MCDM's Draw Steel prides itself on being not just fantasy, but heroic fantasy. The language of heroism is all throughout the game. Many of the ability names are one-liners, and the character options mix crunchy rules with fiction full of soaring rhetoric.
Those great humans, your ancestors, did not focus on differences. They did not weigh different people and grade them based on arbitrary traits deemed virtues and flaws. [...] No, those humans focused on the future. On making a better world... for all of us. A world many of them knew they would not live to see. [...]
Stopping Ajax will require you to become something else. You must become heroes. [...] That may seem unlikely now, but the future has a way of surprising us.
Some of your names, I will see written in future textbooks.
But some of your names, I will see written in the stars.
But what makes a hero? D&D and its close relatives have had their own kind of answer, and it's an answer I've always found unsatisfying: 'Above all,' the most common tradition in tabletop gaming seems to say, 'a hero is triumphant.' The protagonists of D&D are defined by their capacity for violence and control. When their will runs into opposition from others—as it always does—they have the strength of spell and arms to impose their desires on the world. The will of the opponent often dies with them once they're reduced to zero hit points.
But aren't MCDM's heroes also powerful? Yes; their class abilities include the tools for great violence, and the game assumes that they will unleash those tools on 'hordes' of enemies. The combat is designed to make the players feel cool and clever for outmaneuvering the bad guys. The bestiary defines hell-monsters and undead as moral non-patients—harming them is ethically neutral at worst—explicitly so that the players can sometimes engage in the thrill of combat without remorse. This is not a condemnation; I do not demand that a roleplaying game, or indeed a person, adheres to a strictly pacifist worldview if I am to engage with it. What this does tell us is that Draw Steel shares D&D's view that heroism sometimes involves fighting. If there is a difference in their definition of a hero, we should look for it elsewhere.
We may find a hint to that difference in how Draw Steel defines a monster: To be monstrous is to thrust your will upon reality in a way that infringes on the well-being of others, AND to do so beyond what is necessary to meet your own needs. A lioness definitely pursues her will at the antilope's expense, but hey—she and hers need to eat. That's not monstrous, that just the circle of life. When that same lioness invents capitalism, and begins to farm the antilope for far more meat than she needs—because she now cares more about the profit of the sale than about the mouths she will feed—now we have a problem.
That's when we call in the players! Their heroes oppose monsters. That's what all their powers are for. Here Draw Steel is again similar to D&D, which especially in its later editions positions heroes as the defenders of a status quo. There is the world at rest, and it's a good place. Or it's a grittily brutal place, but we don't expect our protagonists to do anything about it—we may assume that to be impossible. Only when some outside force overruns the village or seeks to combine eleven orbs of "WOOOORLD DOMINATION" do these heroes spring into action. They storm the beach and kill the Nazis so that the world may return to the way it was before those guys showed up, and then they go back to their normal lives.
And here's the difference. We see it in the quote shown earlier on. Stopping Ajax—the archetypical tyrant of Draw Steel's setting—is not a matter of returning the world to the neutral state it was in before the villains showed up. It's a matter of leaving the world better than they found it. This idea is present throughout the two core rulebooks. A monster entry about dragons proclaims:
Dragons are both a provocateur and a consequence of people's anguish. A thorn dragon will cover crops and forests in a fortress of bramble vines and threaten to starve the people living there, yet they were born out of decades of hunger and strife that came before them. Vanquishing a dragon might be necessary to save innocent lives, but unless the underlying problems are addressed, another dragon will take their place in time.
Times being what they are, this is an inspired take on fantasy heroes. In my circles there is the perception that the world used to be good, and it is now going to shit. But the evil we see on the news and increasingly suffer in the streets is not some externally imposed exception to the normal way of things. Reactionary politics, violence against minorities, and financial starvation are inherent parts of the ways we have organized our society. This was always the logical outcome of how our leaders have been running things, and it's always been happening somewhere. The only difference is that it's now happening more in places where we—me and people like me—can get hit by its more dire consequences.
To save the village from a dragon, Draw Steel's heroes must imagine a better world that does not create dragons in the first place. Then, they must struggle to bring their imagination into reality, even when most people think they're naïve or overreacting. This is rarely the work of the well-respected, but of those who are in a position to see a society's injustice. Of outcasts, of unpopular radicals, of people who suffer most under that injustice.
An act of heroism is an act of revolution.
Let's make an adventure about that.