On Wizards, Sorcerers, and Necromancy

On Wizards

Bachelor pad

- Wizards are to fantasy worlds what millionaires and billionaires are to us.

- Imagine it. You have your wizards tower, or your cursed keep, or your dragon lair-front property. You have the power to call gold from the ground and access to planar treasures. You have more in common with your fellow, equally rich, equally culturally-powerful wizards than you do some peasant asshole complaining that goblins stole his potatoes.

- Wizardry is one part mystery, one part daring, and two parts narcissistic ego. People don't become wizards for altruistic reasons, and if they do, they forget those reasons fast. Being able to fling fireballs and teleport at will does that to you.

- While the rich in our world exploit everyone for money, wizards exploit monstrosities, weird beings, and magical deviants for their mysteries and power. Thus, their relative inactivity in the normal operations of day to day life means they have little impact on it. Basically, everywhere is a third world country and wizard towers are the only first world countries around to them.

- A wizard's power comes from two things. 1.) Their intellect. Their synapses are finely tuned and their capacity for knowledge large enough to properly contain the complex contents to weave a spell. 2.) Their spellbooks. A wizard's true prestige is measured not by their many dungeons, the amount of traps in their towers, or the many chimera they've created, but instead by their library of spellbooks. As a rule of thumb, each level of a spell requires half a book to write. Some spells, such as Contact Other Planes or Find Familiar, are many volume monstrosities. A wizard's personal spellbook condenses information that they call upon, but the library is where this is all kept.

- Memorizing a spell is a process. Over the 8 hours, sometimes 8 days, it takes to do so, the wizard in question reads through their spellbooks. This process causes them to experience the equivalent of a DMT trip--their souls open up, they hallucinate, and they are interfacing directly with the laws of physics that they wish to bend. Should a non-magically adept person attempt to read a spellbook, it's like reading a series of nonsense poems with strange images interlaced.

- Cities where wizards live are cities of intrigue, oddity, and power. They are fabulously rich there, of course, but rare is it they take a ruling position. A wizard's presence, however, attracts the supernatural much how a fire at night will attract every cold bastard for miles around. Beholders will set up shop in underground tunnels, elves will begin to weave fairy tales in the slums and in noble bedrooms, drow will make conspiracies, and factions will vie for ownership over the detritus the wizard throws out and no longer needs.

- Wizards do not contribute to armies (usually). This is for the fact that two wizards can very easily annhilate one another. There are a billion ways a level 5 wizard can kill another level 5 wizard. It's best not to attempt. And, sadly, every wizard has a rival. Every move they make is usually being tracked by at least 3 others interested in what they're doing.

- Because of the above, the more powerful the wizard, the more mundane their life becomes. Oddly enough, once you're rich and relevant and can summon forth illusory dragons from the shadow glades, one develops a taste for the simpler things in life. This applies up through the first 15 levels of the game. After that, once a wizard has learned a 9th level spell...

- A wizard with 9th level spells has tapped into something that has twisted a fundamental part of them. These powerful men and women don't even look human for the most part; those that do are usually hiding what they really are. High level wizards are unheard of not because they are rare (in fact, they are frighteningly common), but because they have detached themselves from our world much like the Buddha has, and occupy a realm all their own.

- A wizard isn't really considered a wizard until they've earned a lot of money and have their own library--no matter how small it is. This usually means that any wizard below 9th level is considered an extended apprentice, learning the ropes of the high life. These apprentices are usually concerned with all kinds of petty things, like saving their daughters from Falhast (Barker) or stopping a Red Wizard from turning their loved ones into zombies.

- Wizards take on apprentices easily enough. It's always easier to entertain yourself supernaturally with friends who take on the psychic load for you. There are lots of petty level 1 or 2 wizards in the world, capable of casting a handful of spells, but most of them get themselves killed because they bite off more then they can chew. Because of this, it's rare that magic effects the common people. Apprentices only come through town to make a few gold before getting offed by some asshole bugbear because they learned "Jump" instead of "Magic Missile."

On Sorcerers

Young savant

- Sorcerers are never from here, always from elsewhere.

- Sorcerer ways are always strange and have one step in a foreign superstition that strikes you as odd but almost sensible.

- Sorcerers never speak a fluid tongue, but a syncretic mix of languages, just passable enough for you to understand.

- Sorcerers put no stock into gods or demons, but fear their power all the same.

- Sorcerers lust not for power or for wealth but instead for a tighter control on what they are. What they are is what makes them separate from you.

- Sorcerers always have a tick that involves some distant custom that strikes you as wise.

- Sorcerers will talk you out of gold and favors just as easily as a snake did Eve in the garden.

- Sorcerers are quick to help, especially if one of their many taboos have been broken.

- Sorcerers do everything you do, but one step to the right or left; their tea is made with strange beetles, their foods spiced with crushed kobold bone, their clothes dyed with the pituitary glands of gnolls and wyverns.

On Necromancy

More necromancy, less lung cancer

It's a common belief that certain magics can bring people back from the dead. This is incorrect.

- It's a common belief that there is an "Afterlife," and that death is a "journey." This is also wrong.

- It is true that spells can resurrect a corpse, but once Death has danced with you, you can never return. You are always dead. Even if your lungs work and your eyes can see and your mind thinks, you are dead, hollow, ashen. Your skin will feel like wax. Food will taste like chalk. Spellcasting physically hurts an organ inside of you that doesn't exist.

- Learning necromancy is dangerous. Memorizing a spell that involves calling the attention of death can be fatal to the untrained mind. Few apprentices go down this path because of what it can do.

- This is why magical healing is rare, even if it comes from prayers. Death cannot be corralled. Stitching flesh back together might just make her want to tear it apart even more. Many have had limbs reattached only to be utterly savaged by some violent coincidence. Most cultures have superstitions that say that being healed unnaturally just leads to more violent wounds, and they are right.

- Speaking with the dead is like trying to convince a starved tiger not to bite out your throat. The spell holds the spirit back, but the mental load is incredible; this is why such a seemingly simple feat earns usually only a simple yes or no answer.

- Some necromancers have been bought into wars in exchange for the dead. The true necromancers, the skilled necromancers, abhor such things; playing with the fear-charged flesh of a ruined soldier never ends well.

- Curses are a form of necromancy. Every curse is the same, even if its execution is different; with a snap of your fingers or a cooing of a poem, you call the attention of Death or her Dead on someone and they work their magic on them. This is why breaking a curse is so difficult, because you need to hide that person from Death's gaze, or so the philosophy teaches.

- Many cultures believe in a soul. That is a half-true belief. There is something that puppeteers the flesh and that can be drawn on, but when the flesh dies and rots so does this thing. Calling it back or manipulating usually kills parts of anything that's imbibed that soul; plants, mice, ants, parts of someone's brain or heart, etc. Usually this process is incomplete when a spell is cast, partially explaining why raising the dead is always such a mockery.

- Lichdom. How cruel a thing to do to yourself. To be a lich is to be a Cenobite from Hellraiser. You've flayed your spiritual nerves in such a way that you can no longer connect with other things, no matter how well you understand them. Few master necromancers go the way of the lich out of fear of what the soul-flesh will do to them.

- Necromancers are, in some ways, Death's favorite people, for all Necromancy spells call her attention to someone to dance with. This is why Lichdom is even possible, because she is not wont to lose one of her favored dance partners.

- Lots of wizards see Necromancers as either really eccentric and cool or as hacks.