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.
