Games Like Tomes and Tactics

Some games hand you a world. Tomes & Tactics hands you a place that was here before your character drew breath, and will go on after they fall.

This is a turn-based, single-player RPG that remembers what the great old role-playing games felt like: classes with real identity, a map you earn one tile at a time, and death that means something. Just you, one character, and sixty levels of a world that never quite lets its guard down.

Choose who you are — and live with it

Eleven races and thirteen classes, drawn straight from the golden age of the genre. Tank as a Warrior, twist songs as a Bard, raise the dead as a Necromancer, drink deep as a Vampire, or walk the dark road of a Shadow Knight. Every class earns its power differently — a Wizard buys spells from guarded trainers, a Warrior grows stronger by fighting, a Shaman seeks out rare elders scattered across the world. Roughly 100 abilities per class across 60 levels means the character you build is genuinely yours.

A world lit by hand

Tomes & Tactics renders in unicode — but forget the terminal. A custom Rust engine paints every tile with a cone of vision, colored light that falls off with distance, and reflections that ripple off water and ice to reveal what lurks just out of sight. Explored ground you've left behind dims to memory. Torchlight, lava, and spellfire all throw real light. It's ASCII the way you always imagined it — alive.

Death the old way

Fall in the deep places and you don't just respawn. You drop your corpse and everything on it where you died, and wake as a ghost at your bind point. Getting your gear back means the long, tense walk to reclaim it — the kind of risk the genre's classics were built on. Prefer no safety net? Flip on permadeath and make every step count.

A living, authored world

Explore Hollowbrook and the Eastern Steppes, climb to the capital at Kingsholm, march the war-front of the Reach, and delve the catacombs beneath it all. Towns hold shops, trainers, and rumors; factions — cultists, guilds, the restless dead — track how you've treated them, and remember. Follow a multi-stage main quest through a kingdom on the edge of war, or simply wander and see what the wilderness turns up.

Music that lives in the world

There is no soundtrack piped over the top of the game. All music is diegetic — a bard in the Hollowbrook Inn plays a real, seven-track songbook, and you hear it swell as you approach and fade as you leave. The world sings for itself.

Built to be played, not rushed

Come build a character worth walking back for.