Solasta: Crown of the Magister Update – Toss a Coin to Your Party

The latest development update for Tactical Adventures’ D&D-based CRPG Solasta: Crown of the Magister starts by reminding us about the recently released Features trailer and the ongoing community vote. It then shifts its focus towards party creation and shares a detailed breakdown of how we’ll be rolling and customizing our characters in this upcoming RPG.

Here’s an excerpt:

It’s Party (Creation) Time!

Alright everyone, it’s high time we give you a tour of our shiny new Character Creator, so grab a cup of tea or coffee and get cozy because this Dev Update is going to be long!

Before we jump into the specifics of each steps of Character Creation, let’s quickly break down the UI. As you can see, the screen is split in three parts:

• On the left is a summary of your statistics. As we’ve just started Character Creation, you’ll see that the only information displayed for now are the racial attribute modifiers, as well as your base movement speed and your proficiency bonus. This summary will get updated as you make more and more choices.
• In the middle is the “Main Choice”, where you will be making the most important decisions when building your character. In this example, you get to select your Race / Sub-Race.
• On the right is the “Information / Secondary Choice”, where you will see all of the information to help you decide on what to select, as well as any other choices that wouldn’t fit in the middle window. Here you can find all you need to know about the Dwarves (and the Snow Dwarves in particular), as well as the Gender Selection.

The first screen of the Character Creator is the Race & Gender screen, where you can pick and choose between a total of 5 races, or 8 if you take into account all the Sub-races. Here you will find a mix between good old SRD choices (Hill Dwarves, Half-Elves, Humans & High Elves) and homebrew Solastan ones (Snow Dwarves, Sylvan Elves, Marsh Halflings & Island Halflings). The world of Solasta isn’t similar to any of the official D&D settings, which means that races have a different history than you might expect – and developed differently as a result. For instance, the old Elven Empire of Manacalon wasn’t above the usage of slavery (as a matter of fact, it relied quite heavily on it).

You might also be wondering: why have the gender selection here instead of later? Well, it’s fairly simple – as you can see on the right, there is a character model that will evolve depending on the choices you made, so we thought it’d be a little sad to have a male avatar forced by default until the customization screen.

Time to Pick a Class!

The second screen of the Character Creator is the Class Selection screen. Here you will find the 4 base classes (Cleric, Fighter, Rogue & Wizard) as well as those that were added through the Kickstarter Campaign (Paladin & Ranger) for a total of 6 classes at launch. As a reminder, we have also promised a free post-launch DLC to add the Sorcerer to the game for everyone.

While selecting a class might seem simple enough, in Solasta we have decided to give the player a little more choices based on existing Tabletop rules – and that is to edit your starting equipment based on your class. As you can see here, my Ranger is starting off with a Scale mail and two shortswords. However if I click on Edit Equipment…

My Dwarven Ranger is now wearing a Leather Armor, and has a Handaxe and Club equipped! This is actually not just a visual change on the avatar, the character’s inventory has already been created at that stage and they are simply equipping the weapons and armor that are getting added to his backpack.

On another topic, this is also where you’ll be selecting your Favored Enemy / Terrain as a Ranger, and you also have a little button “At Higher Levels” which can show you what new Class Features you’ll unlock (and when). Some of the other classes have special screens to select special features of their own, but we’ll show that another time!