. And that one, it returns to a lot of the roots that I love in the world of The Witcher, in terms of the game, but it brings a decidedly cosmic and horror side of it that pairs very nicely with what I've been working on in the day for Enshrined. And then I fill my nights with The Blood of Dawnwalker.
Jon de Nor: Thank you so much, both of you, for coming on. Enshrined looks really interesting. And I'm a sucker for good art. And there is a ton of it, and I hope, more to come.
Aestus: Oh, yeah.
Ryan: Yes, absolutely. Never a dull day.
Jon de Nor: Wonderful. Thank you so much for coming on.
Aestus: Well, thanks, Jon. It's been a blast, as always. Yeah, hopefully you'll have us on again for the next Enshrined project, too.
Ryan: Would love to see that. It was awesome being here. Thanks for having us.
Outro
Thank you so much Aestus and Ryan for coming on. If you're listening to this as it drops, the crowdfunder will be live in a few days. It sounds like they've spent a lot of time making the combat encounters especially fun, well worth it for any Draw Steel director.
I want to thank FoxTrick for submitting questions for Aeastus & Ryan.
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.
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Next episode is on the 5th. That's the roundup for the month of September.
See you next time. Snakkes.