Announcing Shattered Arcana — Seven Planes, One Throne

Mythforge Studios is proud to announce our debut title: Shattered Arcana.

This is not a small game. We are building the most ambitious turn-based fantasy strategy game ever made — a spiritual successor to the classics that defined the genre, rebuilt from the ground up in Unreal Engine 5 with a scope that the original designers could only dream of.

The forge has been lit. Here is what we are building.

What Is Shattered Arcana?

You are a wizard. Not a hero, not a soldier — a wizard. A being of enormous magical power and even greater ambition, vying for supremacy across a multiverse of eight interconnected planes of existence.

You begin with a city, a spell book, and a handful of troops. You end — if you survive — as the undisputed master of reality itself, commanding vast armies across planes of golden sunlight and purple shadow, forging pacts with Dragon Lords and Demon Princes, weaving spells that reshape the very terrain underfoot.

Shattered Arcana is a 4X turn-based strategy game (eXplore, eXpand, eXploit, eXterminate) at grand scale. Every turn, thousands of decisions unfold across the world. Cities grow. Armies march. Wizards scheme. Portals between planes flicker open and closed. Dragons expand their domains. Plagues spread along trade routes. Organizations recruit agents. The world is alive — and it is trying to stop you.

The game runs on any hardware from the last five years, including integrated graphics. This is a thinking person's game. It does not need to be beautiful at 4K to be profound.

Eight Planes of Existence

The multiverse of Shattered Arcana is divided into eight distinct planes — each a complete world with its own surface, Underdark, and underwater zones. Portals connect them. Control the portals, and you control the flow of armies, resources, and magic across reality.

Aurelith — The golden plane. Endless daylight, towering spires of sun-bleached stone, fields of amber grain. Home to High Elves, Sun Giants, and the Golden Wyrms. Magic school: Radiance. Spells of blinding judgment, solar flares, and dawn resurrection.

Noctharion — The shadow plane. Perpetual twilight. Crystalline obsidian forests, rivers of liquid shadow, cities lit by cold witch-fire. Home to Dark Elves, Shadowkin, and the Void Serpents. Magic school: Shadow. Spells of dream invasion, void consumption, and nightmare summoning.

Verdantis — The primal plane. An ocean of living forest broken by volcanic peaks. The trees are ancient and aware. Home to Wood Elves, Treants, Beastkin, and Myconids. Magic school: Primal. Spells of living walls, spore plagues, and beast communion.

Infernyx — The dual fire plane. Volcanic wastelands meet iron cities in a single tortured realm. Fire Giants, Magma Wyrms, and chaos-aligned demons share a world with calculating Archdevils, soul forges, and the cold bureaucracy of hell. Two factions. One plane. Irresolvable conflict. Two magic schools: Magma (volcanic) and Pact/Binding (contractual). Spells of lava flood, forge enchantment, soul contracts, and devil summoning.

Aethermist — The crystal plane. Floating islands of pale blue crystal above endless cloud banks. The air tastes of ozone. Home to Crystal Elves, Stormborn, Wind Djinn, and Phase Hawks. Magic school: Crystal. Spells of mana crystallization, time slow, and resonance shatter.

Abyssal — The demon realm. Endless chasms. Architecture built from flesh and bone. Chaos magic that warps the laws of reality itself. Demon Princes rule through fear and raw power — no law, no hierarchy, only dominance. Magic school: Chaos. Spells of reality tearing, mutation, and entropy waves.

Ethereal — The spirit realm. Translucent, shifting, unknowable. Mist seas. Crystallized memories. Thought storms. Home to Wraiths, Phantoms, Will-o-Wisps, Phase Beasts, and Dreamwalkers — creatures that are neither good nor evil, merely alien. Magic school: Spirit. Spells of phase shifting, memory drain, and ghost armies.

Feywild — The ever-shifting realm of the Fey Courts. Time moves wrong here. Forests rearrange themselves overnight. Two courts war in perpetual cold conflict: the Seelie Court of eternal summer, and the Unseelie Court of endless winter. The Erlking rides at the head of the Wild Hunt, and his quarry is anything bold enough to enter uninvited. Fey Bargains bind tighter than iron. Magic school: Glamour. Spells of true naming, illusory armies, time distortion, and pacts that cannot be broken.

Each plane has its own surface, Underdark, and underwater zones. 256,000+ full-grid tiles of world to explore, conquer, and reshape.

54+ Playable Races

Every plane is populated by multiple civilizations, each with unique unit rosters, city mechanics, magic affinities, and AI personalities. Surface races. Underdark races. Aquatic races. The full roster spans over 54 species — from High Elves and Dwarves to Myconids, Leviathans, Crystal Elves, Shadowkin, and beings with no name in any human tongue.

Each race builds differently, fights differently, and views the world differently. Playing a Lizardman empire on the swamp margins of Verdantis feels nothing like playing a Dark Elf empire in the frozen Underdark of Noctharion.

Race design follows one principle: every civilization must feel like it has a real culture, a real economy, and real reasons to exist — not just different stat blocks.

600+ Spells Across Nine Magic Schools

Magic is the heartbeat of Shattered Arcana. Your wizard's spell book defines your entire strategic identity.

There are two layers of magic in the game:

Universal schools — Life, Death, Nature, and Arcane. These spells work on all planes, scaling gradually with distance from their plane of origin.

Plane-native schools — nine schools across eight planes. Infernyx alone has two: Magma (volcanic, chaos-aligned) and Pact/Binding (contractual, devil-aligned). Radiance on Aurelith. Shadow on Noctharion. Primal on Verdantis. Magma + Pact/Binding on Infernyx. Crystal on Aethermist. Chaos on Abyssal. Spirit on Ethereal. Glamour on the Feywild.

Casting a plane-native spell on its home plane costs 50% less mana. Casting it cross-plane costs 300%. Some spells — Lava Flood, Phase Merge, Soul Contract — only function on their home plane at all.

Wizards native to a plane start with three plane-specific spells. Any wizard can research any spell, but non-native wizards pay double the research cost.

600+ spells total. No two wizards will ever have the same book.

The Vision

We are building Shattered Arcana because we believe the 4X strategy genre has not been pushed to its true ceiling. The classics of the 1990s were constrained by hardware. Modern 4X games have been constrained by scope and ambition.

We have neither constraint.

We have a team of specialists. We have a clear technical foundation. And we have a creative mandate: build the game that the classics were always trying to be.

This game will run on Intel integrated graphics. It will support eight-player multiplayer. It will have a modding SDK. It will be beautiful at every hardware tier — from a $50 used card to a flagship GPU.

And it will have depth that takes years to fully explore.

The forge is lit. The arcana is shattered. One throne awaits.

What's Next

In the coming weeks we will be publishing regular dev blog posts from the team — covering world-building, art direction, engineering decisions, AI design, and the mechanics behind the spell system.

Follow us on Discord, subscribe to the newsletter, and watch this space.

The first dispatches from the forge are coming soon.