Every few days in June I’m picking a TTRPG book that’s been languishing on my shelf or hard drive, reading it, and writing a review. I don’t believe in attempting a full critique of game content I haven’t run or played, so my focus will be on discussing the work’s best ideas and keeping criticisms to text-level quibbles.
I'm rounding out Reviewn June and finishing up with the first chunk of the GLOG at the same time. Today it's The GLOG: Wizards, by Arnold Kemp / Goblin Punch. This is 21 pages of novel magic system for use with the GLOG – but, as the author points out in the source post, there's lots of content that could be excavated for use with another system.
Everything I wrote about the GLOG rules in terms of approachability also applies here, so I’ll mostly leave it out. (One example – The GLOG: Wizards assumes a certain amount of TTRPG knowledge. It’s informed heavily by what came before – the only reason to spend more than a sentence on scrolls and spellbooks, given that they’re functionally identical in the GLOG, is that other games make them instrumentally different things.)
I worked hard to write less this time! This one was a really enjoyable note to end the month on.
How the magic system works:
The text begins with a fairly short, fairly cohesive metaphysics that ties
in magic spells to the rest of the supernatural. I appreciate that, as
the GM can use it to infer a number of answers to player questions
without having to worry about coming up with and then remembering
something consistent.
The GLOG uses slot-based magic. There’s a nice old-school feel to everything, and rules for all the usual peripherals (magic item identification, transporting spells, etc) get quickly laid down. The actual spellcasting rules deviate a fair amount from other D&D-likes. It's based on a dice pool, and there’s a risk/reward tradeoff and therefore important decisions offered to the player. Having, essentially, points to invest creates some good affordances for the GLOG system, in particular the spell keywords ‘Splittable’ and ‘Sustainable’.
Investing more power (dice) in a spell increases the risk of a Mishap (minor penalty) or Doom (major penalty which eventually destroys the character, unless evaded through a quest). Mishaps and Dooms are specific to schools of wizardry. Schools of magic have perks and a spell list that goes up to twelve, but also have restrictions.
There’s a simple uncertainty mechanic; you’ll never be able to predict exactly how many spells you can cast each day (but you’ll have a fair estimate, and bounds). I like that. Another novel improvement is that wizards aren’t penalised for wearing armour (a restriction I’ve seen a hundred explanations for, none of them particularly good, and many of them nonsensical if you know anything about armour). Instead, in the GLOG a magic user is incentivised to choose to forego armour in favour of a magic robe, which increases their available power. No in-world reason given why you can’t wear armour and a robe, but for that, at least, solutions suggest themselves.
One bit confused me. The rules about scrolls on page 2 say they’re not remotely like OD&D scrolls, they’re just variant spellbooks. The rules on page 3-4 talk about casting from spells like they’re OD&D scrolls (but ones which also power the spell up). Text on page 7 might help resolve the contradiction, implying wherever the page 3–4 rules say ‘scroll’ they mean ‘scroll or spellbook’, with the exception that a scroll gives an extra casting die but a spellbook doesn’t. This implies you can burn up your grimoire in a last-ditch effort. It also means someone else can get into your tomes and destroy all your unmemorised magic by casting it. It still doesn't work, though: page 7 also includes a team ability which lets you “share spellbooks as if they were your own”, implying pretty heavily that spellbooks actually don't work like scrolls, because those anyone can pick up and use.
Wizards get access to their spells in a particular order, lightly
implying an escalation of power, but generally what matters is number of
magic dice in the pool. There are legendary spells. Some of them are missing their spell description. From the ones included, I’m not sure that legendary means ‘better’, just ‘not on the main spell list’.
- The Orthodox wizard has no casting restrictions, and on their final Doom, loses the ability to cast spells. Could be a lot worse.
- The Illusionist’s restriction is that they can’t cast spells unless they can currently see all six primary colours. This would be a nightmare to adjudicate (properly), but fortunate they begin the game with rainbow-coloured gloves, which reduces the question to whether the illusionist still has their clothing and can see their own hands. A Doomed illusionist becomes nothing more than an illusion.
- The Necromancer’s shtick is expending corpses and shunning magical healing. They get cool gross spells like ‘Raise Skin Kite’. Their final Doom (besieged by 3d20 undead) sounds fairly survivable, with luck and preparation.
Those are the only wizard schools included in the document, but I’ve seen others in the glogosphere.
Wizards also get team abilities, advancing a design concept I
don’t think I’ve seen in a TTRPG before: “I want to encourage more
mono-classed adventuring parties. A party of wizards sounds cool. So
does a party of thieves.” Team abilities are meant to offset players
increasing their capabilities by diversifying classes. They are little
synergies that apply whenever two or more characters have the same
(main) class.
Juicy content:
Everything is flavourful and hardcore:
A wizard’s number of spell slots “is limited by their ability to flex their brains into mindscapes that better accommodate the spell they wish to lure into their brain-trap. It is not knowledge that achieves this, but rather visualization and self-delusion.”
A wizard’s memorised spells disappear from the encoding in their spellbook. Therefore, to learn spells from a dead wizard, you might acquire whatever was in their spellbook unmemorised, but getting at the ones in their head involves “bisecting the wizard's skull and balancing it atop a golden needle. The memorization of spells causes the brain to carve grooves on the inside of the skull, and the skull now moves over these grooves like an Ouija board. With a compass, water clock, and brain almanac, these movements can be deciphered.”
The Wizard Vision spell can have permanent effects, both good and bad. “You suffer a permanent loss of 1d6 Wisdom (as you reject the impossible reality you are looking at, and go a tiny bit insane) or 1d6 Charisma (as you accept this transcendental truth and become forever alienated from your fellow humans, who will never understand the truth).”
You might escape a particular Doom by eating the heart of a high elf, or by journeying to hell and cutting a deal “with the Underpope or one of the Satans”.
The GLOG spells:
The spells are designed to “lend themselves to clever uses”. To this end, they are mostly adaptations of old-school spells – broader and more powerful, but my impression of the system maths is that wizards won’t typically be able to cast as many spells in this system.
I like the spells, especially the deviations from the classics. The implementation of False Life makes it an interesting tactical tradeoff. I love that the (Diablo-inspired?) Explode Corpse spell works on undead creatures, working particularly well on friendly ones. Revenant only works on dead PCs, turning them into a temporary resource. Fade seems to let a target walk through any solid barrier (which might not be intended? But it is a legendary spell).
I'd modify the necromancer spell list to include Speak With Dead, given that one of their first spells is Essential Salt(s, sic), which is only useful with Speak With Dead.
There's a missed opportunity in that none of the listed spells actually use the ‘Sustainable’ keyword, even though some would have been a good fit. The wording of ‘Sustainable’ does mean you can just end the spell before going to bed and then wake up with your dice refreshed, so maybe there was a concern that it’s too powerful? That said, it's not quite a no-brainer to use on every spell which permits it: there’s a 50-50 chance that each dice invested in a spell comes back immediately, so if you don't need to extend the spell's duration, you're better off with the chance of getting some power back.
Minor text quibbles:
Various grammatical errors (‘off of’); various typos (‘calss’); various terminology errors (‘MP’ for ‘casting dice’).
My main plaint is that spell names like ‘knock’, ‘entangle’, and ‘illusion’ don't get any emphasis when mentioned within a sentence (not even an initial capital), making the text unnecessarily hard to parse.
My favourite bit:
There's lots that's great, and it's hard to pick. Even if you don’t use The GLOG: Wizards in play, it’s inspiring from a design standpoint. If I have to choose just one thing, it's Dooms which wait at the end of every wizard's career. “Every apprentice knows that if they travel down the road of wizardry long enough, their doom will eventually claim them.”
Where to get it:
https://goblinpunch.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-glog-wizards.html
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