Wizards are Weird: Introduction Via Conan

Wizards are weird. We hear about that frequently.

In the modern RPG mindset though, wizards are treated kind of like kindly old college professors, or only-vaguely mad scientists. Or more recently, and more annoyingly, like over dramatic chess masters.

I don't have much of a problem with these, what I do have a problem with, is that we seem to have lost a lot of the reasons why barbarians (justly) dislike wizards and normal folks want to keep them at arm's reach.

Since pop culture makes for easy examples, I turn your head towards Conan. The one with Arnold Schwarzenegger. Hell. I'm going to include the not-as-great Conan the Destroyer movie as well. This gives us four examples of "wizards."

In the first Conan film, we have two wizards.
The Wizard of the Mounds played by Mako and Thulsa Doom played by James Earl Jones.

In the second Conan film, we have a wizard and sorceress And Mako's character, who gets the name of Akiro.  Also we have some other minor wizard. You know what? We had four wizards, you happy? They were our evil Queen Taramis, Mako's character, a random scrub wizard and a guy called Toth-Amon.

Now, let's examine our wizards here.
The Wizard of the Mounds, Akiro, lives in a ramshackle hut, runs around like a tiny weirdo, wears odd clothes, apparently spends his time talking to dead people and communing with gods, and threatens people with his outrageous powers. He's friendly, but he's still a weirdo. I mean he set his house in freaking burial mounds to gain necromantic power.

Thulsa Doom, who might be a snake man, is a cult leader. he leads an army of hippies and barbarians, and barbarian hippies, for the purposes of spreading a world philosophy of utter nihilism to gain power. He also has orgies, feasts on human flesh, shoots snakes out of bows and turns into a giant python FOR NO REASON.

Moving on to the second film, we have..

The guy who tried to open a door but got stopped by Akiro. He's not too strange, except its also implied he's some sort of cthulhic giant being who are worried about Conan and crew awakening an elder god.

Taramis claims to have necromantic power to reunite Conan with his lost love, but her real objective is to resurrect the elder god Dagoth, which will reign destruction on mankind. Why does she want to resurrect it? She wants to bang him before he erradicates all reality. So, she's such a ridiculous hedonist and so jaded she wants to literally cross 'booty called cthulhu' off her bucket list.

Toth-Amon? Aside from inspiring dozens of D&D Dungeons in the 80s, this guy lives in a giant crystal castle in the middle of a lake. He uses weird mirrors, wanders around half naked most of the time, and his immediate reaction to being attacked by heroes is to transmogrify himself into a green ape man wearing a red cape to try to beat Conan by going WWF on his ass.

What do these guys tell us? They tell us that wizards are weird. When Conan makes friends with Akiro, its a big deal to Akiro. Why? He's a freaking weirdo. Nobody wants to be around a guy who claims he hears spirits and lives in a graveyard so he can have conversations with them.

Toth-Amon and Thulsa Doom may or may not even be human anymore, if they even were to begin with. Taramis' motivations are perverse, creepy and insane.

The reason for this is because wizardry in pulp, carries with it an intrinsic idea of 'wrongness,' or 'cheating.' Its an art based on illusion and misdirection, and sneaking around, and accomplishing things by treating with stuff better left untouched. Its the marketplace for people with sick ideals (Toth-Amon, Thulsa Doom and Taramis all have a pseudo-sexual perversity to them), and each wizard is monstrously and bizarrely unique. Taramis the evil seducer queen. Toth-Amon the twisted mirror-mage. Thulsa Doom the Serpent.

Akiro, being a good guy, avoids this by mostly being a shaman. Most of his supernatural power seems to rely on calling on ancestors, or just knowing the right way to deal with bad crap. He doesn't seem to call up vile shades, or reanimate the dead. He seems strangely content to just sit on top of dead men's bones and listen to them sing about better days. He's a weirdo, but he's a nice one.

When Wizards became PCs, they started being less weird. We started having more wizards academies, and good wizards became the norm instead of the exception. I think this has been a step away from really having wizards, and thus magic, feel well.. Magical.

Magical in the bad way. Magical in the dangerous way. Magical in the weird way.