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xxxdragonfucker69xxx · 7 years ago

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wizoner's dilemma

a high fantasy epic fantasy game that uses dice pools, about magicians on floating islands as seen through Abrahamic mythology

-robotvance

-Jonathan Dragonfucker

Generally, Nabushezibanni found that the most embarrassing part of being a sorcerer in Babylon was asking the local demons to serve him as familiars. In Eastern Anatolia, such creatures had acquiesced instantly, eager to gain any foothold in his soul. In Babylon, however, he constantly felt as if they rather looked down on him–that taking the time to corrupt Nabushezibanni would simply upset their rather full social calendars.

-Michael Kay, The Hanging Gardens

-Jenna Moran, Nobilis

The world was a world, once. There were mountains and cities and gardens and potholes in roads. They’re gone, now, because of people like you.

You are a magician: an heir to unimaginable power. You live in your own world: some island, some remnant of the world that was, some bastion against the sea of chaos in which you now float. Maybe you are the last living person you know. Maybe you live in a charming town, the heads of the mannequin-villagers concave masks when seen from behind. Maybe, against all odds, you manage to share the world with another magician.

Not likely, though.

Likelier that you spend your time plotting and scheming. The world is harsh and hostile – literally, yes, because of Chaos at your doorstep and demons beyond the walls – but also in the way that all worlds have ever been hostile, in that the time between meeting someone and being stabbed in the back is measured in days or hours. In that the only defense against betrayal is to betray first.

This is why the world ended.

There are some schools of magic: Sorcery, Enchantment, Evocation, Conjuration. Divide 7 points among them.

Sorcery is concerned with Fate, with fortune, luck, destiny, doom. Sorcerous rituals often involve traditional methods of divination, which include any random element (palm nuts, yarrow sticks, the entrails of a goat). Use Sorcery to

Prophesy a particular death or misfortune

Curse someone with bad luck

Foresee the bad things that will happen to you

Divine the intentions or location of another

Query the cosmos about a mystery.

Enchantment is about minds and hearts and souls and dreams. It is often expressed through song and art. Use Enchantment to

Enthrall someone into your service (another magician will contest with their own magic)

Hypnotize someone to sleep, and walk through their dreams

Infect a whole population with an emotion or attitude

See someone’s memories, and change them if you want.

Evocation is the art of creation, of calling forth the world from nothing, of shaping Chaos. Spells of evocation are flashy and dramatic, full of sound and fury. Use Evocation to

Create an extension of your world, increasing its area or otherwise adding to its landscape

Form a catastrophe, anything from a living earthquake to a storm of fire and glass, and set it upon another

Build a whole new world from Chaos

Shake the foundations of the universe.

Conjuration is the way of binding spirits: the shades of the dead, the memories of angels, or most often demons from Chaos. Set the correct altar, make the correct sacrifice, and invoke the correct names. Use Conjuration to

Summon the ghost of someone particular, and question them

Call up an army: of zombies, monsters, or worse

Create and bind a specific demon for your specific needs

Subvert the binding upon another spirit, freeing it or binding it to your own will

Bind a demon or angel to serve at a specific task, not to be freed until that task is finished (never, if it’s something like ‘guard my island’ or ‘hold up my bridge’).

You own a world. Describe it. Is it very like the memories of the world before the war? Does it have life in it? Does it have people, or things that act like people, in it? Does the sun rise and set? Have you remade the moon? Is it perhaps five days wide, no matter how fast you travel? Is it perhaps unbearably deep, atop ruins of civilizations that never existed? You may later, if you choose, amend this world by magic, so don’t sweat it too badly.

The default unit of time is a season, even though the actual length of a season can vary wildly from world to world. Play proceeds in turns, visiting each player a couple of times over the course of a season as they describe assembling their new magic or otherwise preparing for the final ritual. Over the course of that season you come up with a new working and unleash it on the universe, on your own world or on another. If you suspect that another magician intends to attack your own, you can set up a defense that will take place just before the threat arrives: if you have provoked a master of Evocation and fear her wrath, you can build an army of enormous statues to hold back the flood she is sure to send. If you successfully attack another magician, you gain and they lose a point of mana: equal parts mystic potence and social status. If you know that you cannot resist another magician, you may spend a point of mana to bolster your defenses with another school: inhabit those statues with bound demons to add your Evocation and Conjuration together. You still lose mana this way, but at least the attacker won’t gain any unless they manage to still overpower you somehow. If they still manage to, you can build on the previous season’s defenses with your next working.

Not every working has to be in preparation for war, of course. You can simply try to build your own paradise. But every such working is a wasted opportunity to fight for mana, and if you build too beautiful a world someone else will simply kill you and take it.

Every year, all the magicians remaining journey to the Tower of the Sun where Martael binds them to neutrality, and they partake in the Years Feast. No magic may be performed at this time, on pain of annihilation or censure. During this time the magicians bicker, gossip, and preen. They make alliances and they make enemies, but it has been a long time since anyone was foolish enough to try making friends. Those with the most mana are granted the highest social status, and those with the least may be forced to sit near the servants (though they still bask in untold luxuries). Magicians are capable of bending the world to their whim, and little can touch them; for many, humiliation at the Years Feast is the worst injury imaginable.

[SIDEBAR: Teamwork Makes the Dream Work]

No, it doesn’t.

How can a group of PCs play this in a cooperative mode? What is the goal of this game, the best possible outcome? Let me be clear: there is none. This is a game about people at their pettiest, not their best and not even their worst. Play will continue until you get fed up with yourselves and each other. Nothing good will come of this.

But if you really want the PCs to play nice together, there are some options. First is that you can live in a shared world: pillars of the four elements at the poles of the world, or some other such element. In such a scenario all the PCs are required for the wellbeing of that world, and will not destroy each other; they may even pretend to like each other. Second is that some other, more powerful magician has arisen in a far land, a star in the west. This new power threatens to destroy them all if they do not cooperate. If you want, it doesn’t even have to be a magician; it can simply be an unspeakably powerful demon, named by some foolish amateur and free to destroy all ordered things.

But by default? This game doesn’t mean anything. It will not help express any emotions. It is simply an avenue for some friends to come up with cool curses and dumb shit to do to each other, and do those things.

[SIDEBAR: This Isn’t Artsy Enough]

If you want, you can even decide that the theme of this game – the pettiness and pointlessness of human spite – is dumb and uninteresting and you want to invert it. Maybe you actually live in the last normal remnants of Earth, and you are trying furiously to hold the Chaos and the demons and the evil magicians at bay.

Maybe you want this game to give you emotions.

If that’s so, I’ll add another rule. Well, not a rule, because you don’t have to follow it. Another option.

Usually, when attention comes to a magician during the course of a season, that magician is getting ready to do magic. They are memorizing the myriad names of the dead, or negotiating with the devil, or rearranging the stars in auspicious patterns. But, if you want to be nice about it, you can be doing something else instead. Rather than being a magician, you can be a human being.

Walk down the docks, and don’t even go dressed as a magician; go as an old man, and talk to the fruit-sellers heart-to-heart. Sit on a hill and look at the sky. Take tea with your friends. Revel in beauty. Rejoice in what you have made; be glad, for it is good.

If someone emotes a moment that is so touching, so true, that it grabs everyone; or if, at the Years Feast, you think back to a moment that has managed to stay with you; if someone gives you emotions, like, really good? They can have an extra point of mana. They squeezed it from the world, they grasped the imperishable flame that makes things good and real and holy. What’s left of it, anyways. In such a mode, life is no longer a zero-sum game. You can get better. You can make the world bigger. You can make the world whole again.

as i have remarked this is basically the perfect opposite of a witchs ladder game, i got to the end and it was actually paining me that there ws no avenue for emotional expression

my first robotvance game, im so proud of my beautiful child

i got really jenna moran near the end due to reading a bunch of chuubos for chuubos marvelous wizardry engine

im actually quite happy with how this turned out, it needs firming up but i think its a good first draft

please let me know if you think of an actual good name for this

#tatterpigs #tatterpigsgiving #wizoner's dilemma

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xxxdragonfucker69xxx · 7 years ago

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your centipede heart

Define what your wound is. This will be the source of your narrative and your powers. Even when your wound is no longer critical and you are on the path to recovery, its absence and the shape of the hole it leaves will define you.

Burn: anger, fire, blood, storms and natural disasters, violence

Cut: transformation, transmutation, healing and poison, dissociation, identity crises

Bruise: anxiety, obsession, divination, misfortune, portents and omens

Sting: enchantment, illusion, addiction, compulsion, hypnosis

Scar: depression, darkness, death, silence, emptiness

When you make a character, choose a name and a Wound. Consider how that wound came to be on their life. That Wound starts at 3.

You gain Will when your wound hurts you; when it keeps you from doing what you know is best, when it spurs you towards the worst course of action. When you look up from yourself and realize this is a bad idea but you’re going to entertain it just little longer. When you are a fucked up person.

You can spend Will to enact effects. This is not an entirely conscious decision; it is when your wound lashes out, tries to force itself on the world. The keywords under your Wounds serve as a guide to what you can do with your power.

When terrible things happen and you can’t bear it, you can choose to deepen your Wound, or maybe to take a new one. This lets you automatically do whatever it is you were trying to do.

When you work to heal yourself, it’s going to hurt, and it’s going to take time. Over several scenes, when your Wound tells you something and you make the choice to wilfully turn away from it, spend Will each time. Once you have done this a number of times equal to your Wound, it is effectively reduced....but you should still keep track of what it was. Once you are wounded, you will always be wounded.

If your Wound reaches 5, you die.

That is, you go away. Maybe you don’t actually die. Maybe you’re just in a coma or psych ward or the seventh Nega-Hell. It doesn’t matter. You’re somewhere else. Nobody can reach you. Maybe you’ll come back, eventually, but maybe not.

cosmic brain: writing thirty other things instead of the thing you should be writing

iris is scarred henry is burned izzy is bruised

these were lifted from wizoners dilemma actually the transmutation stuff i went back and wrote cause i was thinking about it and it was something missing

#tatterpigs #tatterpigsgiving #the scorpion inside you

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