Crack! The! Sun!

Hey folks! Matt Colville comin’ at ya like a beam, like a ray, like a laser!

We had our quarterly in-person week a little while ago, bringing everyone out to Orange County to work on the future of Draw Steel. The first wave of post-launch products! There’s a lot, they fall into two broad categories; player options and director options, and I think you already know about all of them?

Inarguably the most ambitious of these, as in a couple hundred pages ambitious, is our first Campaign Adventure or Mega Adventure or whatever you want to call it…CRACK THE SUN! It is so ambitious it’s basically the reason we need to go to crowdfunding in December!

We’ve had several meetings about the plotline of this beast, we’ve partnered with Teos Abadía who’s work you know from, among other things, the Kingdoms & Warfare adventure, The Regent of Bedegar. Teos agreed to act as Managing Director for this project. A lot of writers are going to work on this and we want to make sure everyone’s pulling in the same direction so the finished product feels like one…coherent…whole. Ahem.

The rest of this post is just talking about what Crack the Sun is, and how we got here, so if you’re a player and not a director, you can skip this!! There’s gonna be spoilers!

But this is not “everything we know about Crack the Sun” that would be too long a post, this is just an overview. 

Why Are You Doing This?

Yeah, good question! I am someone who has always loved the promise of an epic adventure that takes the party across “many” levels, I’m sure you can all think of several from the history of this hobby. I have run a lot of them, I have played a lot of them, and I have OpInIoNs about what makes good ones good, and bad ones bad!

So I do not, in principle, think “a big adventure that takes you through multiple levels” is an inherently bad idea. I made a whole Running the Game video about how the “mega-adventure” should be a sometimes food, and not the main staple of your diet. But that means it’s still a sometimes food!

And there will always be people who rush to say “I would rather have 15 more Quests” where a Quest is 1/3rd a level, or whatever. Or 5 normal adventures. Ok, well we’re making a couple of quests, and adventures, and the game is open so anyone can make more. Crack the Sun is more “the kind of thing only MCDM can do.” At least, right now!

We also think it’s important to show everyone how we see the world of Draw Steel. The timescape contains a lot of Metal Hurlant nonsense, sure. But it also contains classic fantasy nonsense. What better way to illustrate that, than an adventure that starts with rescuing hapless villagers, defeating an army of hobgoblins, then pursuing your enemy across two worlds? That’s Draw Steel! 

We were also, simply, inspired. We had a cool idea for a super-adventure that took you through five acts, where each act was one level. You start as 3rd level characters, and when you get the last bit of XP at the very end, you level up to 8th level. So five levels in total. 

That’s one of the reasons people like MCDM. We try ambitious stuff. Draw Steel was hugely ambitious and that turned out…pretty ok! 😀

There’s also the fun of “a lot of different tables all going through the same big adventure and trading notes.” The “many short adventures” model has a lot of things going for it. But one thing you get with a Big Adventure is the experience of playing through something epic at the same time lots of other tables are making their way through it. I think it can give a big chunk of the community a shared experience and that is fun!

Also, we brought a whole big list of adventure ideas to y’all back in January, we got a TON of votes and A: the most popular adventures were all the Really Big Ones and the MOST popular adventure pitch, period, was Crack The Sun! Let no one say we do not listen to our community!!

I think I know why. Directors want to relax, knowing we made something epic, and we did all the work to make it as straightforward to run as is reasonably possible, and all they have to do is run it. 

So: we were inspired, we want to produce the proverbial “good super-adventure” and it was the one the most patrons wanted!

Crack the Sun is ambitious, there are many moving parts, so let’s talk about how exactly we’re building this thing.

The Process

We started knowing there were five acts, each act is one whole level’s worth of adventure, so 16 victories.

That alone is a very powerful tool! Knowing that we basically have 13 Encounters per level, assuming 3 are hard battles worth 2 victories each and there’s probably a negotiation or montage in there somewhere, was incredibly useful when it came time to say “Ok, we THINK we know what happens in this act. Let’s map it out, encounter by encounter.” We literally treated it like a budget we were spending and that was actually fun. This whole process has been fun so far. For me at least! 😀

We started with a pitch from me for each of the five acts. The goal is to give each act the structure of a self-contained adventure with a beginning, middle, and end. So you get to the end of an act and you have accomplished something meaningful, you get rewarded with a level-up, but the consequences of victory lead to the next act. 

We took the pitch and a blank Miro board and started making columns for each act. In the first meeting, we were just brainstorming different ideas for things that could happen in each act, based on the original pitch. So those columns were full of random post-its with; villains, story beats, combat encounters, NPCs, images from movies and comics that indicated the vibe we’re going for, or some story beat we stole from somewhere else.

Each meeting, the Miro board got more detailed, more structured. Soon, there were distinct post-its on the board for each plot point! In order! Progress! 

Those were the early meetings. Don’t stress over the details, we got a lot of ground to cover. In the first meeting, I don’t even think we got to Act Four! Each meeting we pushed farther and deeper and learned more. There was a lot of trust in those meetings. Mostly we were trusting Future MCDM to figure out all the annoying questions we were accumulating. 😀

But that’s important!! It’s really easy in brainstorming meetings for someone to start worrying and that worry spreads and soon you can’t really make progress because everyone can only see the problems. You need to be free to invent, to spitball, toss crazy ideas on the board, and not worry if they make sense.

Because! Critically! There is a point in every such process where you have so many ideas, they start becoming answers to your annoying questions and that is a powerful moment. Where very stressful, annoying questions suddenly click into place with ideas you didn’t realize were answers.

So step one was just: put all our ideas on the board, don’t sweat the connective tissue. When someone asked “But why though?” We said “Good question! We’ll figure that out later.” Because I believed later we’d have more ideas, and therefore more tools to use to answer those questions with.

I call those “Annoying Questions.” Annoying because we need to answer them! But we have no idea how yet.

Annoying Questions

It’s real easy working on a project like this to sit around saying “X happens! And then Y happens!” And it all sounds great and everyone is excited until someone asks “But how do we get from X to Y?” And no one has an answer and everyone feels like the stuff that got them excited was actually bad, because they don’t have a good answer to that annoying question.

So far, in Crack the Sun, the most consistently annoying questions were inter-act. The space between each act. Yes it is very cool that you defeat an army of hobgoblins, and we have really cool ideas for Battle of Dalrath gameplay.

But how do you GET from The Battle of Dalrath to Equinox?? I don’t mean literally how do the players get there (although I do mean that) I mean “how do the players know they’re supposed to go there? Why are they supposed to go there? Yes there’s a demigod in there trying to terraform the heroes’ world, but how do they know that? How do they know who’s doing it? How do they know they can stop it?! How do they know they need to leave now?”

The first three acts fell together pretty quickly because they obey the Aristotelean Unities of time and space. Dalrath is under attack by hobgoblins. Stop them. Easy.

Now, there’s more going on than that! The hobgoblins have an alliance with the shadow elves (answering the question; what makes these hobgoblins different from any others? Why are they, uniquely, a threat?) and there’s tons of cool story beats, but we didn’t really have problems figuring out how to get from A to B.

Those problems started when we needed to proactively leave Orden.

Adventures Aren’t Fiction

These issues are so annoying because they are unique to adventure design! In fiction, the viewer or reader doesn’t actually need to understand what’s going on. They just need to think they do, which is an easy illusion to create because you just have the main characters act like they know what’s going on, and the audience will trust them. How does Indiana Jones know he needs to close his eyes when they open the Ark of the Covenant? It’s never established, it’s never explained, there’s no point in the movie where someone says “The ark kills some people, not others. The only difference seems to be; who had their eyes open.”

But everyone in the audience, without exception, just assumes Indy knows what he’s doing and, guess what? The audience sits there doing nothing and the story plays out in a satisfying way all by itself! Turns out, closing your eyes works! Who cares how he knows that?

The smoke and mirrors that work in fiction, don’t work in adventure design. Even video games; most video games with anything like a story, you don’t actually need to pay attention to the story to make progress. Just follow the little marker on your minimap, or look for the glowing doorway, or the orange paint or whatever, and you will find the content you’re meant to find.

In a TTRPG, the players really need to understand what the hell is going on in a way they really don’t in fiction or video games. They need to understand what the bad guys are doing, why, how they’re going to do it, and a bunch of other stuff.

Leading the players to this knowledge in a manner that doesn’t pull everyone out of the experience and remind them this is just a thing someone wrote, rather than something the players are doing, is Very Hard. 

Whether we succeed remains to be seen. Lots of classic adventures are, in my opinion, a mess saved by the hard work of the person running it. 

But IF we succeed it’s going to be in some part a result of the rigor we applied when trying to answer the Annoying Questions. A couple of us worked on two big, AAA, Grand-Theft Auto-style games, and working on an open world, sandbox game teaches you a lot of critical lessons in interactive adventure design! 

Even experienced developers regularly made mistakes when it came to what you could and could not communicate to the player. It seems as though all the same problems of TTRPG adventure design can be found within GTA-style games. When does the player learn this? How? Does someone tell them? Why? What if the players never go there? Never talk to that person? What if they run that person over with a truck?

Brainstorming and outlining Crack the Sun, we had this short list of rules we kept going back to. Not written down anywhere, imposed by our own desire to keep things engaging and straightforward. Like everything else, it remains to be seen whether these rules produces a great adventure. 

The Rules

Well look, there are no rules. Whatever works is the rule. Whatever hooks the players, whatever sounds cool, whatever makes sense and is fun to run? That’s the rule.

But there are guidelines we used while working on the outline. They are, essentially, a set of rules for good adventure design. Assuming they produce a good adventure! 

And these weren’t written down anywhere! They’re just the precepts we kept coming back to, whenever folks had ideas. We weigh those ideas against the rules.

In no particular order…

Occam’s Razor, aka Use All the Parts of the Buffalo. We want to avoid inventing anything new to solve a problem if at all possible. This is why good brainstorming is so important. People hear the pitch, they get ideas! Put the ideas on the board! 

Then, later, when we’re bashing our heads against the wall trying to figure out: how, why, when, who; we have that list of ideas to pull from. I am always deeply skeptical whenever we have to invent something to solve a problem with the plot. Ideally, the solution was already there, we just didn’t realize it.

How can we, a bunch of mortals kill a twilight celestial?? Well, because the King of the Gnomes has a godkiller weapon he’s been working on ever since the shadow elves forced him to make weapons for them.

Of course the King of the Gnomes has something like that, he’s the king of the gnomes!! He’s a master lorewarden and a smith! And he hates the shadow elves! He might be a 10th level character! How do we know he has it? Because we met him three acts ago! It was hanging on his mantlepiece! It had “CHEKOV” written on it! Ok that last part is a joke, but you get it.

We didn’t invent the King of the Gnomes or meeting him, just for this. We already had him in our back pocket. And there wasn’t an obvious pay-off to meeting him the way there is some of the other NPCs you hang out with in Act One. So this tied that together and paid it off.

Sure, yes, we invented the godkiller weapon (actually a mortalizer. It doesn’t kill gods, it just weakens them sufficiently so you can do it!) and we may replace it with something else! But once we invented it and gave it to the King of the Gnomes it felt like he’d always had that thing hanging over his fireplace, we just didn’t notice it.

This advice can be hard to follow because folks get excited. They’re excited by the deep lore of the world, and want to leverage it, they’re excited by all the stuff the adventure reminds them of and they want to steal a bunch of story beats and stick them in.

But the corollary to this rule is: less is more. Don’t throw in references to the deep lore of the world if you don’t have to. Do not multiply entities unnecessarily. Yeah, that lore is cool! But is it relevant? No? Then don’t try and shoehorn it in. Let the adventure be the adventure, don’t treat it as a means to an end, where that end is showing off your cool lore. Remember that this whole thing is about the heroes doing things. Acting. Verbing. Not soaking in lore.

Conflict arises out of the character’s motivations. If we know why The Acolyte of Lightning is giving the dusk arrows to Bloodlord Varrox, we know a lot about what’s going on! NPCs need their own internal, consistent motivations, which drive the action and create the conflict. Drama arises out of everyone behaving in a manner consistent with their motivations, and wholly inconsistent with the heroes’ motivations.

In a bad adventure, things just happen in whatever manner is necessary to move the plot forward and, in my experience, the players spend a lot of time asking “why are we doing this exactly?”

Sense of Urgency. Remember those annoying questions? A lot of them were “Yeah but why now?” Sure, the players know what is going on, and it is bad, but what exactly causes them to act now? 

You’d be surprised (well, maybe you wouldn’t) how often I’ve tried to run an official adventure and been unable to figure out “yeah but why wouldn’t the players just spend a few weeks….?” Which kills all the drama. 

Good heroes, in my experience, are reactive, not proactive. Luke doesn't blow up the Death Star because he was bored, he does it because the empire char-broiled his surrogate parents! 

Ideally, the heroes move from one act to the other with a sense of purpose and urgency. “We have to go now, because otherwise….!” You need a ticking clock, or a bomb, or sand running through the hourglass, whatever metaphor you want. 

If the players ever ask “I don’t get it, why don’t we just…?” we’ve failed. Players are like water, they’re going to follow the path of least resistance which is also the path of least drama and if you want to keep things moving, we need to light a fire under their butts.

Therefore, Not Meanwhile. Every writer wants to pretend they discovered this, but it’s one of the first things they teach you in creative writing. It’s sort of a corollary to the previous two rules. The action proceeds because of what we already know. 

Because we killed Every Strike Of Lightning A Lover Betrayed, Cthrion Uroniziir’s jail cell starts to open. Because Every Strike of Lightning IS one of her jailors. Her essence, her existence, is part of the seal keeping the Time Ender locked in the sun.

Action follows naturally from consequence, and each consequence begets a new action. It’s really easy to just handwave this away and say “Meanwhile…” and throw a new challenge in front of the heroes that feels related but just has the same vibes. 

Doing the work to actually connect each plot point to the next is probably the hardest part of this whole thing.

Those are our “rules” such as they are, there are probably other unwritten rules I never noticed, but these are some of the guiding principles of the meetings we’ve held.

So what actually happens in Crack the Sun? What IS Crack the Sun?

Crack The Sun

My rule is; the director needs to know, up front, who the villain is and what they’re trying to do. What do they want, how are they going to go about getting it? What happens if the heroes do nothing?

Well there are two villains in Crack the Sun! At least two! Closer to four. But let’s set the stage…

Equinox, also known as Dusk, is a dying world. A parasitic manifold. It is a feral, jungle, elf-world ruled by the twilight celestials and their servants, the shadow elves. Each Twilight Celestial is the patron, or sponsor, of a shadow elf great house.

The twilight celestials were once like the other children of Val: noble, wise. But as their world dies, so die the celestials of Dusk. Their will is no longer enough to hold their corporeal form together, and they begin to lose coherency. They abstract becoming less and less stable, both physically and mentally.

[We imagine abstracting looks like the cover of Peter Gabriel’s second album. Where someone took a polaroid of Gabriel and, as it was developing, smeared the chemicals around. This scene from Fantastic Planet is another reference.

This idea had a lot of impact on our idea of what shadow elf culture is about. Each great house ruled by a twilight celestial slowly losing their mind. Sometimes they’re stable, and remember themselves, and can be trusted. Sometimes they’re unstable, their personality changes, they become cruel, spiteful, unpredictable. 

Since the shadow elves, unlike their cousins in Orden, know their celestial patrons, interact with them, that created a really interesting duality. The shadow elves are Lit By An Invisible Sun, they always seem half in light, half in shadow. Meanwhile their patrons have their own duality. One the one hand, trying to rule Equinox justly, on the other, urging their children to cruelty.]

One of these celestials, Every Strike Of Lightning A Lover Betrayed, set her greatest servant the Acolyte of Lightning a task; find a new world, a new home for our people. Because he is her acolyte, Lightning has some of her power. Because she is very close to abstracting away, he has her cruelty.

[One thing we decided, working on this adventure, was that the two main villains you fight are both acolytes of different gods or demigods. This created some interested interactions as our ideas of what the acolyte class could or should be, based on what we wanted the villain acolytes in this adventure to do, as you will see!]

Every Strike of Lightning gave her servant a seed. “Where you plant this seed, a world will grow.” This is a loose translation as one celestial word for ‘world’ is the same as their word for ‘tree.’

Gathering loyal allies from his house, the Acolyte of Lightning planted the seed in Equinox. From this seed, an Apocalypse Tree grew.

The Apocalypse Tree

Because of the unique ways Equinox and Orden interact, much of Equinox is a “shadow” of Orden. Often in Equinox, you may come upon the shadow of a bridge, or tower, or castle where no structure is obvious. The original structure was built in Orden and collapsed into a ruin centuries ago, but its shadow persists, still new in Equinox.

Folk from Orden who venture to (‘somehow end up in’ would be more accurate) Equinox often note how similar the terrain is to the home they know. They recognize glades, lakes, paths. 

Each apocalypse tree has a corresponding tree in Orden. In Equinox, the apocalypse trees are massive gothic trees. In Orden, their shadow-twin looks very like a cherry tree.

These are called the Bleeding Trees, for their cherry-like fruit drips a blood-red sap that pools around the trunk of the tree. The bleeding trees do two things:

1: They are atmospheric processing stations. They slowly convert the air of Orden into a sorcerous atmosphere hostile to all but the native denizens of Equinox. If they (and, by association, the apocalypse trees) continue to grow unchecked, they will eventually turn the air orange, imposing something like sunlight sensitivity on the humans, elves, dwarves, everyone who lives under Orden’s sun.

This is bad.

2: Their fruit compels whoever eats it to return to their community and convince everyone else to eat the fruit. The people become obsessed, they lose their personality, identity. They become, in essence, the pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Once the village have all (or nearly all) eaten to fruit, they all feel a sudden pull toward the forest and the bleeding tree. As one, the altered townsfolk head to the bleeding tree, never to be seen again.

This is also bad!

The apocalypse trees and the bleeding trees are connected in other ways, but we’ll get to that at a dramatic moment.

[You can see how, as the adventure developed and we talked more about how it could work, we kept hitting upon the theme of duality. Equinox is a world of eternal twilight, never noon nor midnight. Both dark and light. The dominant ancestry of this world, the Shadow Elves, are half-lit, half in shadow. The twilight celestials are both just and unjust, depending on how close they are to abstracting. The apocalypse trees have their own shadow-twin, the bleeding trees.]

So! Who is the villain? The twilight celestial Every Strike Of Lightning A Lover Betrayed. What do they want? They want a new home for their people. How are they going to achieve this? By terraforming Orden!

All good villains have lieutenants, and Every Strike of Lightning’s is the Acolyte of Lightning. She is too close to abstracting to do her own dirty work, but the Acolyte of Lightning is well motivated.

He knows the gift of the apocalypse trees is not enough. The process of terraforming takes too long and the native denizens of Orden would eventually stop it. So he needs allies in Orden who will prevent this. Or, at least, provide enough of a distraction that the locals can’t stop it.

Bloodlord Varrox and the Bloodskull Hobgoblins

How about a power-obsessed cruel, hateful hobgoblin leader!? Yeah, he’ll do!

[Art: Bloodlord Varrox from Draw Steel: Monsters. Art by Grace!]

The Acolyte of Lightning travels to Orden and approaches Bloodlord Varrox, a relatively powerful and influential hobgoblin leader, with a proposition. Help the shadow elves conquer Orden, and all Vasloria will be yours to rule.

To sweeten the deal, he offers Varrox a kind of bribe. Access to a technology that will make Varrox’s armies unstoppable. The dusk arrows.

Each dusk arrow, if it strikes an enemy who is not native to Equinox, teleports the target to Equinox! The supply of dusk arrows is steady, but limited. There are only ever enough for Varrox’s elite to wield them, and even then only one dusk arrow each.

But starting a battle by sending an entire cohort of your enemies into the Dying Realm is one hell of a way to seize the initiative! Talk about the element of surprise!

[Crack the Sun starts at 3rd level and there’s no way a 3rd-level party could take on a twilight celestial or her lieutenant, so Bloodlord Varrox is the villainous star of the first three acts. Very convenient; one evil villain for the first bit, then a different but related villain in the second act.]

Varrox does not exactly trust the Acolyte of Lightning? But it’s simply too good a deal to pass up. He accepts. This alliance between the hobgoblins and the shadow elves is the heart of Crack the Sun.

After agreeing to the Acolyte of Lightning’s offer (how could he resist?!) something extraordinary happens.

The Dragon In The Sun

Varrox receives a vision. A telepathic projection from a being of enormous worldpower. A fiery orange orb appears in Varrox’s mind, and a woman’s voice. Serve me in secret, the vision says, and you will have no need of allies. I will make you lord of all the world.

Well that’s an even better deal!! Varrox cannot resist, he’s so predictable. And now he is an acolyte! An acolyte of the dragon in the sun. Cthrion Uroniziir, the Time Ender, imprisoned millennia ago in the Sun which, in the Timescape, is just another world. The Burning World. It doesn’t burn because Cthrion is trapped within; if she escaped it would still illuminate the upper worlds, but not for long as she would extinguish it along with all other worlds. 

Now we have four villains! Cthrion Uroniziir and her acolyte Bloodlord Varrox, and Every Strike of Lightning a Lover Betrayed and her acolyte! You only fight three of these. The whole point of the adventure is stopping the Cult of All Worlds Ending from freeing Cthrion Uroniziir, so you don’t fight her. But you do fight her acolyte and when you see Bloodlord Varrox in his fully transformed and operational Acolyte of the Time Ender mode? It’s going to be epic.

Everything is now set up for five acts of heroic adventuring across three worlds and five levels. How much of this will you be expected to know when you run it? I don’t know! In general I think we can structure things so the Director only knows what they need to, to run each act, and we handle all the foreshadowing. So you can just run it as written, and these plot points will reveal themselves naturally.

But I also think there will be lots of ways to learn what’s going on in Crack the Sun without having to read the whole adventure (ugh). This post for instance! And there’ll be videos and advice from other directors. Someone who buys Crack the Sun and feels overwhelmed? Will find a whole community of folks eager to help them out.

Ok so that’s the setup, let’s go over the high points of each of the five acts. I’m just going to call out the coolest bits as otherwise this post will never be finished. 😀

Act One: The Bleeding Tree

The heroes investigate the disappearance of the people of Wend, a small village in the barony of Dalrath. When they arrive in Wend, it’s disturbingly empty (save for perhaps one young girl surviving for weeks alone who bears a striking resemblance to a character from Aliens).

Piecing together what happened, the heroes follow the trail of the villagers into the forest (normal forest! Not a wode!) where they eventually find the Bleeding Tree.

They have little time to examine the alien tree before the hobgoblins attack! This may be the first appearance of Bloodlord Varrox!

The heroes are all shot with the dusk arrows, and find themselves in another world….

Five In Equinox

Each of the heroes (we assume the party is between 3 and 6 players) ends up in Equinox, but not all together! They are in different locations, maybe even different times. 

Each of them has a similar experience, a little micro-adventure suitable for one or two sessions. They meet someone native to Equinox, do something to impress them possibly involving a combat encounter. Grateful, the local NPC offers to help the hero return home, though there may be some bad guys in the way.

Between these two encounters, they just get to meet and hang out with this local NPC. Learn about them, their people, Equinox.

We’ve already made notes about these single-session micro-quests. We want to make sure you as a director have more than just five options for a lot of reasons. We don’t know how many players you have, but also we just want to give you choices. You know your players better than we do! They might enjoy some miniquests more than others.

So, when you see how big this whole adventure is, just remember it includes stuff like this. Where there’s several micro-adventures in Equinox for you to choose from, not just five.

We think there may be three quests you must use because they’re core to what happens in the future, but it may be we can find a way to give the players what they need without making some quests mandatory. We’ll see.

Quests for this section include:

Saving a young gnomish girl from some bad guys. Probably a gorhask. 

[Artist Stephen Oakley's gorhask explorations. In-progress, non-final. The gorhask are an intelligent, predatory hunter species native to Equinox. Occupy the same kind of niche as lizardfolk and harpies probably.]

Her father shows up and, grateful, invites you into his home, a micro-manifold. All gnome clans have their own tiny (very tiny, like the size of a small apartment, which is a cavernous space for a family of gnomes!) pocket universes they disappear into whenever the bigfolk of Equinox come looking for a gnomish loremaster. Being invited into one is a great honor for a non-gnome.

[A gnome. We think these guys are about....3-6 inches tall? This would be like a gnome peasant gathering food, gnome heroes are more brightly colored and less camouflagey. In-progress, non-final art from the forthcoming Ancestry book. Art by Jason!]

Rescuing a skarjj opteran (a giant moth used by the skarjj as beasts of burden) from hunters. The skarjj show up very impressed with this weird looking creature from Orden. You!

[Art: A skarjj! Native to Equinox, the skarjj are the dominant aerial ancestry of Dusk. We imagine them, personality-wise, as a cross between British WWI flyboys and the original seven Mercury astronauts from The Right Stuff. In progress, non-final, from the forthcoming Ancestry book. Art by Jason!]

Meeting some not-evil shadow elves! There’s lots of different shadow elf great houses, many of them are chill. Why not hang out with some? Learn that there’s Atreides shadow elves as well as Harkonnen shadow elves.

[Art: Shadow elves by Rodrigo Clark! Art from the forthcoming Ancestry book.]

Meeting some EVIL shadow elves! Actual members of the great house led by Every Strike of Lightning a Lover Betrayed. They might seem very Harkonnen-adjacent, but one of them says “Hang on, let’s not be hasty” and convinces the others to spare you and treat you as a guest. This shadow elf has distinct markings from the others for reasons that will reveal themselves later….

[We like the idea that two different heroes might meet two different factions of shadow elves and come back with very different ideas of who the shadow elves are and what they’re about. We also like the idea that one player hangs out with the gnomes and hears about the shadow elf tyrants, but another player thinks the shadow elves are super cool!]

Meet some fairies! Basically, join the Three Musketeers of Equinox and hang out with them for a bit.

[Art: Faeries by Grace! From the forthcoming Ancestry book.]

Meet a memonek space pirate who’s trying to repair his ship! Memonek Han Solo knew diving into a lower world was risky, but Equinox is a treasure-trove of bio-tech, all these bioluminescent fruits with magical properties. Hard to resist! It should not be immediately obvious the structure he lives in is a small starship. 

Your hero helps this dude recover the starcore he needs to unfuck his ship and get out of this manifold.

[This section, inarguably the craziest thing I’ve ever seen in an published adventure, was initially just a copy of Llevellys’ solo quest from DUSK. But as we talked about it, I referenced one of teenage-Matt’s favorite comics, the New Mutants In Asgard. No idea if it holds up. At one point all the New Mutants journey to Asgard, but they all arrive at different places and times and have their own solo adventures before they meet up again.

I said “obviously we can’t do that…,” and Djordi said “Why not?” The rest of us all sat there stunned. Split the party? Split the party five ways?? Well, but hang on. First of all, people expect MCDM to do ambitious stuff, always have. And this is ambitious as hell.

But also, we thought…surely it’s a lot easier to schedule just one player for just one session? I mean, compared to getting ALL your friends to show up a the same place and time every week? When you put it that way, it started to sound possible.

Finally, lots of stuff we’ve tried in the past eight years sounded crazy but we figure, if there are real, structural problems with this idea, the testers will let us know. And we may be able to solve those problems! We’ll see!]

Each of these miniquests–and there may be one in which there are no NPCs to meet, just an environment to survive–ends with the hero discovering, or being escorted to, the nearest area of bilocation. I.e. a portal to Orden.

All the heroes converge at this portal at the same place and time, only to discover something harrowing. The portal IS one of the apocalypse trees! The connection between apocalypse tree and bleeding tree permits travel from one world to the other, if you know how to use it.

Hanging from the apocalypse tree are dozens of glistening white pods. Human sized pods. The heroes quickly realize; these are the missing villagers! They ate the fruit, were compelled to head to the bleeding tree, which absorbed them and translated them to Equinox, where they became the fruit of the apocalypse tree.

[We should always be skeptical any time we see “the heroes quickly realize” because what if they DON’T realize!? Well, there are always NPCs around who can help make the connection, but in this specific instance I already ran this part of Crack the Sun for the Chain of Acheron gang, and they absolutely understood what they were seeing without me needing to connect any dots.]

As the heroes stare in horror, one of the glistening white pods ‘ripens,’ falls to the ground, and cracks open. There is an object inside. It’s a dusk arrow! The dusk arrows ARE the souls of those captured by the bleeding trees!

This apocalypse tree is guarded by shadow elves, the heroes flight them, free the (remaining) trapped villagers, destroy the apocalypse tree, and use the area of bilocation to leave Equinox, emerging in the forest at the bleeding tree, now dead, where they were originally shot with the dusk arrows from the hobgoblins.

They return the rescued villagers and get their reward from the Lord of Dalrath! Hooray!

[Keep in mind, everything you’re reading in this post is still in the outline phase. You’re gonna have questions. Well, I’m leaving a lot out!! Each act is an entire level! But it’s ok to have questions, we have questions, we’re going to keep working and writing and eventually testing to iron everything out. Assuming this project funds!]

It is the end of Act One. But the heroes have learned (or, if they haven’t, the baron of Dalrath informs them) that Bloodlord Varrox has assembled an army, and that army is marching on Dalrath.

The baron cannot muster enough troops. Too many villages have succumbed to the bleeding trees. It’s up to the heroes to find allies….

Act Two: The Hound of Dalrath’s Call

[Act One is the one we know the most about. In general we try to stop the outline process before we get too detailed, because we want to wait to flesh it all out until we’ve selected a writer to author that section. That way the writer gets to participate in the brainstorming and be one of the authors.]

If you’ve been following my nonsense for a very long time, you may be aware that the royal family of Dalrath are half-homo sapien sapiens, half-homo sapien gol. The queen of the gol, generations ago, gave her daughter a hound, a kind of doberman-looking dog, who would serve her mixed-species children as long as Dalrath never made war against the gol.

The hound appears to be a perfectly normal doggo, acts like a doggo, does doggo things, but it’s also an immortal supernatural hellbeast. Its howl, which sounds only a few times each generation, sounds like the Inception BAAAUUUM and can be heard throughout Dalrath. It normally announces the death of the current lord or lady of Dalrath, and the succession of their eldest to the crown. 

It also sounds in times of great danger to the barony. Keep that in mind!

Anyway, this is your classic “Ride your ass all over god’s green acre trying to recruit allies, or deny your enemy their allies.” We did this in the Kingdoms & Warfare adventure (which Teos wrote! Very well received, that adventure) and it’s classic MCDM politics stuff. Lots of negotiations! 

There are a lot of factions and powerful figures in Urland (the duchy to which Dalrath belongs). Too many for one group to recruit them all in the time allotted. 

These include all the usual suspects; the Wode Elves of the Orchid Court, the High Elves of Fallen Irranys, the local dwarf city, the local orc tribe (the Howling), the local Gol tribe (the Black Rock). And more!

Of course, all these folks have their own problems, which the heroes will have to solve (adventure!) in order to free up that faction to come help in Act Three.

This is another one of those “we’re going to design more content than a single table will use” in order to A: give things a sense of urgency, the heroes are running out of time and can’t do everything but also B: make their decisions matter. Different groups playing through this adventure will have different experiences.

How will the players know when time is up and the hobbos are at the gates? BAAAUUUUMM!!!

Act Three: The Siege of Castle Dalrath

This is the war, folks! This entire act, all of 5th level, is one battle fought in a series of encounters. It will probably take place over two or three days in the game world. Think the Battle of the Pelennor Fields, or the Battle of the Hornburg. Or the Battle of Five Armies Minus Three Armies.

The players run around, defending various strategic points. The Battle for the East Gate, the Battle for the River Crossing, the Battle of the Sewers! This may be another instance where you can’t be in two places at once, and hard decisions must be made!

These encounters are mostly normal Draw Steel encounters with a twist. MCDM made a 5E product called Kingdoms & Warfare with rules for running armies in giant battles. That makes sense for a game like Dungeons & Dragons where so much of the early history of that game comes from wargaming, including actual wargame scenarios like the Battle of Emridy Meadows that lead to the events of the Temple of Elemental Evil. 

Those warfare rules were a lot of fun! But Draw Steel, while more tactical, is not rooted in 1970s wargaming. For Draw Steel, we decided it would be best not to expect players to bust out an entirely unrelated game system to resolve battles. We want to stay with the heroes! The experience of fighting a war should be a lot like the normal experience of playing your character!

But! Because of the work you did in Act Two, each battle in Act Three has a potential Warfare Event. This is the twist!

If, for instance, you help the Wode Elves out in Act Two, they lend you their elite archers, The Thorns. During a specific battle, on a specific turn (not round!) the Thorns show up and rain elf-arrows down on your enemies. This doesn’t end the battle, but it sure makes victory a lot easier! 

And the reverse can be true, Bloodlord Varrox has his own Warfare Events which you, through investigation and intrigue and combat, can prevent from showing up!

That moment where aid suddenly arrives and completely changes the shape of the battle will, we think, feel huge, momentous. Earned because of the players’ actions in Act Two.

Act Three ends with the spectacular death of Bloodlord Varrox! Woo, one villain down, two to go! The players may note that Varrox is accompanied by a small cadre of elite alien fanatics. A new species as yet unseen. These are the heliox, the native denizens of the Sun. Specifically an evil, secret society; The Cult of All Worlds Ending. What are they doing here??

After defeating Varrox the players must now head to Equinox (how? Probably using the Midnight Stone! I told you I hadn’t explained everything! 😀) 

We also think it’s possible, maybe even likely, that the Lord of Dalrath could die during this battle, and the heroes, or a hero, may become regent of Dalrath. But that’s still in the experimental phases. 

We want to light a fire under the heroes’ butts and that probably means, after defeating Varrox and enjoying a little celebration, the sun goes from yellow to a baleful red. All those native to Orden, at least in this local area, now have something like sunlight sensitivity. Thanks to the atmospheric effect created by dozens of bleeding trees across Urland.

The only way to stop it, stop everything? Journey to Equinox, and kill the twilight celestial Every Strike Of Lightning a Lover Betrayed!

[This was something Teos brought up. How do we make sure, in Act One, the players are aware of the stakes in Act Five? Without having to come out and explain it all? The answer we liked: the sun is slowly changing color. Only noticeable to a few with keen eyes at first, impossible to ignore eventually. The players won’t know about Act Five, or that the effect is in the air, not the actual sun, but they’ll be thinking about the sun and that’s all we need. Foreshadowing! So early it’s practically Fiveshadowing!]

Act Four: The Dying Realm

[We got lots of potential names for each act, this one might be Realmdivers]

It may seem like each act is getting shorter but that’s only because A: we know more about the earlier acts and B: it’s 11:30pm on a Sunday and I’ve spent many hours this weekend working on this post. 😀

The heroes journey to Equinox to stop the terraforming of Orden. They arrive at a temple dedicated to Every Strike of Lightning a Lover Betrayed. This temple probably has a lot of iconography that will only make sense to the players later.

There are many shadow elves here, including the Acolyte of Lightning! The players gain a surprise ally. The shadow elf who suggested his fellows not kill the heroes during Five In Equinox is actually a double agent from another house. He’s a spy! Hence his distinctive markings, we need the players to remember him!

The players kill the Acolyte of Lighting and the spy debriefs them on what’s going on. There is now, technically, just one villain left, Every Strike of Lightning.

The heroes must, with the spy’s help, infiltrate a shadow elf city and confront the twilight celestial who rules there. They cannot kill her without first making her mortal, which is where the King of the Gnomes comes in!

How exactly? Hey good question! 😀We’ll figure that out in the brainstorming meeting with this section’s writer!

The Twist

When the heroes, aided by all the allies they made in Act One: Five In Equinox, arrive in the throne room, they discover the Acolyte of Lightning is alive! What?! I thought we killed him!

Well, turns out…that’s just how acolytes work. Like, the actual class you will eventually be able to play, we think. At one point, in order to level up (we think maybe, 6th to 7th level?) your acolyte PC must die in battle! Thereby being reconstituted in a new body more closely resembling your patron. You become an avatar of your patron!

At this point, some players might remember Bloodlord Varrox’s ‘death’ and think “Hang on…,” but there’s no time to wonder more, you got a demi-god to kill!

Using the gnome king’s mortalizer, the heroes dispatch Every Strike of Lightning a Lover Betrayed and her servant the Acolyte of Lightning.

Then, something interesting happens.

The Other Twist

[This part is very hypothetical, but also one of the things we’re most excited about. Funny how those two things tend to go hand in hand.]

After the death of Every Strike of Lightning a Lover Betrayed, the players experience a flashback. 

We jump thousands of years into the past, onto the surface of the Sun. The players watch as five legendary heroes defeat Cthrion Uroniziir in an epic battle, and lock her inside the Sun.

One of these heroes…is Every Strike of Lightning a Lover Betrayed! This is her when she was young, fully possessed of her faculties, a legendary interplanar hero! And maybe one of the other five heroes is a mysterious figure….

The power necessary to keep the Time Ender sealed away must be constantly renewed and this means someone, some powerful entity, must lend some of their power to the lock. Unlike the other heroes, Every Strike of Lightning is an immortal demi-god. She volunteers to seal the lock using her power. As long as she lives, the Time Ender will be trapped.

After the lock is sealed, and the other 4 legendary heroes go their separate ways…Every Strike of Lightning turns and sees the heroes!!

This isn’t a flashback! The heroes have been transported back in time! They are experiencing a vision and participating in it! This is the power of the celestials, who remember the world before the coming of the dwarves, before the Law of Time.

Every Strike of Lightning sees the heroes and breaks the fourth wall of the vision. “Oh it’s you,” she says, triumph touched by melancholy. “Nothing lasts, I suppose. It is, after all, our destiny to abstract. I hope…I hope I wasn’t too cruel…to anyone.”

Every Strike of Lightning tells the heroes what they must do. “If I die, the Time Ender wakes. The seals begin to fail. You must succeed now, where I faltered. You must travel to the Sun, to the Temple of Time Unending, and stop the end of all worlds. Stop the destruction of the timescape. Stop the Acolyte of Cthrion Uroniziir!”

Wait, who? Who’s that?? Holy shit it’s Bloodlord Varrox!! We didn’t kill-him kill him, we just helped him level up as an acolyte! He’s already on the Sun, he’s got a huge head start!

[Art: In-progress, non-final concept art of Acolyte Varrox by Grace!]

This is why Cthrion Uroniziir contacted Bloodlord Varrox in the first place!! Because she saw an opportunity to kill her jailor! Varrox as an ally of Every Strike of Lightning presented an opportunity to get someone in her power close to her enemy. All she had to do was make Varrox a counter offer which, of course, he accepted.

The flashback ends and the heroes are back in the shadow elf city. The death of Every Strike of Lightning means the city-state she ruled begins to collapse. Classic montage test! Escape the collapsing megastructure!

But how to get to the Sun?

As the heroes emerge from the depth of the crumbling fortress-state, standing atop a wind-blasted city disintegrating around them, success seems impossible. 

Just then a ship, small but mighty, rises from the jungle below. It’s a starship!

The doors open and a distinctive figure, grinning madly, waves at the heroes. It’s the memonek space pirate from act one! You helped him unfuck his ship!

“Hey! Losers! Need a ride?!”

Act Five: Lest All Worlds Burn

Aboard the RAC Forgiveness > Permission  (Rapid Armored Courier, Forgiveness Over Permission) the heroes speed into the Sea Between Worlds toward their destiny. The surface of the Sun!

In the timescape, the sun is a world like any other. A glowing world of heat blasted deserts and plasma seas. Astronomers on Orden note black spots on the sun, hypothesizing these are cooler areas of the surface.

But as the Forgiveness > Permission approaches, it becomes clear what those dark spots are.

[Art: In-progress, non-final Crack the Sun cover exploration. Art by Damien Mammoliti]

They’re cities! Heliox cities! Brilliant cities of light powered by the plasma storms (aka solar flares) that sweep across the uninhabited deserts.

The Forgiveness Over Permission lands at a space port and the heroes discover how much of a head start Varrox has. The spaceport is occupied by bloodskull hobgoblins!

Fighting their way out, the heroes meet a familiar figure who aids them. Wait! That’s the ‘mysterious figure’ from the flashback! He recognizes you!

“Oh, it’s you. Good. There’s still a chance, but there is little time. I will tell you how to reach the Temple of Time Unending, but you must go, now. Varrox and the Cult of All Worlds Ending may already be there.”

The figure is human-like but there is something strange about them. Their skin, joints, seem to have…seams.

[The truth of this character might not actually be revealed, whether we even do this is still up in the air, but we think it’s important to have someone on the Sun ready to aid the heroes and Djordi suggested this guy.]

THE OMNIVOK. The timescape’s only truly immortal being, last survivor of a race of intelligent, thinking, feeling general purpose machines made by the steel dwarves. The omnivok gives the heroes the location of the temple where the final battle must happen.

Order Out Of Chaos

From this point forward, things get…weird. There is a normal course of events where the heroes travel across the surface of the Sun, fighting Bloodlord Varrox’s soldiers, fighting the heliox Cult of All Worlds Ending, attaining the Temple of Time Unending and confronting Varrox.

However these events, these encounters, start happening…out of order. Causes occur after effects. 

The end of the adventure is a puzzle! Cthrion Uroniziir, the Time Ender, is using her power to thwart the heroes! She's shuffling the deck of events in the hopes of mazing the heroes in time. 

The players must determine the correct order in which these encounters must happen, in order to navigate their way out of the time maze and confront Varrox, Acolyte of Cthrion Uroniziir.

[How does this work? Good question! This is one of those “That’s real easy to say but how do we DO it” things that always makes me do a skeptical. However, the gathered brains seemed to think it was worth a try! This is one of those details we plan to work out with the writer of this act. It might not work! But we gotta try! 😀]

The final battle then, is not between the heroes and the Time Ender, it’s between them and her acolyte whom you really do kill for real at this stage, stopping Cthrion from escaping.

The end!

That’s A Lot

Well, if it were easy everyone would be doing it. 😀

We’ll probably have a denouement after Act Five so the heroes get a chance to go back to Dalrath and enjoy the fruits of their victory, but there’s still a LOT of planning to do before we even get started writing. 80 victories worth of encounters! Respites need to be planned, downtime activities accounted for!

The production team are already working with Cook & Becker, the folks who engineered the Ajax Edition, for how we’re going to physically present this adventure, but that’s a whole other discussion. This is just the plot.

Having read this whole thing, some folks will be 100% onboard, some will be 100% not interested, some in-between. But we don’t feel like Crack the Sun needs to appeal to all Draw Steel directors. It’s hard to imagine any product that would! I mean, apart from the core rules. 

Crack the Sun seems incredibly bold to me sometimes. Splitting the party!? Flying a spaceship to the Sun? And the Sun is another world?? Madness!

But then I look at the first three acts, and Crack the Sun seems pretty tame to me. Save some villagers, gather some allies, fight an army of hobgoblins. Classic!

That’s sort of how I feel about all of Orden & The Timescape. It’s a multiverse. Orden is classic fantasy, all the stuff you’d expect to find, while the Timescape is more Métal Hurlant. Den of Earth and So Beautiful, So Dangerous.

Shouldn’t high level characters do stuff like travel to other worlds? It seems like that’s been de rigueur in fantasy gaming since forever.

Anyway, long post. Ambitious project. We’ll see if folks want it. What do you think?!