Spellbound Kingdoms provides a blend of storytelling and traditional combat system design principles.

It is very heavily focused on dramatic flair and the development of characters, but at the same time allows players to enjoy a game with hard mechanics to back up their game. Combat is one of these examples. There are ways for almost every maneuver to be narrated in a fun and exciting way that adds to the flow of play, but there are still hard mechanics to back up the actions of characters.

The combat system is also very interesting. There are multiple styles (both for magic and mundane combat), which flow from moves which balance a character all the way to very powerful but unbalancing moves, leading to a flow of combat that starts slow, then rapidly speeds up, with the potential to end the combat quickly at the potential cost of falling behind the normal rythm of combat.

Spellbound Kingdoms does everything, but still manages to do so in a way that is very non-imposing, each segment feels like its own segment, and you could run a segment entirely as the master of a thieves' guild or the commander of a massive army, then transition back to a traditional hack-and-slash dungeon crawl, social scenes, or chases through dreary cities.

For taking a unique approach to everything, and finding stuff that just plain works, I give Spellbound Kingdoms a 5/5.