James is currently working on a new dungeon crawling RPG called Crows. While he's been tinkering at it for a year, he's only really started to work on it recently. He's been playtesting versions of the game internally at MCDM, and he's brought the game for testing at gaming conventions.
Crows is a game about weak characters delving dungeons for gold. The gold is spent to improve the characters and hopefully make them survive longer. Crows is not a heroic game like Draw Steel, Crows is survival-horror, where a character's lifespan is short.
While James was testing two versions of dice mechanics, it looks like he's landed on a power roll inspired mechanic. You roll 2d10, with the tiered result, but instead of the characters having abilities, the outcomes are tied to the equipment the character's using. Also unlike Draw Steel's power roll, Crows might include null results, where a bad roll means you make no progress. But with combat being short and fast, the wait between doing something shouldn't be too long.
Crows will also include mishap tables, which describe what happens when characters critically fail. Unlike Draw Steel, Crows will punish the character for bad rolls. Rolling a natural one or two, will make the GM, called the ref, roll on the mishap table, which will produce a bad effect for the character. This can happen for both spell casters and weapon wielders. Possible outcomes on the mishap table are everything from the character hurting themself, or the enemies getting some frree damage in, to a portal opening up from the plane of hell, a large demonic hand reaching out, grabbing the character, and pulling them into hell. Forever. Never to be seen again.
Inspired by other games, like Shadowdark, which uses real world time to trigger events in the game world, Crows currently uses something called dungeon turns. One dungeon turn is 20 real time minutes, which are only paused when combat breaks out. At the end of each dungeon turn, consumables will wear off, the monsters in the dungeon might decide to ambush the characters, or other effects might occur. A lot of these effects will likely be determined by rolling on random tables, to generate events.
If the characters manage to make it out of the dungeon, they get back to the village. Once there they can spend the gold they've manged to collect. Gold is equivalent to XP, and can be spent to improve the character. There are no levels in Crows, instead the characters can invest in new skills. Think something akin to a skill tree, but it might not be an actual skill tree in the final game.
The skills will make the heroes better at more things. The numbers on the sheet might not increase much, but the number of things they can do, or do more competently will increase. This includes becoming more proficient with certain items, for example. Anyone can swing a sword, and anyone can cast a spell, given they have a spell book at hand. Buying skills, can make you better and more effective at swinging swords, or better at casting spells.
Also while in the village, the players can engage in crafting and other projects. This is to make the village bigger and more prosperous. A bigger and more prosperous village will attract more powerful NPCs, which might help the characters.
If a character survives long enough, they'll retire from dungeon delving. At that point, they'll become an NPC, living in the village. Those previous player characters will then become NPCs for future dungeon delvers to interact with.
And lastly, I want to mention a fun mechanic they're debating including for the game. They want the monsters to come without names; just images of the monster and a reference, like Monster A. During play, the ref shows the image of the monster to the players, and they name the monster based on what it looks like and what it does. The name they come up with, is the canonical name of the monster in their setting.
It's very early for Crows. Not only do we not know when they intend to release, we don't even know that it's going to be released at all. We'll just have to see what the future brings.
