Spellsword RPG Development Update #15 — Sep 22, 2026
Hello Reader, here are the latest Spellsword updates!
Snapshot / TL;DR
- The full Starting Spell rebuild is live. All 24 packages were reviewed, with 274 retained spell appearances consolidated into 142 canonical spell identities built on 48 mechanical chassis.
- Character Creation received another major revision. Apprentice is now the normal starting Class Mastery, the starting Skill structure is clearer, and 22 new Starting Equipment packages are live across all eight Classes.
- The Blood rebuild is live across Character Creation, Combat, and Magic, with body-scaled Blood volume, revised Blood Loss thresholds, and Blood Potency for Transmutation.
- The Specializations revisions that were still waiting on WordPress in Update #14 are now live.
- Twelve more monsters are live in the public Bestiary: Gryphon, Hippogriff, Basilisk, Cockatrice, Stone Boa, Rock Angler, Skullclamp, Manticore, Gnoll, Lizardman, Barghest, and Dullahan.
- The Manticore through Dullahan videos are all recorded and scheduled. By the time this update reaches you, Manticore and Gnoll are live on video as well, with Lizardman, Barghest, and Dullahan queued behind them.
Major Progress This Cycle
Starting Spells Are Finally One System
The Starting Spell rebuild is finished and live.
This was not just a balance pass. We audited all 24 current Rune packages and every spell they were carrying. The source material contained 288 listed spell appearances. After removals, 274 remain.
Those 274 appearances (as in the individual spells within starting packages) are now represented by 142 canonical spell identities (actually different spells) built on 48 underlying mechanical chassis (overarching but shareable spell structures) instead of maintaining hundreds of copied or near-copied recipes independently.
That matters because the old structure made every future change more dangerous than it needed to be. If the same mechanical spell existed in several packages, changing one copy did not guarantee that the others changed with it. Some were exact copies, some were renamed copies, and some had tiny differences that needed to be either justified or collapsed.
The new Starting Spell Compendium now owns those mechanics. Class packages point back to the canonical spell or a defined variant instead of maintaining their own duplicate numbers, shortening the Character Creation chapter by removing bloat.
The rebuild also forced a cleanup of several Rune interactions that Starting Spells depend on. Target and Bypass now have clearer jobs, Charge handles later applications rather than abusing Trigger, Adhere is limited to persistent attachment, Homing can function as a Power or Sub Rune, and Control can move or reshape an established barrier without recreating it.
Basically, by getting in deep to fix problems, other problems showed up. We solved them, and now spells should have better, more consistent rules overall.
Character Creation Now Starts You Ready to Play
Character Creation also took a much larger pass than I expected this cycle.
Apprentice is now the assumed starting Class Mastery, while Novice remains available as a lower-powered campaign option for those that really like the way that sucks. (I get it as a masochistic gamer myself.) Characters build their base Skill ledger (mostly only needed when using scratch paper) before Race and Class additions, and selected or automatic Class Skills receive the revised starting bonuses.
We also synchronized those changes back into Classes and Skills, including the requirements characters actually need to advance a Class. That was important. Character Creation and advancement cannot describe two different versions of what a Class expects from a character.
Starting equipment also got a rebuild at the same time.
I’m tired, boss.
There are now 22 first-pass Starting Equipment packages across the eight Classes. Every character receives a personal baseline, a size-scaled Road Kit (Stoneborn kit and Halfling kit are not the same), a Class package, any applicable Apprentice module, and 5 Silver Scales in ordinary spending money.
The goal is to get a new character field-ready without turning Character Creation into an equipment-shopping exercise.
The packages also respect what actually matters mechanically. Supplied weapons come with the Basic Weapon Specialist support they need, mounted Knight and Cavalier routes can begin with their mount and tack, fitted equipment scales with SIZ and body frame, and the starting armor ceiling remains lamellar rather than handing out top-end plate armor protection like particularly wealthy starting coin could before.
This is still Early Access material, and it needs play. Heavy Bastion in particular remains an intentional pressure case where load and armor choices should matter. But the current package system is live and ready to test.
Blood Now Scales Like Blood
The Blood rebuild is also public now.
Living creatures use physical Blood volume tied to their bodies rather than treating Blood as an abstract resource that happens to share a name with something anatomical.
Bleeding is resolved through Bleed Units and current Blood percentage, with Blood Loss effects escalating as a creature falls through the 85%, 70%, 60%, 50%, and 40% thresholds. This is a notable change from the previous thresholds, but the assumptions around Blood also changed. Before, we treated the absolute volume of Blood as 2x your Blood points; now we don't.
Magic now also uses Blood Potency, essentially the magical richness of your blood, for Transmutation. Stored Blood retains the donor's Potency when properly preserved, which gives magically-loaded blood an actual mechanical value instead of relying on one-off creature text or guesswork.
This work has already started paying off in the Bestiary because creatures of very different sizes and magical strength can now use the same underlying system. This will be carried forward into future creatures. Already existing creatures will receive this with a planned revision and reconciliation after I finish the 70 Monster Challenge. I don’t see sense in doing it before then.
Twelve More Monsters Are Live
The 70 Monster Challenge kept moving despite everything else that tried to eat the schedule.
Since Update #14, the public Bestiary has gained the Gryphon, Hippogriff, Basilisk, Cockatrice, Stone Boa, Rock Angler, Skullclamp, Manticore, Gnoll, Lizardman, Barghest, and Dullahan.
The five newest entries cover a pretty wide spread of encounter types.
Manticore is a very rare magically reinforced aerial predator. Gnolls are organized raiders and hunters. Lizardmen are territorial wetland defenders. Barghests are undead pack hunters built around exhaustion and corrupted wounds. The Dullahan is a solitary mounted executioner hunting a marked quarry.
All five are live on the website for testing and use now.
The matching video scripts are complete, and all five videos are recorded and scheduled. Manticore and Gnoll are live by the time this email goes out, with Lizardman, Barghest, and Dullahan queued behind them.
Systems Under Active Refinement
What We're Iterating On
The new Character Creation flow now needs ordinary players to attack it. Mechanical QA is done; the next useful evidence is whether people can build characters without developer interpretation and whether the new starting packages produce sensible choices at the table.
Starting Spells are in the same position. The rebuild is mechanically complete and published, but a clean spreadsheet or rules audit cannot tell us whether every package feels useful, distinct, and appropriately strong during real play.
Monster Grade evaluation is also still being developed. We now have better physical comparison tools and enough current magic to begin meaningful magical calibration, but a physical-exchange result is not the same thing as a complete encounter Grade.
Problems We're Solving
Some equipment objects used by the Starting Equipment packages are still provisional and need normalization during the broader Economy and Equipment pass. Books, devotional kits, craft tools, ammunition, containers, and some prices still need the same level of cleanup as the packages themselves.
Load also needs table testing. Heavy armor is supposed to create trade-offs, but there is a line between an intentional pressure point and a route that simply feels bad to play. I want to be sure we are on the right side of that line.
The Starting Spell cleanup solved maintenance duplication. It did not magically prove that every spell is balanced or polished. Now that the packages are finally using one coherent rules model, testing will actually tell us something useful.
What's Still Uncertain
I expect some Starting Equipment weights, package details, and prices to move as they get used.
I also expect some Starting Spells to move once players begin putting the rebuilt packages through real encounters. The structure is much healthier now; individual numbers can still lose arguments with playtesting and get changed as a result.
Monster Grades remain provisional where the broader encounter evidence is incomplete. The Grade work deliberately doesn't pretend a calculator can replace terrain, party tools, magic, encounter control, or actual play. But we still want it to give a decent clue to what you are getting into.
Design Insight
Building the Starting Spells took me roughly six weeks.
I wasn't doing that again with the rebuild, if I could help it.
The obvious problem was the amount of material. Twenty-four Rune packages can carry a lot of spells. But once we audited the current source, the bigger problem wasn't the raw count.
It was duplication.
We had exact copies, renamed copies, near-copies, and spells that were mechanically the same except for one bounded change. They were spread across different Classes because that made sense to a player reading one package at a time.
It was me. I was the player.
It made considerably less sense from a game-maintenance perspective, and I recognized that as I finished the first attempt.
The audit started with 288 spell appearances. We kept 274 of them. An appearance is just a listed spell in a package, so only 14 listed package slots were removed in total.
But those 274 appearances only needed 142 actual spell identities, and underneath those were 48 mechanical chassis. Identities would be individually unique spells with different runes. Chassis would be a framework for a spell with different primary Power Runes defining their effect.
Ward Barrier alone replaced eleven copied records.
That kind of number makes the maintenance problem obvious.
If Ward Barrier exists eleven times, then every change to Ward Barrier is eleven opportunities for the game to disagree with itself and confuse both you and me. Maybe ten copies get fixed. Maybe one old number survives. Maybe one package gets a wording cleanup that accidentally changes the mechanic while the others do not.
That’s a friggin nightmare.
The copies are at least convenient until the first time you have to change them...
So the new structure separates two jobs that we had been asking the same text to do.
The Class package tells the player what their character gets and why they should care.
The Starting Spell Compendium owns the actual spell mechanics. That compendium is in the Runes and Spells chapter, making me an honest man. That chapter only included the Runes and their rules until now.
If a package uses the same spell as another Class, it points to the same canonical record. If it needs a real variant, that variant has a defined difference rather than becoming another mostly identical recipe that has to be maintained separately.
That does make the underlying rules structure a little less self-contained than simply pasting a complete spell into every package.
I think that trade is worth it.
Spellsword changes too much during Early Access for duplicated mechanics to be cheap. Every copy becomes another place we have to remember to update, audit, and test.
That is a broader lesson for me.
Duplication often looks like simplicity from the reader's side because everything they need is right in front of them. And to boot, it's easy to justify it for a website because we don’t have the same limitations as you would in print.
But if the duplication makes the game harder to keep correct, it eventually becomes complexity for everybody anyway.
The better answer is to keep the player-facing path simple while making the underlying rule live in one place.
That is what we finally did with Starting Spells.
And I'd really rather never spend six weeks rebuilding them again, so I’m glad we crushed it in one week this time and made it even easier to maintain while we were at it.
—Christian
What Members and Testers Should Test
- Build a new character using the current Character Creation rules. Pay attention to whether the Apprentice default, Skill setup, Race/Class additions, and Starting Equipment flow make sense without needing somebody to explain the intended order.
- Use the new Starting Equipment packages. Watch encumbrance, armor choices, pack dropping, mounted storage, and whether any Class feels obviously over-equipped or under-equipped.
- Use the rebuilt Starting Spells. In particular, test barriers, Target and Bypass, Charge, Trigger, Adhere, Control, and any package where two spells seem to be competing for the same job.
- Push the Blood rules. Bleed characters, treat them, use creatures of very different sizes, and test Blood Transmutation when potent monster blood is available.
- Use the new Bestiary entries. If a Grade feels wrong, an ability is confusing, or a creature becomes much stronger or weaker than its entry suggests once the environment matters, tell us.
- Share anything weird you find in the Spellsword Discord.
What's Next—2-Week Objective
- Continue the 70 Monster Challenge and keep the new monster/video queue moving.
- Put the revised Character Creation, Starting Equipment, Starting Spells, and Blood systems through real play and fix problems that actually show up.
- Advance the Grade Evaluation work from physical comparison toward a useful encounter-level framework now that current starting magic is available for calibration.
