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I backed Ben Meadows’ Wiki Articles Are Wizards [Citation Needed] during this year’s zine quest because I like wizards and I like game-like systems for generating RPG stuff (my article about using Tarot cards and IMDB to generate campaign history is probably around here somewhere). The PDF was delivered earlier this week, so I gave it a read-through and used it to make a wizard.
The book itself is mostly good, but has a few problems. I wonder if the author promised a minimum page count and had to stretch the book to hit it, because a lot of it feels like filler. The introduction is several pages of making the same point (“wizards are weird”) several times in multiple paragraphs that make the same points. There are also several illustrations with random items in them labelled for no apparent reason, and a bunch of random tables at the end that seem kind of misplaced since they’re just regular random tables that don’t pull from the Wiki articles.
All those problems are forgivable, but the last one is not. There are hyperlinks throughout the book. Most of them go to the last two pages of the book. The last two pages of the book do not have links back to the pages that led there, so you have to scroll back up every time you hit a link. Best of all, they don’t tell you that the links usually go nowhere until about 10 pages in. And they also mention that some of the links are real. I don’t know which ones because I’m not playing that game. Why they didn’t just format the text to look like a link without actually linking to a useless page that only frustrates the reader, I don’t know.
Once you stop clicking the blue links, the content is good. A nice little system that uses a combination of random tables and words or phrases pulled from the wiki article you’ve chosen that result in a basic character sketch of a wizard. There are also rules for pitting the wizards against each other in duels if you want to play with your friends. While I’ve only created a wizard, the duel rules look solid and the wizard-creation rules work pretty smoothly.
Overall, aside form the filler and dumb link idea, this seems to be a solid game with some neat ideas.
Here’s the wizard I created. My only advice is that you might want to avoid articles that are very long–I probably spent over 2 hours just reading through my article and pulling out the words and phrases to use. Actually creating the character once I had them took about 30 minutes. Of course, I guess you could just scan the article each time you need a phrase, but that seems like a way to miss out on some good possibilities.
Strange & Terrible Druulaek
- His minions are gun- and drug-loving trickster elementals.
- His head is open, revealing a skull full of acid-soaked gibberish.
- He spends endless coin on constantly drinking and taking hallucinogens.
- An entity often accompanies him, unnamed but dark, venal, and incurably violent.
- He frequently is the cause of dubious insinuations of bestiality.
- He is generally described as callous, erratic, self-destructive raving beast.
- Currently reading: Fame and Its Consequences.
- The topic of his current writing is “the temptations of the decadent and depraved.”
- He has combined spiders and swine, which he has unleashed on foes and passers-by alike.
- For 800 years he has infected this world, while his old master has floated in the Immaterial
- His Arch-Nemesis: [Note: You’re supposed to put a picture from the article here, but there’s no way to do that without giving away which Wiki page I used. Also, the most appropriate nemesis doesn’t appear on the page].
- His latest “great work” is a two-thumbed clenched fist grasping a peyote button
- Personality: Hopelessly tasteless
Spells:
- Amram’s Cocaine Fueled Savage Beating
- Harikunzru’s Inevitable Long Bursts of Energy
- Vanderjagt’s Devastating Kingdom of Fear
Magical Safeguards
- Cardoso’s Absolutely Necessary Rum
- Zetacosta’s Intoxicated 300-pound Samoan Attorney
- Bejmuk’s Manic Debauchery
He has 115 minor magical tricks
Mystical Artefacts
- Lezard’s Iconoclastic Countercultural Figure
- Elk Antlers of Heavy Drinking
- The Most Accurate and Least Factual Map of the World
- Dickstein’s Decadent and Depraved Sex Book
Want To Win A Prize?
The first person to correctly guess which Wikipedia page I used to create the character gets a free PDF of Magic Rules! You can message me your answer on Patreon, Facebook, Twitter, Mastadon, or Bluesky (the links are on my lnk.bio page) or post it in the comments where I shared this article.
