Spell Death

Your deck is the alphabet

Arrange seven letter cards into a word. The word is the attack. Longer words hit harder.

If you cannot see a word, throw the letters at the enemy one at a time for 1 damage each. We allow this. We do not respect it.

The map, the fights, the rewards and the boss at the bottom of each act will look familiar if you have played a deckbuilder. What you are climbing down through is the Athenaeum Mortis, a library that died badly and kept writing. You are a Lexicographer of the Dead, and the things down here are malformed text: Misprints, Errata, Ligatures fused wrong, marginalia that crawled off the edge of a page.

Paper decides what a letter does

Every letter is printed on a stock, which is the modifier it carries into the word. Iron converts its damage into Block. Gold-Foiled adds damage, and 4 more on words of six letters or longer. Crossed doubles the damage once and then the card is gone. Volatile explodes if it is still in your hand at the end of the turn. Devilish forces a discard, hands you a random buff, and leaves you to work out whether that was a trade. Jagged is the awkward one. It cuts when you throw the letter and does nothing when you spell with it, so a hand of Jagged wants the exact opposite of what a hand of Iron wants.

18 stocks. They go onto any letter you own, so a deck of common vowels can still end a boss.

130 words you have to find first

Spellbook words are not cards you draw. They are words you collected on earlier runs, and you carry three of them into a fight. Arrange the letters and the spell fires on its own. The panel tells you LORE is somewhere in that hand. It does not tell you where the L is, and it will not stop you spelling ROLE for the smaller number.

Four people who are wrong about language in four different ways

• The Compositor sets type. Common letters, Iron stocks, Block, patience. Start here.
  
• The Etymologist opens on a long word, and every word after it must be exactly one letter shorter. Chain down to the root and the multiplier climbs as the words shrink.
  
• Fever Tongue makes one letter in the Glossolalist's hand wild every turn. Wild cards, Sulfuric letters, fights that end early.
  
• The Rhapsodist forges a bar of up to four words and cashes the whole bar at once. AA, AABB, ABAB, AAAA. The rhyme scheme sets the multiplier.

You start as the Compositor. Clear Act 1 to unlock the Etymologist, Act 2 for the Glossolalist, Act 3 for the Rhapsodist.

Down through the dead strata

The Pressworks, where the presses remember being built. The Scriptorium, where scribes revise you mid-fight. The Cuneiform Depths. Then Ur-Script, which was language before anyone invented a surface to put language on, and The Logos, which is language itself and is not pleased to meet you.

73 enemies, 10 of them boss fights. One of the three that can end Act 1, The Redactor, bans letters from a deck you spent the whole act building around them. It is a fair fight and you will hate it.

[hr][/hr]
43 events, 31 scrolls for the run the events made worse, 54 pieces of clothing, 10 finger slots for tattooed letters that turn up in every later combat, 40 achievements, 20 ascension levels.

Also 13 curses, which go into your letter deck like everything else. Aphasia. Stutter. Palindrome. One of them is called Normality and it is the worst one in the game.

Type the word or drag it.