Packet #3 Is Away!
over 1 year ago – Mon, Nov 21, 2022 at 03:24:38 PM

Hey folks! I hope you’re enjoying the monsters we’ve released so far. Based on the feedback we’re seeing online and in our discord, it SEEMS like people are pretty happy with them!

Let me tell you; working on this book is a lot of fun, for all of us. It’s enormously fulfilling to take these creatures we’ve lived with in various forms for decades, and update them with modern design. Really think about how to make them fun, how to make them interesting. It feels like this is what MCDM should be doing; working on the stuff we believe in and people want to see.

So far, in the previous packets (including the Free Preview which is sorta Packet Zero) we’ve delivered….

Basilisks, Giants, Goblins, Humans, Lightbenders, Lizardfolk, Mind Killers, Olothec, Orcs, Overminds, and the Voiceless Talkers! Along with new monsters for the Graveyard, and Enchanted Forest. That’s seventy-five stat blocks and we’re just getting started!

This packet you’ll meet:

The Monsters

Bugbears! Chimera! Hell Hounds! Kobolds! Owlbears! And a new environment; The Swamp! That’s another twenty-seven new statblocks (including companions and retainers) putting us at over 100 stat blocks released so far. Pretty cool!

I’m not certain, but my guess is we’re gonna land somewhere between 250 and 300 stat blocks for this book, so we’re not even halfway through!

There’s a lot of great stuff in this packet, but probably the coolest is the Kobold faction. In our kickoff meeting where the artists and designers all get together and talk about “what are these things?” I said I thought they should be “tiny Romans.” Now, I didn’t mean that literally, I meant they should be very well-organized. Good at fighting in formation, taking orders. Regimented. They are squishier than Goblins, but much less grabasstic.

Spencer Hubnick (aka Pesto Enthusiast, long time member of the community and our Lead Tester) took this “kobold brand statement” to heart and made them very Roman indeed! You can see he did a lot of research in what they might be named and even how they fight! I felt like I was reading an Osprey book when I went over the final result. 😀

You can see the MCDM Kobold is a shield fighter, and gains a small (but, at this level, meaningful) bonus to AC as long as there’s another kobold adjacent to them. Each kobold has cool abilities that help reinforce the idea that these are tiny, but highly organized warriors.

It’s our hope that you don’t even really need to think about this stuff. Just toss a bunch of likely Kobolds into an encounter and, when initiative says it’s their turn, just do what it says in the statblock, and your players will think you’re a tactical genius! :D

They do have some cool combos though and I particularly like the way a lowly Tiro can pick up the fallen standard and get a field promotion to Signifier. “Quintilius Varus, where are my eagles?!”

You can also see our philosophy regarding using spells in combat, as the Discipulus has shocking grasp but you don’t need to go look up what that does in some other book. Says what it does right in the statblock.

Please, if you run any of these monsters in your game, come by our Discord and let everyone know how it went! We got a whole channel just for this book.

The Scenario

These scenarios are a lot of fun for us and they give us a chance to try out some new and novel design without derailing anything else we’re working on.

This time it’s kobold vs. kobold chaos! We hired C. Steven Ross to write a grand PvP scenario with no GM required. One player (or group of players) controls a faction of kobolds battling with another team of tiny lizards, run by another player (or players) over treasure. The first to steal the treasure chest from their opponents wins! It’s good ole-fashioned kobold battlin’ that you can get into tonight.

Q&A

MCDM Lead Designer James Introcaso (aka the dude in charge of this book) will be live on twitch later today (1pm Pacific) answering any questions you folks have about the book or the new monsters!

https://www.twitch.tv/jamesintrocaso

The Art

Last packet you didn’t get any art previews, so we made sure to toss a bunch in for this packet including some fun spoilers for future packet monsters.

Certainly a candidate for “coolest thing in the entire book” is Jason’s take on the TIME RAIDERS! We had a really fun meeting about what our version of the classic UK Astral Raider might be. I thought they might have some interesting organs instead of eyes, something like Cyclops’ visor but actually part of their biology.

Jason really liked that and you can tell ‘cause he came up with a bunch of different variations. The idea was; we’d pick which one we liked best but I thought they were all cool as f….as a very cool thing, so I said “I think these are all Time Raiders!” So you may see lots of cool variation in their ocular organs moving forward.

Jason likes to design in digital clay, and he surprised us with a VERY cool model of a Time Raider with four arms! Was that something we came up with in the meeting? I don’t think so, I think Jason was just inspired.

I love it because it means we can give them abilities that let them use different kinds of weapons. Like many of the entries in this book, I really want to learn more about these guys, more than we can fit in this book.

You’ll see some great art from Grace Cheung for Count Rhodar von Glaeur, the MCDM Vampire Lord. Originally we imagined him as sort of a generic Vampire Lord, and you can see where that landed.

Then Grace gave us some variations and one of them seemed very…Elric-y to me! I said “Hey I like that. This is much cooler than how I imagined him!” And she leaned into that classic archetype. “Make him hotter!” I asked, and…we’ll you’re gonna have to wait until the book comes out to see the final art for the Dragon Count, but I’m in love.

We also get to see some VERY cool demons from Nick de Spain! The Tusker Demon, a gnoll warbeast, and the Slaughter Demon, a hobgoblin warbeast.

Nick’s demons always look totally unique, but they all have his distinctive style. I hope we get minis of these!

That’s It!

Packet #4 has already been through several rounds of testing and is currently in edit, so you MIGHT get it next month? No promises!

Packets #5 and #6 are currently in testing and we’re working on Packet #7!

We’ve already started assigning the Lairs to designers, and we’re working on the prototype for the first Enemy Party. The Black Iron Pact! Once that’s done we start assigning the rest of the Enemy Parties. Exciting!

Stay tuned for more dope monsters!

-Matt

Packet Two!
over 1 year ago – Wed, Oct 05, 2022 at 01:33:12 AM

Yay! It’s Packet Two! You should either already have an email from Backerkit, or be soon to receive an email from Backerkit, explaining how to download all the files in the packet. There’s a bunch of them!

Anyone who doesn't want to wait for the email: you should be able to just log into your backerkit account and download the files from there.

https://mcdm-monster-book.backerkit.com/backer/digital_rewards

Anyone who preordered the book or PDF, either on Kickstarter or Backerkit, will get access to all the packets as they release as well as access to all previous packets. If it’s been three business days since this update, and you still haven’t gotten your email, please contact [email protected].

The Monsters

Whoo, this is a BIG one! Biggest packet yet! Inside you get…

Humans! Maybe the most versatile enemy in the entire book, you get MANY human statblocks, more than enough to make hundreds of unique encounters using just people!

Lizardfolk! Classic swampy beastie great for lots of campaigns.

GIANTS! Really excited about these guys. Making Better Giants was one of the first impulses that led to the creation of this book.

The MCDM Basilisk! A very cool version of the classic monster, now with organs to harvest! :D

And we are very happy to present….the Old Ones. Emerging from the Sea of Stars to rearrange your genome and turn you into a fish person!

We also meet the MCDM Troll! With some fun regeneration shenanigans.

We get to hang out in The Graveyard environment and meet some very cool new monsters, including one slightly-less-new monster, the Bone Hoarder (formerly the Corpse Collector).

The idea with environments (I know I’ve explained this before but it can’t hurt to go over it again) is that you already have an adventure that visits this environment, in this case a graveyard or tomb or mausoleum, you already have a plot and bad guys, etc…. And you’re just looking for some new, cool monsters to challenge your players

So we try to avoid new, intelligent species, or Big Boss Monsters, we got plenty of those in this book already, plenty just in this packet! But these new monsters are fun and reinforce the theme or tone of the environment.

Musique, Non-Stop

And if you want the graveyard to be MORE spooky, we asked our friend and YouTube neighbor State Azure to throw the proper ingredients into his cauldron and cook up some spooky graveyard AMBIENT music. People really seemed to like the last ambient track, so we figured let’s do another one! I dunno if we’ll do one of these for every packet, but we might! We’ll see.

You get a high-quality MP3, and we also uploaded the track to our YouTube channel because I think it’s easier for some people to use and stream at their table that way.

A New Scenario: Fee! Fie! Foe! ….

The Orc Scenario from Packet #1 was really popular, so we figured it was a good idea to do another one! This one designed by our Lead Designer, James! Totally self-contained, this contains all the monsters you need, the map, and the rules! So you can have fun with them TONIGHT!

This one’s called Fee-Fi-Fo-Fum! Each player controls an MCDM giant trying to smash up a village of human bandits run by the GM.

The giants are in a friendly competition to see who can cause the most destruction, scoring points for stomping down buildings, throwing trees, befouling the lake, and gobbling up orchards. As you destroy buildings, you find useful items you can use to help you smash more stuff: like an explosive keg, a powerful hammer, and… a kitty cat!

Meanwhile the GM spawns human minions that attack the giants in droves and controls a storm mage who blasts the players with lightning. So the giants need to work together to fight the humans, but they’re also competing to see who can destroy the human village fastest. You know, giant stuff.

This is not a competitive scenario like Against the Horde with a score and leaderboards, we may do another scenario like that, but we had a cool idea for this one and we didn’t want them all to feel the same. We just wanted to give you a reason to use these monsters tonight and just…have fun with them. Learn what they can do in a non-critical environment. There are no stakes, you’re not running your normal PCs in a campaign, it’s just fun. Like a little board game using the MCDM rules!

We hope you get a kick out of this scenario, if you stream your playthrough, please tag us on twitter! @hellomcdm.

Ongoing Development

There isn’t really a lot to talk about in terms of the behind-the-scenes development of the book, we’re well stuck-in to the assembly-line process. All the monsters in the book have been assigned to designers, most of them have been delivered. We have a bunch of monsters currently with our paid SuperTesters, and another big chuck already went through that process and are with the volunteer Alpha Testers.

So at this point we’re starting to move on to the Enemy Parties, don’t know when you’ll see the first of those but I think we’re basically waiting on me for that? We’re going to use The Black Iron Pact as the example for our designers.

That means I need to take the notes I used back when they fought the Chain and turn them into “designlish” which is a hybrid of English and Actual Design. Just enough to get their abilities fleshed out. Then James takes my Designlish and turns it into real, actual 5E design and then it goes to the SuperTesters!

After that we’ll have one, finished (well, “finished,” there’s still one more round of testing after that, but those changes tend to be smaller) Enemy Party we can use as an example for all our freelancing partners.

So that’s something I get to do next week! :D It’ll be fun, this whole process has been incredibly fun and rewarding and I think it shows in the final results. Every time I open these documents, even monsters I’ve seen four or five times already, I get excited all over again. I can’t wait to USE all this stuff!!

Speaking of fun…

The Time Raiders

I have no idea which packet these guy’s stats will be in but WOW I am really excited about the visual direction, so I thought I’d share it with you folks.

These are MCDM’s take on the classic 80’s UK astral humanoid. They don’t really raid time but they do pillage ships and vessels traveling between the worlds of the Timescape and some of those worlds are very Space Fantasy so they’re more like genre raiders, but that’s not as cool a name. :D

We had a big meeting about what the MCDM Time Raider should look like, and I’m not going to spoil it all for you but there were a lot of influences thrown into the pot. We like that DIY, scrounged, kitbashed Mad Max aesthetic that communicates; these are nomads and pirates of the timescape. They raid anyone traveling between worlds and steal whatever they need.

We liked the idea that they’re alien, they’re native to the Sea of Stars which means they thrive “where the winds of limbo roar.” They’re gaunt and tough and they evolved to see in multiple spectra (or maybe their ocular organs are hardened against the alien energies of the Astral Sea? Haven’t decided.)

So their humanoids (mostly, no spoilers) but their ocular organs are really weird. I had this idea; “what if instead of eyes, they had like Cyclops’ visor, from the X-men? But not something they’re wearing, that’s just how they see. It’s a natural part of their face?”

Jason thought that sounded pretty cool! So he went and noodled in Zbrush and produced….THIS!

Look at these guys! Madness! In a good way! All of these are cool in different ways but I gravitated toward H and I, mostly because they looked the most like what I was imagining, but you can see Jason is already thinking of these ocular organs as having facets, but like a gemstone, not an insect-eye.

This might be because A: our Time Raiders (an exonym, their demonym is Kur’zoi) are natively psionic, and B: in Orden psionics is closely tied to crystals and gemstones.

So from these, Jason takes H and I and does a new round of explorations. This is classic visual development. You start with a broad idea, do lots of wild variations with that idea and see what people like.

Then you use the ones they like as a starting point for a whole new round of exploration and you get THESE!

I can safely say…I love all of these, in fact I think these are ALL legal Time Raider heads. I like the variations in ears and nose structure. All very, very cool.

Mind you, these guys aren’t hairless, they’re gonna get some wild, Mad Max / 80’s New Wave haircuts. But this is just the head exploration.

It’s ok for me to share these unfinished explorations as long as I include the caveat: this is all temp. None of this is final, we don’t know exactly where we’ll land with these guys but I think you can see we are definitely going in a direction and I am SUPER excited to see where we end up.

That’s it folks! Packet Two! The biggest packet so far but not I don’t think, the biggest packet you’ll ever get, we’ll see.

Thanks for your support everyone, we love working on this project and we hope you like where everything’s going.

Stay tuned for Packet Three!

The First Packet...is Away!
over 1 year ago – Fri, Aug 12, 2022 at 08:43:50 PM

There is a LOT to talk about!

Hey folks, Matt Colville here. The first packet is done! You should either already have an email from Backerkit, or be soon to receive an email from Backerkit, explaining how to download all the files in the packet. There’s a bunch of them!

Anyone who preordered the book or PDF, either on Kickstarter or Backerkit, will get access to all the packets as they release as well as access to all previous packets. If it’s been three business days since this update, and you still haven’t gotten your email, please contact [email protected].

On with the show!

The Monsters

I mean, this is what we’re all here for, right? This packet contains the MCDM Orcs as well as the Voiceless Talkers (aka the MCDM Squid Dudes) and the Enchanted Forest environment. That’s 19 different stat blocks! We also made an Orc Retainer, and a Companion for the Orc Critter, the Mohler.

I think people are going to get an enormous amount of use and value out of the monsters in this packet, but not all packets are equal. This one has 19 stat blocks in it because the last four months started with us assigning all the monsters in the entire BOOK. And that was an involved process, each monster gets a Kickoff Meeting where the whole team and the designer assigned to the monster get together and talk about “what kind of thing is this?”

These meetings are only about an hour long, but the result is that the designer and the artists and everyone else on the DevTeam all agree on what kind of thing it is we’re making.

The Orcs

Like the orcs! We worked with Willy Abeel to figure out “what is an MCDM orc?” We don’t want to reinvent the wheel, but we want to have a clear vision that we believe in and we feel is exciting and more fun than the generic orc.

Out of the Orc Kickoff Meeting came the idea of Orcs having blood fire. Literally their veins glow in combat when they are close to death. And the Relentless trait which grants them one chance to strike a killing blow before they die.

We think that core ability and the visual of it makes our orcs pretty fun and distinct. But that’s just one ability shared by all Orcs, each orc also gets cool unique abilities that reinforce the idea of orcs as being organized, coordinated, intelligent fighters.

The kickoff meetings are also where we talk about the art design. What are our Orcs going to look like? This is a major issue! We want something that makes you think “yep that’s an orc” without looking or feeling generic and I feel pretty good about where we landed!

We tried a lot of different ideas until we started focusing on their faces and hair! Grace Cheung drew an orc with long flowing locks and I was reminded of stories of the Spartans getting ready for war. “Long hair adds beauty to a good face, and terror to an ugly one.”

Once we hit upon that look it seemed like the rest of the orc fell into place and you’ll see a bunch of orc concepts in the packet, showing off that process.

Warning! Less Is More!

All these orcs are cool. I’ve fought against them in playtesting (Garotters SUCK!) and I’m excited to run them as a GM (Garotters are AWESOME!). But it’s easy to see all these new options and want to try them all! Right away!

The problem with that is; it’s just too many new, different abilities for your first encounter. Relentless, Gnashing Horde, Unimpeded, Juke, Affinity, Elemental Discharge, Power Burst, Rush, Healing Rally. I mean that’s just the first several orcs and that’s not including their actual weapon attacks.

If you use more than say 3 different kinds of orc in your first encounter, you’re going to overload yourself. Better to start with an encounter with one kind of orc, or maybe two or three, and slowly over the course of an adventure, vary which kinds of orcs you use until you’re familiar with all of them. Then you can go crazy!

But still, it would be fun to get to know how these new orcs work, maybe outside the context of your normal campaign. So we had an idea!

Against The Horde

We partnered with the folks at 2C Gaming to create a unique scenario in which 4 heroes (pregenerated characters are included) see how long they can survive against a literally endless horde of orcs. We even made a custom map for it!

This is not a scenario that can be “won.” It is a desperate last stand against impossible odds. The only question is…how long can you survive?

I was part of the playtest for this and it was super fun even before it got honed down into its current form. The goal was; give GMs and players a fun way to learn how our new orcs work, in a consequence-free environment. I think this does this really well!

Of course, a lot of people play RPGs specifically because there IS no winner or loser, it’s very much not a competitive game and so we know some folks will find this scenario sort of pointless. It’s not part of any adventure, there’s no continuity, we get that.

But I had a lot of fun going through it as a player and I suspect many other people will too. We don’t know if a LOT of people will dig this scenario, or maybe just a few, but just in case we created a special channel in our Discord for folks to get together and talk about how their team did, and maybe use the channel to make groups just to try this scenario out.

If you STREAM your attempt and then paste a link to your stream into the discord so we can check it out and make sure it’s real, then we’ll add your group and your score to the leaderboard!

If people like this scenario and get value out of it, we got lots of cool ideas for future scenarios featuring the monsters in future packets.

Partnering with 2C Gaming meant we could deliver this scenario, which has been extensively tested just like everything else we do, without impacting the delivery of the packet. I wrote a short pitch, 2C Gaming took it and turned it into something incredibly cool, and the testers polished the hell out of it. All while the monsters were proceeding normally through the development pipeline.

The Voiceless Talkers

VERY excited to see what you folks think of the MCDM Squid Dudes, you get two different basic flavors (a controller and an artillery) and one action-oriented villain; Lord Syuul.

Known formally as the Synlirii, these monsters were a lot of fun to design. We imagined they could “steal your thoughts” and the challenge was contextualizing that in gameplay. I think our implementation (Memory Thief) is pretty good! But what matters is what you folks think!

They also show how we think of psionics and spellcasting. We’ve developed our own psionics system for an upcoming product, but you don’t need to know how any of it works! The Synlirii just have dope abilities with a tag that tells you how powerful they are (3rd-Order Power, 5th-Order Power, etc…).

Then once the MCDM Psionics Rules come out, if you’re playing a Talent (our custom Psionics Class) those tags explain how hard it is for your character to learn the synlirii’s unique psionic abilities.

We like the idea that a Psionic PC can just see a Voiceless Talker do their thing and then get a chance to figure out how they did it, and we think this is a simple and elegant way to achieve that.

The Enchanted Forest

You get two monsters just for use in any adventure where your players are moving through an Elf Wode or a Mystic Forest and you want to spice things up. That’s the idea behind “environments.” Your players are already here for whatever reason, and you want some new, cool options to challenge them and reinforce the theme of that environment.

Sadie Lowry handled design duties for these creatures, the Dancing Lady (a plant!) and the Empyrean Stag which I think as being basically the Elgenwights that Salar Bearmantle works for. So the next time I run a game in or near the Beowode (DUSK?!) the Empyrean Stag is what I intend to use for those guys.

And IF you’re in an Enchanted Forest AND you get ambushed by a Dancing Lady, you might need a pretty tactical map! So Nick de Spain, one of our artists and our Art Outsourcing Manager made a tactical map just for this purpose for you to either print out for use at the table, or use in your VTT of choice.

He made a day and a night version of the map, as well as gridded and non-gridded versions. Thanks Nick!

Music! Wait, Music?!

Yep!! This first packet includes a 45-minute long generative, ambient piece composed and performed by Synth YouTuber State Azure! I sort of can’t believe we actually did this.

When we first met and talked about what was going to be in this packet, we thought, “What would our backers like to see that they haven’t even thought of?” What could we surprise people with? That’s where the idea of the Against The Horde scenario came from and in that meeting I wondered if folks who might have a use for the Enchanted Forest monsters might also like some…music? Something ambient that sounds like an Enchanted Forest?

Thanks to my noodlings in modular synthesis I follow a lot of musicians including a YouTuber named State Azure. I’ve reached out to him in the past to get permission to use his ambient tracks in the background

I love this track, I’ve already listened to it like 10 times at least. It’s got a lot of cool stuff in here including vocal samples! I had no idea what State Azure would produce out of my description, and sort of the whole idea of generative ambient music is that even the artist doesn’t know what it’s going to do on a moment-to-moment basis, but I knew he’d deliver something amazing and it basically sounds EXACTLY like I imagined it would.

You are free to use this music at your table, or in the background of your twitch stream, but the music is ours and we do not grant permission for folks to use it in any products.

This stuff isn’t free, we make sure the folks who work with us are well-compensated, but it should be obvious that doing stuff like this, a 45-minute piece of ambient music, doesn’t impact the development of the book. I mean, we couldn’t have made this music even if we wanted to!

Like the Orc Scenario, this is one of those things where we THINK you folks will like this and use it, but we don’t know! Maybe this is just something we did once and there’s no real need or desire for more. But if enough folks like this and use it, we could do more!

Also, special shout out to our art director Jason Hasenauer who made some “album art” for the YouTube video and then also to Jerry for making it move! Super cool!!

Art, Art, Art

There is no final art done, but we’ve done a ton of concepting and we all thought it was a good idea to share it with you!

In the files you’ll download you’ll find a little over 40 pieces of art, mostly just sketches and explorations of what things COULD look like. Orcs and Hobgoblins and Giants and Voiceless Talkers. There’s a lot of cool stuff in here!

I think some of these are near-final designs but then once we believe in the design of a monster, it’s time to make illustrations that USE that design. So for instance you’ll see a bunch of giants in here, just in these neutral poses, facing the camera.

All those giants may go through lots of iteration before we’re happy with them. Do we like their proportions, do the Ice Giants have the right mix of being covered in ice without looking like they’re MADE of ice, do we like their outfits, do we like the way they cover themselves, or use technology?

Once we’re happy, then we can draw them DOING things, probably with a background, and those are the final illustrations in the book. These concepts probably won’t appear in the book at all, but we included them in the packet because we thought you’d like to see them! They might appear in the final book, like in the back? We’ll see.

Orc Concepts

You can see how our process works if you look at the orc concepts, but you sort of need to know what order to look at them in.

We did a bunch of exploratory work on the Orc Look, just our artists, mostly Grace, experimenting. That’s where stuff like this came from.

At this stage, we’re just trying stuff out. You gotta start somewhere, so draw some stuff you think is cool and see how the team reacts.

After Grace took a stab at the orcs and drew many different iterations, we got together and talked about what we liked and what we didn’t and what kinds of archetypes we like and what stereotypes we wanted to stay away from.

Once we hit upon the idea of “Dope Hair” or, as Jason called it “Hot Orcs” we suddenly felt like we were on to something, and some new art quickly arrived based on these ideas.

As soon as I saw this, I knew we were on the right track. I had a very strong, positive reaction to this. Part of the design process is taking certain design elements and seeing what happens if you really push them forward. Like what happens if we take the facial ridges and really exaggerate them?

This was a useful exercise, but I thought we’d gone too far. But that’s the process. You often HAVE to go too far in order to discover what counts as “too far.”

This is where we eventually landed.

Obviously I can’t speak for all of you, but I LOVE these guys! I really, really love them. Now when I think of Orcs, this is what I picture in my mind and for me, that is a huge success.

Voiceless Talkers

Jason handled design duties on the Synlirii and his first stab at it was cool but a little conservative.

I saw this and I thought it was really cool but I was like…we can do better. This is obviously a creature with muscles and bones and I said “Jason, go crazy. Give me an alien tentacle monster. Imagine we made an RTS and these were our Evil Squid Aliens, what would they look like?”

And he literally said “Oh, really? Ok, yeah I can do that!” I could tell he was holding back, he was drawing what he thought I wanted? Or what he thought everyone else wanted? But I was saying, “Give me YOUR alien squid dudes,” and this is the result.

I was just STUNNED when I saw this. I was in love. So often when the art team delivers what they’re inspired by, I have this sense of “I’ve never seen this before, but this is exactly what I wanted.”

Of course, Jason is a huge Sci-fi NERD and he couldn’t resist actually explaining how these guys actually work.

Oh yeah we gave them laser rifles FYI. I mean they’re not literally lasers, they’re psionic, but that was part of the brief. I wanted to communicate that these guys don’t just live down in some cave somewhere, they are from another world and they have developed their own high tech stuff, but it’s all based on psionics. It’s not science fiction, it’s space fantasy. And these are the villains.

Jason often designs via sculpting and then once he’s happy with the 3D sculpt, he uses it to do a paintover and turn it into a 2D illustration.

I had to let Jason down and explain “No they need to be human-scale.” But! I said a unique, named villain like Lord Syuul could very well be Large like this.

Some Fiction

I dunno I just like writing, ok? I thought it would be fun to include a short interlude in which we meet some Orcs who are dealing with the Hobgoblins from a future packet, and discover the Ogre ally they were counting on is Not What He Seems.

And because I know some people prefer audiobooks to reading, I recorded my own take of the fiction. I’m no voice actor or narrator, but I had a lot of fun doing this and I hope you like it. :D

It’s just meant to give a sense of how the Orcs aren’t just creatures of hate and rage but thinking, feeling beings who can be just as insightful as anyone, and also how the Voiceless Talkers use their Guise ability to infiltrate societies and observe and manipulate things from the shadows.

That’s it! That’s Packet One

The next packet is HUGE, mostly because we spent a lot of the last 4 months just assigning the creatures to designers and then scheduling and attending the various kickoff meetings and then art meetings. So this packet sort of represents the initial trickle of results, and next is the flood.

But I think this packet, judged purely on the monsters, is a lot and folks will be using the Orcs and Voiceless Talkers in their games this week and some of them, like me for instance, for a long, long time.

We hope you like it all but we want to know what you think regardless. You can post your comments here or come by our discord and join the discussion there.

Thanks for all your support folks, we really hope you’re happy with the monsters and that there’s at least one other thing in here you didn’t expect and got a kick out of.

The Backerkit Update
almost 2 years ago – Sun, Jun 12, 2022 at 12:03:24 AM

Hey everybody! Our Pledge Manager is launching now so I figured this was a good opportunity to explain what that is and how it works and just generally update everyone on progress with Flee, Mortals! (spoiler, everything’s going according to plan. :D)

Backerkit

So, you already know some of how this Kickstarter thing works, right? You already pledged at some level that included some rewards. That’s how you got here!

But Kickstarter only collects certain information. If your pledge includes say, a dope shirt, Kickstarter doesn’t ask you your shirt size. Or even where you live so we can ship this stuff to you.

So a whole ecology has evolved to help manage people’s pledges so you can tell us your shirt size and give us your shipping info. These are called Pledge Managers and ours is Backerkit. You should be getting an email from them soon. Well, “soon.” See below.

Customizing Your Pledge

Backerkit allows us to collect your shipping info and shirt size, etc…. But it also lets you customize your pledge!

You could add more Xorannoxes (Xoranni? Xorannoi? Xorannini?) or if your pledge didn’t include a T-shirt and now you want one, you can add it to your pledge in Backerkit. Some folks will add a second hardcover book to their rewards so they and a local friend can save on shipping.

Taxes & Shipping

Also, Backerkit is where we collect taxes and shipping! That’s super important, especially now when shipping costs change wildly from one day to another.

These steps will happen closer to the release of the book. Obviously if we charge you for shipping now and the price changes, that is Bad. So the plan is to charge for shipping as close to the actual shipping of the book as possible.

Which means you’ll probably get a few emails from Backerkit over the next year and a half.

Waves

You should get an email from Backerkit saying “The Flee, Mortals! pledge manager is open!” You may already have one.

However, there’s a LOT of backers and automated email systems get frisky when you try to spam ~30k people all at once, so if you’re reading this within say 24-48 hours of it being posted and you haven’t gotten your email, do not fret. Your email is probably coming.

If it’s been a week since this update and still nothing, at that point it's reasonable to contact us at [email protected]

Pre-orders

The pledge manager also allows folks who missed the Kickstarter campaign to preorder the book! Or anything else on offer. You can do that here!

https://mcdm.gg/FleeMortalsPreorder

Actual Book Update

Things are going…according to plan! We still think the first packet will drop towards the end of July, all the monsters within have already had one design pass and are currently with our contract testers (i.e. the testers who are under contract and get paid).

I am personally very happy with everything and super excited for you all to see the Dope Stuff in this first packet. So, really there’s not much to talk about. There’s a lot going on behind the scenes, but I want to avoid talking about which monsters are in each packet, or what choices we’ve made in development, just because if folks hear that the Frumious Bandersnatch or whatever is in this next packet, and that’s a monster they’ve used a lot in the past, then folks start “guessing” at what the MCDM version will be like, and some of those guesses will be really cool and then other people get excited and then the actual MCDM Frumious Bandersnatch comes out and folks are like “Oh. I liked CoolGuy420_69’s idea better.” I have seen this happen on other projects I’ve worked on in the past and it's super disheartening for the team.

We’d rather make a strong first impression with the actual design, so stay tuned! The first packet will be here before you know it and then A: there’ll be plenty to talk about and B: the next packet after this one should happen a little quicker as much of the initial design for the book has been frontloaded in these last several weeks.

So that‘s it! Tons of cool stuff on the horizon and hopefully a few surprises in this first packet.

PeaceOut!

-Matt

Two MILLION Dollars!
almost 2 years ago – Thu, May 05, 2022 at 02:46:38 AM

So twenty-seven THOUSAND of you just said “yeah gimme that monster book!” Which is, I’m not going to lie, a bigger number than I expected. :D

And that means a LOT! It means we’re going to play The Campaign For North Africa! You know, I’m not sure I ever really considered this before, but I don’t think there’s any other way we’d ever try to play that game. It’s been sitting on my shelf for years but there was never any serious thought given to actually playing the damn thing! Well, now we have a really good reason! :D

But come on, that’s just a thing we’re gonna do, it’s not the reason you’re here. This is about making more and better monsters for 5th Edition. It’s about making fighting monsters more fun for everyone involved.

We’re already a certain percentage of the way done! That preview packet (let’s agree to call it the Preview Packet, and the next packet will be Packet #1) shows how we think, our design, and points in a certain direction.

Now it’s time to get started on the REST of the book, which is to say, the fun part. :D We’re already contracting writers, and have kickoff meetings scheduled THIS WEEK!

Kickoff Meetings

Most monsters (or bands, or environments) get a Kickoff Meeting where I (design director), James (lead designer), Jason (art director) get together in a call with the freelance designer who'll be writing and designing the monster. Nick (artist, outsource manager) and Grace (staff artist) are usually in the call too.

We need all these people (six people!) in the meeting because the Kickoff is where we figure out “what is this thing?” What does it look like? What abilities does it have? How is it similar to the classic monster we already know? How is it different?

These meetings are work, but they’re also a lot of fun. We usually end up with an idea board of different images that will inform the visual design, and a short list of ideas for different gameplay abilities. No final design, but we might say…the Voiceless Talkers can steal your memories. What does that MEAN!? Well, that’s for the designer to figure out later.

But the point of the meeting is that, even if we don’t know all the details, we agree on and believe in the direction. We’re all working on the same monster whether you’re an artist or a designer.

The designer doesn’t need to know how “steal memories” works yet, but they need to be confident they can come up with something.

I’m in the meeting because it’s my job to make sure everyone understands “what kind of thing is this?” For the Goblin kickoff meeting I said “Our goblins are slightly goofy but also deadly.” And that was…about my entire contribution! It’s my job to define the scope of the problem. “It has to fit in this box.” But within that box, the artists and designers are free to explore and create.

Not everyone who works for us is as familiar with the history of fantasy roleplaying as I am, so it’s also my job to make sure, if the team starts going down the wrong path, I can not only correct them, but explain why. If you’ve played a lot of video games or wargames, even worked on them, it’s easy to get excited about what an MCDM Orc might look like, for instance. But it’s my job to say “No that would be more like a kobold.”

I do the same thing for the design. Each freelancer is only working on a few monsters, so it would be easy for the Snake Folk designer and the Frog People designer to both give their monsters the “amphibious” trait. It’s my job to tell one of them “no that’s already spoken for.”

These meetings usually only last about an hour, and then the art team designs the Concept for the creature. Here’s the original concept for our Goblins.

As you can see, this is not exactly what we ended up with, but it does point very clearly in a certain direction. Concepts are not finished illustrations, they never become finished illustrations. They exist only to let the artists know what our monster looks like. You can see everything you need here; a snout instead of a humanoid skull (the human skulls on the left are for scale), long floppy ears. Elongated arms, bandy legs, and prehensile feet.

It was only after seeing how Jason drew the feet that we thought “they should be arboreal!” And James gave them a climb speed.

This concept only came together after quite a lot of discussion and exploration. When folks see the Kickstarter goal, and it's so much more money than other RPG kickstarters, this is where the money goes. We went down a lot of dead ends before we hit on the simian body-style inspired by bonobo apes and silverback gorillas, but those dead ends aren’t failures, we all know: this is the process. It’s an exploration.

Once the concept is done, the artists start drawing different goblins! And that’s when the concept is refined, tweaked.

This is pretty similar to what the designer does. They spend their time thinking about “how do goblins behave in combat?” Once they have an answer (they’re Crafty!) then it’s time to make several different kinds of Goblins.

What’s Next?

By the time you read this we’ll already have had our first two or three kickoff meetings, but I shall not reveal which monsters. :D

There’s going to be a lot of radio silence until Packet #1 drops, because if we start talking about which monsters we’re working on at the moment, then everyone starts imagining how they’ll work. You’d see lots of ideas and theories in the Discord and folks would get excited about certain guesses….

And then the actual packet drops and folks are disappointed it’s not what they guessed. “I liked what that one person posted!” We want people to be surprised and excited when a new packet drops!

Packet #1 will probably drop around the end of July which seems like a looong time right now, but that’s because we’re doing all the kickoff meetings now and there’s a lot of scheduling and assignments and, basically, logistics.

After all that work is done and the first packet drops, you’ll get new packets more frequently and probably pretty regularly. And they’ll be pretty big! Some will have many more monsters than the Preview Packet!

Miscellaneous Features

Folks have asked for a LOT of new features. Stuff not covered in the Preview Packet. By and large if we haven’t announced it in the Kickstarter Campaign page or the announcement video, it’s probably not going to be in the book.

HOWEVER, James and I are always thinking, planning, scheming and sometimes we think “we didn’t promise this, but it has a lot of value and would not add a lot of time to the schedule.” When that happens…we add it!

Now at this stage, I do not know what those features are, but part of being an independent company is that if we think something’s a good idea, and we have the time to do it then we can just…decide to add it!

When Will The Pledge Manager Launch?

Around the end of this month, you'll get an email letting you know it's live. The pledge manager will allow you to customize your pledge. It's where you tell us your address or shirt size, you can add or remove items from your pledge. 

Future Updates

I’m not a huge fan of talking just for the sake of talking (that’s what twitch is for!). So you’re only going to hear from us when there’s something to talk about.

But that will include the new packets and the art when it drops, so there’ll be a LOT to talk about once the assembly line starts spitting out finished, tested monsters. Tons of discussion once that happens.

Until then, I strongly recommend the MCDM Discord if there’s stuff you’re excited about or have questions about. Kickstarter isn’t very robust as a social platform. But the focus right now is on delivering the book we promised, so if you’re excited about some feature not mentioned there, the answer is probably “we’re not planning on that right now.”

But once the assembly line is working, who knows?? :D

Thanks for all the support everyone, I am personally very excited about where the monster book is going just from the Kickoff Meetings I had today. I think you folks are gonna love these monsters.