Greetings! The latest development arc has concluded with early elemental magic items and spells, and the new scholar class!

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The goal was to add some early magic item and spell content for an eventual demo, so magic skills would have some use. Some low tier items and spells were added for air, earth, fire and water magic.

• New class: scholar. Scholar was inspired by ancient philosophers, and starts with very high intelligence but terrible agility. He starts with a couple of spell casting items and a natural way to build him is to make him a spell caster.

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• New items: some early tier magic items were added for all elemental magic schools. Some early tier items just offer a simple bonus, but many more advanced items have situational uses, in that they are useful for a particular build or in specific situations or against a foe type. An example item is Ashen Cloak:

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• Spells: items in the game are used by right clicking on them, and then left clicking on anything to target the usage. Any item in the game can be used on anything, although many interactions obviously don\'t have a particular result. Spell casting is performed using items in this same system; the casting item states what spells it can trigger by targeting specific things, and once the item is used on such a target the hero makes a magic skill check and suffers some sanity damage, and the spell goes off. Casting items are typically wands, orbs, staves and such, but spells can be on any item. An example wand:

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• Similarly to magic items, spells are designed to be unique and situationally useful, so you are probably not going to go through the whole game just spamming one spell in every situation. Here\'s an example damage spell:

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• Item crafting: as usual for a roguelike, you are to some degree required to play around the items that happen to drop for you. There is however also a way to craft items, as shown in this infographic:

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To make a lot of magic items you need to have magic skills to fill sigils, and smithing and/or crafting skill to imbue sigils into items. You also need to find magic essences, or perhaps extract them from existing magic items. Smiths/crafters with no magic skills can still make magic items if they find sigils that already contain magic essences. Similarly, characters who can imbue sigils but not smith/craft can still enchant items if they find runes that allow for automatic crafting checks.

There are currently 41 spells in the game, and this is only some of the lower tier spells for half the magic schools!

That\'s all for now. Next up are some items and spells for the four sorceries of astrology, blood magic, nature magic and necromancy.

Greetings! Latest development arc has been finished with the implementation of the \'Well Caves\' dungeon, and with it, the three starter dungeons are ready!

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• New dungeon: The newest dungeon is a damp network of tunnels one under an old well. A new level generator was needed to achieve the squiggly small tunnels that connect small open areas. This dungeon is the most challenging of the starter ones, both in monster levels but also regarding the secondary skills that are used to complete it in the most efficient manner, starting from athletics skill checks to climb down and up the well shaft without hurting yourself.

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• New monsters: The new dungeon is populated with monsters mostly of an aquatic theme. Here are some of them:

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• Tactical challenges: When designing monsters, care is taken to make them tactically different. Giant centipedes move 2 tiles per turn requiring care in positioning if you want the first strike. Ichthyan warriors have reach 2 spears so you need to match their range, sneak in next to them, or run in and accept they get an extra attack on you. Cultists have a prayer that gives them temporary health for a short while, giving you a choice to either kite them for a bit waiting for it to run out, or just fight and chew through the extra health.

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• Minibosses: As a first, there is a named miniboss among them. Minibosses appear randomly on some runs, offering extra challenge and sometimes loot. Rend-Fin the ichthyan warrior is always equipped with a magical coral trident, for example.

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• Choosing a path: You are not the only one looking to solve problems in the starting village, as there are two guards in the town. You have a free choice of which of the three starter dungeons to go to, but once you do, the guards will clear the two others. Overall, there will be a lot more dungeons in the game than you are supposed to go to in one run, this way each run will can take a different path based on your hero\'s needs and capabilities, starting right from the beginning.

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• Colored item labels: Item labels (that show when holding alt or ctrl) are now color-coded for convenience: equipment, consumables, magic items, coins etc get their own color.

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• Keys: Locked doors/containers were added in last arc, and to add to that I implemented an \'old key\' item that can open any lock (for now at least), to give characters not skilled in thievery a way to access locked doors and containers. Keys often break when used, but can be repaired by smithing.

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• Many miscellaneous additions like smooth camera movement, poking at dungeon objects with weapons, improved balancing, lots of bugfixes, and so on.

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That\'s all for now. Next up are spells and magic items for the early game!

Greetings! Development is coming along, and last week the Traps and Thievery arc was finished!

This has brought several new things to the game, such as:

• Traps: Fire/poison traps which create appropriate clouds when stepped on, and hunting snares/traps which deal damage to legs and hold target in place for a while. Traps can be avoided with an agility save, but the save is more difficult is trap is not detected (with a perception skill check).

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• Locks: Doors and containers like chests can be locked. Locks can be forced open by just clicking on the door/container using an aggression skill check, but forcing things open might result in injury or breaking things inside a container.

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• Thievery skill: Heroes who have the thievery skill can use picks to try to open locks and disarm traps. Additionally, a pick can be used to turn a demon-fire globe or a noxious fumes globe into a fire or poison trap on the ground.

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• Survival skill for snares: Survival skill needed some love, so the new hunting snares and traps use survival skill to place and pick up. These can be very powerful in the early game. Hunting traps can be broken when triggered, but unless they are completely destroyed they can be fixed with the smithing skill.

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• Theft: Two types of stealing were added: pickpocketing to take items from NPC's, and stealing items from shop floors. Both require being hidden, so the talent Hide in Shadows and many stealth skill checks are also needed to pull these off. Both actions require a thievery skill check, naturally.

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• Thief class: Thief class was added to the game. Starting with high agility, the thievery skill and a pick, this class can take advantage of the other new features added.

  

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• Thief got its own character generation similar to other classes. Each has five-ish questions with multiple choices for answers. Most questions have more than three answers (most notably star sign, which is 12 + 2 rare ones), but three of these are chosen randomly to be presented. This makes the character generation different each time you roll a character.

  

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• Intimidating shouts: Shouting can now now scare monsters, giving it more of a function. Enemies get a brawn or a spirit save (using the better one) against your aggression skill check. On a fail they gain the horror condition, running away for a little bit. In any case they are immune afterwards. This can be useful for breaking up packs of weak monsters.

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• Strip of cloth: You can use a bladed weapon to tear cloth items into strips of cloth with an easy crafting skill check. These work as poor quality bandages. Additionally, crafters can try to upgrade bandages into better ones (strip of cloth -> bandage -> heavy bandage). Crafting and healing skills have some synergy now.

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• Giant wasp nest: A new container can be found in the dungeons! Much to no one's surprise, these contain giant wasps. With some perception checks, you can also often find some useful items that have ended up inside. Also, maybe related to this, it is now possible to burn containers found in dungeons.

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• Stunned condition: You and the monsters can now be stunned. Stunned gives a massive penalty of -6 to all skill checks. Stun condition always has a number of stacks, which is usually just one. You can clear each stack by waiting a turn, leaving you with a choice of fighting with penalties or clearing it out by waiting a turn.

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• Use names for classes: NPC's might use class names in their lines, like "Good day, hoplite!". With the thief class, this does not make sense, as no one should outright call them a thief out of the blue. Now every class has a name that NPC's use. For thief, this is "law-abiding citizen".

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• Many small additions: chameleon condition for stealth bonuses, flammable potions, small gameplay additions, improvements and fixes.

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That's all for now. Next up is a new dungeon, some denizens for it, and a slew of general dungeoneering improvements!