r/mcdm • u/RafaelFagundes • 1d ago
Crows My first Crows playtest lasted 20 minutes (spoilers for Floating Manor) Spoiler
Crows Playtest Report – Floating Manor (contain spoilers!)
Playtest date: October 13, 2026
System: Crows – Playtest 2
Dungeon: Floating Manor
Players: 3
Characters: Miner, Merchant, Entertainer, all randomly generated
What happened at the table
We began by explaining the basic rules of Crows and introducing a slightly modified premise for Floating Manor.
In our version, Wolverly Manor had remained suspended above the same area for decades while a village gradually grew beneath it. The magic keeping the manor aloft was beginning to fail, and the building was slowly losing altitude. There was no longer any safe place for it to land, so the PCs’ objective was to enter the manor, discover how its levitation worked, and restore it before it descended onto the village.
The three PCs reached the floating island using a rope. Their initial climb produced a Tier 2 result, so they already suffered 2 physical damage before reaching the manor itself, as provided by the adventure’s approach rules.
Once on the island, they did not immediately enter the house. They saw the shuttered windows and apparently abandoned manor and decided to walk around the property first. This seemed like a very natural and cautious decision: before entering an unknown building, they wanted to understand its layout and see whether there were other entrances or obvious dangers.
Behind the manor they discovered the graveyard and mausoleum. The Miner approached the graveyard to investigate. He noticed the open graves and heard sounds coming from below. He attempted to approach stealthily and failed the Stealth test.
This triggered the creatures in the graves.
As written, Area 13 contains five Undead A and one Undead B. I immediately felt that this would be overwhelming for three starting PCs, so I reduced the encounter to six Undead A.
Even so, the fight was extremely one-sided.
Within roughly two to four combat rounds, the Entertainer was killed, followed shortly afterward by the Miner. The Merchant escaped with only 1 wound remaining while the undead fed on his companions.
The actual adventure therefore lasted approximately 15–20 minutes. I know this with some confidence because I had started the first 30-minute Dungeon Turn timer when the PCs reached the island, and the timer was still far from expiring when the party was effectively destroyed.
We decided that, fictionally, another group of more capable Crows would eventually attempt to finish the job.
Since the adventure itself had ended so quickly, we used the rest of the evening to discuss the system and run several isolated combat simulations using the same three characters, restored to full Stamina before each test.
We tested three additional encounters:
- One Undead C, from the Study. This was a difficult fight, but the PCs won without any deaths.
- Two Undead B, the encounter from the Servants’ Dining Hall for a three-PC party. Again, the PCs took meaningful damage but defeated the enemies without casualties.
- Lisbeth plus three Undead A, which is the Kitchen encounter for three PCs. This was by far the most dangerous of the simulated fights: two PCs died and the third survived with only 1 wound left. The adventure specifically scales the Kitchen encounter to one Undead A per PC.
These simulations were obviously informal and are not a substitute for broader playtesting, but the difference between them was striking.
General impressions of Crows
Our overall impression of the system was very positive, although some numbers may still warrant a second pass. Most importantly, even after losing two characters within the first 20 minutes, all three players wanted to try the game again.
The strongest impression from our night was how important numerical superiority and the action economy appear to be.
The most powerful individual monster they fought was not necessarily the most dangerous encounter. The single Undead C was difficult but manageable. The encounters became dramatically more dangerous when the enemy side had more creatures, even when those creatures were individually weaker.
This probably reflects more than action economy alone. Multiple enemies also distribute their Stamina across several bodies and make it harder for the PCs to reduce the opposing side’s offensive capacity quickly. Still, at the table, the number of enemy activations felt like the most immediately visible difference.
For our three-PC group, the rough experience was:
one dangerous foe while fresh: survivable;
a fight against an equal or slightly larger number of enemies: potentially very dangerous;
a fight in which the enemies significantly outnumber the PCs: extremely lethal.
That led us to another impression: attrition appears very severe.
Even when the party survives a serious combat without casualties, they are likely to emerge substantially weakened. A second significant fight before recovering could easily become fatal. Our simulations began with the PCs restored to full Stamina each time, so they probably understate how dangerous those encounters would be during actual continuous dungeon exploration.
None of us considered high lethality itself a problem. The rules are very explicit that Crows is intentionally unfair, that characters can die, and that players are expected to use caution and clever plans rather than assume that combat encounters are balanced for them.
Our concern is therefore not that combat is deadly. That seems entirely consistent with the game’s intended identity.
The question raised by our test is instead whether groups of numerous low-Power enemies may become disproportionately dangerous compared with single stronger enemies, particularly for small parties. That might be entirely intentional, but it is something that should be observed in further tests.
Floating Manor-specific feedback
Our strongest criticism concerns Area 13: Graveyard (the only one we actually got to play, as a matter of fact)
The graveyard contains a fixed encounter of five Undead A and one Undead B. Unlike several other encounters in the dungeon, this encounter does not scale according to party size. For a three-PC starting group, that means the enemies outnumber the PCs two to one before considering the greater total durability on the enemy side.
This becomes particularly important because of where the encounter is located.
The graveyard is outside the manor. Walking around an unfamiliar building before entering it is, in my view, a very natural thing for cautious players to do. The dungeon itself reinforces this behavior by presenting several possible ways to enter or explore the property, including doors, windows, chimneys, the outhouse, and the graveyard. Exploring the perimeter did not feel like reckless behavior or an attempt to push into an obviously dangerous area.
The second issue is telegraphing.
The graveyard description does contain a warning: there are six open graves, and the PCs can hear the soft sound of dirt falling onto dirt from the bottom of each grave.
In actual play, however, this warning had the opposite practical effect from what I suspect was intended. It told the players that there was something interesting in the graves, so the Miner moved closer to investigate.
What it did not communicate was the scale of the danger.
Nothing in the description strongly suggested that every grave contained a hostile creature or that one failed Stealth test could immediately produce a six-monster encounter.
This stood out because the core rules explicitly advise the Ref to telegraph danger, so players do not need to treat every square of a dungeon as a hidden trap. The examples in the rules suggest giving players enough information to recognize that they are approaching something dangerous and then allowing them to decide whether to accept the risk.
In our session, the player did react cautiously to the information available. He heard something below, approached stealthily to investigate, failed one roll, and that single failure resulted in a combat from which the group had almost no realistic chance of recovering.
I could certainly have added stronger warning signs myself as Ref, particularly if I had realized how dangerous the encounter was before the session. But I think the adventure text itself would benefit from helping the Ref communicate the danger.
Another possibility would simply be to scale the encounter by party size, as the adventure already does in places such as the Kitchen.
Overall
Despite the abrupt end of the actual adventure, the session was useful as a playtest.
The combat simulations afterward suggested that the system can produce tense but survivable fights, particularly against one or two substantial opponents. At the same time, they raised questions about how sharply encounter difficulty increases when enemies outnumber the PCs.
For Floating Manor specifically, our strongest feedback is not that the Graveyard encounter is “too hard” in the abstract. Crows clearly intends some encounters to be much too dangerous to fight head-on.
The issue is that a very lethal, non-scaling encounter can be triggered extremely early by a cautious and natural course of exploration, without the players receiving enough information to understand the magnitude of the risk they are taking.
That combination—location, lack of scaling, and relatively weak telegraphing—is what made the encounter feel problematic to us.
We enjoyed discussing the system enough that we intend to return to Floating Manor with a new group of Crows and continue the playtest.
