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.

Villains, need to be Villains or I Ate My Villain, I Ate His Little Face and I Ate The Mess He Made

 Way the hell back in the post ‘I Understand, You’re Still a Jerk’ I mentioned that there were two points I wanted to expand on.

One was the underwear gnomes plots that frequently come up with bad guys, and how those plots need to make sense.

The second is that villains need to be villains.  They need to be the kind of people the players want to oppose.  

In tabletop games and similar rpg areas, the function of an antagonist is different from the function of an antagonist in say fiction. The job of an antagonist is to move the story forward, to move things along and in fiction to provide a specific foil to the main character or team. However, in a RPG you aren’t writing the heroes. You don’t determine their motivations. You don’t determine how the players view their own characters or each other, or the world, all you do is lay it out for them.

An antagonist you see, is the meal you lay out for your players to eat. It’s only by interacting, in many ways consuming the thing that it accomplishes what it’s meant to. And if you’re successful, the players feel satisfied and they speak fondly of the experience like a fine wine or meal.  If you screw it up, it’ll be like that time they got food poisoning from bad Mexican food.

The various traits, the tragic motivation (which should be seen in how he acts not unloaded at the heroes like the bad guy needs a psychotherapist) are the seasonings and preparation of that meal.

Like a master chef you have to know though what it is that your customers want.

If they’ve come to you for some simple fair, say wanting to beat up an orc warlord to let off some steam and have a nice scrum, let’s call it a hamburger villain, then don’t lay out a sneaky political lawyer villain, let’s call it a  soufflé villain, for them.

Also keep in mind there can be gourmet hamburgers and crappy soufflés. Simplicity does not mean bad and complexity does not mean good.

Using the meal analogy it’s also important at times to worry about your player’s nutrition by varying the kinds of threats and enemies they encounter. Hamburgers, soufflé, hot dogs, quiche, lasagnas, and maybe even some sushi, as the time proceeds on. Don't just feed them the same stuff, unless that's what they really like.

Early on it can be helpful to give your players a buffet of threats, meanies, weirdoes and monsters to oppose, use it like a taste test to see what they like. Also learn what your own specialties are.

And again, don’t forget. The purpose of the antagonist is to be consumed. Consumed by the adventure and the players. He has no value unless he’s fought against, opposed, and either overcome by the party, or proves too much for them.

And during the course of that, your presentation is going to get messed up a little. The party is going to pour gravy all over it, and splatter ketchup on your Filet Mignon, because that’s how they enjoy eating it. When they call your villain with deep emotional-trauma a “Momma’s Boy” to his face in the middle of his monologue, you’re succeeding, not failing (or they wouldn’t bother insulting him!)

A freeze dried preserved meal that you put on a shelf so you can show off how talented you are, and how well made it is, isn’t a meal anymore, and it won’t satisfy anybody.

Wizards are Weird: Wizards as the Creature

 In the previous parts of this series of posts, I mentioned Toth-Amon and Thulsa Doom from Conan, and how they might not be human anymore, if they were to begin with.

This shows up in other places, the idea that the magic-user isn’t quite a normal human being. The two places I’m going to mention might surprise some, although others are going to shake their head and go ‘we knew that already Spook!’

Arthurian Legend and the Lord of the Rings.

Merlin and Gandalf are beneficent characters, to be sure, but they share that same conceit that ‘wizard’ isn’t something that gets assigned to you by your high school guidance counselor. Merlin is apparently an offspring of one of the fairer or more diabolical folk, and Gandalf is a Maiar, which might be compared to a god or to an angel.

Even Harry Potter presumes some biological differences betwixt witch and muggle. And we often see the concept or conceit of the witch-race or the magic-user-species in science-fantasy.

This ties in with the wizard-as-weirdo thing again, since it means that the wizard is literally not a human. He’s some sort of similarly shaped homunculus who doesn’t quite work the same as the humans he surrounds himself with, and also might contribute to why wizards look down on normal people. They view themselves as the Cro-Magnon in a village of Neanderthal. That assumes the wizard carries any similarity with mankind at all.

In the case of Thulsa-Doom the question one must ask is if his wizardry turned him into a snake creature, or if he’s a snake creature disguising himself as a man.

I think sometimes it’s only the desire to put magic in the hands of the players that kept the wizard out of the monster manual, particularly as they almost always find themselves playing the roles of foe.

Now, from a DM perspective, what does this mean? It means when you have a wizardy foe show up, he doesn’t necessarily need to follow the same rules as normal PC wizards. He can, and perhaps should, have other powers, weird taboos, and behave differently. Maybe he has green hair? Perhaps he breathes flame? Perhaps he can survive in temperatures that are uncomfortable to others (explaining his weird outfit)? Wait, why is his blood literally blue? Did he seem to turn into a featureless white thing for a moment when we struck him?

It is quite remarkable how many things players can accept when ‘he’s a wizard’ is the explanation. This kind of makes them similar to dragons.