James Introcaso is a current game director and former lead game designer at MCDM. Fresh from Draw Steel‘s success, MCDM are launching their second system. Crows: Fortune or Death is James and the team’s pitch for an OSR-adjacent game and it’s live on BackerKit now.
However, MCDM is far from James’ first rodeo. There’s also a gold award ENNIE-winning blog (World Builder Blog; active from 2014-2017) and a library’s worth of material to his name. He’s contributed to titles for Wizards of the Coast (including Ghosts of Saltmarsh; Dragon Heist; Dungeon of the Mad Mage), wrote for indie companies (Eternal Night of Lockwood and others for ZWEIHÄNDER; Roll20’s original RPG Burn Bryte), and there’s also the mountain of work uploaded to DriveThruRPG and the DMsGuild. For the record, much of this was done while writing and producing for companies like National Geographic.
In short, James has worked like a man possessed. Work ethic and talent are a powerful mix. It feels easy to say he’s well on his way to becoming a design titan in TTRPGs.
James Introcaso on Becoming a Game Designer
First off James, thank you so much for taking the time to do this interview. Your credits go so far back, was it always the objective to become a full-time game designer?
It was, and it wasn’t. If you went back in time and asked 10-year-old James, he wouldn’t be surprised. This was always the dream, but I didn’t really work for it for a long time because I honestly didn’t know how you got a full-time gig in TTRPGs.
When I was 28 and had just started blogging, my goal was just to see if I could get any paid work at all. After a couple years, I got some paid work! Then my goal became “contribute to a hardcover D&D book.” It was only after I achieved that when I really started to think, “Maybe this could be a full-time job!” I got really lucky when MCDM decided to work with me. I enjoyed working with the team so much and worked my butt off to show them my best stuff in the hopes they’d hire me for a staff job. It worked out apparently!
On Outside Influences
In the introduction, I alluded to your working your way up to senior writer and producer for National Geographic. Are there any major influences on your approach to design (or indeed GMing) that come from outside the hobby?
When I was at National Geographic, my work was mostly writing and producing TV promos for the shows on their cable networks. It was so much fun! Every promo was different. Some were little movie trailers, others where graphically driven, and a few were original shoots. I learned from some very creative people about how to write creatively, evocatively, and concisely. You often only have 30 or 15 seconds to get your message across. That has been super helpful in writing RPGs, because you also have space limited by your pages and layout.
The other thing I take from my work at Nat Geo is that the real world is full of strange creatures, political intrigue, bizarre mysteries, and human drama. We can pull a lot of inspiration from science and history. Check out blue holes! They’re fascinating ecosystems with unique critters (and I got to include a small section about them in Ghosts of Saltmarsh). The discovery of Machu Picchu! There’s just so much good stuff in the real world we can use in our games that is stranger than fiction. Did you know there are lizards that SHOOT BLOOD OUT OF THEIR EYES AT PREDATORS? That’s a real thing, and it should be in more TTRPGs.
(Note from John: I had no idea. That is wild. For the curious, info on the lizard—with its shooting range of 5 ft.(!?!)—is here.)
On MCDM’s Latest Smash Hit: Crows
Crows: Fortune or Death is currently crowdfunding on Backerkit (link to the campaign here). It’s well past its target and now it’s just a question of how high it will go. Huge congratulations to James and the rest of the MCDM team for a second success!
The playtest for Crows (free to download here; scroll down to the end of the post) feels a strong blend of innovation and originality. Elements like the town-building (which speaks to my Darkest Dungeon-loving heart) and insistence players name monsters feels genuinely new. On the other hand, it’s also easy to spot the influences of Shadowdark, Mausritter, Knave, and more with timers, inventory cards etc. How do you go about identifying what to revolutionise and what to iterate on?
A lot this comes out of starting from the ground up on the game. We come up with the fantasy, “We want to make a survival horror dungeon crawling RPG,” and then we craft the rules to support it. I love all the games you’ve mentioned, and they had already at least partially answered some of the questions we had. “We really want loot to be an important focus of the game because you need to have a reason to go into the dungeon,” lead me to games like Knave, which has equipment-based PCs and therefore encourages you to go into the dungeon to find better loot since it expands what your PC can do.
Likewise, Mausritter makes inventory management fun with cards. If equipment is part of the game, you need to be limited in what you carry, but it can’t be an accounting exercise. Tracking how long a torch burns or when to roll for a random encounter can be forgotten or tedious. Shadowdark used real-time to make a torch burning down a gripping simulation that’s always remembered. So we played around with real-time as well to solve some issues we saw at the table, and we instituted it differently because I don’t want the players to know that a torch is going to burn out after a certain time … just that it’s possible.
We needed ways for the PCs to spend gold, again to encourage them to keep delving. That’s how we came up with the town-building elements. We wanted players to really fear monsters, so we decided to make them stuff you’ve never seen before. It all comes down to identifying problems, coming up with solutions (which you don’t always have to start from 0 on), and then playtesting the crap out of them and revising until you have a game that’s fun and fits your intended world.
On Differences Between Draw Steel
The power roll carries over from Draw Steel into Crows, from heroic tactical combat into highly lethal survival-horror. How do you make a mechanic match the vibes of very different games?
The power roll is very similar to the core mechanic of the Powered by the Apocalypse and Forged in the Dark games. Most of them tend not to be very tactical, but we DID make the power roll work for Draw Steel. It’s really just about having three different outcomes for each roll. For Crows, this works well because we wanted attrition to be a part of the game. The fact that you can succeed at a cost in Crows (rather than just a binary pass/fail set of results), means that more of your resources can be expended in a meaningful way. “We picked that lock, but my lockpick broke.” “I climbed that wall, but my Stamina was depleted.” That middle outcome makes for more interesting dungeon-crawling play, which is why we used it in Crows.
For Draw Steel, you were the lead game designer. For Crows, you’ve stepped into the role of game director. What are some of the major differences between the roles, day-to-day?
For Draw Steel, I only had to worry about the design of the game, meaning the rules were up to me. Matt was the game director and oversaw the rules, the worldbuilding, the art, the layout, etc. He is a great boss and gives us all a ton of autonomy in that regard, but at the end of the day it fell to him to make sure the game was completed and polished in the best way possible.
For Crows, I’m the Matt! It’s a smaller game, so I’m also the me! I’m writing all the rules, but I also oversee the creation and polish of the whole product with an amazing team of people here at MCDM. I owe our operations and production teams a huge debt for their work on this, and I am super grateful to Nick De Spain. Nick is the Crows Art Director (and he’s doing a killer job), and he’s also stepped into a game designer role for this project. He’s come up with some cool story ideas and also some of the game’s best rules. The idea of the Miasma came from Nick!
Thinking of Trying Crows?
What would be your biggest tip for groups trying this type of game for the first time? And as a part b), what about groups who are old hands at OSR and OSR-adjacent games?
First, I’d say read the beginning of the Rules PDF in the playtest. We give some advice for players and Refs about how to approach this kind of game if you’re used to more heroic fantasy. The short version is that Crows, and games like it, are all about solving problems creatively. Good ideas just work. The dice are only there to remove uncertainty. This game hasn’t been balanced. You can’t win every battle by rushing in headlong. You’ll need to use your player brain to solve problems.
For the old hands, I’d say that Crows appeals to my taste because it has a few more codified rules that a typical OSR game. That’s because I like to feel supported by the game as Ref and don’t want to do a lot of work making up new systems to support the game I’m playing. If that sounds cool to you, give it a shot!
James on the Future
Draw Steel launched the system first, and now the setting and a campaign are coming. Would you be able to shed any light on whether Crows will follow this blueprint? Alternatively, are there any spaces you’re particularly excited to see the community fill with their own creations?
We want to make more dungeons, items, and monsters for Crows, and we’ll likely do that by building out the world. So you will see more of Cornath! I’d also like to build other games using Crows. I think this game engine works well for a modern zombie apocalypse, old-timey pirates, futuristic space scavenging, and basically any other post apocalyptic survival story. I’d love to see people create their own monsters for Crows, but I also want to see what new games they make using the system. There’s already a magazine coming out called SWORD! for Crows and I know of Swords & Sorcery, a game less lethal, more fantastical dungeon crawling RPG that uses the Crows rules.
MCDM have been on an exciting trajectory for some time now. Taking a look at the wider hobby, do you see any particular trends continuing or changing in TTRPGs?
I do see more companies able to afford full-time employees. It seems like the TTRPG space is growing. I think so many folks have come to the hobby through D&D over the last ten years, and now many of them are ready to play a second (or third or more) game. That is good for all of us! Even in these hard economic times when many industries are hurting, it seems like many people are able to make some or all of their income from these games. There’s certainly more full-time jobs now than there were ten years ago. I love that. I hope it continues.
The MGS Loot Haul Grows…
MGS is building a treasure chest of d100 random loot. What useless magic item or cursed relic would you like to add?
A pair of glasses that allow the wearer to shoot toxic blood from their eyes, thus causing damage to the target and the wearer (for losing blood).
An enormous thank you to James for taking the time to answer these questions. It’s incredible to think he has developed so much cool material for tabletop roleplaying games already; yet, there could be so much more to come. Crows is well on course for topping 1 million dollars at this time of writing. Congratulations again to James, Nick, and the rest of MCDM!
Where to Find James Introcaso
James is currently up to the elbows developing for Crows, but he still finds time to connect with people on BlueSky. Included below are also links to MCDM and the Crows BackerKit which still has over three more weeks to run. Definitely check out the campaign page (the artwork there is phenomenal and James was kind enough to share more for this article); as mentioned, you can get the playtest rules for free!
— James’ social: BlueSky
— Crows: Fortune or Death: campaign page
— MCDM’s main website: MCDM Productions
The MGS Loot Chest Thus Far
- Bag of the Lost Left Socks – Seth Skorkowsky
- Buzzing Brooch – Bob World Builder
- Poison Pen – Professor DM
- Glasses of the Horned Lizard – James Introcaso
