D&D RPG Solasta is getting gnomes, tieflings, and a high-level campaign

Palace of Ice - Teaser trailer - YouTube

Solasta: Crown of the Magister, the RPG that let me finally make the weird D&D party of my dreams, is about to get even weirder. The newly announced Palace of Ice DLC will add two more playable ancestries—gnomes and tieflings—as well as a new campaign for characters level 10–16.

A continuation of the base game's campaign, Palace of Ice will let you either import heroes who completed Crown of the Magister or roll up new ones to take advantage of the added options. Like the original campaign, it can be played solo or in co-op with up to four players.

Alongside the Palace of Ice DLC will be a free update for the base game, adding six more faces to choose from and raising the Dungeon Maker's level cap from 12 to 16. Solasta's toybox for designing your own adventures, the Dungeon Maker, is also being expanded with a follower system for NPC companions and a world map to let you connect locations and throw in random encounters during overland travel. Owning the Palace of Ice will also let you add its monsters and environments to your DIY dungeons.

Solasta's Dungeon Maker is basically Neverwinter Nights meets Super Mario Maker, a way to both create and share your own dungeon crawls. Combined with Solasta's modability, it makes for a decent toolkit and you'll find some recommended adventures on our list of the best Solasta mods. I'm partial to Caer Falcarn and a HeroQuest tribute called SolastaQuest myself.

The Palace of Ice campaign promises to bring back the villainous soraks, the shapechanging lizard people from the Crown of the Magister campaign, but will also add some "ancestral creatures" who will be more challenging for high-level characters than the usual goblins and skeletons.

Story was never Solasta's strong point, but its implementation of D&D's 5E rules made for highly tactical turn-based challenges across a variety of multi-level environments. It fills a niche that's adjacent to Baldur's Gate 3, but distinct enough from it to keep me coming back with each new expansion.

Palace of Ice will be out in May, and can be wishlisted on Steam.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.