Grave expectations

Psychic Software have announced The Lich Wars, a standalone prequel for their widely acclaimed RPG The Necromancer's Tale. Widely acclaimed by me, anyway. I'm pretty wide, these days – the local Morrisons keeps doing discounts on 80-biccy packets of bourbon creams.

I liked The Necromancer's Tale specifically for how it wove a whole RPG around the narrative dynamics of a single RPG class, with players performing rituals in each chapter to develop their morbid spellcraft, while managing the suspicions of nearby townsfolk. I also really loved its choose-your-own-adventure prologue. The Lich Wars sort of spins the prologue out into a full game.

It's a partially voiced, branching storybook experience with skills and stats, evolving relationships and the possibility of character death (and presumably, undeath, if you end up dabbling in tomb wizardry). It casts you as a musketeer in the alt-1700s, battling through two of the titular lich wars in the course of a 30 year career with three main paths that also features plenty of regular, non-lich wars.

Here's how the devs characterise the plot: "The Lich Wars explores the early romantic & gothic themes of technological anxiety, unfettered progress, the ethics of war, and the destructive mental infection brought on by dark magic. This is a time at the cusp of rational thought and superstition; science and magic. The world is dark and dangerous. Courtly intrigue collides with black magic even as chemistry emerges from alchemy."

As regards the presentation, there are still elements of the old 3D world in the shape of maps and tabletop, but the bulk of it appears to consist of hand-drawn illustrations and unfurling paragraphs. "You will visit much of the alt-history kingdom of Rulsthen, near Venice," the devs promise. "You may also travel across Western Europe as you march to the Great Northern War and the War of Spanish Succession." Gosh, whole lotta wars. Can we not just have one big war - a "World War", if you will?

This feels like a more economical production than The Necromancer's Tale, but I think it's change for the better: toing and froing about the 3D town was my least favourite aspect of the older game, much as I enjoyed the writing of the setting. Lift the coffin lid of the Steam page for more. Release date there is currently none.