Perennial Wizardposting

 

On posts like this, AI art suffices.

A year has fled with hardly a post to my name. This post will be light and unpolished, to hopefully initiate a habit. And, what else should it be on but wizards?

My recent thoughts on wizards have been on the diversity of their abilities. To my mind, there's essentially two types of wizards. The first is the Mage. This is the wizard whose spells are simple solutions to problems. When it is dark, they cast Light. Their toolset is practical, but limited. I think Harry Potter wizards tend to be like this, or else that's simply how they're written. They stick to their expelliarmis, lumos, etc. OSE wizards are also unashamedly of this type, at least to start.

The other type is, I suppose, the Arcanist. When they encounter an issue, they respond with "I think I'll try..." or, with hope, "I've been waiting for ages to try out...". Their spells are arcane, that is, esoteric and unknown. They have a grand variety of spells that, in 90% of cases, simply don't apply. For all their faults, I think that comic books have the best illustrations of this type, though I don't often read them. From what I've seen, Dr. Strange (in the comics, not in the movies) is always casting some weird-ass spell that never came up before or ever will again. 

I think, at least to my current mind, that the Arcanist is the more really Wizardly of the two. Wizards should have a really big bag of weird tricks. This, I don't think, is really represented in RPGs right now. Even GLOG wizards have only 2 real spells to start with. There's a real dissonance there. Why does an orthodox wizard need a whole tome for Knock and Grease? One can come up with the standard vancian answers, of course, but I think there's a real potential in having wizards whose tomes are full, 100+ pages of spells like Gershwin's Modulation or Servant of the Fungal Power which the wizard, if she is weak, hasn't learned or, if she is powerful, is simply waiting to use.

I've had 2 RPG experiences that could be considered to have come close to this kind of wizard. The lesser one, but the one which I think would probably apply more widely, is the magic system from Maze Rats (at least, v. 0.1). Originally, I was kinda put off by it, since a central feature is that the Magician class can swap out their spells when they rest for entirely new ones, randomly generated. "This works for warlocks," I said to myself, "but how could a Wizard neglect to remember the basics?" But in the context of an Arcanist, perhaps a beginner looking through a tome they hardly understand, it makes perfect sense that one day they'd have Concealing Bronze Sigil and the next day they'd try out Enraging Wine.

My other experience, which probably cleaves more closely to the true Arcanist, was in a GLOG campaign I played, Beyond the Bizarre Armoire. My character was, ironically, more supposed to be of the first type, with practical little tricks (or at least that's how I think Vayra designed the Class). However, by a quirk of rules, I gained access to a considerable portion of wizard spells from several wizard schools (Necromancy, Biomancy, Elementalism, and Snake Wizardry I think). The caveat was that I could only cast these spells once each, and each one permanently drained my max health by 1. The result was that I, very sparingly, cast the most wack spells imaginable to apocalyptic effect. It was probably one of the most fun wizards I've ever played. Due credit to Semiurge, though, for making very interesting and dynamic situations which respond well to those weird catalysts.

Yeah that's the post, just wanted to talk about wizards some. If you want to make more of the arcanist type, Maze Rats 0.1 is a good place to start I think. I might join in with the Dungeon 23 thing that's been going around? dunno. Alright I'm gonna go eat.