Bladeforge: Ascension Crusade

About This Game
In a single instant, every living person in Valthir saw their deepest longing made real: a dead king returned, a wife brought back from death, a kingdom burning, one faith rising above all others. And with that vision came a certainty: whoever reaches Qalar first can impose their perfect world on everyone else. No one knows what anyone else saw. Trust collapsed in an afternoon.
Bladeforge: Ascension Crusade is a tactical CRPG in which you lead a crusade across a desert continent toward Qalar. There are no good sides or bad ones — only people willing to kill for their own paradise. And the question the game asks you from the first minute is whether you, holding the power to impose yours, would be able to choose not to.
Positional Tactical Combat
Move multiple units per round from a shared action-point pool, with no rigid side-by-side turns. Inspired by the logic of chess, the system keeps the pace alive even with more than fifteen units on the field.
Choreographed Cinematic Combos
Corner an enemy between several of your units and trigger a choreographed combat sequence with dynamic camera work. But every strike can be blocked or dodged, and certain Arcanix abilities can trigger the combo from either end, changing the outcome depending on the order you combine weapons, elements, and positioning. A combo is planned across several turns — never guaranteed.
The Arcanix System
Six primordial elemental stones that fuse into your weapons and combine with each other to create compound elements: magma, steam, poison, electricity, ice, ash. Each Arcanix has a percentage-based quality that determines its power and skill ceiling, and the same stone unlocks different abilities depending on the weapon and fighting style of whoever wields it.
The Battlefield as a Resource
Raise walls of earth, flood an area to heal your allies, freeze that same puddle with wind, set a field of grass ablaze, hide a unit behind a curtain of steam. Terrain states stack and react with each other. And there's no separate map for exploration and combat — you fight exactly where you travel.
Classless Progression
No one is locked into "warrior" or "mage." Each character specializes based on what they actually use: the weapon they wield, the Arcanix they master, the professions they practice — archaeology, alchemy, trade, linguistics, diplomacy. Switching weapons doesn't erase what you've learned; it opens new paths.
Permadeath, Permanent Consequences
When a character dies, they don't come back. And their absence transforms those who remain: dependence on a fallen companion can curdle into panic, loyalty can turn into hatred toward whoever is seen as responsible.
Manage a Living Crusade
Hunger, stress, morale, and happiness. Your followers doubt, celebrate, break down, and can abandon you. Not everyone believes in your cause — some follow out of necessity, others out of a loyalty that's already broken. There's no single right way to reach Qalar, and not everyone will get there.
A World Built From Scratch
No orcs, no elves, no inherited pantheons. Valthir has its own races, religions, and languages: humans fractured by their own oaths, the hive-minded Xerthari, the Jabal who march toward the Wandering Edge seeking death, the desert-dwelling Azarim codebreakers, and the armed theocracy of the Valkorians.