CODEX MORTIS

Plan before you slaughter, because once the mission starts you fight with what you brought. Before every mission you assemble your loadout from the spells you own, and that loadout is your deck. A deck weighted toward Summoning wins the field by crowding it, with skeletons soaking the horde while you cast. A deck weighted toward Blood Magic hits harder and sacrifices your life to do it. 

Mutations sit on top of the skills you carry and change the way they work. A mutation riding your bone spear sends it out in a pattern you have to learn again, and one on a summon calls up another archetype of undead. Others reshape the ground an area spell covers or give an aura a character of its own, so a spell you have cast a hundred times comes out of your hands changed.

Every spell in your collection belongs to one of the ten schools of dark magic. There are 200 spells in all, and every school combines with every other.

• Necromancy: bone spears, corpse explosions and skeletal prisons.

• Summoning: raise undead armies and bone golems.

• Blood Magic: sacrifice life for power.

• Soul Magic: harvest essence, phase through enemies.

• Curses: break enemy will, spread terror and confusion.

• Harvest: cull the horde with the scythe.

• Death Knight: close-quarters swordplay, spectral armor and war cries.

• Spiritism: forbidden rites, spirit turrets and sacrificial urns.

• Desolation: sand shades and zones that punish the living.

• Apothecary: dark alchemy, elixirs and blight.