Craft wizards out of Wiki articles

The Kickstarter campaign for my weird 2025 Zine Quest contribution is wrapping up, 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 with descriptive bits will do. Let’s choose the Wikipedia article on ‘puzzles’.

Step two: Generate some wizard aspects.

Amongst the zine's many tables, some (pages 10–17) give you templates which turn wiki article content into wizard features. 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 little bit of description from the article, turning it into an activity, descriptor, or thingummy. Other times you'll compress and mangle names from the article’s references into a fantastic name. (See page 8 for more info!)

We'll pick out some descriptive phrases from our chosen article on puzzles: ‘riddle of the Sphinx’, ‘hangman’, ‘missing square’, ‘used the resulting pieces as an aid for teaching’, ‘16th century’. We turn them into wizard traits:

• 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.

Note that 'Kangdell' is a mangled name from the article's reference section.

Then we can pick out some more content from the wiki article and use it to construct more traits: ‘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.

Pages 18–21 are full of even more tables, to give our wizard some personality descriptors. We use these by choosing the first and last letter of the article title, which in our example are the P and S from ‘puzzles’. Add some random rolls for the relevant tables and we find that Kangdell is 'particularly proud', and 'somewhat spiteful'.

We round it out with a few more traits, in particular merging a few categories from the article into his research interests: ‘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.

Now that we know what Kangdell is like and have a sense of his 'theme', we create his magical arsenal from article content, using some simple guidelines for spell names (pages 22–23). We'll create three spells, three defences, and three artefacts.

Picking some descriptive content out from the wiki article and turning them into spell names: ‘becoming’, ‘hidden object’, ‘the size of a sand grain’, ‘sawed around’, ‘many riddles’.

Three powerful spells Kangdell knows:

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

Then picking out some article content that sounds more defensive or obscuring: ‘World Cube’, ‘three cups’, ‘unite the elements’, ‘enigmatology’, ‘disentanglement puzzles’, ‘the outline’.

Three of Kangdell's magical 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! This article has lots of great possibilities, and I ended up choosing: ‘nine linked-rings’, ‘temple tablets’, ‘cartographer’, ‘a perplexing problem’, ‘folding problem’, ‘advanced device’.

Three artefacts secretly in Kangdell's possession:

• 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 extra tables of Ancillary Wizard Information (Part 6 of the zine). 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! Available now!

This post was updated in June 2025.