A collection of 33 leveled treasures for Draw Steel! Introducing new Fractured treasures, which the heroes have to reforge after finding all of their fragments, as well as guidelines on why and how you should fracture the treasures in your games.
Treasures from the Cauldron is a collection of 33 leveled treasures for Draw Steel, 7 Fractured Treasures that a character must reforge to use to their full potential, and The Revenant King's Regalia, a set of 3 leveled treasures that grant you set bonuses if wielded together.
Who is this for?
This book is for players and directors who love the leveled treasure system in the core rules of Draw Steel, but feel a little underwhelmed by the actual treasures. Players using these treasures will engage with their hard-earned magic items more, making them a part of their character's story, as they will have to journey and explore in order to reforge them.
Some more info about the treasures currently in the book:
7 Fractured Treasures: a brand-new type of treasure that, should the heroes want to use to its full potential, they must track down its fragments and reforge it! Comes with guidance on why you should FRACTURE the treasures in your games, and how to do it.
The Revenant King's Regalia is a trio of leveled treasures, one of them Fractured, once worn by a powerful necromancer warlord. Bring them all together to tap into the Revenant King's power, in the form of Set Bonuses! Be careful though, as using a powerful undead king's treasures is sure to draw his ire...
4Armor Treasures to defend against evil; don Leviathan's Grasp to not only swim at full speed and breath underwater, but also summon magical tentacles to throw your foes around or grab them from a distance; craft The Dread, Slain from the corpse of the mighty beast you fell, now adorning your backside.
5Implement Treasures to devastate your enemies with; the Beads of Fickle Prayer allow a Conduit to access an additional Domain; use the Magnum Opus 44, the most powerful handgun wand in the world to blast your target's head clean off.
7 Weapon Treasures to slay any who stand before you; the Soul Harvester does exactly what it says on the tin; the Spell Sunderer... also does exactly what it says on the tin!
8 Other Treasures too cool to be contained to a category! Enter the backrooms using There-and-not; trace constellations on the battlefield with the Celestial Shawl; become a luchador by donning the Wrestler's Mask!
Layout Preview
I've been on layout for quite a while, and I think it's in a nice spot, but I will probably keep working on it up until release, just cause I like doing layout so much and I keep learning and improving!
I have been using Fractured Treasures in my games for months at this point. Originally, there was just one fractured treasure; a really cool sword that had been scattered into pieces and needed to be reforged. The players were adventuring in the nine cities of Hell, and every time they found a fragment of the blade, the treasure became stronger.
Since then, almost all the leveled treasures in the games I run have been Fractured. This has served three purposes:
The initial cost of 450 project points is just not worth it for most of the leveled treasures in the book, compared to what they offer. In my experience, every single time a player wants to forge one of these items, they are dissuaded by the huge cost and instead start crafting consumables or imbuements.
If you do away with leveled treasures, the heroes miss out on cool magic item discoveries. Trinkets are fine, but they do not make for memorable experiences. With Fractured treasures, the players have to first discover the BASE of the treasure, which still holds some power, and then go about finding its fragments and reforging it. This combines the instant gratification of finding a cool staff, with the promise of adventure down the line.
Speaking of adventuring, regular leveled treasures are easy to forget after you implement their stats into your character. This isn't true of fractured treasures, which will see the players going out into the world and looking for trouble (and following the Director's adventure threads!) in order to gather the fragments and reforge the treasure.
In addition to 7 ready-made fractured treasures (or more, depending on backing), this book has a section offering further advice on Why, How, and When to fracture the treasures in your games.
If this project funds, I will have covered my expenses; namely, all the art I have purchased and commissioned up till now. If there is more support after that, well, there will be more art in the finished book!
Currently I have spent €200 on this project, which is a lot of money for a student where I'm from. I have also spent upwards of 100 hours designing and testing these items, as well as on the layout and graphics of the book, and while I do not expect to be compensated for my time in a TTRPG self-published product, it would be awesome if I could go buy groceries at least once with money earned from my hobby!
After that, community copies will be given out for people who want to use this product in their games but can't afford to buy it.
Ok so, if this project exceeds the funding goal, here's where the money is gonna go:
€400+ - Extra Art and Community Copies For every €200 raised, there will be 2 additional bespoke pieces of artwork for the leveled treasures, and 2 community copies will be given out.
€3000 - Art Paid in Full Excluding any items designed after the crowd funder's launch, the artwork for every other treasure will have been funded at this point. Highly unlikely, but this is here just in case!
What's done: When this crowd funder launches, all the treasures have been designed and the book's layout is in its later stages.
What's left:
Playtesting for 6 of the most complicated and out-there treasures.
Layout, which should be done by the time this crowd funder ends.
If this gets enough funds for artwork, the final book's release will of course be pushed back for every piece of art commissioned, approximately five days per artwork funded, according to our artist. This might sound like a lot, but artists are people too, and they need time to sleep and eat and spend time on their own hobbies!
Hi! My name is Alex, and I've been creating homebrew content for TTRPGs for almost a decade now (holy shit I just realized this as I'm writing it, time flies). I always loved learning how something works and then taking it apart and hopefully putting together something better; that's the reason I destroyed every mechanical pencil I had growing up, but also the reason most of the best foods I've eaten in my life was stuff I cooked myself after going rogue on some poor recipe.
Ever since the first time I played a TTRGP, I've always been a homebrewer. When I picked up Draw Steel 9 months ago, I started homebrewing content for fun only 2 weeks later. I joined the Draw Steel Brewery soon after, and it has been a big part of my life ever since. The folks there are awesome and insanely helpful, shoutout to the server because this project would have just stayed in my google docs if not for them!
If you want to take a peek at my other Draw Steel works, followers of the crowdfunder can get my parasitic ancestry, the Dweller, for free (if the link broke again, let me know and I'll fix it right away). I created the Dweller for the Jams of the Timescape #2: Ancestries of the Timescape game jam (https://itch.io/jam/jott02-ancestries/results), and managed to get 4th place out of 111 entries! Another shoutout to the JotT people, because they first gave me the push to get off my ass and actually finish and publish a project.
If you aren't a follower but are still reading this, weird! But! Even if you end up not backing this project, I have several plans for more Draw Steel products, so give me a follow here or over at my itch page (https://cauldron-of-tales.itch.io) to be notified when the time comes. Current plans include a collection of animal hybrid ancestries (are beetles animals? are jellyfish animals?) with a few Draw Steel twists in them, a first echelon exploration adventure into Ix, a Witch-knight class, and a few other bits and ends.
If you read all this, thank you! And feel free to boast about it in the Brewery server, I'm sure everyone else will be as impressed as I am!
