Why I Made a New Treasure System for Draw Steel
Introduction
Hey folks, Aestus here. I love Draw Steel, but it isn’t perfect. One area I’ve always thought was weak is its treasure system – or what I tend to call its loot system. And the day this article goes up, I’m doing something about it: I’m launching a crowdfunding campaign for Mythic Treasures, my own treasure system for Draw Steel, designed in partnership with Surfing Bird (Ben), founder of the Home Brewery Discord server and the mind behind the popular Scion class.
I want to use this piece to do two things. First, to explain why I think Draw Steel’s stock treasures fall short – not as a complaint, but as a design problem worth examining carefully. And second, to show you how Mythic Treasures tries to solve it. This is a game-design essay before it’s a pitch, so let’s start where I always like to start: from first principles.
The Design Principle: Treasure That Defines a Character
Draw Steel is a heroic fantasy game. It draws on classic fantasy, but it also wears its love of superhero literature openly – the X-Men, the Avengers, that whole tradition. So when I think about what great treasure looks like in a game like this, I reach for heroic-fantasy touchstones.
Consider two characters and their gear: Thor and his hammer, Mjolnir, and Bilbo and the One Ring.
Thor uses Mjolnir for almost everything. He flies with it, he calls down lightning with it, he channels his identity through it. Mjolnir isn’t an accessory – it’s central to what Thor can actually do. Strip away the hammer and you’ve meaningfully changed the character’s capabilities. In game-design terms, Mjolnir is core to Thor’s mechanical identity.
But it’s also core to his narrative identity. Mjolnir can only be lifted by the worthy, and in the MCU’s telling, becoming and remaining worthy to wield it is one of the central events of Thor’s arc. The hammer isn’t just a weapon. It’s a moral test he carries around.
Bilbo’s ring works the same way on both axes. Mechanically, invisibility is how he solves most of the burglar problems his heroic journey throws at him – it’s his core tool. Narratively, the ring gestures at something much older: Plato’s myth of the Ring of Gyges. Could anyone holding that kind of power still choose to act justly? Bilbo is a hero precisely because he largely does. I think part of what Tolkien is doing with that ring is sketching the kind of person who can resist extreme temptation – and his answer is a simple, decent person like Bilbo.
That’s the standard I want treasure to reach. Treasures that are both mechanically and narratively character-defining. I’m not claiming it’s the only valid way to design loot. But in a heroic fantasy game like Draw Steel, I think it’s a thing worth supporting deliberately, and right now I don’t think the game does.
Once I had that principle as a target, it became pretty clear that Draw Steel’s level treasures weren’t close to the bullseye.
Why Draw Steel’s Stock Treasures Fall Short
The cleanest way to see the gap is to put Draw Steel’s level treasures next to Draw Steel’s subclasses – because the subclasses are a genuinely good example of design that is both mechanically and narratively character-defining. The game already knows how to do this. It just doesn’t do it with loot.
The Subclass Standard: College of the Harlequin Mask
Take the College of the Harlequin Mask as a standout. The narrative richness starts with the name. It’s a college – so I have to imagine a college into my world – and specifically one that teaches illusion magic and practices subterfuge and infiltration. Immediately I’m drawn toward a concept: a secret college, an invisible college, a world of ciphers and quiet conspiracies. (For my own table, I borrowed heavily from the late Alexander Waugh’s speculative work on codes and ciphers in late-Tudor literature to bring my version to life. Set aside whether the theories are true and just engage with them as story, and they’re an enchanting piece of imaginative history. I’d recommend looking him up.)
Then there’s the mechanics. The subclass gets an ability called “I’m No Threat.” As a maneuver – costing no heroic resource – you wrap yourself in an illusion that makes you appear harmless to your enemies. In battle that grants you a surge, which is a core part of how the Shadow operates, so the ability slots directly into your combat loop. But it’s also a wonderful roleplay tool: you decide what non-threatening creature you become. One of my players ran a Harlequin Mask and was constantly delighted to imagine what she was turning into, in and out of combat.
That’s a single name and a single ability, and already, choosing this subclass means something for your character – mechanically and narratively at once.
The Treasure Reality: Adaptive Second Skin of Toxins
Now compare a level treasure. I’ll grab the very first one in the Heroes book, so no one can accuse me of cherry-picking the worst case: the Adaptive Second Skin of Toxins.
It’s magical light armor – a suit of tough leather set with thousands of tiny (mercifully painless) barbs. The crafting prerequisites are actually narratively cool, and I’d point you toward the Dice Society’s forthcoming crafting project if that’s your thing. But set crafting aside and look at what the item actually does:
- 1st level: +6 bonus to Stamina, plus immunity to acid and poison damage equal to your highest characteristic score.
- 5th level: the Stamina bonus rises to +12. Additionally, whenever an adjacent creature deals damage to you, they take 3 acid or poison damage (your choice).
- 9th level: the Stamina bonus rises to +21, adjacent retaliation rises to 6 acid or poison damage, and you gain a maneuver to transmute a 2-cube area of adjacent liquid or gas into acid or poison gas until the start of your next turn. Any creature entering the area for the first time in a round, or starting its turn there, takes 6 damage.
Look at the shape of that. For the first two tiers, this is almost entirely stats – more Stamina, then more Stamina plus a trickle of retaliation. There’s nothing action-oriented to build around. It isn’t until 9th level that you finally get something tactical: the acid/poison cloud.
And even that arrives late and lands soft. Notice the cloud costs a maneuver. Back at level 1, the Harlequin Mask was already spending its maneuver to turn into an adorable hippo and pick up a surge – and a surge deals a comparable amount of damage (around +4 at level 9, +5 at level 10) while also being far more flexible. You can spend a surge on damage, or save it to push a potency, or any number of other things. There are simply more tactical angles in one surge than in this entire armor.
The point is this: when I chose the Harlequin Mask, it transformed how I play and how I imagine my character. When I choose the Adaptive Second Skin of Toxins, it means very little for either. If I were handed these exact abilities as subclass features, I’d be disappointed – there’s almost nothing to build around.
And narratively? Is there anything here like Mjolnir being lifted only by the worthy – a thread I could pull on to explore an arc? Honestly, no. There’s one evocative sentence of flavor, but it’s not a heroic arc. (If you can see one in there, genuinely, tell me in the comments – I’d love to be wrong.)
To be fair, there are level treasures in the Heroes book with real promise; this isn’t a blanket condemnation. But I’d submit that even the best of them rarely clears the bar the subclasses set. That gap is the whole reason Mythic Treasures exists.
What Mythic Treasures Does Differently
So what is a Mythic Treasure? The short version: it’s like a level treasure, except far more mechanically and narratively involved. The longer version is a set of deliberate design choices, and I want to walk through them, because the why behind each one matters more than the what.
One Treasure Per Character
In vanilla Draw Steel, the Heroes book recommends up to two level treasures per character, and allows as many as three. In Mythic Treasures, you get one. Full stop.
We landed on that early, and for both narrative and mechanical reasons.
Narratively, each of these items asks your character to walk a specific heroic arc. Stack two or three on one hero and you dilute the concept – you can’t be on three journeys at once and have any of them mean much. It also creates an enormous amount of homework for your Director, who now has to find ways to instantiate multiple narrative arcs for every player at the table. We wanted one focused heroic narrative per treasure, mostly carried by what we call the beat system (more on that in a moment).
Mechanically, being character-defining costs budget – both power budget and complexity budget. If you spread that across two or three items per hero, none of them can be truly central. There just isn’t enough room. One item, done richly, beats three items done thinly.
That said, we know mix-and-match is part of the joy of any loot system. So the book also includes around 100 trinkets designed to combine with your Mythic Treasure – that’s where the tinkering and customization live.
The Beat System: Narrative Conditions That Unlock Mechanical Tiers
This is the heart of how Mythic Treasures fuses the two axes. Each treasure has a beat system – a set of small narrative conditions you complete to unlock the next mechanical tier of the item. The mechanics don’t just scale with your level; they scale with the story you choose to tell. Reaching a higher tier means your character actually went somewhere, made a choice, lived through a beat. That’s the mechanism that ties Mjolnir’s “worthiness” idea to something a table can actually play out.
Heroic Abilities, Not Stat Bonuses
All of our Mythic Treasures grant heroic abilities at levels 3 and 7, alongside the more typical 5th- and 9th-level benefits. This is a deliberate design lever, and I want to be careful about why, because the first reaction people have is, “That looks really powerful.”
Here’s the thing. We grant abilities, not additive stat bonuses. And heroic abilities always cost a resource to use. That makes them fundamentally different from a flat +12 Stamina. They aren’t raising your raw power floor every round – they’re options. More tools in the chest. They broaden what your character can do without letting you do more per round than you otherwise could. You gain flexibility and a slight power bump, not runaway scaling. We also balanced every one of these against heroic abilities that already exist in the game, rather than inventing power in a vacuum. Granting abilities rather than stats is, to me, how you add genuine depth to a treasure without breaking it.
Soft Multiclassing
There’s one more idea here that Ben was especially excited about, and it falls out naturally from designing items around strong fantasies. Many (not all) of our treasures are built around what another game might call a class fantasy or subclass fantasy. Because of that, picking one can function as a kind of soft multiclass – something Draw Steel doesn’t normally let you do.
Want to play a Fury who’s also a religious, conduit-flavored warrior channeling a divine ferocity? Put the Saint Scepter on that Fury and the two work beautifully together – you’ve got a soft multiclass. Want a Tactician so burdened by the responsibility of keeping their companions alive that they go looking for power in unsavory places? (And note: for someone in that seat, seizing power isn’t selfish – their friends are depending on them.) That’s the Soul Eater on a Tactician. You get a warlock-tactician. The treasure becomes a second identity layered over your class.
Let me make all of this concrete with the two examples I know best.
Worked Example: Saint Scepter
The Saint Scepter is a Mythic Treasure I designed primarily myself, though Ben had a lot of creative input. If I had to map it to a class fantasy, it’s the most Conduit-like of our items – a cleric-adjacent treasure.
The Narrative: Justice and Mercy
Like all scepters, it’s a symbol of authority – and specifically, it carries the divine authority of St. Elowen the Innocent. In life, Elowen was a woman falsely accused by a corrupt judge who eventually proved her innocence and, in time, sat in judgment over the very judge who had condemned her. Now ascended to sainthood, whoever bears her scepter becomes the representative of her divine justice on Orden.
So when you pick this item, you’re narratively signing up to be a judge – one wielding divine authority. And the beats ask you to sit in a real tension: do you trust St. Elowen’s brand of justice, or do you temper it toward mercy? The narrative conditions that unlock each tier represent your character living out that question. There’s the heroic arc the Adaptive Second Skin was missing.
The Mechanics: The Veneration Core Loop
Every Mythic Treasure is built around what we call a core loop. For the Saint Scepter, that loop is building Veneration.
Here’s the text as I wrote it: the wicked must bow to your divine authority. While you wield the Saint Scepter, you start each combat with a unique resource called Veneration set to zero. It lasts until the end of the encounter and grants stacking benefits based on how much you’ve built. And the way you build it is by knocking targets prone – forcing them to bow before your saint. You gain 1 Veneration each time you knock a non-solo creature prone, and 2 each time you knock a solo prone.
A Veneration table lays out the escalating benefits. The capstone tier unlocks at 8 Veneration – and that is a lot. You’re not going to drift into 8 by playing the way you normally would. In our playtests, reaching 8 (and reaching it early enough to actually use it in a fight) demanded that you build and play around the loop deliberately, knocking many targets prone on your turn and getting your allies to help. It becomes a genuine team win condition.
And it’s a win condition because the payoff is potent. At 8 Veneration you unlock this, on top of everything else: the weight of their sins crushes your enemies – targets you knock prone are also dazed. Anyone who’s played Draw Steel knows dazed is a serious condition. And note carefully: there’s no potency check. Knock them prone, they’re dazed, every time.
Prone and dazed interlock viciously. Standing up from prone costs a maneuver – but being dazed means spending that maneuver is most of what you can do on a turn. So you knock an enemy down, they’re dazed, they burn their whole turn just standing back up, and you do it again. Build around it and you simply take over the fight. There’s this slow, satisfying ascent into divine status, and then you’re ruling the battlefield. It feels genuinely great.
Opening the Loop to Every Class: The Kneel Maneuver
Now, here’s a problem we hit, and how we solved it – because it’s a nice illustration of the design work.
In the base game, knocking enemies prone isn’t a very valuable thing to do; prone is a fairly weak condition. So the first thing we did when drafting this item was audit the entire Heroes book for every way to knock a creature prone. (It was genuinely fun.) Some of the best methods turn out to be lifting and dropping. For instance, the Paragon subclass of the Censor has a Judgment maneuver that can vertically pull a target – pull them into the air, drop them, and they land prone. Drop them onto another enemy and now both are prone, which is 2 Veneration in one move, with no potency check to fight through (you just have to overcome their stability).
The trouble is that this siloed the Saint Scepter into a handful of classes – Paragon, Conduit, Troubadour – that could reliably generate prone. We wanted this item to be usable by most classes, even if some are naturally better with it.
So we added a maneuver called Kneel. It’s simple: it lets you knock targets prone, checking against their Presence potency, and you can spend some heroic resource to knock several targets prone at once. That gives any class a way to rush toward 8 Veneration – at the cost of pouring in heroic resource. It opens the door without flattening the classes that were already good at it.
Layer on the heroic abilities at levels 3 and 7 (more action-oriented options, all balanced against existing heroic abilities), plus the usual 5th- and 9th-level benefits, and you have an item that genuinely changes how you play. The moment you pick up the Saint Scepter, you start building around knocking targets prone – something essentially nobody was doing in vanilla Draw Steel. That’s the contrast with the Adaptive Second Skin in a nutshell: this isn’t a pile of stats, it’s a new way to play your character, wrapped in a story about justice.
Worked Example: Soul Eater
The Soul Eater is Ben’s design, primarily. If the Saint Scepter is a Conduit-flavored item, the Soul Eater leans warlock.
The Narrative: How Much Power Can a Hero Take?
To get this weapon, you typically have to make a pact with some sinister power. Narratively, it invites you to explore how much power a hero can take onto themselves before it costs them something. It’s the One Ring again – a temptation arc. If you want a character who flirts with that line, this is the item for them.
The Mechanics: Souls as a Strategic Resource
Mechanically, whenever you (or an ally) kill a target, you can use an ability called Reap to take a piece of their soul, building up a resource called Souls. You then spend Souls to empower your abilities – adding damage, gaining distance, expanding an area, increasing potency, and so on. The breadth of what you can do with them is, frankly, very cool, and they combine in interesting ways with the heroic abilities you get at levels 3 and 7.
What makes Souls genuinely novel design in Mythic Treasures is that they’re a strategic resource – they persist between encounters. Unlike a heroic resource that resets each fight, you can bank Souls, save them up, and unload them on a big boss encounter. That carries the temptation theme straight into the mechanics: the hoard is always sitting there, and so is the question of when to spend it and how much power to reach for. I’ve played Soul Eater a few times in playtest and genuinely enjoyed it.
And this is where soft multiclassing comes back around. The Saint Scepter lets a non-Conduit touch a cleric fantasy; the Soul Eater lets a non-warlock (Draw Steel doesn’t even have a warlock) touch a warlock fantasy. Put it on that burdened Tactician I mentioned and you get a hero seizing forbidden power to protect the people who trust them. The mechanics and the story are telling the same tale.
On the Crowdfunder: An Honest Word
So that’s the thinking behind Mythic Treasures. If it sounds like something that would improve your table, here’s where things actually stand.
The book is, honestly, mostly done in terms of writing and design. The Mythic Treasures crowdfunding campaign is principally about funding art and graphic design (we’ve partnered with Dojikaan) and editing, layout, and graphic design (Jonas Tintenseher). There are also stretch goals for additional narrative content, which I’ll be writing.
I want to be plain about this, because I’d rather you trust me than pledge on impulse: read the campaign carefully before you back it, so you understand exactly what you’re getting. I’m not going to hard-sell you. Ben and I think we’ve made something good here – a treasure system that takes the heroic-fantasy promise seriously and tries to make your loot mean something both at the table and on the character sheet. If that’s something you want, the campaign is there and we’d genuinely appreciate your support. If it isn’t, that’s completely fine, and I hope the design thinking in this essay was useful on its own.
Closing Thoughts
The argument underneath all of this is simple. In a heroic fantasy game, the gear our heroes carry can be more than a stat block. Mjolnir and Bilbo’s ring are character-defining on two axes at once – what the hero can do, and who the hero is becoming. Draw Steel’s subclasses already reach that standard. Its stock treasures, mostly, don’t.
Mythic Treasures is my attempt to close that gap: one focused item per hero, a beat system that ties narrative arcs to mechanical tiers, core loops you actually build around, abilities instead of stat padding, and a touch of soft multiclassing so your loot can become a second identity. The Saint Scepter turns you into a slowly ascending instrument of divine justice; the Soul Eater into a hero wrestling with the price of power. That’s the kind of treasure I want in my games.
If you’d like to bring it to yours, take a careful look at the campaign. Either way – thanks for reading, folks. I’ll catch you next time.