Design Notes: Two Wizards Enter, Two Different Wizards Leave

I'm back from Gencon, and ready to get back into Seven-Part Pact design. On the long drive home with Ruby, I had some important breakthroughs around the game, specifically around the two most powerful Wizards in Seven-Part Pact. For those unfamiliar, the lineup of Wizards is:

• The Necromancer, Gate-Keeper, who has GM authority over death and the dying.

• The Hierophant, Flame-Keeper, who has GM authority over companions, common folk, and faith.

• The Warlock, Throne-Keeper, who has GM authority over violence and warfare.

• The Mariner, Wilds-Keeper, who has GM authority over travel, weather, and weird beasties.

• The Faustian, Chain-Keeper, who is the antagonist GM.

• The Sorcerer, Rune-Keeper, who is the rules lawyer GM.

• The Anchorite, Star-Keeper, who is the big picture narrative GM.

Woah, wait, if you've played this game at all you'd know those last two are different than normal! What happened to the Librarian? Why has the Sorcerer been demoted to second place? Who's this Anchorite fellow — is he some kind of mineral?

In a game as regimented as this one, it takes a big shakeup to move Wizards around like this. But there were a number of factors that led me to make this change.

First, the Librarian felt very passive and irrelevant. The more I was writing and developing him, the more I found myself falling back on tropes around dark academia, universities, and college professors — tropes that feel very uninteresting and out of place in the broader world of Isha. He also consistently felt like the Sorcerer's second fiddle, like he didn't have enough authority or enough to do in his game. The game I designed for the Inscrutable Library wasn't really producing compelling play, and a big part of that was because the Librarian was doomed to constantly fight against stagnation. He never made choices that produced problems for other people.

Second, the Sorcerer felt very one-note and game-dominating. There was only one real way to play as the Sorcerer, and that was the version of the character I first played as in my first few sessions of the game, before I had a dedicated playbook. Additionally, because he's the highest-ranked member of the Pact and the highest-ranked member of the Celestial Audience, he was a natural fit for the facilitator, creating a black hole of status that warped the player culture around the Sorcerer's presence, both in-character and out-of-character.

I knew I wanted to preserve the flavor of the Sorcerer, the Sorcerer's Domain Game, and the Celestial Audience (GM) functions of the Librarian and Sorcerer.  I wanted to find ways to make the Librarian more active, the Sorcerer no longer top dog on all three levels of play, a new game for the Librarian, and a more multifaceted approach to both. 

So I took the lore of both the Librarian and the Sorcerer and combined them together. Now the Sorcerer is the second-highest ranked member of the Celestial Audience (if one was to rank them) while still being the undeniable leader of the Wizards on the material plane. He's in charge of the last great Wizard Tower, complete with a Library that has overgrown its original function and taken over the entire island. He's arrogant and pompous but no longer indisputably in charge, and he can feel his sanity getting eaten away by the Library he stewards. He has a new mini-game inspired by Microscope and i'm sorry did you say street magic, where he's constructing a narrative for Isha's past, which ripples out into disastrous foreshadowing in the present day. 

Then, I took what was left of the Sorcerer (the Domain game, with Masks and Nightmares, and the Celestial Audience role) and imagined a new Wizard — the Anchorite. The Anchorite is a hermit who can peer into the dreaming world, using it to arrange for certain futures and avert other ones. He can be a kind old man dispensing swords by lakes, or a megalomaniac prophet-child manipulating everyone around him, or anything in between. He dwells in a grotto underneath the Orrery, and has a big pool full of dreams in it.

There were a ton of rippling out choices from this change, a ton of alterations I had to make as a result. What are the associated planets and metals of these new Sorcerers? (we settled on both sun and moon (gold and silver) for the Sorcerer, and Neptune and Bismuth for the Anchorite — because the dude is a magical weirdo! Of course he uses the ghost star!) What are their isles? What is their lore? All of that will become clearer and easier as I write them both out.

I hope this is a useful little window into a part of game design that isn't often talked about — when to combine, when to cut, and when to preserve. I'm constantly looking over the entire game and asking myself, for each component part of it, what that part is serving, what it's contributing, and what the downsides are. It's easy for quick choices I made early in the process to become ossified as convention. "I can't change that because it's been this way since the start." But that mindset is anathema to producing a final product. Leave that thinking for the people making 5th and 6th editions of games. When you're working on a project, there's no holy cow, and just because something has been a certain way since the beginning of the project doesn't mean it must remain that way to make the work of art you want to create.