SHADOWSPIRE

Getting Started

Shadowspire is an old-school, first-person party dungeon crawler in the spirit of The Bard's Tale and Wizardry. You build a band of heroes, explore an overworld of thirty towns, and descend into the scaling dungeon beneath each one.

From the title screen you can Create Your Party — up to four heroes, each chosen from eight races and thirty classes — or hit Quick Start for a ready-made band of four (a fighter, a rogue, a mage and a priest) to jump straight in.

A classic balanced party is a front-line fighter, a healer, an arcane caster, and a rogue or ranger. You begin with 200 gold and everything to prove.

The Loop

Each town sits on the overworld with its own dungeon below it. The rhythm of the game is simple and endlessly deep:

• Descend into a town's dungeon to fight monsters, earn XP and gold, and gather loot and crafting materials.
• Return to town to rest at the Inn (restoring HP/MP/Stamina and applying your level-ups), shop, heal at the Temple, and train.
• Push deeper. Every floor is more dangerous than the last, and every town's dungeon is tuned to a higher band of monster levels than the one before. The overworld's danger rises the farther you roam.

Dungeons scale all the way to character level 400. There is always a deeper floor and a stronger foe.

Combat Basics

Battles are turn-based. Each hero takes an action in initiative order against up to six enemies. Your options each turn:

Hover any spell or ability in combat to see exactly what it does. Fallen heroes can be raised at a Temple, so a bad fight is rarely the end of the road — but retreat is always an option.

Heroes & Stats

Every hero has seven core attributes. They rise as you level (you spend points each level based on your class tier) and shape everything from your accuracy to your mana.

Your race adjusts your starting stats, and your class's two "primary" stats are the ones it leans on — those are the ones to grow.

The Eight Races

The Thirty Classes

Every class is one of three archetypes: Martial (fights with abilities and stamina), Caster (wields spells and mana), or Hybrid (a bit of both). Classes come in tiers — Basic, Advanced, and Expert — and you promote to higher tiers at the Trainer's Guild as you qualify. Higher tiers grant more stat points per level and a bigger power multiplier.

Basic — where everyone begins

Advanced

Expert

"Access" is what a class is allowed to use. How strong those spells and abilities are comes from your skill ranks — see Skills & Ranks.

Magic & Schools

There are nine schools of magic, each with around forty spells that unlock across ten skill ranks — from a first-rank cantrip to a devastating high-rank working a level-300 archmage grows into.

Each spell tells you plainly what it does — a line of flavor plus the mechanics (target, effect, cost). Open a caster's Spellbook to read every spell they know.

Hybrid Spells

Beyond the single-school spells there are over 120 multi-school hybrid spells — workings that fuse two schools into something greater. Steam (Fire + Frost), Firestorm (Fire + Storm), Oblivion (Shadow + Death), Lifebloom (Holy + Nature), and many more, each in four escalating grades (Greater, Grand, Supreme).

This is where magic goes deep: a caster with several schools has a huge web of powerful combinations to work toward.

Abilities

Martial heroes fight with abilities — powered by stamina (SP), fully separate from spells. There are eight ability families with twenty abilities each (160 in all), unlocking as you raise the matching skill so there's always a stronger technique to aim for.

Every hero's known abilities — with a plain description of each — live on their Abilities sheet.

Skills & Ranks

Skills are the heart of your power. There are seventeen: nine Magic Spheres (one per school) and eight Martial skills (one per ability family).

Each skill has a Rank (1–10) and, within each rank, a Level (1–10). You raise a skill simply by using it — casting a Fire spell trains Fire; using a Blade ability trains Blade. Fill a rank's ten levels and the skill ranks up (Rank +1, Level resets to 1).

Higher ranks do two things: they unlock stronger spells and abilities, and — for anything you already know — every rank you hold above its requirement adds mastery power on top. There's no wasted training.

Towns & Services

Every settlement offers the same essential services — your base of operations between delves:

The Tavern

The tavern is more than a rest stop. Its rumor board carries word of other real adventurers across the realm — deeds pulled from actual events: parties reaching new floors, heroes hitting milestone levels, bosses slain, and the occasional grim tale of a party that didn't make it back.

You can also talk to the barkeep — ask about the dungeon, the towns, or just trade stories. They'll answer in character, drawing on the goings-on of the world.

Listen for rumors before a big delve — you never know what you'll learn.

Professions & Crafting

Once a hero reaches level 10, they may learn a profession at the Crafting Guild. Professions turn the materials dropped by foes and found in chests into real gear — and at high mastery they produce equipment better than anything a shop sells.

• Weaponsmith — swords, maces and great melee weapons.
• Bowyer — bows and ranged weapons.
• Armorsmith — heavy chain and plate armor.
• …and more, each with its own line of blueprints.

Every craft grants profession XP, raising your Craft Level (up to 100). Higher craft levels unlock better blueprints and improve the quality of everything you make.

Growing Stronger

There are several axes of progression, and the best parties push all of them:

• Levels — win fights for XP, level up (to a cap of 400), and spend stat points to shape each hero.
• Skills — use spells and abilities to rank them up, unlocking stronger options and adding mastery power.
• Class promotions — meet a higher class's requirements and change class at the Trainer's Guild. You keep your level, stats and skills; you simply gain a stronger kit and more points per level.
• Gear — buy, loot, and eventually craft equipment far beyond the starting fare.
• Deeper towns — each town's dungeon is tuned higher than the last; the realm always has somewhere more dangerous to test you.

Deep Mechanics

For players who want the numbers under the hood.

Class tiers

A class's tier sets two things: stat points per level (Basic 3 · Advanced 4 · Expert 5 · Master 6) and a power multiplier applied to all your spells and abilities (Basic ×1.0 · Advanced ×1.2 · Expert ×1.45 · Master ×1.75). Promoting is a straight upgrade to both.

Mastery power

A spell or ability lists a required skill rank. Its effective power is roughly:

base × (1 + 0.10 × ranks above requirement + 0.03 × (skill level − 1)) × class power × your stat power

In plain terms: every skill rank above a spell's requirement adds +10%, every skill level adds +3%, your class tier multiplies it, and your relevant stat (INT for arcane, WIS for healing, STR for melee, etc.) multiplies it again. Overtraining a skill is never wasted — it keeps making everything in it hit harder.

Hybrid gating

A hybrid spell requires access to both schools and a rank gate in each (typically one rank below its grade in the primary school and two below in the secondary). Casting it trains both schools.

Resources & regen

HP scales with CON and level; MP with your class and WIS; SP with CON and DEX. All three tick back up as you move through the dungeon and refill completely on a night's rest. Accuracy, dodge, crit, defense and initiative are all derived from your stats, gear and level.