Image credit: Psychic Software / Rock Paper Shotgun

Psychic Software have announced The Lich Wars, a standalone prequel for their widely acclaimed RPG The Necromancer's Tale. Widely acclaimed by me , anyway. I'm pretty wide, these days – the local Morrisons keeps doing discounts on 80-biccy packets of bourbon creams.

I liked The Necromancer's Tale specifically for how it wove a whole RPG around the narrative dynamics of a single RPG class, with players performing rituals in each chapter to develop their morbid spellcraft, while managing the suspicions of nearby townsfolk. I also really loved its choose-your-own-adventure prologue . The Lich Wars sort of spins the prologue out into a full game.

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It's a partially voiced, branching storybook experience with skills and stats, evolving relationships and the possibility of character death (and presumably, undeath, if you end up dabbling in tomb wizardry).…