Wizards are Weird: The Unclean Arts

I’ve mentioned in previous posts about the idea of the wizard as a cheat, or the wizard as the foolish rule breaker. The foolish rule breaker wizard, for the most part, has transmogrified into the mad scientist. The guy who uses the nuclear reactor to cook his hot pockets because a microwave takes two and a half minutes, but its only thirty in the reactor and HE KNOWS WHAT HE’S DOING, YOU FOOL!!!

As a result, the short sighted genius still lives on, he just took off his wizard hat.

Then there’s the other side of things.

The evil side.

Sometimes they can be musicians.

Magic and spell casting is strongly associated with the forces of evil. Why is that? Well from a Judeo-Christian perspective (which informs most fantasy) it’s because powers only have two real sources, one side is the noble side, granted by God, and the other side is well, not.

The other side is the side of blood sacrifices, of using things for purposes they decidedly aren’t intended for. The seductive dark side. And there are no shortages of weirdness to be found here. Horrific, terrible, and for a DM, wonderful weirdness.

I was born to murder the world!

This is where we see the wizards as the corruptors, the destroyers, the despoilers. The strange agents of the unholy amongst us. With motivations as strange and imperceptible as a hurricane, or a demon.

The guy above is Nix. We never quite learn what his motivations are, but the guy is evil. He leads a cult. He keeps trained baboons. He comes back from the dead as an undead thing. And he claims he was born to murder the world. 

He’s horrifying, but a lot of what he does, doesn’t make sense. He kills those loyal to him. His aim always seem to be corrupting others, to spread whatever it is that corrupted him, to people of equally promising skills. But why? Who knows.

The idea that magical powers have an intrinsic cost is represented by people like this. They start down the path of magic for whatever reason, start as normal folks, and then turn into, well..

Something inhuman.

The master would not approve

By the simple expedient of trafficing with powers that are..not right, they themselves become the sorts of entities who spread that not rightness.  To the point that while we know that these creatures began as human, the fact they started treating with unholy powers, started making deals with strange masters, and started drifting with powers better left untouched, they transmogrify into something so thoroughly, we can't even imagine them as once being a "normal person."

You can even see this in sci-fi depictions of wizard. Remember, the 'wizard' isn't just the guy with a pointy hat. He's the weirdo. The strange thing that commands powers outside the ken of most.

Such as the Emperor of Darkness

I might revisit this, there's a lot here, but remember that just by being something else the wizard can be weird, and terrifying.

Also, I think that Grahf picture there is ridiculously righteous. I found it at this link here so please, go check that guy out. His art's pretty awesome.