Spellblade: Vengeance of the Witch Sisters

Spellblade: Vengeance of the Witch Sisters is a retro-ish, 2d, turn-based, fantasy computer role-playing-game that takes everything good about the RPGs of the 80s, 90s, and the modern era and blends them to create the ultimate CRPG.

Spellblade has too many inspirations to list, but some of the most important are Richard Garriot's Ultima series (especially IV and V); Interplay's Wasteland, Dragon Wars, and Fallout titles; Might & Magic (especially 1-3); The Elder Scrolls II: Daggerfall; SSI's Gold Box titles (Pool of Radiance et. al); Microprose's Darklands; and more modern fare like Nox Archaist and Pillars of Eternity. (Seriously, I could keep going, but then this would just turn into an index of every CRPG I've ever loved and we'd be here all day.)

Basically, I love CRPGs, and wanted to make one that combines every element I've ever loved into one ultimate package. Spellblade will not play exactly like any of the above-mentioned titles, but it should feel like an old friend to fans of any of them. 

Spellblade takes you to the land of Arraldyn on the planet Tella, a comfortingly-familiar fantasy world inhabited by humans, elves, orks, dwarves, and more. You will create your own blank-slate character, choosing from classic fantasy races (human, elf, ork, or dwarf) and explore the kingdom of Mercia. Mercia is being troubled by a rabble-rouser who claims to be a famous witch named Rowena Winter, who led a rebellion that nearly destroyed the kingdom 200 years ago.

Spellblade has two game modes: Adventure, and Classic. Adventure is an open-world, nonlinear RPG with a main quest, factions, companions, and multiple endings. Classic is an old-school dungeoncrawl that focuses on resource management and mastering the combat system, with a story that can be uncovered or ignored at your leisure.

In Adventure Mode, you'll travel through Mercia's duchies and counties, meeting nobles and peasants, and encountering factions and sidequests galore. It's up to you how you proceed--do you make a name for yourself as an adventurer or hero? Find a nice little "home base" to quietly develop your skills and build your wealth? Join a guild? Or investigate the rebel leader who threatens to embroil the land in a second Witch's War? Your choices will help decide the fate of the kingdom. 

If you're in the mood for an even more retro experience, Classic Mode plops you outside a dangerous megadungeon called the Winter Sanctuary. Built by Rowena Winter's older sister Kassia, it is teeming with monsters, treasure, and other adventurers from far and wide who've come to loot the place. Each delve will take you deeper, facing harder foes and more challenging puzzles, and forcing you to carefully balance rations, treasure, healing items, and your own health. Clearing all 13 levels will unlock the full story of Kassia and Rowena Winter and what happened to them 200 years before Adventure Mode takes place. 

In addition, Spellblade will feature:

• Deep mechanical character customization including attributes, skills, and feats that drastically affect how you move through the world and story. Perception affects what you can see. Intelligence affects what you know. Strength affects how often you get tired or if you can break that door down. Agility affects if monsters can hear you and traps can hit you. Charisma affects how people react to you. Every point matters. 
• A complex branching narrative that you get to define your character's place within. Spellblade doesn't hand you superpowers or a special destiny to force you into the center of the narrative; you decide your place in the story.
• A turn-based combat system that starts off very simple and gradually increases in complexity over the course of the entire game so it never gets old.
• Tons of role-playing options: more skill and dialogue checks than New Vegas on steroids, special encounters everywhere you go, multiple ways to resolve every problem.
• Fair and immersive mechanics: You will never see messages like "This lock can't be picked." If it's possible for you to fight an NPC, then it's possible for you to kill them, no matter how "essential" they are. 
• Active skill use and puzzles: Inspired by games like Wasteland and Quest for Glory, you'll use skills, spells, and items to interact with the world in thousands of ways. Ordinary locks can be picked, broken open with your Strength or a prybar, broken with a magic missile, unlocked with the Knock spell, dissolved with acid, or opened with a magical Silver Key, if you're a master alchemist. Every obstacle you encounter has multiple solutions; there's always another way. 
• All kinds of NPC relationships, including romances both casual and deep. If you like Bioware-style companion romances, we've got 'em. If you loved being able to hoe your way through the wasteland in Fallout 2, well, step right up. And if you're tired of NPCs propositioning you constantly as if you're the only attractive person in the world, fear not, because Spellblade NPCs will only pursue you if it makes sense. Get married, sleep around, be chaste, marry into royalty, be polyamorous, or just make friends.
• A mature story that isn't unrelentingly bleak nor needlessly morally convoluted. Our main quest is serious and deals with serious themes, but it's not a gauntlet of cruelty and misery where every choice is between the lesser of two evils. 

I (Christian) didn't grow up with CRPGs the way a lot of people in this space did, but when I discovered them, I fell head-over-heels in love. 

The difference between me and a lot of retro game devs (and players), which I feel makes Spellblade unique, is that I have no nostalgia for the RPGs of the 80s and 90s. Fallout 4 was my first Fallout game, and Skyrim was my first Elder Scrolls game, and my favorite games in those series today are still from the 90s (2 and Daggerfall, if you're wondering). I genuinely prefer many things about older games, even with no nostalgia. 

This helps me to think about them in a way that I feel is somewhat unique. I recognize their flaws, but also their timeless strengths. I can play, for example, Ultima IV without rose-tinted glasses, which helps me really understand the things I like about it and the things that I don't.

So when I set out to make an old-school CRPG, I knew that I wanted to focus on those strengths--the things that those games genuinely did well (sometimes better than modern games!), without being blinded by childhood nostalgia. The way they used abstraction to encourage players to immerse themselves in the game world. How they weren't afraid to (gasp!) actually demand attention from the player, thus forcing us to engage with the world and mechanics on a much deeper level. How they used creativity to overcome technical limitations.

Spellblade is an attempt to make a game that appeals to what we love about retro CRPGs without relying on nostalgia. It's not meant to run on an Apple II or look like an Ultima clone--it's meant to make the gamers of today feel how it must have felt to boot up one of those games, to wonder at the possibilities, to imagine all the ways they are about to inhabit a fantastical world.

Kickstarter allows us to give Spellblade the attention it deserves to become the RPG we've always dreamed of, without taking half a decade or more to develop. 

All work on Spellblade thus far has been done in our spare time. We've sacrificed leisure time, other hobbies, sleep, and social lives to bring the game to its demo/proof-of-concept stage. To our great satisfaction, people seem to like what we've made so far.

So now's the time to seek a boost. Raising a modest amount of money on Kickstarter allows us to crunch over Summer 2026 to ensure the game is ready for an Early Access release in 2026 (which backers who give $10 or more will get for free, of course). With all the groundwork of the engine and mechanics and artwork in place, nearly all of that time can be devoted to content. That means the game gets made much faster than we could ever hope to do treating it as a hobby, and a vibrant community gets to help shape the direction of the game. 

The money (minus 20% for Kickstarter fees and taxes) covers what I would have made in income during the months of June, July, and August, and will allow me to work 60-hours-per-week solely on developing and polishing the game, for 9 weeks straight. I will post devlogs at least twice weekly to update backers on progress, share screenshots, and solicit feedback.

We will also keep updating the free demo, and giving backers early builds, so that mechanics, story, gameplay, and more are refined and responsive to our players' wants. If our goal is met, we will set a tentative 2027 date for a full release of the game, with DLC/expansion content to come in 2028.