Designer’s Notes

This was an interesting project that went flying from beginning to end. Fresh from combining magic and technology in OGL Steampunk, writing this book yanked me back to a world of pure magic, where science is merely a servant of arcane designs. I cannot say that it went down easily, but compared to my work in other Quintessentials, it came out without too much effort.

Like fighters, wizards are one side of the genre’s coin; one of the elements of ‘sword and sorcery’. Creating options not yet explored by other sources proved a little difficult. I had not only to complement the excellent material in the original The Quintessential Wizard, but I also had to manage not to step on the toes of three years’ worth of Encyclopaedia Arcane. Luckily, magic is a vast field and there will still be scores of books that can be written about it – I still feel like I only scratched the surface of the subject of wizards and their craft.

Spell Research was something I had wanted to do for some time as I noted the similarities and apparent structure beneath the game’s magic system. As I delved deeper, I discovered that such structure is very shaky and depends on many judgement calls about what ‘game balance’ is. I took the main features of most of the existing spells and distributed them along a framework which could be used to draw equivalents to truly unique effects that would create equally unique spells. I must admit I am a fan of toolkits and I could not resist the temptation to make this chapter into one.

Another interesting chapter was Magic Schools, which gave me the chance to honour a classic in fantastic literature, where a hot-shot young wizard learns about magic and must deal with dark forces he unwittingly unleashed. I am not talking about the bespectacled kid with the lightning-shaped scar, but about Ged, also known as Sparrowhawk from Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea series. The school of magic depicted there was not a whimsical place to have all sort of exciting adventures; it was a mysterious and foreboding place where young men and women were taught to mess with the fabric of reality. With that (and yes, also with that other school of witchcraft and wizardry) in mind, the chapter flowed pretty consistently, until new things began to pop up in my mind and I had to go back to previous sections and write them in before I forgot about them. All in all, I hope this becomes a useful tool or even a temporary crutch for Games Masters who want to answer the question of who taught magic to his campaign’s wizards. Of the rest of the chapters, Tricks of the Trade gave me the chance to write about some of my pet ideas regarding a world that functions with magic but are in and of themselves too small and disconnected to be made into a full Encyclopaedia Arcane sourcebook. I had to generalise a lot in order to make the material as generic as possible but also as accessible as I could make it so that Games Masters could tailor it to their own campaign. The vagaries of constellations and exact geographical features are not something that worries Games Masters when they have to deal with half a dozen adventurers wrecking every other plan they devise.

All in all, this book was an interesting experience that helped me get reacquainted with the original magic-user after a rather long binge of playing fighter types.

Alejandro Melchor