Spellsword RPG Development Update #12 — August 11, 2026

Hello Reader, here are the latest Spellsword updates!

Snapshot / TL;DR

We started the 70 Monster Challenge, published five new monsters, and opened the Bestiary to the public.
We tested and settled on a new direction for spell clashes, Wards, and magical defense. These changes are still internal and are not in the Rulebook yet.
The Force System received a substantial cleanup and expansion, including new Pushing Contest and Force-based Damage rules. The revisions are published.
Campaign Mode jumped forward again. Characters can exchange blows, combat engagements are being tracked visually, and area spell effects are getting close.
We are testing a possible move of the living Rulebook toward Notion with a publication layer such as Sotion. Even if the final platform changes, the consolidation work is already cleaning up our source material.
Some planned Mass Combat, Faction Play, and PDF work did not move as far as intended this cycle. Scheduling and other gameplay testing got in the way, while several unexpected areas moved much faster.

Major Progress This Cycle

70 Monsters, a Public Bestiary, and the First PDF

I announced a slightly ridiculous production challenge this cycle: 70 new monsters.

The first five are already live:

Crowned Wyvern
Revenant
Death Knight
Soldier
Giant Mosquito

We also opened the Bestiary to the public instead of keeping it behind an account.

There is an obvious marketing benefit to having a steady stream of monsters to show people, but this challenge is also solving a very practical problem for the first PDF.

The living Rulebook can always gain another monster next week. If the Bestiary is thin today, we can publish another entry tomorrow and everyone using the website gets it.

A PDF does not have that luxury.

Somebody might buy the PDF, download it, print it, and never check the website again. They might not even bother claiming whatever digital access comes with their purchase. Whatever monsters are in that book could be the only Spellsword monsters that person uses for quite a while.

That means the first PDF needs a Bestiary large enough to actually support play on its own.

There is no magical number where a Bestiary becomes "done," but the number we had was plainly too small for the standalone product we want to release. The 70 Monster Challenge gives us a concrete reason to attack that problem aggressively while also producing content that we can release publicly as we go.

Expect a lot more monsters.

Magic Defense Is Being Rebuilt

We spent a significant chunk of development time this cycle digging into Spell Clashes, Wards, Arcane Armor, and Arcane Penetration.

The current internal direction replaces the existing Arcane Armor and Arcane Penetration concepts with a cleaner resolution built around information the casting roll already produces.

For Spell Clashes and Wards, we take the spell's EDR, multiply it by the caster's Arcane Modifier and the spell's Spell Modifier, and compare that result against the opposing magic.

The stronger effect wins.

That gives casting quality direct mechanical weight rather than resolving the spell and then pushing it through another separate defensive layer.

Wards are also being built around this model. Once cast, they remain passive for their duration, but their defensive strength comes from the EDR established when the Ward was created.

We still have some questions to answer. In particular, we have not finalized how multiple Wards from the same caster should interact.

We also decided to add an active emergency defense against magic: the Mana Flare.

A caster will be able to generate a defensive flare equivalent in strength to a spell of the same mana cost, provided their Transmutation skill is developed to the required mastery. Defending against a Journeyman-level spell with a Journeyman Mana Flare, for example, requires Journeyman Transmutation.

None of this is published in the Rulebook yet.

We tested the underlying direction internally and like where the math is going. The next step is implementing the changes cleanly throughout the actual rules before we tell anyone to start playing with them.

This work should also give us a better foundation when we return to testing magic at Mass Combat scale. That connection looks promising, but we have not tested the revised magic system in Mass Combat yet.

Campaign Mode Is Starting to Look Like Combat

Tech continues moving the Companion App forward independently, and I got another look at Campaign Mode during our meeting Monday morning.

It has moved considerably.

Characters can now exchange blows, and the combat interface clearly shows who is engaged with whom. The encounter UI has also been cleaned up substantially, and time tracking in the normal campaign lobby has improved.

He is also getting close to applying spells across an area instead of only handling effects between individual actors.

Naturally, the moment he tried to show me more of it, things started breaking.

This appears to be one of my supernatural powers.

There are still bugs in the interactions between actors, area spell handling is not finished, and monster systems have not been built into Campaign Mode yet. Because of that, I still would not call full remote play close.

But the difference from one build to the next has been enormous.

Every time I get a proper look at Campaign Mode lately, it feels like the project jumped forward by a month. Seeing actual Spellsword combat taking shape inside the app was genuinely exciting.

Force System Revision Published

The Force System also received a substantial cleanup this cycle.

We reorganized and reformatted the section, drafted new Pushing Contest rules, added Force-based Damage rules, revised Impact Forces, and cleaned up Falling Force for easier reference.

Those revisions are now published.

This is less flashy than a new monster or a combat interface, but Force touches a surprising number of situations once characters start throwing things, knocking enemies around, falling from unreasonable heights, or otherwise interacting violently with physics.

The goal was to make those rules easier to actually use rather than merely having technically complete rules buried inside dense text.

Specialization Learning Is Live

The Specialization Learning rules discussed last cycle are now published in the Specializations chapter.

We also added Speedcaster, a new specialization that allows sufficiently trained casters to reduce the casting time of Apprentice-grade spells and above.

This closes another progression gap in the rules: characters now have an explicit published procedure for learning new Specializations after character creation rather than relying on an implied process.

Rebuilding the Rulebook's Foundation

We have also begun testing whether Notion could serve as the underlying source for Spellsword's living Rulebook, potentially using something like Sotion as the publication layer.

No final migration decision has been made.

The attraction is fairly straightforward: editing and publishing could become much faster, cross-referencing should be cleaner, useful search becomes easier, and maintaining one organized source of truth would be considerably less painful than the current WordPress-heavy workflow.

There are still things we need to prove, particularly access control, security, and how well the structure will interact with the Companion App.

Even if we ultimately decide against this exact publishing stack, the work is already useful.

Moving the Rulebook into a cleaner source structure forces us to consolidate material that currently lives in different places, validate which versions are actually current, clean up organization, and establish more reliable source documents.

That is work we also need for the PDF.

The PDF's editorial and format work largely fell through the cracks this cycle, but the underlying material has not simply sat still. A clean, validated source will make the eventual PDF conversion substantially easier than trying to design a book while simultaneously figuring out which copy of a rule is authoritative.

Systems Under Active Refinement

What We're Iterating On

The new magic-resolution model is now moving from an internally tested direction toward actual Rulebook implementation. Wards, Spell Clashes, Mana Flare, and related interactions all need to be written consistently before the revision goes public.

The Notion experiment is moving from "this might be useful" toward a real test of whether it can handle the Rulebook structure, permissions, publishing needs, and future integrations we actually care about.

Campaign Mode combat continues moving forward through actor interactions, encounter UI, area effects, and eventually monster support.

Faction Play has technically begun. The first couple of faction orders went out, but most of those orders have not produced player responses yet. I need to prod people and get that moving.

Problems We're Solving

The magic revision still needs clean implementation across every affected rule rather than changing one section and leaving contradictory old mechanics elsewhere.

The living Rulebook has grown across enough documents, tables, website pages, and development history that maintaining a trustworthy source has become a problem of its own. The Notion work is partly an attempt to solve that before PDF production magnifies it.

Campaign Mode can increasingly represent a real combat encounter, but interactions between actors still produce bugs and monsters are not yet part of the system.

Faction Play has a different problem: rules cannot generate a useful test if the humans involved do not submit their orders.

What's Still Uncertain

We have not finalized how multiple Wards created by the same caster should interact.

The new magic model has not yet gone through Mass Combat testing.

We have not committed to Notion/Sotion as the final public Rulebook platform. We are testing whether it actually satisfies our requirements first.

Full remote play through Campaign Mode is still a decent way off despite the rapid progress. Stable actor interaction, area spell handling, and monster support are among the major pieces still needed.

Mass Combat testing also slipped this cycle. Scheduling conflicts got in the way, and some of our available gameplay time went toward other tests.

Every once in a while, we also need to actually play Spellsword and remind ourselves that it is fun to play instead of merely difficult and tiring to build.

That is probably healthy.

Design Insight

We went into this cycle looking at several different pieces of magical defense: Spell Clashes, Wards, Arcane Armor, and Arcane Penetration.

We came out of it planning to delete two of them.

That is usually a good sign.

Arcane Armor and Arcane Penetration were doing useful jobs. Magic needs a way to resist other magic. A powerful spell should not automatically overpower every weaker caster, but the quality of the cast should matter too.

The problem was that we already had information capable of representing that.

Every successful spellcasting roll produces an EDR. That result tells us something meaningful about how well the character actually performed.

So we tested what happened when we stopped treating magical offense and defense as another largely separate layer and let that casting result carry more of the load.

The current internal model is simple.

Take the spell's EDR. Multiply it by the caster's Arcane Modifier and the spell's Spell Modifier. When two magical effects oppose one another, compare the resulting values.

If one wins, it gets through. Well, some of it depending on the effect.

That same basic logic can determine the strength of a Ward.

If I cast exceptionally well, the quality of that cast contributes directly to whether my spell breaks through opposing magic. If I throw up a Ward with a strong result, that Ward is stronger because I performed better when creating it.

The manipulation roll is no longer something we resolve and then partially forget while moving into a different layer of magical defense.

That also gives us room for more interesting defensive choices.

We decided this cycle to add Mana Flare as an active magical defense. Instead of requiring a caster to already have the correct Ward sitting in place, they can spend resources and use Transmutation to meet incoming magic with raw defensive power.

There are still limits though.

You cannot simply produce whatever defensive strength you want because you have enough mana. Your Transmutation mastery has to be capable of producing mana at that level quickly.

That gives us a distinction I like.

A Ward is preparation. You establish it ahead of time and let it do its job.

A Mana Flare is reaction. Something dangerous is coming at you now, and you burn the resources and capability necessary to stop it.

A Spell Clash happens when two magical effects directly oppose one another.

Different situations, but they can all speak the same mechanical language.

That becomes especially important as we keep expanding the scale of the game.

For instance, we have already been wrestling with what magic means during Mass Combat. The more special rules we need to translate ordinary magic into a larger conflict, the easier it becomes for Mass Combat to turn into its own disconnected game.

This new model may give us a cleaner bridge because the strength of an effect is already being expressed in a value derived from the normal casting process.

I say may deliberately.

We have not tested this model in Mass Combat yet.

Maybe it works beautifully. Maybe fifty wizards immediately expose something stupid that two wizards did not.

That is what testing is for.

But this revision has reinforced something useful for me: before adding another stat, another defensive value, or another procedure, check whether the system is already producing information that can do the job.

Sometimes the cleaner answer is sitting in the roll you already made.

—Christian

What Members and Testers Should Test

Use the new monsters. Crowned Wyvern, Revenant, Death Knight, Soldier, and Giant Mosquito are live. If one produces strange combat interactions, confusing abilities, or obvious balance problems, tell us.
If you have Rulebook access, put the revised Force System through ugly situations. Push people into things. Fall off things. Hit things with other things. Use Force magic. The rules are most useful when they survive situations we did not write the example around.
Try the published Specialization Learning rules. Pay particular attention to whether the procedure is clear enough that you know what your character needs to do to gain a new Specialization without developer interpretation.
Share anything weird you find in the Spellsword Discord.

What's Next—2-Week Objective

Continue the 70 Monster Challenge and keep expanding the Bestiary.
Push the Notion-based Rulebook test far enough to determine whether the structure and publishing approach can actually satisfy our needs.
Finish implementing the revised magic-defense and Spell Clash model and get the new rules published.
If time allows, return directly to PDF editorial and format work using the cleaner source material coming out of the Rulebook consolidation.