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Solasta: Crown of the Magister devs discuss crafting a new D&D adventure

What goes into crafting a whole new game based on the world of Dungeons & Dragons? We asked the developers of Solasta, Crown of the Magister, which just released today on Steam Early Access.

Ozzie Mejia

October 20, 2020 6:30 PM

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There have been many games that have entered the Dungeons & Dragons space. The latest comes from the team at Tactical Adventures who are putting together Solasta: Crown of the Magister. This mixes together the storytelling elements of Dungeons & Dragons, the dice rolls of a tabletop game, and operates on the SRD 5.1 ruleset. It's a fresh way to experience an all-new D&D world and we reached out to Tactical Adventures CEO & Founder Mathieu Girard and Marketing Director Pierre Worgague to learn more.

"I'm a big fan of tabletop and D&D," Girard told Shacknews. "I've been for 30 years. It really feels like I'm old, but I am actually. I'm a veteran player of these kind of games and I tried to make it as authentic, as faithful, as possible in-game, so we have a license to use the D&D 5e rulesets, meaning that we can use the system reference document, the SRD. So we don't have everything from D&D, so [for] the rest we created homebrew ancestries and races and then classes and subclasses. So, the game is very faithful to all the monsters, items, classes you can find in the SRD and then we're adding on top of that our own. Again, trying to be faithful, but Solasta has a very strong focus on verticality and lighting. Light can be used as a weapon even, so we've also created subclasses which take advantage, which leverage these special features."

Girard and Worgague also discuss how COVID has impacted Solasta's ongoing development, working as a small development team of 17 people, the challenges in converting a physical tabletop game into a digital video game, the in-depth character creation system, and working with Wizards of the Coast. They also talk about the challenge of creating awareness for a D&D-based adventure when a certain other D&D-based adventure is getting a lot of the buzz.

Solasta is available now on Steam Early Access. For more interviews like this, be sure to subscribe to Shacknews and GamerHub.TV on YouTube.

Ozzie Mejia

Senior Editor

Ozzie has been playing video games since picking up his first NES controller at age 5. He has been into games ever since, only briefly stepping away during his college years. But he was pulled back in after spending years in QA circles for both THQ and Activision, mostly spending time helping to push forward the Guitar Hero series at its peak. Ozzie has become a big fan of platformers, puzzle games, shooters, and RPGs, just to name a few genres, but he’s also a huge sucker for anything with a good, compelling narrative behind it. Because what are video games if you can't enjoy a good story with a fresh Cherry Coke?