Scrolling for Caller's Bane

Scrolls/Caller's Bane Official Launch Trailer Thumbnail. Taken from YouTube.

Not matter how much you enjoy something, you need to have a break from it and redirect your attention to something else. While Minecraft was still in development and getting closer to release, some people at Mojang Studios wanted to do something different. Something new. It doesn't seem like there was a problem with that as Scrolls, a game that's now known as Caller's Bane, was announced and then released.

Most people out there only know Mojang Studios for Minecraft, but there're were other games released by company that weren't related to their blocky hit. A few people will likely recall those titles and I intent on covering them similarly to Minicraft and other games I wrote about here. As all of them officially faded away, I think it would be interesting to see what Caller's Bane had to offer and where it is today while learning about the game.

Not Cards, Scrolls.

Despite the continuous success of Minecraft, some folks at Mojang wanted to do something new. It doesn't come as surprise that Markus "Notch" Persson was involved in the process since he loved working on smaller projects he finds interesting (if Minicraft is anything to go by). Another notable developer is company's co-founder Jakob "JanKob" Porsér. Scrolls was announced on March 2, 2011. Similarly to Minecraft, it would go through both Alpha & Beta testing and glow together with the game's community. Releasing in December 11, 2014 for PC, Android and Mac, Scrolls might've not had enough space in the gaming niche as Hearthstone from Blizzard came earlier to the party.

Scrolls Champion Cape.
Taken from Minecraft Wiki.

You know, I think it's pretty save to say that it was overshadowed? Too soon? Fine. What the game is about, anyway? Well, it's a multiplayer title with seemingly no story and/or lore. Nothing wrong with that, so let's just get over to the gameplay stuff. Cards here are called "scrolls" and they come with multiple types, required resources and rarity. Caller's Bane combines board and trading cards genres with the board personally reminding me more of something like Heroes of Might & Magic series. I really like the game's art and music is decent too.

I'm not doing Caller's Bane any favours and these posts never dived deeper into this stuff in these kinds of "articles", so let's get over to some curious highlights. While you had to buy this game, there were optional microtransactions using "shards" as premium currency if you really wanted to get more scrolls. While there was a typical achievement system, the special reward in a form of Minecraft cape awaited the player who managed to earn five weekly first place badges on Scrolls from November 7, 2014 to September 30, 2015. This decision was related to the game's fate as Mojang also stopped selling aforementioned shards, but we have to address the elephant in the room.

Parchments' Fate.

I have to mention the settled legal conflict between Mojang and Zenimax Media over the use of name "Scrolls" since they thought it infringed The Elder Scrolls trademark. Situations like this are always so weird and baffling to me, whenever it's Gearbox changing Homeworld: Cataclysm to Homeworld: Emergence because Blizzard trademarked "cataclysm" for the third World of Warcraft expansion or Sky company trying to go after No Man's Sky. You can write an entire post about this circus, that's how ridiculous it gets! We're getting sidetracked though.

As it likely became apparent to you, Scrolls never got as much attention as it needed and/or deserved. Twenty days after the release of "Echoes" update on June 9, 2015, Mojang published the "It's been a Blast Automation!" article where they announced that this would be the last major update for Scrolls with servers staying alive until at least July 1st, 2016. I'm not sure if any other company provided such an early heads-up since that was a sweet move from Mojang Studios. It wasn't until February 13, 2018 when the fateful day came and Scrolls servers went offline. Mojang's developers jumped into the game on February 9th and two days later, on February 11th, they run the last official community tournament.

"The Game is now free!" Thumbnail. Taken from GitHub Archive.

This wasn't the end, however. In that "Status update", Mojang expressed their desire to let players host their own servers. Roughly four months later, they delivered. Scrolls name was changed to Caller's Bane, the game itself became a freeware with an option for hosting community servers. They weren't able to move over players' collection of decks and scrolls, but at least server owners can deal with that in their own way. After releasing a minor stability patch in 2019, Mojang left Caller's Bane in people's hands.

Useful Lateness.

Well, I should've started writing this post earlier... You see, when I initially thought about covering Caller's Bane, Mojang still kept the game's site on. It looked decent, as you can see on what seems to be the latest archived version at Wayback Machine. However, now all you can get is this GitHub archive with a few recent articles, media stuff and download links... No, it's great I wrote it now. Otherwise, I could've had outdated links here.

Caller's Bane Logo. Taken from Wikipedia.

That's pretty sad though. While things could've got much worse, and it's better than nothing, one could wonder if Mojang really just couldn't afford to keep the Caller's Bane running as a part of Xbox Game Studios family. It doesn't appear like Microsoft is interfering into their gaming studios nowadays (at least not as much as they've used to; for better or worse) and I think this is an easy way to just explain it with "Xbox pulled the plug". Too easy. There's likely some truth to it, but I'll get there later on.

I like to think that there's some irony to the "Caller's Bane" title. Keep in mind that this name change happened before Zenimax was acquired by Microsoft. As for the game's current status, I wasn't able to find a proper community hub. All you have is a rather barren subreddit. You can look in its latest post for an invite in a Discord server and perhaps get a chance to properly try Caller's Bane out or you can the matters into your own hands.