If I could only change one thing in Siralim 2, it would be Runes. While the core concept is interesting enough, this system has a few flaws. First, the effects of runes were poorly balanced. Many of these items were useless, while others were so powerful that they were must-haves. Runes also didn’t stack in your inventory and saw very little use in post-story content, which caused players’ inventories to constantly clog with dozens of runes that you’d clearly never use. Aside from all of that, runes simply weren’t that interesting. I hope to address these problems in Siralim 3.

Runes

Runes now stack in your inventory. This should make them much easier to manage. In addition, there are now 50 runes for you to find, and most of them have different effects than they had in Siralim 2. Here are a few examples:

Ith Rune – Your creatures’ Critical buffs now also work with spells.

Yar Rune – Your creatures’ Taunt buffs now also cause them to automatically Provoke at the end of their turns.

Zar Rune – Enemies’ Blight debuffs now also cause any buffs they gain to be converted to a random debuff instead.

If these feel too niche for you, there are a few basic ones as well, such as the Aen Rune which simply increases your creatures’ Health by 10%.

Runewords

You can equip 5 specific Runes to form a “runeword”. Runewords give a very powerful effect to you or your creatures. For example, you can equip the AenKihMulRuhZar runeword which translates to “Light”. While this runeword is active, Surathli will sometimes join you in battles to support your creatures. There will be dozens of different runewords for you to discover. Note that not all combinations of runes will form a runeword.

To prevent players from constantly swapping out their runes to form new runewords without any thought, there is a now a small chance that your runes will break when you unequip them.

Artificer

The Runemaster from Siralim 2 will return in Siralim 3, but this time he’ll be known as the “Artificer”. You can trade your unwanted runes to the Artificer in exchange for knowledge of a new runeword. The Artificer also allows you to choose from the list of runewords you’ve discovered and equip the necessary runes automatically. The Artificer also has one other function that will serve as a rune dump, but that’s related to another system that I will reveal in a later post.