| 1 |
From a charlatan, who was very surprised when the wizard started doing real magic somehow. |
| 2 |
From an academy for battle-mages that used brutal discipline to turn human beings into living artillery pieces. |
| 3 |
From their own future self, who went back in time and taught them magic in a bootstrap paradox. |
| 4 |
From the ghost of a wizard who haunted a ruined tower they were dared to stay the night in. |
| 5 |
From a stranger at a crossroads, in exchange for promising the stranger their firstborn child. |
| 6 |
In an enchanted casino where anything could be gambled,
wagering against a mage who put their knowledge of spellcasting on the
line. |
| 7 |
From a washed-up hedge-mage in exchange for a bottle of hooch. |
| 8 |
From their parents, in a centuries-old family tradition of wizardry. |
| 9 |
From a treacherous master who intended to use them as a sacrifice to their diabolical patron. |
| 10 |
From a bound demon who hoped to tempt or trick the wizard into freeing it. |
| 11 |
From the broadcast dreams of an eldritch entity that
lay at the bottom of a crater lake, and in fact created that lake when
it crash-landed on the world. |
| 12 |
From the whispers of wights entombed in a nearby barrow. |
| 13 |
From the very city they lived in, after gaining an
interest in architecture and discovering the mystic geometry built into
its streets and boroughs. |
| 14 |
From an intelligent familiar whose own wizard had died, and so had grown lonely and longed for a replacement. |
| 15 |
From a magic mirror that had a tutelary spirit bound
within it. Unfortunately, just like their reflection is flipped, all the
spells they learned from the mirror have been inverted in effect. |
| 16 |
From soiled scraps of cast-away spellbooks they dug out of sewer-muck while working as a tosher. |
| 17 |
From a sickly old wyrm no longer able to leave its cave, who wanted to turn the wizard into its instrument of vengeance. |
| 18 |
From a grungy ascetic who swore off the pursuit of worldly power to live in the woods and eat grubs. |
| 19 |
From a serpent-man sorcerer-scientist who kidnapped
them and kept them for many years as a spell-slave in its underground
citadel before they escaped. |
| 20 |
From a dryad who kept them charmed and ensconced in her grove for a decade. |
| 21 |
From a secret society of guildsmen who used magic to stoke their business, and took them in as an initiate. |
| 22 |
From the Scholomance - a school of magic where the
headmaster is the Devil himself. The price of attendance was the soul of
the lowest-performing student of each year. |
| 23 |
From a shady cult that claimed to receive their power in return for blood sacrifices to a nameless god. |
| 24 |
From ultra-dimensional entities while tripping out of their mind on hallucinogens. |
| 25 |
From a mermaid they caught in a fishing net, in return for her release. |
| 26 |
From a night hag who liked the taste of their dreams. |
| 27 |
From fragments of memory left over from another wizard's failed attempt to overwrite their mind with a copy of their own. |
| 28 |
From a vampire who tutoured them in exchange for victims they procured. |
| 29 |
From a grimoire they stole from a wizard's manse during their days as a rambunctious urchin. |
| 30 |
From a book of folktales about wizards they compiled, deriving the real practice of magic from the stories. |
| 31 |
From ethereal spirits that leaked into their head after they were trepanned. |
| 32 |
From an extradimensional library they became lost in by accident. |
| 33 |
From a lich interred in their family's crypt - a distant ancestor of theirs. |
| 34 |
From a golem they stumbled upon, enchanted by a fallen
civilization to educate its next generation in the fundamentals of
magic. Soon after they encountered it, the golem exhausted its energy
source and shut down. |
| 35 |
From programming implanted directly in their brain when they were grown in a vat as a mass-produced servitor. |
| 36 |
From observation of balefire stars in occult constellations. |
| 37 |
From their study of mathematics that went so deep it transcended reality and entered the realm of magic. |
| 38 |
From a monastery in the mountains which taught that knowledge of magic revealed the gods' truest designs. |
| 39 |
From a once-prestigious school of magic that squandered its reputation in an ill-advised, downright hubristic venture. |
| 40 |
From a cruel master who kicked apprentices who couldn't keep up with their curriculum to the curb. |
| 41 |
From the meat of the Salmon of Knowledge, which they caught by complete accident. |
| 42 |
From the grotesques of a carnival they ran away from home to join, who used magic to enhance their acts. |
| 43 |
From an imperial eunuch who wanted them to become a sort of heir. |
| 44 |
From a genie bound to a lamp they unearthed. |
| 45 |
From a primordial titan, chained to a dry river-bottom
and sentenced to have its kidneys eaten out by badgers every night for
some crime against the divine. |
| 46 |
From a lost astral traveler whose soul drifted along their path. |
| 47 |
From an aboleth who mutated their brain to better handle arcane energies. |
| 48 |
From a tsochari parasite hoping to groom them into a magic-bearing host. |
| 49 |
From an older adventurer who wanted to make them into an expendable soldier. |
| 50 |
From a grimoire inherited from their distant black sheep uncle. |
| 51 |
From satyrs and maenads who they partied with on a months-long bender. |
| 52 |
From clay tablets they dug up while digging a well. |
| 53 |
From an intelligent sword once wielded by a legendary gish. |
| 54 |
From elves who kidnapped them as a child, leaving a
changeling behind in their place, in order to test methods too risky for
their own long lives. |
| 55 |
From a warlock who gleaned arcane secrets from their
own master, and intended the wizard to be their ace in the hole with
magic that didn't depend on being beholden to anyone. |
| 56 |
From a living illusion made in the image of some great
beauty, who believed that the wizard could someday grant them
corporeality. |
| 57 |
Under the wing of a royal agent tasked with investigating and neutralizing occult threats to the crown. |
| 58 |
From banned texts they confiscated while working for an inquisiton. |
| 59 |
From the surviving crew of a crashed spelljammer, who
hoped the wizard would help them acquire the components to repair their
craft so they could someday return to the stars. |
| 60 |
From the personal library of a debt-ridden mage they repossessed after a few too many missed payments. |
| 61 |
From a lecherous old master who shared knowledge as a pretense to try seducing them. |
| 62 |
From their ex-spouse, who's one of the fair folk, and bears a grudge against them to this day. |
| 63 |
From a fallen angel once tasked with teaching magical
knowledge benevolently to humanity, yet became consumed by vices and now
wanders the earth instructing only for its own obscure ends. |
| 64 |
From the mystics of a clan of bullywugs they were taken prisoner by, whose practices they rationalized and codified. |
| 65 |
From extensive tattoos they had no memory of getting, which they woke up with after a bender. |
| 66 |
From a dragon so that they could serve it as an accountant of the magical items in its hoard. |
| 67 |
From a devastating, enchanted plague that killed most who caught it, but awakened magical talent in some vanishing few instead. |
| 68 |
From the echo-recordings of an extinct civilization of
bat-people, kept repeating endlessly and with minimal degradation in
exquisitely-excavated chambers. |
| 69 |
From being partially assimilated into a parasitic fungal hivemind that escaped from an archmage's laboratory. |
| 70 |
From the child of an old and potent magical dynasty who they tutoured in more mundane subjects. |
| 71 |
From a secretly heretical priest whose studies led them to believe that magic could let them usurp the very gods. |
| 72 |
From a brittle, centuries-old tome they looted from a tomb while employed as a linkboy by an adventuring party. |
| 73 |
From their own memories of a past life in which they
were the wizard-king of a city-state, brought to their current awareness
by the experimental treatment of a controversial physician. |
| 74 |
Working as an amanuensis for an elderly wizard who suffered from arthritis. |
| 75 |
From a unicorn who found them abandoned as an infant in the woods, and cast them out when they reached adulthood. |
| 76 |
From a spirit naga who they worshipped as a fierce guardian deity. |
| 77 |
From a yugoloth scholar in return for a terrible fee,
which the yugoloth worked behind the scenes to make them desperate
enough to pay. |
| 78 |
From a sphinx whose many riddles they were able to answer to its satisfaction. |
| 79 |
As part of a bardic education, but they became
disillusioned with the art and frippery of it and so reduced their magic
to the purely academic. The vocal components of their spellcasting
still retain a musical quality. |
| 80 |
An apprenticeship under a travelling
craftsman-enchanter who delighted in making magical toys and time-saving
conveniences for people. |
| 81 |
From a sentimental master who took them on as a replacement for their child who died as a result of their risky tutelage. |
| 82 |
From an eccentric alchemist who taught that material transmutations were only ever a metaphor for transformations of the mind. |
| 83 |
From a flesh golem whose brain was cobbled together
from those of some of the greatest magical minds of its generation.
Secretly, the golem hoped to refresh itself with the wizard's brain
after they had enough time to learn and grow. |
| 84 |
From an order of assassins who use magic to commit untraceable murders. |
| 85 |
From a green slaad who admired the chaotic mess of their life. |
| 86 |
From a family of brownies whose chores they'd always help with. |
| 87 |
From a research council of purely theoretical mages,
who considered their turning of magic to practical ends to be near to
blasphemy. |
| 88 |
From a dissociative episode wherein they also realized the artifical nature of their reality. |
| 89 |
In a prison hulk, from their criminal wizard cell-mate. |
| 90 |
In the vast planetary library of the Great Race of Yith, after one of their number swapped minds with them for several years. |
| 91 |
From a giant sage whose tribe was wiped out, and wished to pass on their oral tradition. |
| 92 |
From a circle of gnoll necromancers who advanced their
art by interrogating the souls of those they devoured, dragged howling
from the hereafter. |
| 93 |
From a treant who dwelled at the heart of a primeval
forest, who used to donate its wood to pulp for the grimoires of the
greatest mages. |
| 94 |
From the psychic puppet of a mindflayer who craved the unique flavours of wizard brains. |
| 95 |
As part of the state exams of the magocratic nation they were born in. |
| 96 |
From a squadron of modrons who predicted their actions would restore order to the multiverse to some extent. |
| 97 |
From a memory-crystal encoded by ancient elves. |
| 98 |
From the universe itself, after dedicating their life to meditation. |
| 99 |
From a shapeshifting gnome they rescued from a hunter's trap. |
| 100 |
From a charred grimoire which flew over the horizon and
landed at their feet, propelled by an explosion created by its former
bearer's miscast spell. |
