The Anti Wizard

The Anti Wizard

My first try at making a wizard school with Goblin Punch's fantastic system. You're not anti-wizard. You're an Anti Wizard. A wizard of Against, capital A. Against the past and the future, Against good and evil, life and death. Against energy and matter and space and time. A Rebours.

Crawler, by Kim Jakobsson

Perks

You are of tremendously refined taste. Your dreams always touch the Ultrareality.

Drawbacks

Without daily exposure to novel sensations or ideas, you cannot regain magic dice. Your dreams always touch the Ultrareality.

The Ultrareality is a little like the Collective Unconscious, and a little like Parabola, and a little like a metaphorical wonderland in a coming-of-age novel. It’s where ideas come from, and has native denizens of its own. It isn't real, it's better than real. It loves you.

Cantrips

1. By closing your eyes, you can nullify as many of your senses as you wish.
2. You can fix minor clothing damage, smudged makeup, burnt hair, etc, by fussing with it.
3. You can learn whether you’re being observed by posing the question aloud.

Spells

1. Petaled Mask  
2. Gemstone Edge
3. Glint in the Dark 
4. Palace of Thorns
5. Flower War
6. Devour Sensation
7. Sleep of Reason
8. A World of My Own
9. No More Dominion
10. Dollhouse Windows
11. Absolute Reality
12. Annihilation’s Pearl

Perils

1. MD only return to your pool on a 1-2 for 24 hours 
2. Take 1d6 damage
3. Random angelic or faerie mutation for 1d6 rounds, then make a save. Permanent if you fail.
4. Lose your most dominant sense for the next 1d6 rounds. 
5. The next 1d6 spells you cast affect you, and only you.
6. Summon an Ego Sprite.

Dooms

1. Your physical experience overlaps completely with the Ultrareality for 1d6 hours.
2. As above, but for 1d6 days.
3. In the ultimate act of pure solipsism, you implode into an Annihilation Pearl. Echoes of your personality live on in the Ultrareality, to torment and seduce future player characters.

You can escape your doom by committing your life to a deep, profound, and mutual love, or by shattering yourself and submitting utterly to the judgement of your other selves.

The Ultrareality has its own method of determining events, drawing from the tarot deck I use to narrate players' dreams instead of the playing cards I use normally. In the case of overlap, where a player is losing grip on reality, I draw from both. This is inconvenient, though rarely dangerous in itself.

Petaled Mask

R 0 T self D conditional

Your face blooms and falls away in petals of dry parchment. Beneath is a new face of your own imagining. You can grow facial hair, adjust your cheekbones, change your hair or eye color, etc, but nothing changes that couldn’t be covered by a masquerade mask. You may end this effect at will, returning to your natural face. If you do not do this before [sum] minutes elapse, your new face becomes your natural face. You may never use this to create the same face twice.

Gemstone Edge

R stroke T edge D [dice] minutes

Slide two fingers along the edge of something. It becomes as sharp as a razor. If the edge is metaphorical, the sharpness is also metaphorical. In this case, you must physically touch the metaphorical edge, as you would a literal one.

Glint in the Dark

R stroke T [dice] creatures D [sum] rounds

Amplify the sensitivity and refinement of a particular physical sense. The degree of amplification depends on the number of dice invested. 

1 [dice]: as discerning as a critic, as sensitive as a child 2 [dice]: as discerning as a wine-taster, as sensitive as a newborn 3 [dice]: as discerning as a sphinx, as sensitive as an orchid 4 [dice]: as discerning as an angel, as sensitive as blank canvas

Palace of Thorns

R glance T creature D [sum] minutes

A creature you can see is suddenly overcome by a creeping paranoia. Everything is sharp, bristling with pale marble thorns. They’re tucked under the petals of flowers, in the mouths of lovers, everywhere but their own clothes and skin. Every time they touch anything, they must save against magic or take 1d4 damage. This damage can’t kill them, and if they survive long enough for the enchantment to wear off, it’s all undone. Every [die] you invest increase the damage die by one step. At 4 [dice], the effect is passed on when they describe it.

Flower War

R voice T [sum] creatures D [dice] nights

Your voice shifts the perspective of [sum] creatures who hear it. Unless they save against magic, they accept the premises and values that underly your words (though not, necessarily, the words themselves). They have advantage on morale checks while acting on their newfound ideals. Whenever their new ideals drive them to a course of action abhorrent to their old ones, they get another save. 

Devour Sensation

R 0 T sensation D [sum] nights

Devour a specific sensation you're feeling and store it deep inside your heart. Everyone around you experiencing the same sensation immediately ceases to do so. You relive the experience of this sensation every night. This recollection is like memory- a reconstruction that emerges in context, and might feel markedly different depending on the circumstances you prepare for yourself.

Sleep of Reason

R 0 T self D [dice] hours

You can only cast this spell while you’re dreaming. In 5 seconds, sketch the shape of a monster, and have another player say the first three words that come to mind when they look at it. Roll 3d6 for its stats as usual, and give it an ability commensurate with its threefold nature. When you awaken, you’ll find it sitting by your head. It is newborn into this world, and how your party treats it, and what they tell it, will define its sense of reality. It hold ontological inertia for the duration of the spell, at the end of which it fades into ambiguity and nonexistence.

A World of My Own

R voice T creature or object D forever

By describing something, you can subtly change the relationship of a thing to its conceptual form, making it more or less like its ideal. Neither the thing nor the form change, only the perceived space between them. The more [dice] you invest, the more significant this effect can be. 1 [dice] changes the perceived quality or style. 2 [dice] makes it a hybrid. 3 [dice] makes it an uncanny imitation– something else in disguise. 4 [dice] makes it unrecognizable. Specific effects vary for individual observers, but the spell is clever, and aims for a relatively uniform outcome.

No More Dominion

R kiss T ensouled creature D [dice] nights

Places a pleasant haze over someone’s soul. This separates the target from the influence of other worlds, from the Underworld to the Ultrareality. Neither of them can observe or interact with one another, and any persistent influence on one by the other is suspended for the duration of the effect. Psychopomps won’t be able to tell when they die, and won’t be able to find them if they’re already dead. Dreams won’t find their way into their sleeping mind. Etc.

In The Lovely Dark, the soul is a kind of implanted ID chip used by the Underworld to catalogue deaths, and plenty of anarchists and anti-humanists destroy or corrupt theirs. In a setting with a more transcendental view of the soul, this spell might be especially dangerous.

Dollhouse Windows

R kiss T creature D [sum] nights

A single specific conviction, obsession, or delusion in your target becomes contagious for the duration. Anyone who they tell about it must save against magic or be affected by it themselves. This is not an immediate effect. Rather, it roots its way into the victim’s subconscious and proliferates there, emerging from the context of their own life. When the duration expires, the contagion ends, but the delusions remain.

Absolute Reality

R glance T everything real D [dice] rounds

The Ultrareality comes crashing into mere reality like a wave into a sand castle. Think a word. Any word. Everything real within your line of sight must save or be that thing, in addition to what they are. If that thing contradicts what they are, it consumes and replaces it.

Annihilation’s Pearl

R 0 T 0 D 0

A hair’s breadth from the tip of your nose, the world begins to end. Over the next ten seconds, the apocalypse blooms from that single point, dragging reality in on itself like a rain-soaked evening gown. This annihilates everything within a foot radius, gradually expanding by another 1d6 feet every minute, exploding on a 6, exploding in the reverse direction on a 1, and finding equilibrium on a 3. Once equilibrium has been found, the unmade zone becomes incredibly sensitive to imagination, and a new reality flourishes from the dreams of those nearby, spawning 1d6 Ego Sprites.