The beastheart is the eleventh heroic class for Draw Steel, joining the summoner and the nine classes in Draw Steel: Heroes. When you play a beastheart, you actually get to play two characters: a wild beast and their (also pretty wild, honestly) humanoid companion.
Back in the day, MCDM published a 5E version of the beastheart. Our new Draw Steel beastheart is not a direct translation of that class—it’s more like a continuation of the conversation. You still control two characters, but we’ve leaned harder into the “beast” aspect of the beastheart: Rampage.
In battle, your beast becomes more and more riled up until they fly into a rampage and attack enemies and allies alike. Sure, you might accidentally bite some of your friends. But they won’t be too mad, because that friendly fire actually fuels the pain you’re dishing out to your enemies.
And in true Draw Steel fashion, your abilities get bigger and wilder as combat goes on. On turn one, your wolf, condor, lightbender, or other companion is a more or less ordinary beastie. By turn three or four, as their rampage grows, they cast aside their mortality and become a primordial avatar of destruction, towering above the battlefield like a kaiju or phasing through walls to gulp down enemy minions.
The beastheart’s a chunky class. It sits at the big kids’ table, joining the summoner as Draw Steel’s second master class. That means that it can break the rules a little. Like the summoner, the beastheart expects you to juggle more than one character at a time. And like the summoner, the beastheart plays with Draw Steel’s action economy. You and your faithful beast share a main action and a maneuver between you: while one of you spends
their main action on a traditional heroic ability, the other can unleash one of our many new beastheart maneuvers (a lot of which are pretty beefy attacks in their own right).
And of course, you get to pick a beast! We’ve got 14 companion species to start, ranging from the mundane (panther, wolf) to the fantastic (drake, lightbender, sporeling). Each species comes with its own bespoke powers and traits, and it earns new ones as it levels up. And just as the beast becomes more bestial, so does the beast’s partner: if you have a gummy ball companion, you can gain the ability to stretch like taffy, while a spider buddy can teach you to websling your way around the neighborhood.
