In one of my settings, warlocks have schools rather than wizards. Wizards do the master/apprentice thing and are considered masters of the craft. Warlocks are more common among nobles and the rich because they dont want to spend so much time learning when they can quickly be of use to their families. They don't need in depth knowledge, they need just enough to get an edge over their political rivals. Some families have specific patrons that they petition, generation to generation.
I like the idea that warlocks are apprentices to supernatural creatures. And that eventually they will become one of those creatures by then end of it. That's what makes them scary, the loss of humanity and they seek it out.
On the flip side, people often overlook the opposite situation, where the otherworldly creature is the one that approached the Warlock, potentially even without input from the character in it happening. Like, I'm currently playing a John Constantine style exorcist character who was marked by a Celestial at a young age, prompting the local Clerical order to adopt him and raise him in the priesthood, basically having no input in his life path before being swept up into the adventuring party by circumstance. Even then, he knows his Patron probably expects "something" of him, and it probably even relates to the situation the party is in now, but what that is never telegraphed to him except if he's somehow straying away from it. Then again, in said party over the course of the campaign has been the Paladin that's a Werewolf, a noble Hobgoblin Eldritch Knight/Lore Wizard with a Champion Fighter Snow Goblin as their knight, a Firbolg Forest Druid that is willing to burn anything man-made, a Warforged Gunslinger (played by the player with the worst dice rolling luck, of course), a Sorcerer in a plague doctor mask who's potentially a Vampire, a Kalashtar that was somehow a practicing Cleric in Faerun, and an Awakened flying squirrel Bladesinger, all of us trapped in a demiplane that has been in eternal winter for 200 years (except for the Snow Goblin I guess, being a native, but their entire tribe was infected with bone-drinking parasites and had to be put down), so destiny makes for strange bedfellows. Also, the squirrel's NPC creator was a Barbarian/Druid that got so angry trying to solve the unnatural winter that they spontaneously combusted into a pillar of continuously burning flames for several months (until we roleplayed with the squirrel to let us take that guy's set of seriously good magical ironwood armor that had taken on its wearer's properties in death). ...Wait, what was this comment about again? What video is this? Oh, right, the interplay between player classes' mechanical and roleplay implication in a story or setting. Think I got off topic. Just going to stop typing and post this before I can fully consider just deleting the whole thing.
YES! When I was messing around with how I would re-design 5e classes, this is VERY MUCH the flavour I wanted for Warlock. Instead of wonky spell progression, they would start to take on traits of their patron creature, to be able to summon the minions or even part of the realm of this entity. And absolutely the end goal of this, the capstone ability, was that you transcend physically into being one of these creatures, maybe in some kind of hybrid form, but definitely a permanent change.
I like the idea that Wizards are rare because most die before they reach higher levels. You only can cast high level spells by learning with real world experience of adventuring. You have lv.1 hedge wizards that never leave their town after learning magic and then you have the lv.20 master wizards that was lucky enough to survived adventuring. All their other classmates died on low level adventuring
Young wizard: Accidentally kills mentor through incompetence and stupidity Mentor: Oh thank god I finally got away from this idiot Young dude: Hello I have brought back your spirit and put it into this cat
Rather than a giant fire that the wizard can see in their tower, maybe they light a magic candle in the town and it's twin at the wizard's tower also lights to make the wizard aware that he needs to scry on that particular village. The wizard has a wall of candles with labels for the town they are in.
Oh, I *love* the idea of a dead wizard coming back as a familiar. Waking up, rubbing their eyes and freaking out about suddenly being an owl. "Rookie, what did you do??? WHAT DID YOU DO TO ME?"
@@ChristophZak Which would be weird if they came back as a weasel instead. Seriously, though, Kaepora Gaebora is just a wizard stuck in a familiar body, that's why he never shuts up.
Similar to this, a warlock who ends up making a Pact of the Chain, thinking they're pledging allegiance to a powerful fiend, but it turns out they've been punked by a single imp, who is now both their patron and their familiar.
I thought of it as more like doctors/professors. Being a doctor of something holds weight like you are supposed to trust them. You can also still have the young doctor freshly graduated who doesn't know how to apply all the things they learned and they need real world experience to utilize it all.
Hahaha I see that 4 seasons landscaping shirt. :D On topic: I did a similar thing with my setting, mostly because once you play Dragon Age and you have that whole "wait, how _would_ civilization actually react to magic that allows people to mind control others and blow s-- up randomly" it's a little hard to dislodge that from your brain when you're building your world. I didn't go hardcore "okay let's persecute the wizards" but I set up a very similar "how much do we trust these people" scenario where wizards, by dint of having a regulated system of learning are easier to license and control, Sorcerers are seen as a sort of trick of biology and are rare enough that they can be at least eyeballed by the authorities in case they start getting up to shenanigans, but Warlocks? Well, woof. A warlock is basically an ambulatory nuke with a devil or an ancient evil (or just a weird archfey)'s finger on the button. No one's going to be comfortable with that running around.
omg dael i legit have been designing a homebrew setting society in which the socio-political hierarchy is somewhat class-based so this video has come to me right on time!!
Really dig this. It got me thinking about an idea for wizards where an apprentice is branded on one of their hands by their mentor with a ward that prevents them from using magic. The mentor controls that Ward like a water faucet, opening it up more and more as the apprentice becomes adept. The ward cannot be removed. On graduation, to be free of their master, their hand is removed and cannot be restored. I like this for a couple of reasons, mostly because I feel like magic should be rare, scary, somewhat unpredictable, and powerful. A player who wishes to wield that power has to make a commensurate sacrifice. Within the construct of the world wizards are known and recognized for their missing hand amongst other things. ... They won't be climbing any ropes, that's for sure.
I like the idea of a master wizard sending their apprentice out to collect experience - and then at the end of the dungeons they complete, they can find spells carved into the walls. The dungeons therefore act both as monster lairs and as a test of strength and skill for an apprentice wizard to continue their craft.
On my setting, there is the Arcane Council, this DA Circle-like organization that has a lot of respect in all countries, and designated leaders in each region. Every wizard and sorcerer is forced to be a member of this organization, and there they have to obey rules to what is and isn't allowed to do with magic, so if your were to, like, mind control someone with your magic, the Council would severily punish you. At the same time, I really like the idea of Wizard institutions (not necessarily mass-learning academies, but the idea that being a wizard has a lot to do with beaurocracy and learning from the right sources, so places of experiments and resources) and of Sorcerer families (who have learned to keep their inate power generational and by that secure social status), both of which I can explore in the Council. Warlocks are welcome to join the Council, and benefit from both the wizards' resources and the sorcerers' influence, but for that they have to expose their status as a warlock, a thing that many don't wish to do. The Council isn't a "good" entity, necessarily, but it also isn't "bad". There are many people who use it to explore others, and just as many who use it as a way of democratize magic. We haven't gotten far enough on the campaign that would let me explore that (one of my players is a Draconic Sorcerer whose grandmother is one of the leaders of the Council. They also have the spirit of a black dragon tied to their bloodline, and it has awoken in this PC), so this is all I have for now. But I'm pretty proud.
In my world, I have wizard academia at odds with the bardic colleges, which are more like confederacies than proper schools. The bards are tapping into arcana via experience, emotion, & memory instead of math & measurements and the wizards don’t like that “they’re doing it wrong” and still get the right answers, to put it simply.
I have something similar too, but the two schools share the building! There used to be only the wizard's school and then bards became so popular they opened the bard college wing and now they have to bear with sharing the corridors with each other
Pfft one of my bard characters actually had something like this as a backstory, she came from a wizarding family and by all means she could've been an amazing wizard if she actually wanted to but the nature of bardic magic called to her more strongly so she ran away and joined a bard college (she also later multiclassed into wizard because she'd already been studying the fundamentals as a kid but never actually got to first level wizard so when we found a book some of the spells on her bard list and a few rituals from that and some scrolls as well she immediately got to work transcribing the spells in her own style and figuring out how that wizard magic worked hence gaining a wizard level (which also meant I could start replacing some of the bard spells I knew that were also on the wizard list, like disguise self, comprehend languages and detect magic)
Earthdawn is a good example of an RPG that marries the class mechanics to the setting. If you're a Thief, you're not just someone who steals stuff -- you're someone who's learned a specific set of magical talents that makes them supernaturally *good* at stealing stuff.
Order of Scribes Wizard + Undead/Undying Tomelock = new magical student struggles with the responsibility of being the only physical representation of a dead great wizard, who has to teach them spells to be their agent on the material plane.
In our campaign all magic is available to all classes. Classes more so describe how you tap into magical energy and what you may need to do to get it. Anyone can learn to cast a 9th level spell but it can come at great cost potentially draining the caster and party resources for a time. You may also need other materials or it can have consequences for the wider world around you like damaging the "magical" environment. This way I can say yes to almost anything a player wants to dream up but they also sort of police themselves to not ruin their own world building story.
I'd really love to hear about your thoughts on the Fighter/Rogue/Bard trio, because I can't for the life of me think of how those classes are connected, but I'm sure there's something interesting you've struck upon!
The main problem i have with the "build whatever character you want, there are no restictions here maaaaan" mentality is that it requires the world to, at least practically, be empty of any hard lore and consistency. Its also the problem with how 5e handled player centaurs (they are some weird miniature variant that still has the same name so it will have minimal impact on gameplay) and minotaurs
I'd be interested to hear more of your thoughts about the other classes you didn't go into detail about, especially the way bards fit in with fighters and rogues.
I really like the concept of wizards being sort of scientists in that they strive for most of their lives to understand the ways their world works and, when they try to share that knowledge, almost no one understands or even believe it. I also like the idea of the wizard as the kind of adventurer that actually plans in advance by creating potions, scrolls and magic items in order to have always the right tool for the work at hand
This is so exciting! I’m making a warlock who used to be a military captain before becoming a warlock and this is exactly what I needed! (Because both of her parents are alive and I needed some Angst. No one just becomes a warlock when they have a happy home life, a successful job, and good friends)
@@MonarchsFactory rouges need a special mandatory thing where you cannot become a rouge or subclass into rouge if you have parents. I don’t make the rules I just spread them
One of the strengths of D&D is how neatly comparisons between classes can be drawn, and I think the more frameworks of groupings you come up with and take into account the more interesting insights you get. Like to me I can see a grouping of trained magic (Wizard, Bard, Druid) with maybe Artificer as a cheaty 4th, then gifted magic (Cleric, Sorcerer, Warlock), then martial magic gained from honing certain beliefs and skills (Paladin, Monk, and Ranger), and then the non-mages who fit neatly into a trio of lawful/neutral/chaotic or, in other words, how well they fit into society (fighter, rogue, barbarian, respectively). Actually all four of those subgroups could be organized as "most societally normal", "accepted part of society but only sometimes", and "not seen as acceptable by society" - play around with how you organize them to your taste. I really love that 5e has explicitly uncoupled Paladins from religion because it lets them slot into more frameworks easily. Intuitively I can see how your groupings work too, though I kinda question how Bard is being placed with fighter and rogue unless they're just three different "normal people" kinda things? You could also sort as mastering magic "outside" oneself (Wizard, Cleric, Druid, Warlock), mastering magic as an internal skill (Paladin, Monk, Ranger, Sorcerer, Artificer), and those fighty three. Or learning magic at an official school or college (Wizard, Bard, Monk), learning it through nature (Druid, Ranger, Sorcerer), learning it through beliefs (Cleric, Paladin, Warlock), and then the fighty three + artificer.
Great video as always! Your world's Wizard/ Sorcerer paradigm is reverse of mine; where Sorcerers are seen as having been granted the divine right to cast spells and wield magic, whereas Wizards our outlawed unless given express permission by the Empire, as they're seen as meddling with forces that they can't possibly understand.
In my setting a wizards tower is a conceptual idea, like a mind palace, where they store their spells. It is a physical thing in the ethereal plane and can be anchored to the material plane giving the wizard a domain that is the seat of their power. The tower in the ethereal is guarded by the living spells that you have memorized for that day.
I love this. You could also flip it on its head if you want, and the wizards are an entrenched oligarchy who monopolize power while a warlock is a rebel who fights back by stealing power they aren’t supposed to have.
I have a homebrew setting where wizards are philosophers studying to understand and manipulate the world, sorcerors are hunted for organ harvesting (like you would do to a manticore for magic components), and warlocks know the truth of the world.
My first character was a tomepact warlock who described himself as a 'mage' not wanting to disclose where his powers come from. I really think these things you discussed help flush out the setting and make the world feel more real.
Having a one page or something simple to help guide the world's reaction to the PCs is such a great idea and makes a lot of sense! Grouping them helps organize it a lot too, You can see that in Five Torches Deep, they do Mages, Zealots, Warriors, & Thieves as classes, and what we normally think of classes as Archetypes (subclasses). It's a;; super clever, super valid, and super helpful as a compass for RP, worldbuilding, and game prepping. Great work!
Sorcerers wandering around with spellbooks containing nothing but gibberish, or walking around with a little animal and declaring it to be their familiar. Wizards demanding a "wizard tax" to the town, otherwise he won't help them. Wizards putting people in debt for the services he's provided them Not having campaigns that go from level 1-18 in a matter of months
The phrase you're looking for is "mechanically-implied setting". It's the thing that culturally distinguishes Gygaxian TSR D&D from every version from 3e to present, including Pathfinder.
There's a huge difference between "There are no" statements and "You can't be" statements. "There are no young wizards" is an invitation in my mind, there aren't any in the world so you get to be the first. "You can't be a young wizard" is a command and it can be a fair or unfair one.
I guess Im not really thinking of these as either "there are no" OR "you can't be" statements. I'm thinking more along the lines of "this is what wizards are understood to be, this is their reputation in the world, so because your character defies that expectation, that's a character point we'll want to zoom in on to work out why you're different"
@@MonarchsFactory That's kind of what I meant by a "there are no" statement, but I have a terrible habit of being overly reductive in my phrasing and then having to go back and explain myself. I was definitely imagining a slightly more confrontational implementation, the classic Dragonlance-style "nobody has done magic like this in centuries" trope. Regardless, I absolutely agree it isn't about "knee-capping" your players, it's about creating a setting/atmosphere and engaging in a dialogue with your group.
Yes! I’m always trying to explain to my characters that classes are a meta concept and that the NPCs don’t necessarily know what they are. A minstrel and a character bard are different things, a cleric and a player Cleric are different things. To an NPC most arcane spell casters would be called Mages because they don’t know the difference between the classes.
On a semi-related note, I think(?): Something that has been sort of bothering me about D&D is the asymmetry between martial and arcane classes. It might just be me, but it feels like there is just something inherently cool about casters being connected to the illusive Weave (woooooh) that lends itself really well to storytelling. This, however, leaves the fighter, rogue, barbarian etc. feeling incredibly basic, like glorified guards or thieves. I like the way this was done in Brent Weeks' Night Angel series, where (if I recall correctly, it's been a long time since I read the books) people who practice their art enough, gain access to something called the "Talent" (capital T), which allows them to supernaturally enhance their basic abilities. E.g., the rogue is particularly good at sneaking because they use the Talent to LITERALLY meld with the shadows, the fighter is particularly good at hitting stuff because their Talent allows them to hit stuff supernaturally hard and/or fast, etc.
Oh wow. Your point about Clerics' deities not being necessarily real has me envisioning a party's campfire after a long march, they're all weary, getting on each other's nerves, and the Cleric ranting about how the Warlock's power is usurped and potentially evil. The Warlock tries to defend himself, saying they're basically the same, his patron is like the Cleric's deity, and this just insults the Cleric even more. He yells about how his powers come through piety and trust not some contract, so eventually the Warlock sighs, finishes his meal, gets up to go to his tent, turns back to the cleric and says "At least I know my patron is real" and heads into his tent for the night. The bard smiles, the rogue laughs, the wizard says "well he's not wrong" and the paladin is left to console the cleric. "It's ok. Pelor is real. He's just a dumb Warlock what would he know."
Grouping the magic together is across different class groups that in game would be their own societies is a cool idea. Making me think of the Diablo world where the Druids and Barbarians split off from one another but there's still that little bit of savagery shared between them.
I love this idea of grouping the classes up aswell. Paladins believe in taking action for their deity by facing their enemies and are more likely to be in armies expecting their deities will join them. Clerics on the other hand stay in towns helping the followers giving them guidance, they also treat their gods the same by asking for help rather than expecting it. Monks are more scholars than fighters learning from the gods of old. Taking the morals and lessons from different deities to shape their teachings. Most believe that the gods are dead or atleast can't/shouldn't influence the world any longer.
A while back I started writing a setting that is highly elitist and religious (in the sense that the government bases it’s laws off of the gods, not that there’s any real reason to believe), and out of spellcasters, sorcerers are the most respected. The idea is that in the early days of civilization, sorcerers were still being born when nobody else had any knowledge of magic, and because they were so powerful compared to others, they became the natural leaders, and now in many places they still rule as nobles and other important figures, families of sorcerers are highly important and well respected. One of my favorite details is that these families are constantly on the hunt for Wild Magic sorcerers, who they’ll either try to marry into their families or kill, since WMSs are generally the beginning of a new bloodline. I also plan to write in little quirks for different families, and wild magic sorcerers will develop their own quirks that can add to a bloodline should they marry into an already existing family. Wizards are seen very similarly to Dael’s being highly respected in old age, however young wizards are often mistrusted, often being associated with experiments gone wrong and magic going awry. Warlocks, however, are hated, they’re seen as heretics and cheats, seeking power for the sake of power without taking the time to learn it or earring it by birthright. I have a really big document going over the associations with all the classes and how they’re seen by the public and it’s one of my favorite things to write about, highly recommend trying it
+1,000,000 Nerd Cred for the Omadon and Flight of Dragons reference! (Not that you in any way need additional nerd cred, but seriously, that made my day. You're awesome!)
My party doesnt like to follow any class norms. We have a monk that's basically acting as a ranger, a barbarian that's acting as a bard, and a warlock acting as a cleric. Though this can be a way for the players to be the exception to the societal rules.
I’ve always had the assumption that wizards would resent and look down on sorcerers as, unlike wizards, sorcerers don’t have to spend time and dedication to learning magic, they were just born with their abilities. However, while re-reading The Magician’s Nephew, I noticed that the Queen Jadis seems to think of it the other way around. She disdains uncle Andrew’s lack of natural talent and noble blood, saying that his is just imitation magic. She even mentions that wizard type magicians were wiped out in her world.
I literally just thought of a new DnD character based on this! I was thinking about a ranger who’s sole objective is to prove to the world that the Ranger class isn’t pointless and shouldn’t be dismissed.
D A E L I've been stuck on how my magic system works for my first campaign, and this was a BOLT of lightning to my brain! Thank you sooooo much, I'm stealing all of this wholesale for my world :D
As a folklorist and D&D fan, your channel is seriously one of my favorite things I've found lately! My whole campaign is very Ghibi/folklore inspired, so watching your stuff has been endlessly helpful and entertaining ;w;
This reminds me a lot of the first system I played. Wizards, or rather Mages, had to belong to one of three guilds. Not registering with a guild would make you an illegal magic user, a bit of a problem when one of the more popular gods had a hankering for rules and called a sect of mage-hunters amongst his followers. Wether you learned at a school (schools had a maximum of students accepted at one time, depending on how many teachers were available) or with a single master mage, you automatically joined up with the school's or master's aligned guild. The guilds, after a test of your abilities would brand you, mostly on a obvious place, like the palm of your hand. And only then were you deemed fit to learn further during travels. Common custom was, that a mage would show their palm at the initial greeting. The guilds had their own set of morals and accepted spells, i.e. one would focus on healing and prophecy etc, one would focus on battle magic, one would focus on the in between stuff. Politics were taught at most schools, because they invested too much time into their students for them to run into a stupid situation and getting themselves killed because of magic. Necromany and demonology were deemed forbidden magic and not suppoted by either guild. So imagine how stuffy the mages had to be, always tiptoeing the line of not attracting unwelcome attention. And then an unlicensed magic user shows up, a druid, a witch, or even someone with an inborn talent for two or three spells.
The crux of my current campaign is that because sorcery shows up "naturally" in society while wizardry is a discipline, sorcery is much older. So in this setting wizardry is a brand new idea that is popping up with all sorts of crazy stuff going on, while the sorcerers have trusted schools, tons of training, and a wonderful reputation. The party, are a band of adventurers with sympathies for the fledgling wizard college, and are trying to keep the college from being absorbed by the governing board of the sorcerers association who feel that unlicensed and haphazard magical studies are incredibly dangerous.
I reworked the classes to make them more different. Clerics for instance are limited by the local status of their god in the area. So a cleric has a reason to sanctity a shrine or use their magic to help the village or drive out an opposing cult.
i think a neat rule for lore heavy groups would be to have their starting intelligence modifier determine how young wizards can start at level 1. +3 wizards can start in their late 20's, +2 wizards can be late 30's, and +1 wizards are mid-late 40's using point buy
These are great ideas, and I'm taking them all. My 'true wizards' are guardians of secrets and they belong to secret societies, and they often perch on a lone tower or treasure vault. But in my setting states/kingdoms/guilds have learned that if they throw money at mages colleges they can train up agents that can throw magic around. The battlewizard is more of a singlesided officer loyal to the state/king/guild that put them through school. The sorceror is like you described a loose canon.
Hm, something that this made me consider. I ALSO don't want a bucketload of wizards running around my setting, yet I also want an academic institute of arcana or two somewhere. (It's an evocative location and a potential resource.) My solution? MAYBE most wizards need to study at these places,but most of the students and all but the most high-up of the faculty are only sages! Yes, they know a lot about dragons and the many arcane arts and the other realms of existence, but that's all they have: knowledge. I get my big ol' libraries AND being able to channel magic still makes a person significant.
“What stops a sorcerer with a fireball? A wizard with a fireball” banner at the entrance of the National Wizard Association. “Spells don’t kill people, people kill people”
I'm using the three PHB warlock patrons as sources of a power struggle in my Colonial America Spellpunk campaign - Old One cultist, Fiendish diabolists, and Fey witches.
I have _almost_ played a Warlock quite a few times (among other things because I find that class mechanically interesting), but I always chickened out; especially the connection Patron/Warlock oftentimes feels like I would be giving up autonomy of my actions? Most if not all warlocks (that I remember) have that component to their stories where their patron has goals opposed to their own. Or they want to be unleashed into the material plane (it's usually a bad sign if something has to be "unleashed"...). Or a million other reasons it's a point of contention with a "good-aligned" party. Inner Party conflict (or let's call it "work relation conflict") is all well and good for storytelling, but it always ups my heartrate in a non-good way, and gives me cold sweats. What can I do to minimize that? (Great, now I'm thinking of patrons and I want a soft himbo fey patron who's just a tiny bit of a villain/wants world domination, but in the nicest way possible)
Talk to your gm. It depends on the game, but class mechanics don't necessarily need to use the lore given in the book. Perhaps you're a sorcerer that just works like a warlock, or maybe your patron isn't interested in evil but just wants to watch someone have adventures. That doesn't mean they can't cause you problems, but the intent mould be to make things more interesting rather than ending the world or something.
Dael also did a video on something she calls the Pact-Burner Warlock where she talks about creating a "shadow-class" specifically for the warlock who wants out of the pact. You may want to take a look at some of the ideas there
I love this stuff. I wrote the first chapter of "The Book of Artifice" to provide in-world explanations for spell levels and other such game mechanics. It makes Arcana feel like an actual science in the world. In my head canon, wizards are basically programmers of reality. So spells are like programs that are known to be stable, and spell levels describe how many smaller arcane functions you have to combine for that effect. For example, Dimension Door and Demiplane might both start with "Mordenkainen's Metaphysical Mesh" as a base. But Demiplane requires more additional code and "processing power" (or mental effort) so it's a higher level spell. Cantrips are like: console.log('Hello, World!'); 9th level spells are like Google-level shit.
I agree 100% Dael. Within the Bramble campaign setting: Abrauzx, the classes (especially the spellcasters) have a well defined cultural identity that those within the world are very cognizant of. To give a taste, the 5 Magical Arts (Arcane, Divine, Innate, Primal, and Profane) were previously at war. Allegiances made between different practitioners gave rise to different societies and communities that reflect their unique union. One such society are "Wyches". These are societies of Arcane & Profane practitioners that reside deep within the wilderness, away from the prying eyes of the Divine practitioners who would deem their works as heretical. Wyches often deal with fey, fiends, and other extraplanar entities. The denizens (called witches by outsiders) gain power and protection through these entities. Throughout Abrauzx there are various societies born from the intersection of certain classes, their identities formed around the ideals and capabilities of the combination.
This has got me thinking about how I'd go about doing something like this for my (Slavic-inspired) homebrew setting that I'm working on I don't have much figured out for wizards - although I might steal some of the ideas you mention here - but for sorcerers... So, in my setting, aasimar are people born near a site sacred to a particular god. For instance, a lightning-struck oak would be sacred to Perun, god of thunder and oaks, so a child born near such an oak might become an aasimar of Perun. Aasimar are usually regarded with cautious reverence, with the caution-to-reverence ratio varying depending on the god (after all, people are going to react differently to an avatar of the god of spring and life than to an avatar of the goddess of winter and death.) Tieflings, on the other hand, are those who were affected by Nav - the realm of the dead, and also this setting's equivalent of the Feywild - in some way, for instance being part-navka, or having been born on Forefathers' Night. Tieflings don't *usually* face open hostility, but they do have to deal with distrust, on account of being associated with potentially dangerous ghosts and nature spirits. *Sorcerers* fall somewhere in the middle of this aasimar-to-tieflings spectrum Warlocks would actually be the *least* trusted, mainly because of the kinds of entities they get their powers from. Baba Yaga is alright, though she's just as likely to eat you as she is to help you; Koschei the Deathless is basically the prototypical evil lich; dragons are basically natural disasters with scales, wings, and a hell of an appetite; and Simargl the Doomsday Hound will literally cause the end of the world if he's ever released. And I kind of unintentionally created a running theme of hunger when I was planning what possible patrons there'd be in this setting, so it's possible that warlocks would be seen as hungry for *power* to go with that. That said, this isn't a universal view - dragon-worshippers exist, with reasons varying between groups, and they'd just regard dragon warlocks as similar to clerics or paladins. Speaking of clerics and paladins, the gods in this setting ARE definitely real, but they're also basically forces of nature. Kind of like how gods are depicted in Michelle Paver's Gods and Warriors series, although not quite to the same extent. I'm thinking that the "elderly master and young apprentice" thing that you came up with for wizards would work with clerics too, at least in this setting - kind of like Saeunn and Renn in the Chronicles of Ancient Darkness series, also by Michelle Paver. Saeunn's old (and cranky) and knows a lot about the spirits, the legends of the past, and magecraft, Renn's got a talent for magecraft but she needs to learn how to hone it and read the signs. I'm also going to be taking inspiration from the Chronicles of Ancient Darkness series when it comes to how druids and rangers approach the wild. In the first book, there's a prophesy about "The Listener" and one of the characters basically explains that the reason it talks about The Listener, not The Speaker or The Seer, is because you have to *listen* to what the wild is telling you. Also, shepherds are regarded as magical in some Slavic folklore, and smiths are regarded as magical in lots of different cultures' folk tales and the like, and I definitely want to run with that vibe when it comes to druids and artificers respectively. On the one hand, they're necessary and people do see the importance on what they do, on the other hand they basically live on the outskirts of society - druids/shepherds spend all their time in the forest/fields; smiths and artificers spend all their time in the forge. Oh, and for barbarians, how people view them basically depends entirely on whether they're "our" barbarians, or barbarians from one of the places that keep attacking us.
My friend and I were just talking about the meta-gaming element (and often tendency) and bringing players more towards the RP. Transforming class into the RP element is a great example of this (similarly race and gender could be used this way). Even as NPC townsmen, maybe getting a gig as a member of the town guard could mean certain status benefits and financial security other members of the town don't have, etc...
For some reason, my brain always puts Clerics/Paladins/Warlocks all together as magic from an external source. This line of thinking intrigues me because it kind of blurs the line between cleric and warlock, especially if you consider patrons to have god-like powers. I liked your Ranger/Druid/Barbarian and that's probably what I would do as well. Then Wizard/Sorcerer/Bard as arcane casters and I feel like Bard would take some training and so be kind of a middle ground. I also like the fantasy of the Bardic Collegium as a repository for knowledge and history and Bards kind of being that wanderer bringing news, tales, and knowledge to all the smaller cities. My favorite depiction being from Mercedes Lackey in Valdemar, where even the nobles sent their kids to be educated at the Bardic College. Fighter/Monk/Rogue as disciplined melee fighters. This is less of a spiritual take on Monks that I would guess you have, pairing them with paladins and clerics, and more of a kung fu/martial arts fighter concentration.
I didn't love the show The Magicians in its entirety, but overall I thought it was a fun fantasy romp, kind of a pulp-pop True Blood, except...wizards. One thing I did love that they did quite well in their magical hierarchy was to note that 'Magicians' were academy students and alumni, but 'Hedge Witches' were rejects, dropouts, and hobbyists on the fringe. Sort of a High Magic vs Low Magic class structure, with a great deal of generational mistrust and built up antagonism between the two camps. Plotlines that found both sides in conflict contrasted with plotlines that found their interests aligned allowed for a great deal of character development and growth. It's an idea I've had rattling around in my head to introduce to my new campaign I've been working up.
On a semi-related note, I've been thinking a lot about bards lately and how I find the general interpretation of them as primarily performers/musicians a bit limiting. I like the idea that bards have a more intuitive connection with magic essentially based on persuading the world to do what you want, and using whatever means they choose to resonate with the primordial forces of the world to bring magic forth. I haven't fully crystallised my thoughts on it but I'd love to hear your take on bards and whether you agree that there could be something else underlying their magic than "just" performance!
Magic in my world is nearly exclusively the domain of the gods, the fey, and the beings of the Outer Planes. Wizards are the only people with the fortitude and patience to study the realms beyond mortal ken. I love the idea of wizards always being part of a pair - a master and an apprentice - and the potential for roleplay that that engenders. Scholars often cut off from the world, wizards need their apprentices to handle their affairs, to shoulder the drudgery of everyday life and to seal the doors between worlds when the dangers of The Pursuit prove fatal.
In my world setting, wizards do end up having multiple students (3 is usually the max), but by the time it takes for the students to learn all that their mentor knows, it generally takes 20 years and the mentor tends to die of old age by that point. The recent students (usually aged between 30 and 40), then go out into the world for roughly 10 years to learn from life experience, seeking out druids and sorcerers to broaden their understanding of the aether and how it is used by others. By the age of 50 to 60, they seek out new students to teach everything they've learned along with the old teachings of their mentor. Essentially making each generation to be more knowledgeable than the last. Sorcerers, despite their innate magical aptitude, tend to seek out wizards, druids, clerics, and even monks for guidance. The curiosity of their magical origins may bring them to others that have knowledge in this area. Sorcerers who want to hone their discipline might seek out wizards and potentially find out theories of their bloodline. Clerics could be useful to find out if divine intervention caused their magical birth or something more infernal. Also, Clerics in my world setting tend to have libraries within the clergy filled with tomes and books detailing the celestial, infernal, and the history/biography/bestiary of the world around them. Warlocks may end up seeking out wizards and clerics for similar reasons. Keeping their pact a secret, of course. A warlock may be interested in learning more about their patron and go to various clergies across the continent. A wizard may bring insight to the warlock's understanding of the aetheric powers they are renting. I know this was a paragraph and a half of a comment, but I'm pretty much saying that NPC's in my world can and sometimes are the classes that the PC's can be. I wanted to broaden the interaction between the classes in a societal way.
one thing that i immediately thought of when you were talking about wizards. and their age. since obviously there's a disconnect between how a wizards power increases mechanically compared to how its meant to increase narratively. so like, the idea that 'its takes a lifetime of study in order to master wizardry' and yet a PC could go from lvl 1-20 over the course of only a few months. what if: since magic is such a foreign concept to the mortal mind. it might take them that long before they can even understand magic at the level necessary to even cast a single spell. but once they're got that basic understanding, its relatively simple to figure out harder and harder spells. so you can have PC's prodigys that were able to figure it out fairly young, but they're a rare minority. most wizards average multiple decades of study before they're able to cast a single spell. this solves a few 'issues'. *first* : it explains why wizards tend to be older, even if they've been studying all their lives, while PC's needn't be older. *second* , it also explains why wizards are so rare. many, many people may *want* to go down the path of wizardry. but really, it takes a special type of person to make that commitment in the first place. but even then, of the people that do make the commitment, many of them will lose steam, and give up before ever reaching the neccesary level of understanding (or they'll die first...dnd worlds are dangerous yo). *third* it explains how magic can be not-ubiquitous. lets be honest: realistically if it only took a couple of years of study to learn even basic magic. then, low level magic would be as ubiquitous as technology is today. its just way too useful for that not to be true. but what if that just...wasn't possible? what if most people that tried to study magic averaged taking 20-30 years before casting their first cantrip? thats obviously not something to can add to the primary school curriculum... idk, my own setting isn't that low magic, but it seems like a neat idea.
My wizard towers are actually old, old towers built across the lands by the ancient elves. They are basically subway entrances to the ancient underground society of the elves (they liked nature so much that they decided to live underground). When this society broke down, the educated and aristocratic peoples created a society of philosophy and overwatch, and they use these wizards towers to 'babysit' the world.
My warlock's whole backstory is that he was a wizard who never got beyond basic magic even after a hundred years so he went and made a tome pact instead so this is uh... pretty relevant
I've personally always found the implied lore of D&D classes to be super interesting, especially when it comes to the differences between Warlocks and Clerics. I would love a more in depth look at some of the half casters as well, like ranger and paladin. The one thing that has always bothered me about rangers is that there magic doesn't feel like druid magic in the same way that paladin magic tends to feel like cleric magic.
I really like the concept but had two questions: 1. What are your other groupings of the classes (including artificer)? 2. How do you handle when a player wants to break that mould? For example, what if your player wants to be a barbarian noble? Are you putting them as the head of some tribe nobody has heard of or do you allow them to go against grain and what does that look like to you? Thanks in advance! Great video, this one and the displace hunt.
I have an article on my world anvil project where I talk about Magi (written back in January, noting because some of these ideas are very similar to Dael's) - magi, in that world, are representatives of any casting focused class: wizards, sorcerers, warlocks, bards, druids, clerics, etc. Basically: people who do magic. By and large they're quite respected - this is a society that is fundamentally built on magic the way our world is built on science, so they're like scientists and engineers in terms of status. But some have specific opinions about specific classes among them: Sorcerers are a little concerning - they're less a person who's actually trying to be magic and more a person just dealing with the fact that they are inherently magic, which implies less about their character than someone who's devoted themselves to study or nature or worshipping a god or whatever. Bards can be quite concerning because of associations with mind control magic, because magical mind control is a fucking terrifying concept, have you seen stuff like Manchurian Candidate, imagine if that kind of shit was real!? Warlocks are stigmatized enough against that I'd actually warn players that they might want to pretend to be a different kind of class, because they're literally signed up with some power that's giving out magical superpowers in exchange for services rendered. That's a shady as heck relationship, there's a reason people in the real world who were accused of making such deals were literally burned at the stake. (I mean, a large part of that is the lack of a rigorous justice system to prove that knowing medicinal herbs is not the same as signing up to be the devil's minion. But, y'know, it's a shady idea and warlocks are *actually* doing it.) As you can see, I like the idea of having classes play into role play, at least to some extent. The physical (mundane? non-caster?) classes are a little harder to firmly categorize. Rogues can be thieves, but this world has just been through a major war, there's probably plenty of people who've learned to go without being seen because they were scouts for the army or just because living in a war zone and not being able to sneak around is often not conducive to long term survival.
I built a setting in the modern day which was basically earth but with D&D magic and stuff. There were no gods, though people still believed there was and 2 of the groups favourite NPS were Atheist Clerics. One was a Trickster Domain Cleric who got his powers from his devotion to the ideals of Anarcho Capitalism and was a big time CEO of a tech company. His powers revolved around tricking and swindling people to get ahead in the game and playing the system and his magic had a flavour to it that if you saw him using his magic with true sight, you see necrotic veins coming from him and his spells and if you interacted with them then they flake away as burned money and have the smell of moral death about them. The other was a Life Domain Cleric who drew her powers in her faith in the goodness of humanity and our charitable nature. She spent all of her time trying to help and heal people and doing charitable works. Her magic always had an off white yellowish glow to it and sounded like laughter. I chose off white because she was channelling human goodness, but people also have innate evil in them so her magic was never truly white.
This video definately got my wheels turning...erm...mental ones. My setting takes place shortly (+/-50 years) after the apocalypse happened and the apocalypse was caused by the forces of magic suddenly becoming much more powerful. Now i'm thinking that the people of this world would be highly suspicious of anyone who can use their own magic (wizards/sorcerors) but maybe not so much of those for whom someone else is providing the power/guidance/...manipulation (warlock/cleric). My thinking is that, since the beings providing the magic for warlock/cleric are frequently extraplanar then their magic wouldn't have been affected in the way that 'local' magic was (just realized that in my setting magic is somehow localized. Thanks Dael, now i'll be trying to work that out all night) and might then be regared as safer, leading to this weird thing where a warlock gaining power from a devil might be regarded as safe to deal with than a wizards whos magic might just blow up a building instead of lighting a candle if he's misjudged how 'strong' the local magic is. Does that seem to make sense?
Great video and ideas ... the only thing I might add is that a class doesn't have to be a monolith. For example, I have two factions of druids in my campaign, those that try to integrate with and bridge peace between civilization and nature, and those that have no interest in civilization or being diplomats but would rather just see nature take its course. Some of that could be related to subclasses as well (schools of magic, warlock patron type, etc). And as far as the baking video goes ... I already watched (so there!). Keep up the great work.
Have you read "Uprooted" by any chance? It's very similar to what you suggested. It has a Wizard's tower, the Wizard has a territory, and surrounding settlements light beacons when they require aid It's also a fantastic book in general, and I feel like you'd enjoy the magic system!
I love all of your videos. You have an enormous amount of ideas and you fully think them through in your world as a whole and in small. We are 2 of a kind! Keep it up please!
The young wizard out in the world fits into that same apprenticeship dynamic. The point f being a journeyman is to journey, you've achieved a degree of proficiency in your trade and are seeking other masters to learn from.
I don't know if it's from basic or advanced DnD (I saw it in Old School Essentials) but there was a thing about there only being exactly nine 12th level druids at all times (three 13th level and one 14th level I think?) and to level up you don't just need the XP but to find and defeat one of the existing ones in a fight or whatever challenge you agree on I think that kind of "class quest/goal" could be a really cool thing to make classes feel different besides just their abilities, although that kind of stuff might be a bit hard to fit in unless _everyone_ is doing that kind of "training montage" individual thing at once
I like differant idea about sorcerers. I like the idea that sorcerers did have to do some training and learning to master their magic, but it's not the same. For the most part, every wizards fireball tend to be casted the same way, give or take a couple flourishes. But when a sorcerer casts fireball, they more are doing whatever it was that they know triggers a fireball from within them. It's not so much casting as it is a muscle or skill that they trained and figured out how it works for them. This could lead to the sorcerer discovering their new spells accidentally after a level up. They then roleplay practicing it. This could also lead to a sorcerer who doesnt know they have certain spells. "What do you mean, Charm Person, I just say please and they do things."
I love your stream-of-consciousness style. Not sure it's scripted ot not, but it seems organic. The points you raise are what I hate and what I love about class-based RPGs. I think that without putting some thought into the "why" of the classes it becomes a little too easy to emphasize the mechanics in a way that doesn't impact the settting in a meaninful way. I dream of making a campaign where I outline the specific monastic traditions, barbarian tribes, pantheons, and magical sources and schools in a way that both inform and are informed by the setting.
I love it. I had been thinking of a similar idea to make sense of classes in the world. Did you have idea for how Bards fit in to your world? I was able to make sense of the other magic classes except that one.
In one of my settings, warlocks have schools rather than wizards. Wizards do the master/apprentice thing and are considered masters of the craft. Warlocks are more common among nobles and the rich because they dont want to spend so much time learning when they can quickly be of use to their families. They don't need in depth knowledge, they need just enough to get an edge over their political rivals. Some families have specific patrons that they petition, generation to generation.
That's so clever, I love it!
I like the idea that warlocks are apprentices to supernatural creatures. And that eventually they will become one of those creatures by then end of it. That's what makes them scary, the loss of humanity and they seek it out.
Oooooh, interesting
...that is DOPE and STOLEN.
Yo this is awesome and I'm absolutely stealing this
On the flip side, people often overlook the opposite situation, where the otherworldly creature is the one that approached the Warlock, potentially even without input from the character in it happening. Like, I'm currently playing a John Constantine style exorcist character who was marked by a Celestial at a young age, prompting the local Clerical order to adopt him and raise him in the priesthood, basically having no input in his life path before being swept up into the adventuring party by circumstance. Even then, he knows his Patron probably expects "something" of him, and it probably even relates to the situation the party is in now, but what that is never telegraphed to him except if he's somehow straying away from it.
Then again, in said party over the course of the campaign has been the Paladin that's a Werewolf, a noble Hobgoblin Eldritch Knight/Lore Wizard with a Champion Fighter Snow Goblin as their knight, a Firbolg Forest Druid that is willing to burn anything man-made, a Warforged Gunslinger (played by the player with the worst dice rolling luck, of course), a Sorcerer in a plague doctor mask who's potentially a Vampire, a Kalashtar that was somehow a practicing Cleric in Faerun, and an Awakened flying squirrel Bladesinger, all of us trapped in a demiplane that has been in eternal winter for 200 years (except for the Snow Goblin I guess, being a native, but their entire tribe was infected with bone-drinking parasites and had to be put down), so destiny makes for strange bedfellows. Also, the squirrel's NPC creator was a Barbarian/Druid that got so angry trying to solve the unnatural winter that they spontaneously combusted into a pillar of continuously burning flames for several months (until we roleplayed with the squirrel to let us take that guy's set of seriously good magical ironwood armor that had taken on its wearer's properties in death).
...Wait, what was this comment about again? What video is this? Oh, right, the interplay between player classes' mechanical and roleplay implication in a story or setting. Think I got off topic. Just going to stop typing and post this before I can fully consider just deleting the whole thing.
YES! When I was messing around with how I would re-design 5e classes, this is VERY MUCH the flavour I wanted for Warlock. Instead of wonky spell progression, they would start to take on traits of their patron creature, to be able to summon the minions or even part of the realm of this entity.
And absolutely the end goal of this, the capstone ability, was that you transcend physically into being one of these creatures, maybe in some kind of hybrid form, but definitely a permanent change.
I like the idea that Wizards are rare because most die before they reach higher levels. You only can cast high level spells by learning with real world experience of adventuring. You have lv.1 hedge wizards that never leave their town after learning magic and then you have the lv.20 master wizards that was lucky enough to survived adventuring. All their other classmates died on low level adventuring
Very cool idea!
Young wizard: Accidentally kills mentor through incompetence and stupidity
Mentor: Oh thank god I finally got away from this idiot
Young dude: Hello I have brought back your spirit and put it into this cat
There was a comic within Dragon magazine that played this out. I believe it was "All too familiar"
theres anime on this too
Rather than a giant fire that the wizard can see in their tower, maybe they light a magic candle in the town and it's twin at the wizard's tower also lights to make the wizard aware that he needs to scry on that particular village. The wizard has a wall of candles with labels for the town they are in.
I love this. It's like the labelled servant bells in an Edwardian manor a la Downton Abbey, but fantastical.
That still fits the bill.
Maybe the tower is needed as a focus for the candles magic
My wizard mentor sent me out into the world to get him a pumpkin spiced latte. It sucks being a wizards intern.
It's a test. If you were any good as a wizard, you'd just summon the latte.
@@michaelsommers2356 i cast prestidigitation on a cup of water. "here one hot pumpkin spice latte, good for 1 hour"
@@EvelynNdenial Congratulations on passing the admissions test for Unseen U.
Oh, I *love* the idea of a dead wizard coming back as a familiar. Waking up, rubbing their eyes and freaking out about suddenly being an owl. "Rookie, what did you do??? WHAT DID YOU DO TO ME?"
I think you mean "WHAT DID YOU DOOHOO HOO" ... don't worry I let myself out..
@@ChristophZak Which would be weird if they came back as a weasel instead.
Seriously, though, Kaepora Gaebora is just a wizard stuck in a familiar body, that's why he never shuts up.
This concept works perfectly with the "wizard of scribes" from tashas
Similar to this, a warlock who ends up making a Pact of the Chain, thinking they're pledging allegiance to a powerful fiend, but it turns out they've been punked by a single imp, who is now both their patron and their familiar.
So wizards in your setting are basically Jedi, I love it
Jedi have academies though
I thought of it as more like doctors/professors.
Being a doctor of something holds weight like you are supposed to trust them.
You can also still have the young doctor freshly graduated who doesn't know how to apply all the things they learned and they need real world experience to utilize it all.
You have a tower but we do not grant you the rank of wizard
Maybe pre-prequel jedi, when our minds were yet untainted by the image of Yoda with a light saber.
Which would make Warlocks Sith.. i like that
Now we need a video about wizard towers
I want it so bad!
I love your idea of reverse-lighthouse wizard's towers. I'm stealing it! Yoink!
Hahaha I see that 4 seasons landscaping shirt. :D
On topic: I did a similar thing with my setting, mostly because once you play Dragon Age and you have that whole "wait, how _would_ civilization actually react to magic that allows people to mind control others and blow s-- up randomly" it's a little hard to dislodge that from your brain when you're building your world. I didn't go hardcore "okay let's persecute the wizards" but I set up a very similar "how much do we trust these people" scenario where wizards, by dint of having a regulated system of learning are easier to license and control, Sorcerers are seen as a sort of trick of biology and are rare enough that they can be at least eyeballed by the authorities in case they start getting up to shenanigans, but Warlocks? Well, woof. A warlock is basically an ambulatory nuke with a devil or an ancient evil (or just a weird archfey)'s finger on the button. No one's going to be comfortable with that running around.
omg dael i legit have been designing a homebrew setting society in which the socio-political hierarchy is somewhat class-based so this video has come to me right on time!!
Yesssssss!!
Class-based you say? That doesn't sound very comradical...
@@tilmo777 you do realize that in Russian slang that means gay, don’t you?
*edit, Twas China, not Russia
@@elskaalfhollr4743 have you been huffing paint? Comrade means friend.
@@elskaalfhollr4743 can you provide literally any proof, even anecdotal?
Really dig this. It got me thinking about an idea for wizards where an apprentice is branded on one of their hands by their mentor with a ward that prevents them from using magic. The mentor controls that Ward like a water faucet, opening it up more and more as the apprentice becomes adept.
The ward cannot be removed. On graduation, to be free of their master, their hand is removed and cannot be restored.
I like this for a couple of reasons, mostly because I feel like magic should be rare, scary, somewhat unpredictable, and powerful.
A player who wishes to wield that power has to make a commensurate sacrifice.
Within the construct of the world wizards are known and recognized for their missing hand amongst other things.
... They won't be climbing any ropes, that's for sure.
I like the idea of a master wizard sending their apprentice out to collect experience - and then at the end of the dungeons they complete, they can find spells carved into the walls. The dungeons therefore act both as monster lairs and as a test of strength and skill for an apprentice wizard to continue their craft.
On my setting, there is the Arcane Council, this DA Circle-like organization that has a lot of respect in all countries, and designated leaders in each region. Every wizard and sorcerer is forced to be a member of this organization, and there they have to obey rules to what is and isn't allowed to do with magic, so if your were to, like, mind control someone with your magic, the Council would severily punish you. At the same time, I really like the idea of Wizard institutions (not necessarily mass-learning academies, but the idea that being a wizard has a lot to do with beaurocracy and learning from the right sources, so places of experiments and resources) and of Sorcerer families (who have learned to keep their inate power generational and by that secure social status), both of which I can explore in the Council. Warlocks are welcome to join the Council, and benefit from both the wizards' resources and the sorcerers' influence, but for that they have to expose their status as a warlock, a thing that many don't wish to do. The Council isn't a "good" entity, necessarily, but it also isn't "bad". There are many people who use it to explore others, and just as many who use it as a way of democratize magic. We haven't gotten far enough on the campaign that would let me explore that (one of my players is a Draconic Sorcerer whose grandmother is one of the leaders of the Council. They also have the spirit of a black dragon tied to their bloodline, and it has awoken in this PC), so this is all I have for now. But I'm pretty proud.
In my world, I have wizard academia at odds with the bardic colleges, which are more like confederacies than proper schools. The bards are tapping into arcana via experience, emotion, & memory instead of math & measurements and the wizards don’t like that “they’re doing it wrong” and still get the right answers, to put it simply.
STEM majors versus Art majors.
I have something similar too, but the two schools share the building! There used to be only the wizard's school and then bards became so popular they opened the bard college wing and now they have to bear with sharing the corridors with each other
@@ingridplata2411 Haha! I love it but now I want to run a Hogwarts setting where each house is comprised of each of the four arcane casters.
@@kylewilkes9761 Oh, that sounds real cool!
Pfft one of my bard characters actually had something like this as a backstory, she came from a wizarding family and by all means she could've been an amazing wizard if she actually wanted to but the nature of bardic magic called to her more strongly so she ran away and joined a bard college (she also later multiclassed into wizard because she'd already been studying the fundamentals as a kid but never actually got to first level wizard so when we found a book some of the spells on her bard list and a few rituals from that and some scrolls as well she immediately got to work transcribing the spells in her own style and figuring out how that wizard magic worked hence gaining a wizard level (which also meant I could start replacing some of the bard spells I knew that were also on the wizard list, like disguise self, comprehend languages and detect magic)
Earthdawn is a good example of an RPG that marries the class mechanics to the setting. If you're a Thief, you're not just someone who steals stuff -- you're someone who's learned a specific set of magical talents that makes them supernaturally *good* at stealing stuff.
Order of Scribes Wizard + Undead/Undying Tomelock = new magical student struggles with the responsibility of being the only physical representation of a dead great wizard, who has to teach them spells to be their agent on the material plane.
In our campaign all magic is available to all classes. Classes more so describe how you tap into magical energy and what you may need to do to get it. Anyone can learn to cast a 9th level spell but it can come at great cost potentially draining the caster and party resources for a time. You may also need other materials or it can have consequences for the wider world around you like damaging the "magical" environment. This way I can say yes to almost anything a player wants to dream up but they also sort of police themselves to not ruin their own world building story.
I'd really love to hear about your thoughts on the Fighter/Rogue/Bard trio, because I can't for the life of me think of how those classes are connected, but I'm sure there's something interesting you've struck upon!
The main problem i have with the "build whatever character you want, there are no restictions here maaaaan" mentality is that it requires the world to, at least practically, be empty of any hard lore and consistency. Its also the problem with how 5e handled player centaurs (they are some weird miniature variant that still has the same name so it will have minimal impact on gameplay) and minotaurs
People are saying this was an april fools joke but i LOVE the ideas presented here and theyve inspired me to go do a bunch of work on my setting
I'd be interested to hear more of your thoughts about the other classes you didn't go into detail about, especially the way bards fit in with fighters and rogues.
Yeah, I didn't get the theme of that trio either
I can confirm the risky whisking video is really good and you should give it a go.
I really like the concept of wizards being sort of scientists in that they strive for most of their lives to understand the ways their world works and, when they try to share that knowledge, almost no one understands or even believe it. I also like the idea of the wizard as the kind of adventurer that actually plans in advance by creating potions, scrolls and magic items in order to have always the right tool for the work at hand
This is so exciting! I’m making a warlock who used to be a military captain before becoming a warlock and this is exactly what I needed! (Because both of her parents are alive and I needed some Angst. No one just becomes a warlock when they have a happy home life, a successful job, and good friends)
Hahaha, you're not wrong
@@MonarchsFactory rouges need a special mandatory thing where you cannot become a rouge or subclass into rouge if you have parents. I don’t make the rules I just spread them
My whole body is tense during youtube videos today.
Right?!
One of the strengths of D&D is how neatly comparisons between classes can be drawn, and I think the more frameworks of groupings you come up with and take into account the more interesting insights you get. Like to me I can see a grouping of trained magic (Wizard, Bard, Druid) with maybe Artificer as a cheaty 4th, then gifted magic (Cleric, Sorcerer, Warlock), then martial magic gained from honing certain beliefs and skills (Paladin, Monk, and Ranger), and then the non-mages who fit neatly into a trio of lawful/neutral/chaotic or, in other words, how well they fit into society (fighter, rogue, barbarian, respectively). Actually all four of those subgroups could be organized as "most societally normal", "accepted part of society but only sometimes", and "not seen as acceptable by society" - play around with how you organize them to your taste. I really love that 5e has explicitly uncoupled Paladins from religion because it lets them slot into more frameworks easily. Intuitively I can see how your groupings work too, though I kinda question how Bard is being placed with fighter and rogue unless they're just three different "normal people" kinda things?
You could also sort as mastering magic "outside" oneself (Wizard, Cleric, Druid, Warlock), mastering magic as an internal skill (Paladin, Monk, Ranger, Sorcerer, Artificer), and those fighty three. Or learning magic at an official school or college (Wizard, Bard, Monk), learning it through nature (Druid, Ranger, Sorcerer), learning it through beliefs (Cleric, Paladin, Warlock), and then the fighty three + artificer.
Great video as always! Your world's Wizard/ Sorcerer paradigm is reverse of mine; where Sorcerers are seen as having been granted the divine right to cast spells and wield magic, whereas Wizards our outlawed unless given express permission by the Empire, as they're seen as meddling with forces that they can't possibly understand.
Oooo. That's a nifty twist
In my setting a wizards tower is a conceptual idea, like a mind palace, where they store their spells. It is a physical thing in the ethereal plane and can be anchored to the material plane giving the wizard a domain that is the seat of their power. The tower in the ethereal is guarded by the living spells that you have memorized for that day.
I love this. You could also flip it on its head if you want, and the wizards are an entrenched oligarchy who monopolize power while a warlock is a rebel who fights back by stealing power they aren’t supposed to have.
I have a homebrew setting where wizards are philosophers studying to understand and manipulate the world, sorcerors are hunted for organ harvesting (like you would do to a manticore for magic components), and warlocks know the truth of the world.
My first character was a tomepact warlock who described himself as a 'mage' not wanting to disclose where his powers come from. I really think these things you discussed help flush out the setting and make the world feel more real.
Having a one page or something simple to help guide the world's reaction to the PCs is such a great idea and makes a lot of sense!
Grouping them helps organize it a lot too, You can see that in Five Torches Deep, they do Mages, Zealots, Warriors, & Thieves as classes, and what we normally think of classes as Archetypes (subclasses). It's a;; super clever, super valid, and super helpful as a compass for RP, worldbuilding, and game prepping. Great work!
Sorcerers wandering around with spellbooks containing nothing but gibberish, or walking around with a little animal and declaring it to be their familiar.
Wizards demanding a "wizard tax" to the town, otherwise he won't help them.
Wizards putting people in debt for the services he's provided them
Not having campaigns that go from level 1-18 in a matter of months
Bards acting as propagandists and secret police for the kingdom.
Wizards are highly trained professionals, so why wouldn't they put a price to their services like doctors and lawyers.
The phrase you're looking for is "mechanically-implied setting". It's the thing that culturally distinguishes Gygaxian TSR D&D from every version from 3e to present, including Pathfinder.
There's a huge difference between "There are no" statements and "You can't be" statements. "There are no young wizards" is an invitation in my mind, there aren't any in the world so you get to be the first. "You can't be a young wizard" is a command and it can be a fair or unfair one.
I guess Im not really thinking of these as either "there are no" OR "you can't be" statements. I'm thinking more along the lines of "this is what wizards are understood to be, this is their reputation in the world, so because your character defies that expectation, that's a character point we'll want to zoom in on to work out why you're different"
@@MonarchsFactory That's kind of what I meant by a "there are no" statement, but I have a terrible habit of being overly reductive in my phrasing and then having to go back and explain myself. I was definitely imagining a slightly more confrontational implementation, the classic Dragonlance-style "nobody has done magic like this in centuries" trope. Regardless, I absolutely agree it isn't about "knee-capping" your players, it's about creating a setting/atmosphere and engaging in a dialogue with your group.
Yes! I’m always trying to explain to my characters that classes are a meta concept and that the NPCs don’t necessarily know what they are. A minstrel and a character bard are different things, a cleric and a player Cleric are different things. To an NPC most arcane spell casters would be called Mages because they don’t know the difference between the classes.
On a semi-related note, I think(?): Something that has been sort of bothering me about D&D is the asymmetry between martial and arcane classes. It might just be me, but it feels like there is just something inherently cool about casters being connected to the illusive Weave (woooooh) that lends itself really well to storytelling. This, however, leaves the fighter, rogue, barbarian etc. feeling incredibly basic, like glorified guards or thieves. I like the way this was done in Brent Weeks' Night Angel series, where (if I recall correctly, it's been a long time since I read the books) people who practice their art enough, gain access to something called the "Talent" (capital T), which allows them to supernaturally enhance their basic abilities. E.g., the rogue is particularly good at sneaking because they use the Talent to LITERALLY meld with the shadows, the fighter is particularly good at hitting stuff because their Talent allows them to hit stuff supernaturally hard and/or fast, etc.
I loved Martin's idea of a Hedge Knight and have borrowed it for my homebrew as a subclass for fighter.
Oh wow. Your point about Clerics' deities not being necessarily real has me envisioning a party's campfire after a long march, they're all weary, getting on each other's nerves, and the Cleric ranting about how the Warlock's power is usurped and potentially evil. The Warlock tries to defend himself, saying they're basically the same, his patron is like the Cleric's deity, and this just insults the Cleric even more. He yells about how his powers come through piety and trust not some contract, so eventually the Warlock sighs, finishes his meal, gets up to go to his tent, turns back to the cleric and says "At least I know my patron is real" and heads into his tent for the night. The bard smiles, the rogue laughs, the wizard says "well he's not wrong" and the paladin is left to console the cleric. "It's ok. Pelor is real. He's just a dumb Warlock what would he know."
Grouping the magic together is across different class groups that in game would be their own societies is a cool idea. Making me think of the Diablo world where the Druids and Barbarians split off from one another but there's still that little bit of savagery shared between them.
I love this idea of grouping the classes up aswell. Paladins believe in taking action for their deity by facing their enemies and are more likely to be in armies expecting their deities will join them. Clerics on the other hand stay in towns helping the followers giving them guidance, they also treat their gods the same by asking for help rather than expecting it. Monks are more scholars than fighters learning from the gods of old. Taking the morals and lessons from different deities to shape their teachings. Most believe that the gods are dead or atleast can't/shouldn't influence the world any longer.
A while back I started writing a setting that is highly elitist and religious (in the sense that the government bases it’s laws off of the gods, not that there’s any real reason to believe), and out of spellcasters, sorcerers are the most respected. The idea is that in the early days of civilization, sorcerers were still being born when nobody else had any knowledge of magic, and because they were so powerful compared to others, they became the natural leaders, and now in many places they still rule as nobles and other important figures, families of sorcerers are highly important and well respected. One of my favorite details is that these families are constantly on the hunt for Wild Magic sorcerers, who they’ll either try to marry into their families or kill, since WMSs are generally the beginning of a new bloodline. I also plan to write in little quirks for different families, and wild magic sorcerers will develop their own quirks that can add to a bloodline should they marry into an already existing family. Wizards are seen very similarly to Dael’s being highly respected in old age, however young wizards are often mistrusted, often being associated with experiments gone wrong and magic going awry. Warlocks, however, are hated, they’re seen as heretics and cheats, seeking power for the sake of power without taking the time to learn it or earring it by birthright. I have a really big document going over the associations with all the classes and how they’re seen by the public and it’s one of my favorite things to write about, highly recommend trying it
+1,000,000 Nerd Cred for the Omadon and Flight of Dragons reference! (Not that you in any way need additional nerd cred, but seriously, that made my day. You're awesome!)
All wizards are worthy of respect. Most can be trusted.
Casually slides necromancer behind a curtain.
Gimme that tasty drama when the party sorc is a goodie two shoes while the wizard is an undead raising bastard
My party doesnt like to follow any class norms. We have a monk that's basically acting as a ranger, a barbarian that's acting as a bard, and a warlock acting as a cleric.
Though this can be a way for the players to be the exception to the societal rules.
I’ve always had the assumption that wizards would resent and look down on sorcerers as, unlike wizards, sorcerers don’t have to spend time and dedication to learning magic, they were just born with their abilities.
However, while re-reading The Magician’s Nephew, I noticed that the Queen Jadis seems to think of it the other way around. She disdains uncle Andrew’s lack of natural talent and noble blood, saying that his is just imitation magic. She even mentions that wizard type magicians were wiped out in her world.
I literally just thought of a new DnD character based on this! I was thinking about a ranger who’s sole objective is to prove to the world that the Ranger class isn’t pointless and shouldn’t be dismissed.
D A E L
I've been stuck on how my magic system works for my first campaign, and this was a BOLT of lightning to my brain! Thank you sooooo much, I'm stealing all of this wholesale for my world :D
Hahaha, you're welcome
As a folklorist and D&D fan, your channel is seriously one of my favorite things I've found lately! My whole campaign is very Ghibi/folklore inspired, so watching your stuff has been endlessly helpful and entertaining ;w;
This reminds me a lot of the first system I played. Wizards, or rather Mages, had to belong to one of three guilds. Not registering with a guild would make you an illegal magic user, a bit of a problem when one of the more popular gods had a hankering for rules and called a sect of mage-hunters amongst his followers. Wether you learned at a school (schools had a maximum of students accepted at one time, depending on how many teachers were available) or with a single master mage, you automatically joined up with the school's or master's aligned guild. The guilds, after a test of your abilities would brand you, mostly on a obvious place, like the palm of your hand. And only then were you deemed fit to learn further during travels. Common custom was, that a mage would show their palm at the initial greeting.
The guilds had their own set of morals and accepted spells, i.e. one would focus on healing and prophecy etc, one would focus on battle magic, one would focus on the in between stuff. Politics were taught at most schools, because they invested too much time into their students for them to run into a stupid situation and getting themselves killed because of magic. Necromany and demonology were deemed forbidden magic and not suppoted by either guild.
So imagine how stuffy the mages had to be, always tiptoeing the line of not attracting unwelcome attention. And then an unlicensed magic user shows up, a druid, a witch, or even someone with an inborn talent for two or three spells.
The crux of my current campaign is that because sorcery shows up "naturally" in society while wizardry is a discipline, sorcery is much older. So in this setting wizardry is a brand new idea that is popping up with all sorts of crazy stuff going on, while the sorcerers have trusted schools, tons of training, and a wonderful reputation.
The party, are a band of adventurers with sympathies for the fledgling wizard college, and are trying to keep the college from being absorbed by the governing board of the sorcerers association who feel that unlicensed and haphazard magical studies are incredibly dangerous.
I reworked the classes to make them more different. Clerics for instance are limited by the local status of their god in the area. So a cleric has a reason to sanctity a shrine or use their magic to help the village or drive out an opposing cult.
Your reverse lighthouse idea is brilliant.
i think a neat rule for lore heavy groups would be to have their starting intelligence modifier determine how young wizards can start at level 1. +3 wizards can start in their late 20's, +2 wizards can be late 30's, and +1 wizards are mid-late 40's using point buy
These are great ideas, and I'm taking them all. My 'true wizards' are guardians of secrets and they belong to secret societies, and they often perch on a lone tower or treasure vault.
But in my setting states/kingdoms/guilds have learned that if they throw money at mages colleges they can train up agents that can throw magic around. The battlewizard is more of a singlesided officer loyal to the state/king/guild that put them through school. The sorceror is like you described a loose canon.
Hm, something that this made me consider. I ALSO don't want a bucketload of wizards running around my setting, yet I also want an academic institute of arcana or two somewhere. (It's an evocative location and a potential resource.)
My solution? MAYBE most wizards need to study at these places,but most of the students and all but the most high-up of the faculty are only sages! Yes, they know a lot about dragons and the many arcane arts and the other realms of existence, but that's all they have: knowledge. I get my big ol' libraries AND being able to channel magic still makes a person significant.
FINE! I'll watch you baking...
EDIT: Well, that was delightful.
Every video of yours, without fail, is about something I literally dealt with this past week.
Bless.
I hope her next video is about winning the lottery.
"Light the -bat signal- the wizard signal!"
I love this
“What stops a sorcerer with a fireball? A wizard with a fireball” banner at the entrance of the National Wizard Association. “Spells don’t kill people, people kill people”
I'm using the three PHB warlock patrons as sources of a power struggle in my Colonial America Spellpunk campaign - Old One cultist, Fiendish diabolists, and Fey witches.
I have _almost_ played a Warlock quite a few times (among other things because I find that class mechanically interesting), but I always chickened out; especially the connection Patron/Warlock oftentimes feels like I would be giving up autonomy of my actions? Most if not all warlocks (that I remember) have that component to their stories where their patron has goals opposed to their own. Or they want to be unleashed into the material plane (it's usually a bad sign if something has to be "unleashed"...). Or a million other reasons it's a point of contention with a "good-aligned" party.
Inner Party conflict (or let's call it "work relation conflict") is all well and good for storytelling, but it always ups my heartrate in a non-good way, and gives me cold sweats.
What can I do to minimize that?
(Great, now I'm thinking of patrons and I want a soft himbo fey patron who's just a tiny bit of a villain/wants world domination, but in the nicest way possible)
Talk to your gm. It depends on the game, but class mechanics don't necessarily need to use the lore given in the book. Perhaps you're a sorcerer that just works like a warlock, or maybe your patron isn't interested in evil but just wants to watch someone have adventures. That doesn't mean they can't cause you problems, but the intent mould be to make things more interesting rather than ending the world or something.
Dael also did a video on something she calls the Pact-Burner Warlock where she talks about creating a "shadow-class" specifically for the warlock who wants out of the pact. You may want to take a look at some of the ideas there
I love this stuff. I wrote the first chapter of "The Book of Artifice" to provide in-world explanations for spell levels and other such game mechanics. It makes Arcana feel like an actual science in the world.
In my head canon, wizards are basically programmers of reality. So spells are like programs that are known to be stable, and spell levels describe how many smaller arcane functions you have to combine for that effect. For example, Dimension Door and Demiplane might both start with "Mordenkainen's Metaphysical Mesh" as a base. But Demiplane requires more additional code and "processing power" (or mental effort) so it's a higher level spell.
Cantrips are like: console.log('Hello, World!');
9th level spells are like Google-level shit.
I agree 100% Dael.
Within the Bramble campaign setting: Abrauzx, the classes (especially the spellcasters) have a well defined cultural identity that those within the world are very cognizant of.
To give a taste, the 5 Magical Arts (Arcane, Divine, Innate, Primal, and Profane) were previously at war. Allegiances made between different practitioners gave rise to different societies and communities that reflect their unique union.
One such society are "Wyches". These are societies of Arcane & Profane practitioners that reside deep within the wilderness, away from the prying eyes of the Divine practitioners who would deem their works as heretical. Wyches often deal with fey, fiends, and other extraplanar entities. The denizens (called witches by outsiders) gain power and protection through these entities.
Throughout Abrauzx there are various societies born from the intersection of certain classes, their identities formed around the ideals and capabilities of the combination.
I do want to see the video going even deeper into the Wizard's tower! Or I guess, higher into...
This has got me thinking about how I'd go about doing something like this for my (Slavic-inspired) homebrew setting that I'm working on
I don't have much figured out for wizards - although I might steal some of the ideas you mention here - but for sorcerers...
So, in my setting, aasimar are people born near a site sacred to a particular god. For instance, a lightning-struck oak would be sacred to Perun, god of thunder and oaks, so a child born near such an oak might become an aasimar of Perun. Aasimar are usually regarded with cautious reverence, with the caution-to-reverence ratio varying depending on the god (after all, people are going to react differently to an avatar of the god of spring and life than to an avatar of the goddess of winter and death.) Tieflings, on the other hand, are those who were affected by Nav - the realm of the dead, and also this setting's equivalent of the Feywild - in some way, for instance being part-navka, or having been born on Forefathers' Night. Tieflings don't *usually* face open hostility, but they do have to deal with distrust, on account of being associated with potentially dangerous ghosts and nature spirits. *Sorcerers* fall somewhere in the middle of this aasimar-to-tieflings spectrum
Warlocks would actually be the *least* trusted, mainly because of the kinds of entities they get their powers from. Baba Yaga is alright, though she's just as likely to eat you as she is to help you; Koschei the Deathless is basically the prototypical evil lich; dragons are basically natural disasters with scales, wings, and a hell of an appetite; and Simargl the Doomsday Hound will literally cause the end of the world if he's ever released. And I kind of unintentionally created a running theme of hunger when I was planning what possible patrons there'd be in this setting, so it's possible that warlocks would be seen as hungry for *power* to go with that. That said, this isn't a universal view - dragon-worshippers exist, with reasons varying between groups, and they'd just regard dragon warlocks as similar to clerics or paladins.
Speaking of clerics and paladins, the gods in this setting ARE definitely real, but they're also basically forces of nature. Kind of like how gods are depicted in Michelle Paver's Gods and Warriors series, although not quite to the same extent. I'm thinking that the "elderly master and young apprentice" thing that you came up with for wizards would work with clerics too, at least in this setting - kind of like Saeunn and Renn in the Chronicles of Ancient Darkness series, also by Michelle Paver. Saeunn's old (and cranky) and knows a lot about the spirits, the legends of the past, and magecraft, Renn's got a talent for magecraft but she needs to learn how to hone it and read the signs.
I'm also going to be taking inspiration from the Chronicles of Ancient Darkness series when it comes to how druids and rangers approach the wild. In the first book, there's a prophesy about "The Listener" and one of the characters basically explains that the reason it talks about The Listener, not The Speaker or The Seer, is because you have to *listen* to what the wild is telling you.
Also, shepherds are regarded as magical in some Slavic folklore, and smiths are regarded as magical in lots of different cultures' folk tales and the like, and I definitely want to run with that vibe when it comes to druids and artificers respectively. On the one hand, they're necessary and people do see the importance on what they do, on the other hand they basically live on the outskirts of society - druids/shepherds spend all their time in the forest/fields; smiths and artificers spend all their time in the forge.
Oh, and for barbarians, how people view them basically depends entirely on whether they're "our" barbarians, or barbarians from one of the places that keep attacking us.
Great wizard ideas for world building a low magic world! Thank you
My friend and I were just talking about the meta-gaming element (and often tendency) and bringing players more towards the RP. Transforming class into the RP element is a great example of this (similarly race and gender could be used this way). Even as NPC townsmen, maybe getting a gig as a member of the town guard could mean certain status benefits and financial security other members of the town don't have, etc...
For some reason, my brain always puts Clerics/Paladins/Warlocks all together as magic from an external source. This line of thinking intrigues me because it kind of blurs the line between cleric and warlock, especially if you consider patrons to have god-like powers. I liked your Ranger/Druid/Barbarian and that's probably what I would do as well. Then Wizard/Sorcerer/Bard as arcane casters and I feel like Bard would take some training and so be kind of a middle ground. I also like the fantasy of the Bardic Collegium as a repository for knowledge and history and Bards kind of being that wanderer bringing news, tales, and knowledge to all the smaller cities. My favorite depiction being from Mercedes Lackey in Valdemar, where even the nobles sent their kids to be educated at the Bardic College. Fighter/Monk/Rogue as disciplined melee fighters. This is less of a spiritual take on Monks that I would guess you have, pairing them with paladins and clerics, and more of a kung fu/martial arts fighter concentration.
I didn't love the show The Magicians in its entirety, but overall I thought it was a fun fantasy romp, kind of a pulp-pop True Blood, except...wizards. One thing I did love that they did quite well in their magical hierarchy was to note that 'Magicians' were academy students and alumni, but 'Hedge Witches' were rejects, dropouts, and hobbyists on the fringe. Sort of a High Magic vs Low Magic class structure, with a great deal of generational mistrust and built up antagonism between the two camps. Plotlines that found both sides in conflict contrasted with plotlines that found their interests aligned allowed for a great deal of character development and growth. It's an idea I've had rattling around in my head to introduce to my new campaign I've been working up.
On a semi-related note, I've been thinking a lot about bards lately and how I find the general interpretation of them as primarily performers/musicians a bit limiting. I like the idea that bards have a more intuitive connection with magic essentially based on persuading the world to do what you want, and using whatever means they choose to resonate with the primordial forces of the world to bring magic forth. I haven't fully crystallised my thoughts on it but I'd love to hear your take on bards and whether you agree that there could be something else underlying their magic than "just" performance!
Magic in my world is nearly exclusively the domain of the gods, the fey, and the beings of the Outer Planes. Wizards are the only people with the fortitude and patience to study the realms beyond mortal ken. I love the idea of wizards always being part of a pair - a master and an apprentice - and the potential for roleplay that that engenders. Scholars often cut off from the world, wizards need their apprentices to handle their affairs, to shoulder the drudgery of everyday life and to seal the doors between worlds when the dangers of The Pursuit prove fatal.
In my world setting, wizards do end up having multiple students (3 is usually the max), but by the time it takes for the students to learn all that their mentor knows, it generally takes 20 years and the mentor tends to die of old age by that point. The recent students (usually aged between 30 and 40), then go out into the world for roughly 10 years to learn from life experience, seeking out druids and sorcerers to broaden their understanding of the aether and how it is used by others. By the age of 50 to 60, they seek out new students to teach everything they've learned along with the old teachings of their mentor. Essentially making each generation to be more knowledgeable than the last.
Sorcerers, despite their innate magical aptitude, tend to seek out wizards, druids, clerics, and even monks for guidance. The curiosity of their magical origins may bring them to others that have knowledge in this area. Sorcerers who want to hone their discipline might seek out wizards and potentially find out theories of their bloodline. Clerics could be useful to find out if divine intervention caused their magical birth or something more infernal. Also, Clerics in my world setting tend to have libraries within the clergy filled with tomes and books detailing the celestial, infernal, and the history/biography/bestiary of the world around them.
Warlocks may end up seeking out wizards and clerics for similar reasons. Keeping their pact a secret, of course. A warlock may be interested in learning more about their patron and go to various clergies across the continent. A wizard may bring insight to the warlock's understanding of the aetheric powers they are renting.
I know this was a paragraph and a half of a comment, but I'm pretty much saying that NPC's in my world can and sometimes are the classes that the PC's can be. I wanted to broaden the interaction between the classes in a societal way.
This is a beautiful way of thinking about it. So many choices it creates
one thing that i immediately thought of when you were talking about wizards. and their age.
since obviously there's a disconnect between how a wizards power increases mechanically compared to how its meant to increase narratively. so like, the idea that 'its takes a lifetime of study in order to master wizardry' and yet a PC could go from lvl 1-20 over the course of only a few months.
what if: since magic is such a foreign concept to the mortal mind. it might take them that long before they can even understand magic at the level necessary to even cast a single spell. but once they're got that basic understanding, its relatively simple to figure out harder and harder spells. so you can have PC's prodigys that were able to figure it out fairly young, but they're a rare minority. most wizards average multiple decades of study before they're able to cast a single spell.
this solves a few 'issues'. *first* : it explains why wizards tend to be older, even if they've been studying all their lives, while PC's needn't be older. *second* , it also explains why wizards are so rare. many, many people may *want* to go down the path of wizardry. but really, it takes a special type of person to make that commitment in the first place. but even then, of the people that do make the commitment, many of them will lose steam, and give up before ever reaching the neccesary level of understanding (or they'll die first...dnd worlds are dangerous yo). *third* it explains how magic can be not-ubiquitous. lets be honest: realistically if it only took a couple of years of study to learn even basic magic. then, low level magic would be as ubiquitous as technology is today. its just way too useful for that not to be true. but what if that just...wasn't possible? what if most people that tried to study magic averaged taking 20-30 years before casting their first cantrip? thats obviously not something to can add to the primary school curriculum...
idk, my own setting isn't that low magic, but it seems like a neat idea.
My wizard towers are actually old, old towers built across the lands by the ancient elves. They are basically subway entrances to the ancient underground society of the elves (they liked nature so much that they decided to live underground). When this society broke down, the educated and aristocratic peoples created a society of philosophy and overwatch, and they use these wizards towers to 'babysit' the world.
My warlock's whole backstory is that he was a wizard who never got beyond basic magic even after a hundred years so he went and made a tome pact instead so this is uh... pretty relevant
A fellow player's warlock trained much of his life to be a paladin, but found out he was getting whispers from a different source.
@@MonkeyJedi99, my paladin/hexblade has dueling influence from his god and his hammer.
I've personally always found the implied lore of D&D classes to be super interesting, especially when it comes to the differences between Warlocks and Clerics. I would love a more in depth look at some of the half casters as well, like ranger and paladin. The one thing that has always bothered me about rangers is that there magic doesn't feel like druid magic in the same way that paladin magic tends to feel like cleric magic.
I really like the concept but had two questions:
1. What are your other groupings of the classes (including artificer)?
2. How do you handle when a player wants to break that mould? For example, what if your player wants to be a barbarian noble? Are you putting them as the head of some tribe nobody has heard of or do you allow them to go against grain and what does that look like to you?
Thanks in advance! Great video, this one and the displace hunt.
I have done many of these things in my home brew campaign as well. Glad to know I'm not the only one thinking these!
YES! Another DK video I’ll watch at least 10 times to adsorb it in order to make myself a better DM.
Lipstick and shirt rim really pop! Nice styling!
I have an article on my world anvil project where I talk about Magi (written back in January, noting because some of these ideas are very similar to Dael's) - magi, in that world, are representatives of any casting focused class: wizards, sorcerers, warlocks, bards, druids, clerics, etc. Basically: people who do magic. By and large they're quite respected - this is a society that is fundamentally built on magic the way our world is built on science, so they're like scientists and engineers in terms of status. But some have specific opinions about specific classes among them:
Sorcerers are a little concerning - they're less a person who's actually trying to be magic and more a person just dealing with the fact that they are inherently magic, which implies less about their character than someone who's devoted themselves to study or nature or worshipping a god or whatever.
Bards can be quite concerning because of associations with mind control magic, because magical mind control is a fucking terrifying concept, have you seen stuff like Manchurian Candidate, imagine if that kind of shit was real!?
Warlocks are stigmatized enough against that I'd actually warn players that they might want to pretend to be a different kind of class, because they're literally signed up with some power that's giving out magical superpowers in exchange for services rendered. That's a shady as heck relationship, there's a reason people in the real world who were accused of making such deals were literally burned at the stake. (I mean, a large part of that is the lack of a rigorous justice system to prove that knowing medicinal herbs is not the same as signing up to be the devil's minion. But, y'know, it's a shady idea and warlocks are *actually* doing it.)
As you can see, I like the idea of having classes play into role play, at least to some extent. The physical (mundane? non-caster?) classes are a little harder to firmly categorize. Rogues can be thieves, but this world has just been through a major war, there's probably plenty of people who've learned to go without being seen because they were scouts for the army or just because living in a war zone and not being able to sneak around is often not conducive to long term survival.
I built a setting in the modern day which was basically earth but with D&D magic and stuff. There were no gods, though people still believed there was and 2 of the groups favourite NPS were Atheist Clerics. One was a Trickster Domain Cleric who got his powers from his devotion to the ideals of Anarcho Capitalism and was a big time CEO of a tech company. His powers revolved around tricking and swindling people to get ahead in the game and playing the system and his magic had a flavour to it that if you saw him using his magic with true sight, you see necrotic veins coming from him and his spells and if you interacted with them then they flake away as burned money and have the smell of moral death about them.
The other was a Life Domain Cleric who drew her powers in her faith in the goodness of humanity and our charitable nature. She spent all of her time trying to help and heal people and doing charitable works. Her magic always had an off white yellowish glow to it and sounded like laughter. I chose off white because she was channelling human goodness, but people also have innate evil in them so her magic was never truly white.
This video definately got my wheels turning...erm...mental ones.
My setting takes place shortly (+/-50 years) after the apocalypse happened and the apocalypse was caused by the forces of magic suddenly becoming much more powerful. Now i'm thinking that the people of this world would be highly suspicious of anyone who can use their own magic (wizards/sorcerors) but maybe not so much of those for whom someone else is providing the power/guidance/...manipulation (warlock/cleric). My thinking is that, since the beings providing the magic for warlock/cleric are frequently extraplanar then their magic wouldn't have been affected in the way that 'local' magic was (just realized that in my setting magic is somehow localized. Thanks Dael, now i'll be trying to work that out all night) and might then be regared as safer, leading to this weird thing where a warlock gaining power from a devil might be regarded as safe to deal with than a wizards whos magic might just blow up a building instead of lighting a candle if he's misjudged how 'strong' the local magic is.
Does that seem to make sense?
Great video and ideas ... the only thing I might add is that a class doesn't have to be a monolith. For example, I have two factions of druids in my campaign, those that try to integrate with and bridge peace between civilization and nature, and those that have no interest in civilization or being diplomats but would rather just see nature take its course. Some of that could be related to subclasses as well (schools of magic, warlock patron type, etc). And as far as the baking video goes ... I already watched (so there!). Keep up the great work.
Hearing about this like so many of your videos immediately made me think about how good Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is.
I'm totally down for Risky Whisking to be a more regular thing.
Have you read "Uprooted" by any chance? It's very similar to what you suggested. It has a Wizard's tower, the Wizard has a territory, and surrounding settlements light beacons when they require aid
It's also a fantastic book in general, and I feel like you'd enjoy the magic system!
What!? That's wild!! No, I haven't read it, I'll absolutely have to look it up now
I love all of your videos. You have an enormous amount of ideas and you fully think them through in your world as a whole and in small. We are 2 of a kind! Keep it up please!
Well now I want your backlog about Wizard Towers! Lol
The young wizard out in the world fits into that same apprenticeship dynamic. The point f being a journeyman is to journey, you've achieved a degree of proficiency in your trade and are seeking other masters to learn from.
I don't know if it's from basic or advanced DnD (I saw it in Old School Essentials) but there was a thing about there only being exactly nine 12th level druids at all times (three 13th level and one 14th level I think?) and to level up you don't just need the XP but to find and defeat one of the existing ones in a fight or whatever challenge you agree on
I think that kind of "class quest/goal" could be a really cool thing to make classes feel different besides just their abilities, although that kind of stuff might be a bit hard to fit in unless _everyone_ is doing that kind of "training montage" individual thing at once
Your camera focus is perfect, 10/10!
I like differant idea about sorcerers. I like the idea that sorcerers did have to do some training and learning to master their magic, but it's not the same. For the most part, every wizards fireball tend to be casted the same way, give or take a couple flourishes. But when a sorcerer casts fireball, they more are doing whatever it was that they know triggers a fireball from within them. It's not so much casting as it is a muscle or skill that they trained and figured out how it works for them. This could lead to the sorcerer discovering their new spells accidentally after a level up. They then roleplay practicing it. This could also lead to a sorcerer who doesnt know they have certain spells. "What do you mean, Charm Person, I just say please and they do things."
Definitely guilty of not watching the baking video. Sheesh gotta call me out 😅
Going to squeeze every bit out of my character classes!
I love your stream-of-consciousness style. Not sure it's scripted ot not, but it seems organic.
The points you raise are what I hate and what I love about class-based RPGs. I think that without putting some thought into the "why" of the classes it becomes a little too easy to emphasize the mechanics in a way that doesn't impact the settting in a meaninful way. I dream of making a campaign where I outline the specific monastic traditions, barbarian tribes, pantheons, and magical sources and schools in a way that both inform and are informed by the setting.
I love it. I had been thinking of a similar idea to make sense of classes in the world. Did you have idea for how Bards fit in to your world? I was able to make sense of the other magic classes except that one.