Word Wizards

Common folk may think that language describes reality. But you are not common folk. Whether at a quirky school for young wizards, through studying eldritch tomes from a civilization driven mad, or simply from the sheer quantity of hallucinogenic drugs you have ingested, you and your companions have pierced the veil and become something uncommon. You have become wizards! And a wizard knows that language can do more than describe reality. It can reshape it! It can create it! All you need is the mental fortitude to keep the etymological back pressure from squeezing your brains out your ears.

Word Wizards is a 2-page role-playing game (RPG) about a group of wizards who have just discovered wizarding and are rapidly and chaotically expanding their understanding of true words of magic. These stories can play out in a variety of settings and genres. Think stories about children going to wizard school, ill-advised deals with devils and faeries, government experiments with psychedelics, or anything else that sparks your imagination!

You’ll need one or more players, a gamemaster (GM), and a handful of 6-sided dice (d6s) to play Word Wizards. If no one in your group has played an RPG before, you may want to search online for an introduction to RPGs, but here is an extremely brief explanation of how an RPG works: each player makes up a character, the GM describes a scene, the players describe what their characters do, the GM describes how the world responds, and repeat! If a character attempts something risky, the GM will have the player roll dice to determine the outcome of the action.

Attribution: Word Wizards © Brendan Albano 2024. Art by Dodge Greenley. Dice pool mechanics in this work are based on Blades in the Dark, product of One Seven Design, developed and authored by John Harper, and licensed for our use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. All other text is by Brendan Albano and openly licensed via CC BY 4.0.