A Reflection on Dead Wizards

EDIT: I changed the name from Dead Wizards to Sand in the Bone for various reasons. This post is talking about the same game.

What follows is a long-winded reflection on Dead Wizards* and where it is headed for the future.

This might be the first time I mention the game in the blog:

My good friend Cyd is running a Penny Hack for us on Mondays, which is probably wrapping up soon. At that point I will ask my cohorts to indulge me once again and dive into a campaign that is largely inspired by mixing up Tanith Lee, Robert E. Howard, Frank Frazetta, and Richard Corben. Some good ole S&S in a project I've been calling Dead Wizards (or Kanebok... not sure how it will appear yet). I ran this once before and it was nice but this is a totally revamped version. Trying some ideas. Breaking the old game down and working from its bones to make a new toy. If all goes well, this will be one of my 2017 publishing projects.

But that was 2017 and I know for a fact I ran a Dead Wizards playtest locally almost 4 years ago. Or something like that.

This all started when I looked at Swords & Wizardry White Box and fell in love with the simplicity of the single saving throw. Somehow that morphed into a desire to make a sword and sorcery RPG which somehow morphed into sand and sorcery.

Sand and Sorcery

(Which, BTW, might make a killer game title.)

I am not sure if this label has a distinct definition. If it does, I am unaware. But it is what I use to describe Dead Wizards. All I mean by it is that the genre is sword and sorcery and that the setting has

a desert sands flavor.

First, about sword and sorcery. To me, S&S is fantasy wherein magic is both uncommon (but not necessarily "rare") and dangerous. There are no high elf good witches here. The genre sometimes has a bleak view of humanity too. But all I'm really concerned about is that the magic is uncommon and the heroes are larger than life - but still all-too-human. If you are a person who turns into a cat, then  you are weird and dangerous to others, not special and magical.

The sand bit is a little harder to nail down. I am not interested in making fantasy Arabia, but I am interested in riffing on some of the fantasy Arabian tropes. I'm also borrowing heavily from various African cultures and even dipping a little bit into India and southeast Asia. But none of them are the model and this setting isn't a representation of any real world analog. It is fantasy, pure and simple, wherein the people are not white and the landscape is not European.

If that is confusing all I can say is I'm going to try really fucking hard to practice "show, don't tell" with the presentation of this game.

And on to that reflection stuff

So the game began its life as a S&W hack. I ran one or two sessions in that vein, which were fine. Then I broke away for a while to do Rabbits & Rangers and when I came back to it I tried to design an original system, but with lots of S&W bits. The system was kind of modeled on the old descending AC from D&D. You had three categories and for each you'd have a to-hit table. That playtest was short but went OK as well. I still wasn't feeling it, though. I ran a few sessions of it and then my mom got sick and I kind of fell away from running games for a bit.

The next stab I took at it was even more of a non-OSR system. This time no playtesting took place. And now I'm back at it with another redesign. This one feels more right than ever before. An important element fell into place recently where a piece of the setting kind of clicked with the system. Namely, sand.

Since sand is everywhere in the setting, I thought what a great way to express it - have a "sand" category on your character sheet. Sand is how much willpower you can exercise over the world in which you live. The powers-that-be express their will on the world, and sand is their blood. So characters can use sand to express narrative control in the game.

This takes me back, back in time to 2001 when I wrote The Pool. The same concept is at play here. There is a bit of a gamble to the use of sand and the payoff is narrative control. This idea is what I remember being the most powerful and prescient impression I got from The Forge. This simple notion that a player could do some of the work that a GM is normally doing. Of course that idea blew up after those days and now we have probably hundreds of games devoted passionately to narrative gaming. Back then, not so much.

To be clear, this is not a story game. It would be fine it if was, but it isn't. This is a traditional RPG in the sense that you have a GM and players and the GM is responsible for setting the stage, describing things, and adjudication. But, like The Pool, this game allows for some degree of narrative control to go to the players via the sand mechanic.

I'll speak more about sand later. I've yammered enough tonight.

*I decided it was preemptive to bold and italicize a game that doesn't yet exist. So until I actually have a manuscript, I won't bold and italicize Dead Wizards like I normally would. It doesn't matter, I know. Stop judging me. My blog, my rules.

More posts about this game over the last few years:

Playtest #3
A Bit of Dead Wizards
Drawing Gaj'Uth the Three Headed Elephant

Drawing Gaj'Uth the Three Headed Elephant

I have circled back around to Dead Wizards, having taken the very long way to get here. For those who might not remember or care, Dead Wizards is a sword and sorcery tabletop RPG I have been "working on" for a long time now... how long? Let me just go and check...

The earliest post I can find on my blog is 01/22/2017. But I believe I was posting about this on G+ (long may it dance in the Happy Fields of Memory) before that time. I know I ran a playtest of a Swords & Wizardry version of the game at least 3 years ago.

So I have been in a bit of a creative slump lately. I haven't been getting streams of new ideas like I used to. I was beginning to worry that my idea well was dry or I was just so old and jaded I didn't give enough shits anymore to make the pump work. But I was driving home from Indiana on a work trip and I had this amazing 4 hour long brainstorm. Normally I listen to podcasts and audiobooks on journeys but on this one I just let some music play the whole time and I let my mind go nuts. Essentially, I wrote the core of the game on the road.

Because I didn't have a "game" yet. I had versions of a game and I had playtested a few of them, but wasn't really satisfied. That's why I kept thinking I might just make it an OSR game and stick with old D&D mechanics. But now I feel kind of liberated from that idea. The setting could work with those mechanics, but there's really no reason it should have to. I haven't written a standalone RPG of significance in years. Many years. The Questing Beast was probably the last one. It's high time I got back to the work.

Gaj'Uth is not amused by life

Which brings me to drawing Gaj'Uth the Three-Headed Elephant. I mention the elephant in the opening tone-setting for the game thus:

"On the rare occasion the Exalted Prince enters the city streets he is carried in a glowing howdah on the back of an immense three-headed elephant called Gaj’Uth. A brigade of his arcane guards go before him to clear the path, crushing those who refuse to move and demolishing structures so that not even mighty Gaj’Uth is made to touch the dirty city and its dirty people."

For context, the game is inspired by Arabian, Indian, and African mythologies and concepts. It is absolutely not a representation of any particular culture or people at all and is filled with all sorts of feverish fantasy flizbits from my brain that aren't even part of the three influences I mentioned. So it's kind of tricky to decide how to describe it, how to "market" it, and so forth. I'm doing it for my own pleasure and satisfaction, as I usually do everything for that purpose. I want to make something cool and wicked and evocative in the vein of pulp fantasy stories as filtered through my own head. So that means as much or more Tanith Lee as Robert E. Howard.

But I've said all this before. I even presented some mechanics from previous incarnations of the game on G+, generating some nice conversations and debates about how the game would work. I believe in those iterations I was enamored of using the descending AC to-hit matrix as a core mechanic for all game actions. While that's still a sexy idea in my book, I do not believe that's the way I'll go with this game. I have a pretty clear schema in my skullpan that I feel like makes some kind of sense. It's a theater of the mind approach for sure, with less emphasis on game tactics (such as blow by blow combat) and more emphasis on the bigger picture... the life's work of a character and the juicy way they fit snuggly into the game's setting.

And it does have a setting. I'm not shying away from that here. I have often tried to keep things loose in terms of setting so my work can be picked up and dropped into existing game campaigns. Not here. This is a very specific place with a specific ethos and way of existing with it. Not too complex, mind you. I don't like games with a huge wall of text or series of novels I have to read before I can "get it". I don't want to make that game.

Ah see now I ramble as is my wont. Stream of consciousness eat your heart out.

I will post again down the road a bit, probably discussing the mechanics. And I'll arrange some playtesting with my Monday night friends as soon as they will indulge me.

Until then, be kind and enjoy your moments.