Legend of Grimrock Magic and Runes Update

The latest update for the upcoming indie real-time first person dungeon crawler Legend of Grimrock has the team explaining its peculiar magic system, which uses a runes grid instead of a normal list of spells available for casting. Here’s a sampling:

Spell casting is an integral part of the diet of any healthy fantasy setting and there have been numerous different approaches to it in computer role playing games. To us, the systems where you pick a spell from a list have always felt very mundane: invoking magic should feel like you’re messing around with mystical forces instead of a spreadsheet! Runes are true and tested vessels for arcane power and they certainly make your imagination run wilder than text printed with Arial, size 12, so using them was a pretty obvious choice for us from the get go. And despite them being more abstract than writing, they still have the opportunity of having a logical underlying structure that prevents the spell casting system from turning into a bewildering mess where the player doesn’t have a chance to figure out what he’s actually doing. I’m here to explain a little bit of how we handle that logic and what our runes are.

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Now the runes opposite to each others should start to make a little more sense: life is opposed by death, earth by air, spirituality by physicality and they are all bound together around the center that represent the wholeness. The spells are formed by selecting different combinations of these concepts. For example a poison cloud is invoked by calling air (for the cloud) and ground (for the toxic spores) and a powerful exploding fireball, the fantasy game classic, is formed from fire, air and physicality. All the spells have a logical underpinning and a clever player might figure out some new spells before even discovering a recipe scroll from the dungeons for it. But to stop the more modern wizards who wield the power of Google from gaining an unreasonable edge, the spells also have skill requirements the character needs to fulfill to cast the spell successfully.