Video Game / Dawncaster

In a demon-infested world a new champion rises to end an era of darkness...

—Promotional materials

Dawncaster is the first game created and published by Wanderlost Interactive, a two-man indie game studio. It is a roguelike, deck builder, Role-Playing mobile game that sees you take on the role of an adventurer tasked with searching for the Dawnbringer, the chosen champion of the Chantry of Light, prophesized to save the Shattered Realms from the rising threat of the Umbris. Along the way, uncover the truth as to why he's gone missing and the source of the growing evil in the realm.

Like most roguelikes, every run begins with you only having the basic attack cards, 2 shields, and a single special action or ability that you selected as your starting loadout. Each character class accrues Experience Points that unlocks new weapons and abilities, along with their associated cards, and new character portraits. Moreover, you can mix and match unlocked abilities and weapons within a class. But unlike most roguelikes, which typically ties abilities to specific characters, abilities are tied to 3 stats, strength, dexterity, and intelligence, more in-line with traditional RPGs.

Dawncaster was released on March 11, 2021 on both IOS and Android and has since received three expansion packs. The first called "Metamorphosis" released on April 10, 2022 and included new cards, portraits, and balance changes. The second released on August 20, 2022 called "Death Of Divinity" featured 32 new cards as well as entirely new scenarios, including new enemies and bosses. The third released on April 7th, 2023 called "Masks of Misery" included new scenarios, new cards, and a new unlockable character.

Compare Slay the Spire, Monster Train, and Griftlands for other roguelike deckbuilders with RPG Elements.

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This game contains examples of the following tropes:

• Anti-Debuff: Certain Enchantments can make you temporarily or fully impervious to status ailments like Burn, Slow, and Poison. Similarly, certain enemies are also impervious to debuffs. Undead characters, for example, cannot be afflicted with Bleeding or Stun. Some bosses also have the innate ability of cleansing a status affliction at the start of their turn.
• Back Stab: "Ambush" cards have special qualities if played as your first card, or immediately after cards that reset your Ambush. One typical result is double damage.
• Blue Means Cold: The ice cards that the Arcanist can use are all colored light blue.
• Blue Means Smart One: The game uses a Class and Level System based on the Fighter, Mage, Thief fantasy classes that includes intelligence, strength, and dexterity as key attributes Color-Coded for Your Convenience: intelligence is blue, strength is red, and dexterity is green. Each of the 6 classes starts off with 2 skill points coming from those attributes. In a case of Magic Is Mental, the Arcanist (the game's Mage class) starts off with 2 intelligence skill points.
• Boss Bonanza: In the Final Dungeon you have to defeat 3 bosses fashioned after the Grim Reaper who are guarding the entrance to the Arch Demon.
• Cast from Hit Points: There are some strength cards that require you to lose a few HP to play, such Fury to gain stacks of Anger and one to get more energy to play cards. There is also a shrine that allows you to convert the cost of any playable card into 4 HP instead of using your energy allotted for a turn to play. This can be very helpful for higher cost cards since as long as it won't kill you, you'll always be able to play them, rather than needing to accumulate energy over multiple turns. Hurting yourself is also the most dependable way to get Frenzy effects, since not every foe is "nice" enough to hit you with Poison.
• Character Customization: While limited to premade character portraits, weapons, and abilities, you can mix and match them within a class. You can also upgrade your character to take on skills outside of their class, opening up previously unusable cards and abilities, further allowing customization.
• Class and Level System: There are 6 character classes to choose from and each one has its own progression that can be leveled up using experience points accrued from previous runs. Leveling up a character to certain thresholds unlocks new weapons, abilities, and character portraits.
• Class Change Level Reset: Experience points do not carry over across different characters, meaning that when you change classes the new class only has the levels you've reached with them.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Every character role portrait has a different color associated with it. These colors are also indicative of the kind of playstyle each character uses.
  • Arcanist: Blue, and starts off with 2 skill points in intelligence, which is color coded blue as well.
  • Rogue: Green, and starts off with 2 skill points in dexterity, which is color coded green as well.
  • Warrior: Red, and starts off with 2 skill points in strength, which is color coded red as well.
  • Hunter: Orange, and starts off with 1 skill point in dexterity and 1 in strength.
  • Knight: Purple, and starts off with 1 skill point in intelligence and 1 in strength.
  • Seeker: Teal/Turquoise, and starts off with 1 skill point in dexterity and 1 in intelligence.
• Critical Hit: Some weapons allow you to deal critical damage to foes, which is 2x the amount of damage listed on the card.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Corellon doesn't get to do anything before Dantelion just picks him up and crushes him to death.
• Damage-Increasing Debuff: There are mainly three: Brittle, which adds +1 damage to direct physical damage for each stack; Bleeding, which does +1 bleeding damage in a separate hit to the afflicted per stack, and Frozen, which by itself does not increase damage, but in conjunction with particular melee actions, can do critical damage.
• Damage Reduction: Shield decreases oncoming damage by 1 per stack of shield.
• Deck Clogger: Corruption cards are cards that either give you a small Status Buff for a price (typically an HP cost or taking a compensating debuff) or just purely negative cards that give you a negative Status Effect. The former are almost always playable while the latter usually aren't, although they will remove themselves from your deck once the turn they are drawn has passed.
• Decon-Recon Switch: Depending on whether or not you take the Arch Demon Dantelion at his word, the game is one for The Chosen One and The Prophecy. The Chosen One, according to the reigning religious authority and their interpretation of a prophecy, is the Dawnbringer. However, on your way to locate the Dawnbringer, you learn that he's skeptical of his own selection, though he still wishes to go to the source of evil and fight the Arch Demon Dantelion directly. Doing so gets him killed immediately, seemingly making him The Poorly Chosen One and leading to Thread of Prophecy, Severed. The Arch Demon then states that the Chantry only thinks of themselves of The Chooser of the One, led by divine guidance, but in reality they're just led by their own wishes and desires, any god that may have been leading them having long ago abandoned them. That said, he also insinuates that it was you in fact who is the true prophesized hero and should you defeat him, you would have effectively fulfilled the prophecy as The Unchosen One.
• Dungeon Crawling: The game is broken up into 8 different acts or Cantos, each one focusing on a specific dungeon you have to work through, complete with a final boss battle.
• Equipment Upgrade: You can upgrade any attack card by visiting either the blacksmith (who'll upgrade all basic attacks) or the alchemist (who'll upgrade any attack card), and doing so increases the damage the card does by 1 single point. All other card types, however, cannot be upgraded unless they have the Upgradeable trait.
• Eldritch Ocean Abyss: Canto V-A takes place in a watery, ghostly area. After fighting monsters, you can talk to an amorphous, many eyed underwater being who asks you to clear out the enemies in the area for them to get safe passage to the final dungeon where the Dawnbringer supposedly is. They will also bestow upon you a special power if you've met some prerequisites in the earlier chapters.
• Fast as Lightning: The "Zap" card is a lightning-based magic attack that costs 0 energy to play. If you acquire multiple in a hand, you can essentially play these cards quickly as they do not expend energy to do so.
• Fighter, Mage, Thief: The main roles one can play are either these roles straight up or a combination of these roles. Warrior, Arcanist, and Rogue are the classic roles, respectively. Hunter is a fighter-thief hybrid, combining strength and dexterity; Knight is a fighter-mage hybrid, combining strength and magical ability; and Seeker is a mage-thief hybrid, combining magical skill and dexterity.
• Fire, Ice, Lightning: Fire, Ice, and Lightning are the three main types of elemental magic.
• Fire Purifies: The Eternal Pyre acolytes that show up in Canto VI-B believe in a fire deity that will use fire to reveal truth and cleanse imperfections to defeat the darkness.
• The Good Kingdom: Brightcandle is fashioned in this way, albeit more as a frontier city than a kingdom. It is the place you can go after the first two chapters to rest up, it's where the Summoning Guild is located, and it is under threat by the encroaching evil influence of Umbris.
• Harmless Freezing: 99% of the time the Frozen status effect does not deal or impact damage taken. It only lowers the damage the afflicted can do by 1 per stack. However some melee actions will critically hit if the target is Frozen, invoking Literally Shattered Lives.
• Healing Potion: You can buy such potions from the Alchemist. The one that does the most healing will heal 10 HP when the character is above 50% of their HP or 15 HP when they are below 50%.
• Heal Thyself: You can heal yourself using potion cards and some attack cards in battle.
• The Hero: In-universe, it's not you, it's the Dawnbringer, a Warrior Of Light who is said to be the only hope against Umbris taking over. But by the end of the story, you become this as you challenge and defeat the Big Bad, sidelining the Dawnbringer in the process.
• The Hero's Journey: Like many works in the High Fantasy genre, the base story is a version of a classic Hero's Journey, this time with the modernized twist of making the Hero The Unchosen One. See the analysis page for an in-depth comparison.
• Hero of Another Story: The Dawnbringer, though it's played with. Technically, he's The Hero of the Shattered Realms and you are but an adventurer who's tasked with finding him so he can complete his job by defeating Arch Demon Dantelion. Along your path you must learn about his travels in order to find out where he is and what's happened to him. But ultimately, you become the Hero, telling the Dawnbringer that this isn't his fight, and defeating the Arch Demon yourself.
• Holy Hand Grenade: Though no role can start off with this training, if offered, you can get Divine skill points and gain access to Divine card types, many of which are support and stat boosting, but others are attack cards that evoke holy damage and imagery.
• Magic Potion: The Alchemist crafts various potions that you can buy to help you. They can heal, add armor, lower the cost of the next cards you draw, and more.
• Non-Damaging Status Infliction Attack: Some cards allow you to apply one of the several Status Effects to the enemy without dealing any damage. These are useful because such cards typically apply more stacks (4-5) of the status effect because there's no damage. Most Status Infliction Attacks only apply 2-3 stacks or make the number of stacks applied equal to the amount of damage inflicted, meaning that armored foes or foes with Impervious would not be affected.
• The Prophecy: The Chantry of the Light has a prophecy that every few hundreds of years, their God of Light Rae will select one person who is destined to save the Shattered Realm from the denizens of darkness. Whoever is selected is known as the "Dawnbringer".
• The Quest: You start the game off by taking on the seemingly simple quest of aiding the guild pushback against the Umbris. Canto II has you explicitly take a quest from the guild in order to prove your mettle. After you do so, your second and final quest is to help the guild locate The Hero, the Dawnbringer, who has gone missing.
• Shout-Out: The general idea of the game's setting was inspired by The Divine Comedy, as reflected in the sections being referred to as Cantos, and the Big Bad being named "Dantelion", as opposed to the usual "Dantalion".
• Status Buff: Several and both you, the player character, and enemies can gain them.
  • Anger - Increases the damage of all direct damage to the enemy by 1 per each stack of Anger.
  • Barrier - Acts like magic armor, defending against a single point of damage per stack. Unlike armor however, unused stacks of Barrier do not disappear after your turn ends, allowing you to stack them throughout an entire combat.
  • Chain - Increases the damage of your next offensive action. This effect keeps stacking as you use more Chain cards, but is reset when you use a card that doesn't have Chain.
  • Focus - After 5 stacks of focus are accumulated, draw 1 card extra per turn.
  • Haste - Lower the energy cost for the next X amount of cards per stack of Evasion one already has.
  • Evasion - Evade the next X melee action(s) per stack of evasion.
  • Impervious - This one's a bit complicated. For incoming direct damage, it completely negates a single instance of damage per stack of impervious. So if an enemy was going to attack for 50 HP, it would be negated, and you'd lose a stack of impervious. However, for indirect damage dealt via status effects like bleed, poison, burn it will completely negate it without losing a stack.
  • Reflect - An Attack Reflector that bounces back incoming damage per stack of reflect.
  • Regeneration - Regenerating Health that regens 1 HP per stack of regeneration.
• Status Effects: There are several in the game, both ailments and buffs. This trope however, will only focus on ailments and other non-standard status effects. To see what buffs are available, see Status Buff.
  • Bleeding - Attacks do an additional +1 bleed damage per stack of Bleed.
  • Brittle - the afflicted takes +1 damage from melee strikes per stack of Brittle.
  • Burn - per each stack of Burn deal 1 damage at the end of the afflicted's turn.
  • Charmed - When the afflicted's HP falls below the number of stacks of Charmed on them, their health zeroes and they die. However, incoming damage removes stacks of charm, 1 stack per point of damage, with the exception of piercing attacks.
  • Dazed - Counts down for each card played. At zero, Stun takes effect, preventing all further actions that turn.
  • Deep Wound - When the afflicted accumulates 5 Deep Wounds, they automatically die. Also, Deep Wounds can inflict the Bleed status on the afflicted after some upgrades.
  • Frozen - Decrease the damage from all attack cards by 1 per stack of Frozen.
  • Jinx - Nullify the next card played.
  • Poison - The afflicted loses 1 HP per stack of Poison whenever they play a card.
  • Slow - Add 1 stack every time the afflicted plays a card. Increase the cost of the next cards drawn by 1 per stack of Slow.
• Status Infliction Attack: Several cards allow you to both deal damage and afflict one of the many status ailments to the enemy. For example, one of the starting cards for the Arcanist, Frost Shard, does damage and afflicts the enemy with the Frozen status ailment for every point of damage that landed.
• Thread of Prophecy, Severed: Played with. On the one hand, the Chantry of Light chose Corellion Solspear as their champion based on a prophecy and he ends up being squashed like a bug by the Arch Demon, making him The Poorly Chosen One and seemingly playing the trope straight. On the other hand, if the Arch Demon is to be believed, the Chantry doesn't really know what they're doing and Corellion was never anything more than a random noble burdened with responsibility. You were always the one destined to face him, which would subvert the trope.
• Yellow Lightning, Blue Lightning: Lightning cards and the lightning staff are all blue.