LORINDAL

Getting Started

Lorindal 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 built from one of eight races, a spread of starting stats, and three chosen skills — or hit Quick Start for a ready-made band of four to jump straight in. Everyone begins classless; your class is earned at level 10 and shaped by how you actually play.

A classic balanced band covers four roles: a front-line melee hero, a healer, an arcane caster, and a stealthy skirmisher — and in Lorindal you set each hero's direction simply by the skills you pick for them. 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 a handful of stat points each level (three as a Novice, more once you've earned a class) — and shape everything from your accuracy to your mana.

Your race adjusts your starting stats. Early on, grow the stats that back your chosen skills — STR for blades, DEX for stealth and bows, INT for arcane, WIS for healing — and once you earn a class it will lean on two primary stats worth favouring.

The Eight Races

Class & Path

Lorindal has no class-select screen. Every hero begins as a Novice — unclassed — and how you actually play decides the class you grow into.

Levels 1–9: the Novice

You choose three skills at creation (see Skills & Ranks), and those skills are your whole kit through the early levels. Swing a blade and you fight like a warrior; open Fire and you sling flame; take Stealth and you strike from the shadows. There is no class dictating what you may do — the skills you hold are the only gate. Every fight you pick, every spell you favour, and every rank you push is quietly recording the hero you're becoming.

Level 10: choose a class to grow further

Progress pauses at level 10 until you choose a class — a one-time step at the Trainer's Guild. Because a class's rarity is earned through skill mastery (below), most heroes take a solid basic class here to start — Warrior, Rogue, Scout, Monk, Mage or Priest, matched to what your skills qualify for. That's the beginning of your path, not the end of it.

Rarer classes are earned by mastering skills

Keep playing and the guild offers AI-crafted classes shaped from how you fought — named and themed to match, with a kit drawn from what you leaned into. How rare a class you're offered is gated by the rank of the skill it's themed on:

Push Fire to rank 5 and an Epic fire class can open to you; carry it to rank 8 and a Legendary one does. The class is always themed on the skills you truly mastered — commit to a path and it shows. Each grade of rarity also carries more power: more stat points per level, a bigger power multiplier, and deeper resource pools.

The archetype bases

Every crafted class grows from one of sixteen archetype bases — the DNA that keeps it coherent and balanced. Which base a hero draws from is decided by the skills they mastered; the class is then themed and tuned within that base's safe bounds and content pool.

Basic classes are a starting point

A basic class is a solid, fully playable path — but a starting point, not a ceiling. Keep mastering your skills and the guild will offer an earned Rare / Epic / Legendary class themed on what you do best. The goal is that every hero eventually walks a class shaped uniquely for them.

A base's "content pool" is what a class is allowed to use. How strong those spells and abilities are still comes from your skill ranks — see Skills & Ranks.

Magic & Schools

There are twelve 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 140 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 thirteen ability families with twenty abilities each (260 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 twenty-six: twelve Magic Spheres (one per school), thirteen Martial skills (one per ability family), and Lockpicking.

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.

Skill points — a build, not a buffet

You can't simply learn every skill. Opening a new skill at the Trainer's Guild costs a skill point, and points come slowly. You start with three (spent on your three starting skills), then earn one more at levels 5, 10, 15, then 25, 35, 45, then 70, 95, 120, and on up at widening intervals. Because points are scarce — and a new skill opens only within the pool your class allows — every hero is forced into a deliberate build rather than mastering everything.

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; spend skill points to open new skills your class allows.
• Your class — choose a class at level 10, then earn rarer, stronger classes (Rare → Epic → Legendary) by mastering the skills they're themed on (rank 3 / 5 / 8). Each carries a bigger 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 grades

A class's grade sets two things: stat points per level and a power multiplier applied to all your spells and abilities. Basic classes sit at 3 points and ×1.0; the AI-crafted grades climb from there — roughly Rare 4 pts / ×1.15, Epic 5 pts / ×1.30, and Legendary 6 pts / ×1.45, along with deeper HP/MP/SP pools. A rarer class is a straight upgrade on every axis. Which grade you can be offered is gated by skill rank — Rare at rank 3, Epic at 5, Legendary at 8 in the class's theme — so a class's power tracks the mastery you actually earned.

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 grade 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 that you hold both schools and meet 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.