KeeperRL – Guide to Spells

Spells / Schools

Spells are divided into spell schools. These schools are:

Mage

A solid all-round spell school for magical combatants, these spells focus on direct offensive and defensive abilities, as well as mobility.

Early spells like directed blast knock creatures and loose Stuff away, buying time for weaker Keepers to flee or recharge their magic missile, a short-ranged but piercing magical attack.

Mid-level mages can safely cast their longer-ranged magic missiles through friendly lines with advanced magic missile, patch themselves up with Heal Self, and jump around with early teleportation. Top-tier casters can buff their defense, haste themselves, teleport longer distances, and even go invisible.

Healer & Spiritualist

These schools focus on healing and curing mortal and spiritual creatures; in particular, folks trained in these schools can heal other units, protect against poison, and with proper training, patch up whole groups of injured creatures in one cast.

While these schools are totally void of offensive magic, a well-timed healing can decide battles, so recruit healers and spiritualists as your creature population warrants!

Fire

As the name suggests, this school includes spells that use fire-based magic, such as fire elemental, fireball, and fire trap.

Illusion

This school contains spells that manipulate perceptions and deceive enemies, such as deception, panic, invisibility, and pacify.

Fighter / Archer / Vampire

These schools provide some small spells and handle trained creature upgrades, such as vampire ennoblement (which may have been phased out in Alpha 36, unfortunately) and bypass-allies, allowing archers to safely shoot past friendly lines. Fighter types such as the Knight Keepers learn some melee combat techniques, such as shove and swap positions.

In vanilla KeeperRL, these schools are not particularly exciting…but mods can and do add substantial additional spells and techniques, so check your creatures and spell school listings in the Help section when you start a game using mods!

Chickenmancy

This school is a speciality of goblin cultures, and even they require specialized breeding to develop goblins with the right frame of mind to learn and control the power to summon chickens from nowhere and transform, however temporarily, others into chickens. Nevertheless, the school of Chickenmancy is a bit more strategic than might appear at first look!

While summoned chickens aren’t much of a fight and anyone polymorphed into a chicken is invulnerable, chicken’d enemies are much less effective fighters (and any buffs they may have tick down while they are in chicken form), and allies polymorphed into checkin form are invulnerable for the duration, which may save folks in precarious predicaments long enough for help to arrive.

Summoned chickens can take arrows for less-replaceable troops and bog down enemy movement. Please do not mock the chickenmancer.

Dwarf

This school includes defensive and offensive abilities, such as defense bonus, healing, and earth elemental.

Zombie Mage

This school is specific to zombie characters and includes abilities such as summon flies, animate corpses, and blindness.