Wednesday, March 20, 2024

D6x6 Former Wizards

The idea for this came to me in a dream last night - a dream about a worldwide migration, the migration itself the thing people were migrating away from - a dream about people living on the roads and ruins and great trundling vehicles, born in vats in the backseat and dying at the hands of their rapacious fellows.

What matters it this?  In the immortal words of Lawrence T. Arabia: "All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act out their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.". This I have done.

Click the button below to generate your former wizard:


Special thanks to Spwack for the generator generator here: http://meanderingbanter.blogspot.com/2018/10/automatic-list-to-html-translator-v2.html

D6 This former wizard lost their magic
1 to divine confiscation after an inquisition deemed them a diabolical risk.
2 to a catastrophic miscast which will ruin them (and everything within a substantial area around them) should they ever attempt another spell.
3 when it was stolen away by a (magically) sympathetic poppet they created to absorb hexes and wounds in their stead.
4 after their soul was mutilated while on an astral sojourn.
5 in a binding vow after losing a duel with their hated rival wizard, sworn to never again cast a spell and to drown and burn all their books.
6 after being infected by a thaumovoric brain parasite.
D6 This former wizard can still fake a bit of magic
1 with flamboyant pyrotechnics.
2 with cold-reading and sharp intuition, seeming to be a telepath.
3 with an array of poisons and disease-carrying pets imitating curses.
4 by flinging and puppeting things about by manipulating them with nearly invisible wires.
5 by goading the clutch of ghosts that haunt them into poltergeistical activity.
6 with an enchanted item they were able to hang onto and somewhat operate.
D6 This former wizard lives
1 in a tumbledown hovel which was once their tower - the treasures long since looted, the stones themselves carted off by farmers for fences.
2 bouncing between the homes of their half-human children, who grow increasingly intolerant of this burden.
3 as the resident drunk at an inn, sleeping on moth-eaten tatters in the attic and telling amusing tales for drinks.
4 in a cramped apartment, applying their literacy as a scribe-for-hire.
5 in a mountainside hermitage, using what non-magical lore they learned to treat illnesses and suchlike.
6 as a vagrant, terrorizing the superstitious with mystic-seeming nonsense.
D6 This former wizard is still dogged from their wizarding days
1 by a wretched remnant of their dark army, who want to drag the wizard back into their leadership.
2 by the minions of a dragon they robbed the hoard of.
3 by their familiar, whose spirit is trapped in animal flesh with the loss of the wizard's magic.
4 by a devil they struck a bargain with - and without their magic, they're unable to fulfill their end.
5 by a former apprentic whose ritual to achieve immortality they sabotaged, trapping the apprentice in a horrible yet nigh-unkillable state.
6 by a mob of victims they polymorphed on a lark - the transformations partially reverting with the loss of the wizard's magic.
D6 This former wizard schemes
1 to unearth the soul-jar of an ancient mage, and extract only the part of that mage's soul that can cast magic to take into themself.
2 to put together a heist to steal a lich's phylactery from the dungeon the lich built to hold it, so that the wizard can blackmail the lich into researching a way to get the wizard's magic back.
3 to steal an orchid from the greenhouse of an occult order, which blooms only once every hundred years and awakens tremendous psionic power in the one who eats its flower.
4 to found a cult that might allow them to ascend to godhood, and thereby surpass their lost mgic.
5 to expand and aggravate a rising iconoclastic movement, and then channel the energy of destroyed icons and idols into a geomantic array through which they will once again wield magic - by proxy.
6 to kidnap and drain a bunch of elves of their blood, to concentrate and transfuse it into themself in the hope that its natural magic can replace their lost book-magic.
D6 This former wizard might convince you to help them in this scheme
1 by offering the location of a potent spell.
2 by bluffing about a hidden weapon they'll pretend to unleash.
3 by telling you the command word for all the wands and so on they created.
4 by telling you the secret to disarming the traps in another wizard's vault.
5 by promising to summon you a harem of succubi once their power's restored.
6 by revealing to you the true name of a fiend of the underworld, which would let you call up and command it.

1 comment:

  1. > What matters it this? In the immortal words of Lawrence T. Arabia: "All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act out their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.". This I have done.

    This is gold. Don't know if I agree with it but gold nonetheless.

    These entries are great, this is a really cool one, another of the kind where you could easily build a whole world or story around it.

    There's something that feels very anime about it but I don't know why exactly.

    ReplyDelete