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.

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.

Wizards are Weird: That Jerk In Traffic Jams

Wizards have terrible fashion sense, and are in general weirdoes, but they keep appearing all over. One notable trait that the wizard has is that he breaks the rules.

I don’t mean that the wizard is James Dean on his motorcycle. I mean that he’s a cheat. A lot of people look at wizards and try to envision them as glorious visionaries unlimited by our provincial understanding. Most modern occultists spew this line as well, about how they are in touch with the Akashic records or gnosis, or some other word that requires a degree in theology or five dollars in the supermarket check-out line to understand.

The wizard is a cheat. They find tricks around things that normal people have to deal with, weather by trafficking with spirits, or using powers best-left-untouched. Their usual defining characteristic in older tales is that they’re sort of like that jerk in a traffic jam who thinks he’s smarter than everyone else because he ‘figured out’ to ride the shoulder.

This is what’s really meant when people disdain wizards in some of the older stories, especially when they’re perceived as being dishonest. See, with the arrival of D&D and its very legalistic magic system, in fact with the arrival of ‘magic systems’ in general, the concept of the wizard as a rule breaking jerkass has faded (although most wizard players still want to play James Dean), because now they’re using entirely valid and supported methods to accomplish their goals. Thus the guys who disagree with their methods are portrayed as bumpkins who don’t understand cellphones as opposed to guys who don’t think you’re especially clever for wanting to open your locked basement door with dynamite.

Most wizard players are akin to the ‘weekend rider’ playing at being a biker. They want to be the rebellious genius who is feared by an ignorant public for his great power and daring wit, but the average wizard’s magic is no more dangerous than the stuff the black smith trains in.

Oh, I might die during my apprentice ship! Well yeah, but the black smith apprentice might too, what with the intense heat and molten steel.

Oh, I bear heavy burdens that leave their mark on me. So does the black smith apprentice with inhaling the forge.

The modern wizard player tends to desire to be the rebellious genius, but it’s rarely the case.  

That’s the appeal of the weird wizard though. He is trafficking with crap he shouldn’t. He is being a wild crazy jerk too smart for his own good who knocks down fences that should’ve been left up. This is a mindset that doesn’t particularly mesh well with the idea of magic as technology.

Imagine a difference for your players if the local hedge wizard manages his magical cures by the expedient of ‘sending the illness somewhere else,’ or if the sorceress improves her beauty by burning up her youth like a candle.

It’s not hard to notice, that these wizards also make for much better adventure hooks.