Craft wizards out of Wiki articles

I'm excited! The Kickstarter campaign for my weird 2025 Zine Quest contribution is just a day away from completion, and I'm blown away with the level of support.

Wiki Articles Are Wizards [citation needed] is mostly about making bizarre wizards from wiki articles and showing them off in duels. In this note which I'm cross-posting from a Kickstarter update, I'll show you how it works.

Step one: Find an article.

Any decently long article will do. Let’s choose the Wikipedia article on ‘puzzles’.

Step two: Generate some wizard aspects.

Amongst the zine's many tables, some give you templates which turn wiki article content into wizard features. Roll or choose a template, then fill in its blanks by picking something out of the article.

For example, sometimes you'll be asked to use a description or adjective from the article. Other times you'll compress and mangle names from the article’s references into a fantastic name.

Article content: ‘riddle of the Sphinx’, ‘hangman’, ‘missing square’, ‘used the resulting pieces as an aid for teaching’, ‘16th century’

• Kangdell the Sphinx’s Hangman was cast down into this world from the Great Dreaming sixteen centuries ago. From head to toe, his body is missing squares; he uses the pieces as an aid for teaching.

Article content: ‘the Maze of Games’, ‘the World’s Biggest Puzzle’, ‘put pieces together (or take them apart)’

• They call his lair the Maze of Games. His minions are automata which put pieces together (and take things apart) without cease. The work currently open on his lectern is titled: The World’s Biggest Puzzle.

We use the first and last letter of the article title ‘puzzles’, plus some random rolls, to look up personality descriptors from the extensive random tables. We find that Kangdell is 'particularly proud', and 'somewhat spiteful'.

Article content: ‘requiring strict adherence to a particular kind of order’, ‘Category: List of impossible puzzles’, ‘Category: List of puzzle types’, ‘Category: Mechanical disentanglement’

• People find Kangdell the Sphinx’s Hangman to be particularly proud and somewhat spiteful. He requires strict adherence to his particular kind of order. He amuses himself by disentangling types of impossible puzzles.

Step three: Create spells, defences, and artefacts.

We create Kangdell’s magical arsenal from article content, using some simple guidelines for spell names.

Article content: ‘becoming’, ‘hidden object’, ‘the size of a sand grain’, ‘sawed around’, ‘many riddles’

Magic spells:

• Swilsnor’s Hidden Saw
• Spoerork’s Many Riddles
• Become The Size Of A Sand Grain

Article content: ‘World Cube’, ‘three cups’, ‘unite the elements’, ‘enigmatology’, ‘disentanglement puzzles’, ‘the outline’

Magic defences:

• Eymaugladoun’s Three Cups of Disentanglement
• Pftpievandal’s Enigmatic Outline
• Uniting of the World Cube’s Elements

Our wizard should also have some magical treasures and objects of power!

Article content: ‘nine linked-rings’, ‘temple tablets’, ‘cartographer’, ‘a perplexing problem’, ‘folding problem’, ‘advanced device’

Kangdell secretly possesses three artefacts:

• Botesmackar the Cartographer’s Advanced Device
• The Nine Linked Rings of Folding
• The Perplexingly Problematic Temple Tablets

Step four: Pick extra lore and traits.

We can add detail to Kangdell the Sphinx’s Hangman by sprinkling in lore and special powers from the zine’s extra tables. Here are some possibilities:

• Should his staff ever be broken, Kangdell breaks into the same number of pieces (and is mildly inconvenienced as a result).
• He has fragmented memories of four centuries in the jar, bored out of his brain (which was all he was at the time).
• Kangdell wears socks and sandals and carries a little grimoire in his deep-pocketed robe.
• His tower is cuboid, and moves when nobody is watching. Its stones are lined with symbol-inscribed tiles.

There's lots to do with Kangdell!

Our wizard is prone to petty grudges, magical disputes, and ego clashes, and as a result, his cabal will be duelling in the Great Wizard-Off. For information on this and so much more, check out the zine!

What if every D&D power could be used at will?

Seriously, what would happen?

I think that in D&D 5e:

• Resource tracking is fiddly, takes valuably game time, and isn't particularly fun.
  
• The game's built-in resource management is one of its weakest design elements. So much hinges on the long rest mechanic that resources feel all-or-nothing. Between published adventure content and the relative lack of 'living world' rules under the hood, resting tends to be either impossible or unpunished, with little middle ground, depending on the situation. The DM gets little guidance on making it work.
• Resource management decisions are only sometimes important, and seldom very engaging or fun, compared to the other decisions made during play. You learn good spells and tactics, and it's seldom important to change them. You may sometimes have intel leading to an opportunity to prepare differently, but the game isn't so difficult that doing so is necessary, and there isn't much in the way of DM guidance or built-in mechanics for getting intel into the PCs' hands.
• Most of the game's rules are about tactical life-or-death combat, and therefore the game itself is about tactical life-or-death combat (although of course not everyone plays it this way). Trying to conserve resources in combat is a big gamble. After the particularly resource-limited early levels, play styles tend to converge on 'open with full broadside' and not be punished for that.
• It is a game where characters don't just have 'powers' but extravagant superpowers, and it's highly character-focused.
• Character classes all have a fairly similarly design, considered in the abstract. They get an array of at-will small superpowers plus various rate-limited superpowers, almost all of which can be used a low-single-digit number of times between rests. Other limiters on powers (e.g. HP or GP costs) are rare.
• The game's balance is precarious and a DM needs to develop skill to tread the line between 'feeling dangerous' and 'being unfair'.

Let's say you mostly agree with these premises. I think it follows that making all D&D 5e powers at-will – that is, removing their rate limits...

• Would remove part of the game, but not an important one
  
• Wouldn't get rid of interesting choices
• Would work for all classes without changing typical playstyles
• Would lean into the existing superpowered and character-focused feeling of the game
• Would make gameplay much faster
• Wouldn't upset a perfect game balance that doesn't exist.

Spam spells all you like. Action surge on every turn. Put ki points on every attack; metamagic on every spell; enter rage or confer bardic inspiration whenever you can spare a bonus action.

This is an idle fancy – I've never seen it done. But I'd be fascinated to see how it played out. Extrapolating some consequences that seem plausible:

1. The DM could then abandon CR and offer challenges which would otherwise be completely unfair, then see what the players come up with.
2. If the DM created a 'too easy' encounter as a result, it wouldn't matter, because the power disparity and lack of resource tracking means the encounter gets settled in a fraction of the time that combat, spell-based trickery, or the various resource-conserving hedges usually take at the table.
3. The DM could alternatively keep CR but remove all the rate limiters on adversaries' resources: recharges, dailies, slots, etc. (But unlike character classes, this would affect some creatures much more than others)
4. PCs wouldn't need to keep lesser powers and spell choices for backup offense. With normal ideas of challenge abandoned there should be more situations where a particular utility spell or defence is desperately needed. That suggests that spell selection might become a more interesting decision!

Now, historically this sort of thing would lead to a worsening of 'linear fighters, quadratic wizards', but I don't think the difference would be as large in this edition of the game, at least before the highest levels. Fighters getting two actions every turn via action surge is pretty huge, for example. The biggest difference might be in high-level utility powers, the kind where you normally have one use of a valuable high-level spell slot and have to consider whether to save it for a fight. Now you could Fabricate or create a permanent Wall of stone every ten minutes, Mind blank the whole party, spam divination spells, and so on.

What other issues would you need to navigate?

• A few character powers stop mattering. For example, second-rate but 'cheap' healing features are mostly obviated by having lay on hands or a decent healing spell. You might need to introduce some 'alternative features' available to all classes.
• Some character powers would become irrelevant as the character increased in level. This wouldn't matter except that I doubt they're evenly distributed over character classes. You'd want to add a mechanic for swapping defunct powers out once you grow out of them, for those classes that don't already have one.
• There are some slightly more or less resource-limited classes, and they become slightly better or worse choices respectively as a result. I don't think this matters except for warlocks, who deviate from the overarching class design patterns. They'd keep their major disadvantage (few powers) while everyone gets a better version of their major advantage (powers usable more often).
• At the highest levels, powers (and spells especially) can become absurdly strong. But having poked around, I think only a few of them would be real trouble. It might literally just be Wish and Divine Intervention!
• If you're abandoning material costs from spells as well as spell slots, you'd want to look at the few spells that are highly constrained by GP cost: Forcecage, Clone, Sequester, Gate, etc.
• I might be wrong; maybe top-tier spellcasting really does outcompete other classes. You could make level 8-9 spells the sole exception to the 'infinite resources' rule, perhaps sticking to slots or limiting them in some other way (once per hour?).
• Rogues would now get infinite Stroke of Luck as their capstone: their attacks always hit and their ability checks always succeed. I don't think this actually outshines having infinite spells, but it might be boring.
• If the PCs' opponents also have no constraints, there might be a risk at high levels of the game devolving into win-initiative-to-win-combat, but hopefully it would lead to unique solutions.

Implications for the world

Obviously things would get absurd, especially if this is the norm for all people in the setting. But I already think the implied and official D&D settings don't actually develop most of the implications of the things that are canonically possible within them. All sorts of things (technologies, prices, lifestyles, community structures, social structures, etc) ought to look completely alien on the basis of low-level spells alone, and yet the setting (with its dramatic mixture of tech levels, dramatic mixture of society types, dramatic mixture of stakes, etc) stands unaffected.

But overall, losing even more immersion in a typical fantasy setting does strike me as a glaring issue, yes. Maybe abandoning rate limits would work in a more (post-)apocalyptic setting? One where everything is chaotic and in flux, where huge changes happen in the world very quickly, where absurdly spectacular powers are harnessed to mundane ends, and where nightmarishly powerful entities regularly make an appearance?

Wiki Articles Are Wizards [citation needed]

Wizards are disquieting, unique, and steeped in magic. This wizard leaves a trail of fungus wherever he goes, and keeps his spells under glass. [1] That one is nine feet tall and orbited by tiny comets. [2] Another has matchboxes full of slithering tongues, which do his talking for him. [1][3][disputed – discuss]

Announcing Wiki Articles Are Wizards [citation needed], a tome of instruction for crafting such twisted sages! [clarify]

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/periaptgames/wiki-articles-are-wizards-citation-needed

➡️ Step one: Take any article from Wikipedia, or another wiki

➡️ Step two: Follow some simple rules to transform it into a weird, dangerous wizard

➡️ Step three: Pit your wizards against each other, using a tournament-style mini RPG

➡️ ...Or use them as inspiration for characters or villains [ambiguous] in your own games!

Enjoy a hefty tricolour [4] zine with:

➡️ Rules for creating arsenals of spells and protective amulets! [citation needed]

➡️ The truth about true-names! [5]

➡️ More wizardly lore than you can shake a staff at! [original research?]

➡️ Random tables for wizard anatomy, habitats, peculiarities, and more! [vague]

 

 

Inspired by: Wikipedia deep dives, and wizards from old pulps and comics, GLOG, Discworld, and Dying Earth! [1][2][4]

Follow the Kickstarter to get notified when the campaign begins! https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/periaptgames/wiki-articles-are-wizards-citation-needed

'Reasons for reactions' to improve random encounters

You don't want to fall into the trap of your encounters, especially random encounters, being reducible to is-it-combat-or-do-we-ignore-it.

Plenty has already been written about giving encounters extra contextual details (where are they, what are they doing, what are they hiding, etc). But it's also important to give the non-player characters (the appearance of) agency by using varied reactions.

So how do they feel about you?

🟩🟩✅ Good: The rules randomly modify how nice or nasty encountered creatures are. Most games do this.

🟩✅✅ Great: The rules specify a creature's or group's default reaction (friendly, suspicious, wary, indifferent, curious, issues challenges, hostile, fearful, neutral...), and modify this with a dice roll.

✅✅✅ Superb: The rules list plausible reasons for encountered creatures deviating from the default reaction (in case the GM struggles to tie it all together).

This last part is a very useful tool but also seems fairly rare. So, roll or pick something appropriate:

1d10 possible reasons the encounter is unusually friendly:

1. unusual individual/leader
2. need a favour
3. recently sated
4. intimidated and trying not to show it
   
5. hiding a secret
   
6. smell food on the party
7. recent festival, harvest, windfall, or celebration
   
8. hoping to steal / other deceit
9. feeling secure after recent victory
   
10. party is a reminder of old friend(s)
    

1d10 possible reasons the encounter is unusually hostile:

1. on high alert after recent attack
   
2. mistaken identity
3. resource-starved and desperate
4. rabid or maddened
5. hiding a secret
6. already in bad mood
   
7. subject to tyrannical orders
8. party inadvertently breaking taboo/custom
   
9. fear of reprisals from a greater threat
10. bandits, soldiers, hated nemeses sighted in area
    

"The minotaur is trying not to disturb a spider's web by moving, and settles for glaring at you balefully."

Signal the reasons as clearly as you can to the players, of course. It's infamously difficult to get motivations and secrets across at the table. Your encounters will have more verisimilitude, be more engaging, and be easier to improvise.

Out-of-character knowledge: A solvable problem

Note: This primarily applies to trad RPGs, played as trad RPGs. I doubt it has much relevance for story-telling games, or people running a trad TTRPG as a group story-telling exercise.

 

I often think about the player knowledge / character knowledge dichotomy, and in particular the problem of out-of-character or "meta-game" knowledge.

It boils down to this: in any game, within the world a character has capabilities (skills, powers, a viewpoint, certain possessions) that the player doesn't. But the player has information that the character doesn't.

Players, as they get experienced, inevitably end up having knowledge of X that their characters don't. Even if they learned something during the game, they'll eventually have a new, know-nothing character.

People are usually concerned about X being 'monsters' or 'enemy powers and vulnerabilities' or 'magic item properties' or the like. But it can include other, more meta-level, stuff:

• Players hear about what's happening to other player characters, even when they're not together.
• Over-arching information about the scenario, which the player has played or read a review of.
• The GM just said "oops, forget I mentioned that".
• Savviness to the genre of the universe being played in. Players know that pleasant tidy off-ramps in Call of Cthulhu won't be what they seem.
• We remember where our last characters bit the TPK, and the layout of the dungeon level.
  
• The GM brought a whole box of fire imp models to the game.
• The player has read a mathematical analysis of which spells/weapons/feats/etc are optimal.
  

 

Separating player knowledge and character knowledge

I think it's fairly obvious that at least in trad TTRPGs, it's desirable to reduce the impact of out-of-game knowledge on gameplay. Players ideally should have just the information their characters have, and make decisions accordingly.

Otherwise, why not just play with all the GM's stats and maps laid out on the table? Or better yet, given to the players to study before the game? Why not let the players roll to see whether they would succeed or fail at something before deciding whether to try it?

There are solutions, of course

I listed out all the solutions I could think of to "experienced players having knowledge about X that their characters don't". Then, as if I didn't have enough to do today, I rated and ranked them according to my

personal scoring rubric:

✅ Effective

✅ Low-effort

✅ Widely applicable

✅ Incorporates game mechanics

😠 Reduces immersion

😠 Requires doublethink

😠 Culture of play I dislike

😠 GM has to remember something

 

From best to worst, then:

👍 Players who know about X are required to put character points into character knowledge/skill relating to X.

Simple, effective, works with many but not all game engines. Aligns the character knowledge with the player knowledge neatly. Completely passive, but requires some honesty and introspection while setting up. Doesn't work with some kinds of meta-knowledge. Score: 5

👍 The GM uses mostly unique or procedurally generated new forms of X.

Unique monsters, custom-made scenarios, etc. This works well in most situations but is a lot of extra effort. Doesn't work with some kinds of meta-knowledge. Score: 4.5

👍 Any player knowledge of X is rumour, and rumours about X don't match the truth completely.

Very effective and fairly easy for grounded stuff like monsters and setting lore. Much more difficult (possible, but probably not worth doing) for other kinds of meta-knowledge. Risk of it feeling like bait-and-switch. GM has to stay on their toes. Score: 4

👍 Accept that X is well-known within the world.

Very easy, but only narrowly applicable (doesn't work with most kinds of meta-knowledge). Score: 3.5

🤏 Set things up so that knowledge of X has less impact on player decision-making. 

Difficult to do even in the best cases, but can pay off. For example, you can play with time and scene order so that players knowing what's happening with each others' characters at remote locations has less impact on play. Onerous for the GM and there are ways it can all go wrong, but impressive if it does work. Score: 3

🤏 The GM uses lots of deliberate misdirects about X, with in-world justifications.

A partial solution and one that eventually gets tiresome in practise. Technically works on a surprisingly broad set of meta-game knowledge, but doing that would take a ton of work and creativity on the GM's part. Score: 2.5

🤏 Treat the whole thing as not an issue.

I think this is pretty common, especially for sloppier/lower-stakes/beer-and-pretzels play. Players end up using doublethink or feeling vaguely guilty. As low-effort as it gets, but not great pay-off in terms of an actual solution. Score: 2

🤏 Shift the focus of gameplay into identifying that something is X.

Difficult to do, and only works on a narrow set of gameplay content; doesn't help with most meta-game knowledge. Generally requires the GM to be comfortable tinkering with the fundamentals of how the game works. Can be effective within its wheelhouse, but it's high-risk, low-reward. And what happens when players get player skill at identification and then start over at level 1? Score: 1.5

🤏 Players pretend that their characters don't know about X, but play as if they do.

Doublethink all the way. Thoroughly immersion-breaking. Leads to a narrative that seems plausible from the outside, but not from within, even done right. Is it worth it? I know some tables default to this all the time, but I'd rather keep it to just to the most necessary circumstances. Score: 1

👎 GM uses deliberate misdirects about X for no good in-world reason, so players learn they can't rely on any knowledge they have.

Yuck. Takes a lot of effort for pretty much no upside and a lot of downside. Don't do this. Score: 0.5

👎 Players have to commit to their characters not knowing about X, and therefore make deliberately bad decisions. Optional extra: Players get unrelated, perhaps even out-of-game, penalties for (seeming to) act on player knowledge of X.

The worst of all worlds. I've never seen this but I bet it happens. Score: 0

Putting it together

I recommend combining multiple 👍 solutions for best effects. I know that the 🤏 solutions work for some people/games/styles. Steer clear of 👎 solutions.

Did I miss any?

One mechanic to fix RPG spellcasting

(Or, well... it's an untested work-in-progress idea for fixing the things that usually irk me about it, personally.)

Magic has to be constrained, obviously, to avoid just having an instant win button that any wizard can press at any time.

Fantasy game designers usually accomplish this by giving spellcasting certain factors:

• Limited uses (in the form of spell slots, power points, consumable resources, etc). Book-keeping, yuk. You also need to stretch to find a good in-world reason for the limits to exist and the character to be aware of them, so immersion doesn't break.
• Spells of different fixed power level. Usually these have to be unlocked. If only one high-level spell has some effect, then you'll never have a lesser magician who has a knack for that one spell, or can even use it. Different fixed power levels pairs with limited uses to have several consequences:
• Even more book-keeping (bleh).
• Spells often just succeed, or have a single opportunity to resist, because it sucks to have a valuable resource just do nothing.
  
• Strategic choices usually become obvious (and therefore boring). You might straight up stop using your weakest spells.
  
• If spells have different power levels and are only rate-limited then a spell can be exactly as powerful as you can bear if a wizard wants to cast it their allotted N times per day, every day, including in downtime. Get it wrong and some spells are too weak to bother with; others break the game. Usually both, and it gets worse the wider the range of power levels.
• Jarring styles of play. The wizards have expendable resources and an incentive to use them in overwhelming bursts and/or to solve every problem, as much as possible, and then switch to 'spell recovery mode' (usually rest). This doesn't apply to other characters (or it gets awkwardly levered in by giving them inexplicably rate-limited mundane powers).
  
• Quick casting. It's bad enough in D&D-likes, where most spells take six seconds to cast. That's on the shorter side of what I'd prefer. In more granular games like GURPS, they're often cast even faster.
  
• Not much ritual. If there's a big slow evil magical spell happening, it's almost always a plot point rather than a mechanically underpinned option, let alone the primary method of spellcasting. In a lot of the genre fiction, spells are cast over long periods, either building and building in power/effect, or building towards a moment where they take effect! I really like the feeling of this, and almost never see it in a RPG.
  

I think these four aspects are worth changing for their own sake. It's worth noting that they also lead to a 'best practise' which I dislike:

Bum-rush the wizard

The RPG spellcaster in combat is unarmoured or otherwise fragile, and makes up for this with a limited number of extra-powerful hits which they deliver quickly and at range without cost, and can usually snipe a specific target and/or affect swathes of foes at once.

That adds up to a nearly universally optimal strategy: bum-rush the enemy wizard. Expend resources or open yourself to risk in order to take out the spellcaster early; it'll be worth it.

This is made worse by the usual mechanical parity of NPC/PC spellcasters (a satisfying and useful part of most games which I'd like to keep). The strategy is also optimal when it's creatures fighting a PC party with spellcasters. Enemies either bum-rush the PC wizard or are complete idiots. The best you can do is switch up those two options, sometimes making it unpleasant for the PC wizard player and sometimes boring the whole group with stupid enemies.

Here's my solution so far.

 

One unified mechanic which solves all my problems

A spell has fairly minor base effects which always apply, and a buffet of advanced effects.

If you're not already casting a spell, you can always try to cast any spell you know. You must continue casting it if you want the effect to continue (no check) or build (requires check).

When you cast a spell, its base effects take place. When you continue casting a spell, you either maintain it, or you try to make it more powerful by adding an advanced effect. You can do this each round, for most reasonable definitions of 'round'. Each time you want to add an advanced effect to the spell you are casting, you must make an appropriate check, which becomes more difficult with each effect added.

If you spend a round winding down a spell you're casting to end it, there's no risk at all. If you choose to stop casting it abruptly, there's a small risk. If you're forced to stop casting by some interruption or injury, there's a moderate risk. And if you bite off more than you can chew with advanced effects and fail the spellcasting check, there's a high risk.

The more risk, the worse the potential outcomes when the spell ends, and the higher the weighting towards the worse outcomes. The spell might just fizzle or have some cosmetic effect, but then again it might lash out at or turn on the caster, or run horribly rampant. These effects could be generic, tuned to the spell, or both.

The more skilled at wizardry you are, the more likely you are to succeed on your checks, and therefore reduce the risks you face by casting a more sophisticated spell.

Examples

The mage's change spell only makes her target look like a frog, at first. As she adds more and more advanced effects, they become the size of a frog, and then become a frog, and then start thinking like a frog. By adding other advanced effects, she can make the spell last – first an hour, then a week, then permanently – even after she stops casting it.

The wizard raises a wall from the ground at the heel of his staff. As he walks, it follows in his tracks. He puts more effort in, and it changes from packed earth to sandstone, and then to granite. If he risks enough advanced effects, he can make it higher and thicker, or join it up and add features to turn it into a building, or make it last well beyond the time he spends casting. A skilled wizard with patience and a tolerance for repeated small risks could make a whole stone fortress, a little section at a time, and only have to renew it (say) once per year.

The warlock starts casting a spell to call lightning down on the enemy camp. Clouds gather, roil, and darken as she casts. If she releases it immediately, it will have no effect, but as she continues casting, an ominous glow signals more and more charge is gathering. The choice of when to actually bring the lightning down is a calculated risk. Wait too long, and it might lash out at her!

The evil cultist starts conjuring blood eels directly from the bodies of the victims. Over time, more and more of them exsanguinate, and the blood eels grow larger, more numerous, more self-directed, and roam further from the caster. If he doesn't want to push his luck, he can then maintain his swarm of eels for as long as he keeps casting.

Outcomes

So how about those desiderata from the start of this post.

Limited uses? Nope.

Spells of different fixed power level? Gone.

Quick casting? Not if you want to accomplish much!

Not much ritual? Effects build as the chanting continues, which is the key part; see also Possible Extensions, below.

The "bum-rush the wizard" strategy? Still useful, for PCs and NPCs alike, but not a no-brainer. When the wizard starts casting, he's not particularly dangerous. If you let him keep on casting, he eventually becomes very dangerous indeed ...unless he overreaches and destroys himself! We have arrived at "actual decision-making", the backbone of TTRPGs!

Corollaries:

• Casting a spell is a risk, so spells can be powerful and yet not rate-limited. Just play out the spell each time, to see whether something goes horribly wrong. The more powerful the effects you're invoking (and thus the more potential to 'break the game' when done over and over), the more likely you are to suffer catastrophe.
• Note that this requires negative outcomes to have actual major impacts, not just be slaps on the wrist. Otherwise you end up with a long, slow cycle of spend-resources-to-make-resources-to-fix-the-harm-which-occurred-while-making-free-resources-etc. It's going to work best in games where healing is neither easy nor quick, and where character death is a possibility.
• Character improvement for magicians is easy. You can take whatever approach you want with learning/acquiring spells or specific advanced effects, specialising in spells, etc. The main improvement is just in spellcasting skill: a better caster can reliably get more spell effects before something horrible happens. This is skill-system-independent, with one exception: casters shouldn't get so powerful that they can do magic without risk (except possibly for the weak base effects of the spell, which might be safely freely repeatable if that won't damage the setting).
• Certain styles of spell, with quickly-achievable instant fixed effects, wouldn't work very well with this. Your words of command, snap featherfalls, reflexive shields, wizard knocks/locks cast while fleeing, etc. But I'm confident that every interesting spell can be made more interesting with effects that build and layer.
• I expect this to work very well with progressive status conditions, Pathfinder-style. Binary save-or-suck is often a problem with magic systems. "Spells get more powerful as the casting continues" fixed that pretty directly.
  

There are games that have elements of this mechanic – the GLOG's wizards, which I like; games with spells you pump up over time like GURPS Dungeon Fantasy; that one Conan game with open-ended / modular casting; any game with spell mishaps. I haven't seen anything exactly like this, but if I'm reinventing the wheel, please let me know.

Possible Extensions

Off the cuff, ideas for advanced rules:

1. Capacity for the caster to change the spell they're casting on the fly by relinquishing specific advanced effects they added previously, lowering the check difficulty.
2. Extensions for counterspelling / duels of wizardry.
3. In some styles of game, advanced effects might be improvised rather than listed for the player.
4. Rituals involving long timespans and more casters: Increase the time requirement for each 'stage' of the spell, multiplying by some factor or by the number of casters. Get a benefit like reduced risk or easier checks for adding advanced effects.
5. Maybe everyone can do magic; the specialised wizards are just the ones who are good enough to do it with advanced effects and lower risk.
   
6. If you really wanted, you could add complexity back in by giving each advanced spell effect a numeric power level, and a corresponding increase to check difficulty.
   

Random vs procedural generation for game content

Random generation and procedural generation (which is a little more than 'random generation with the crusts cut off') are powerful tools. As GMs and designers we use them to spark inspiration or to populate a game or setting with interesting content. But we use them, or ought to use them, in different ways.

Here's the difference, as I see it.

Random generation

Roll a dice, get an outcome. Or variants thereof.

Random generation is

👉 Extremely quick
👉 An opportunity to use big random tables, which everyone loves
👉 Useful for inspiration by hitting possibilities you wouldn't have thought of, even if you don't use the actual prescribed results 

But it may also result in content with major dissonances and peculiarities.

I think a little incongruence is good, but generating too much randomly can create a sort of silly homogeneity where everything is dissonant, nothing quite makes sense, and no world elements are linked or correlated except by accident. You get ooh-so-zany slop.

Over-reliance on randomness thus requires work to repair, which can itself be entertaining, but takes time and effort.

For example, suppose you roll a random encounter across multiple tables, and get: [roll] hundreds of ... [roll] skeletons ... dressed as ... [roll] jesters .... and they're [roll] hauling a cartload of ... [roll] scented soap ... through [roll] a desert in bloom.

It's something you wouldn't have thought of, sure. But it's too dissonant to be usable in most settings. You hear it and maybe an inkling of a consistent narrative jumps to mind, but the designer needs to plaster over the gaps, tweaking or adding things, to actually get there.

Zany. Too zany? Image by CDD20, via Pixabay.

Procedural generation

Technically a subtype of random generation, procedural generation uses a more complex function to go from inputs to results. It uses randomness, but has deliberate human design built in to create plausible outcomes.

This takes longer, both in the up-front design work and the use of it for creation.

Procedural generation...

👉 Both uses and creates interlinked/ordered/self-consistent information
👉 Combined human decisions and design with randomness to spark novelty but to constrain it in certain ways
👉 Results (ideally) in more plausible or verisimilitudinous outcomes

Examples include:

👉 Branching tables and subtables
👉 Little bits of pseudocode for dungeon room generation
👉 Features added to a consistent core, like a themed monster which gets appropriate thematic features generated via branching dice tables or if/thens

One Application

I'm currently working on a zine. Its premise is that wizards are powerful, crazed, unique, and have strange features which align with their individual theme. For me, that means procedural generation.

I'm exploring a process of taking a wiki article from, say, Wikipedia and pulling out a bunch of descriptive phrases. From these, you get semi-structured thematically-coherent content. Then you follow some guided rules to apply them to the underlying core, which is 'a creepy and erratic wizard'.

After enough customisation, you have generated yourself a wizard. The random element of procedural generation means your character has features you wouldn't have thought of yourself. The human-guided element means the wizard should be more plausible, or at least thematically consistent, than pure randomness generally achieves.

(More news on the zine as I progress with this idea!)

The First RPG Ever Published in 2025

It occurred to me that living in New Zealand (GMT+13) means a shot at being the first to publish a TTRPG in 2025.

So here it is.

 

The premise

SMALL MEDIUM AT LARGE is a mystery puzzle-based role-playing game for two players. Play as a small, psychic cat burglar and the specialised anti-psychic hired to hunt them down.

 

The background

Usually, of course, the REGIONAL CONSTABULARY simply hire a MEDIUM to solve any given crime. But this time, a MEDIUM is the perpetrator, and is muddying the PSYCHIC AETHER to cover their tracks. What's needed is a CLAIRVOYANT whose third eye can still see when things are UNCLEAR.

An UNCLEARVOYANT, in fact.

 

The game

This is a joke but also an actual game I made, and published at 12:45 AM, January 1, 2025, New Zealand time. Until I hear otherwise from my competitors in the Republic of Kiribati, I am declaring it to be The First TTRPG Of 2025.

You can check it out here: https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/507211/SMALL-MEDIUM-AT-LARGE