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!