Draw Steel studio says Crack the Sun will be an epic campaign about a worldrending conquest

Matt Colville has always been transparent about the kind of stories Draw Steel will spin: epic high fantasy tales of good versus evil, heroes versus villains, and courage versus tyranny. The Kingdoms & Warfare designer has additionally harbored ambitions for a rich, multifaceted story that compliments its in-depth and heavily tactical combat. According to a recent MCDM Patreon article, this vision has been realized with the tabletop RPG’s newest and biggest campaign yet: Crack the Sun.

Draw Steel currently has two 1st-level adventures in its vault: The Delian Tomb and The Fall of Blackbottom, in addition to a couple of unofficial, third-party adventures. They’re essentially good ol’ fashioned classic fantasy with a touch of science fantasy — a trait most evident in its futuristic Timescape setting —  but they’re also predominantly one-off modules and quests, rather than a sprawling, epic journey that can potentially span several multiverses. Something like Crack the Sun, which will aim for epic in both narrative and mechanical scale, has apparently been voted the most popular adventure pitch by the Draw Steel community. At the same time, it exemplifies how its team sees the world of its fledgling but already popular RPG. “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!” he wrote in the Patreon post.

To be clear, Crack the Sun hasn’t been completed yet. Rather than a post-mortem, Colville’s staggeringly long post instead delves into the design considerations and some key information on the campaign, such as a narrative overview and the planned five acts. Referring to the campaign as the “first official epic campaign for Draw Steel”, he also shared that acts one and two have been outlined and assigned to writers; it’s why details on these two acts are particularly hefty in the post.  

So, what’s Crack the Sun about? In short, it introduces the dying world of Equinox, with a twilight celestial named Every Strike of Lightning A Lover Betrayed, seeking to find a new world to ensure the survival of her people: the shadow elves. To this end, she has tasked her Acolyte to discover and colonize a new world for their people to live in. As it turns out, this place will be Orden, the realm where humans, elves, dwarves, and other ancestries currently reside. How this is done is through the planting of Apocalypse Trees, which are massive gothic plants that will induce a loss of personality and identities in anyone who eats their fruits. Doing so will, of course, lead to a cataclysmic, worldrending event compounded by the appearance of a secondary villain: the Bloodlord Varrox. 

Set in this scenario, Crack the Sun will subsequently play out in five acts. The first act sees the heroes investigating the disappearance of the people from the small village of Wend. In the midst of their questing, they stumble upon the Bleeding Tree, which stems from the planting of the aforementioned Apocalypse Trees. Examining the alien tree, they’re abruptly transported to Equinox, where the heroes are separated, and run into several folks, from fairies to a memonek space captain. They soon reunite, and would eventually draw the connection between the disappearance of the villagers, the Apocalypse Trees and the calamity that’s set to take place. Then there’s Bloodlord Varrox, who is also assembling an army. With this reveal, act two becomes, in Colville’s words, “your classic ‘Ride your ass all over god’s green acre trying to recruit allies, or deny your enemy their allies’” stint, with lots of negotiations taking place, and factions and powerful figures being introduced. 

This will be followed by act three, where a major war takes place. Here, Colville introduces a new mechanic called Warfare Event, with the tide of battles influenced by the allies the heroes befriended in the previous act. This is a trait that Bloodlord Varrox will also possess, with him forming his own alliances to strengthen his cause. Act four will see the heroes journeying to Equinox to prevent the conquest, and with the group fending off the final stages of the impending calamity in act five. In this final act, the heroes make their way to the scalding surface of the sun, where an imprisoned dragon lies. 

The article is well worth a read if you’re keen to learn more about the campaign’s plot, as well as Colville’s approach towards designing Crack the Sun. For instance, one fascinating challenge to writing Crack the Sun is the narrative glue between acts, which Colville said is unique to adventure designs in tabletop RPGs. “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,” he pointed out. “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.”

Crack the Sun is currently being crowdfunded on Backerkit, alongside a third core rulebook called Encounters, eight new ancestries as compiled in Between Sun and Shadows, and four new adventures — including one in which you play as an anti-hero. MCDM is planning to stagger the releases of these products across 2026, with physical rewards only shipping in the later half of the year and even 2027. It’s an ambitious schedule, especially given the tumultuous distribution reality created by US tariffs. In addition, what’s worth noting is Crack the Sun’s $1.25 million initial goal, a considerably large number compared to other RPG campaigns that backers have already fulfilled. The MCDM team’s inclination for transparency breaks with conventional crowdfunding wisdom and provides us a peek at the minimum cost to print seven books in a single year.