I'm tired of old men in dresses with sticks and owls. How do you make wizards truly strange?

I'm tired of old men in dresses with sticks and owls. How do you make wizards truly strange?

Make them Warhammer Fantasy wizards.

>I'm tired of adult men in amor with swords and horses. How do you make fighters truly strange?

turn them into anime catgirls

Blue/purple robes with stars and moons alon with a big pointy hat. No need to make everything unique, sometimes it’s best to go back to the classics

Magic does strange things to ones body and mind.
Also as a rule I make it so all powerful or upcoming power wizards are a magcal terry a davis. Killing peasants because they're glow in the dark fighter halflings

>Find a crazy quirks random table
>Roll

The idea is that such a long a reclusive, paranoid, and magical lifestyle that magic users are themselves a group of strange individuals with their own tastes and quirks that have evolved over the length and breadth of their magically extended lives, each embroiled in study and learning and stealing secrets.

So why would they all be a homogenous group? They'd probably each branch off and become their own thing, each developing their own perks and quirks and proclivities depending on what secret magical knowledge they've gathered.

Does this count as strange?

Anyone got that picture of the wizard in a diaper with frogs legs and tentacles coming out of his bag as he barfs rainbows into a mug? That. That's how you do wizards right.

Call of cthulhu wizardry. Like worms that walk and stuff. Or on the other hand, make them lower on the flashy bang power -scale. Something like the slavic/finnish folk tradition shamans/witches/wise men. They mainly curse livestock, heal, scry, change weather and that sort of more subtle stuff.

Take magic out of the hands of players. Anything you give to players is going to become mundane and boring, this is why elves aren't special anymore, or even more outlandish shit like Tieflings and Dragonborn.

No. Fuck off anthropomorphic figures. Fuck spiky weaboo faggot Final Fantasy armors that would get rekted by average 13th century peasant with a rock. Fuck your stupid derivative Warcraft wizard crap, levitating burning seals on staves, ten thousand pound heavy pauldrons.

It's like stupid Star Wars shit.

>let's make this new alien species that's different from others because they have like elongated noses and stuff
>we'll call them protoss
>uhm, sir, that's from starcraft
>i thought it was from israel

Runequest magic is cool

Finnish wizards are bards

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you, The Man who Hates Fun

>How do you make wizards truly strange?

dress like a sentai hero

Veeky Forums: the man

Stupid nigger.

If you really go this route, make sure that magic only exists to fuck over the players and their quest is about solving whatever magic fucked up.

>Magic slowly turns you into a sentient tree
>Liches are formed when these sentient trees have enough power to project vessels into the mortal world
>Exdeath was a lich-level wizard who hid his tree-form in a demiplane

This is why you go low power and folklore-esque. As and said.

Low power Wizards are just as interesting and arguably more fun then high powered ones. Your Wizard doesn't get 'spells' in the same way, the most powerful offensive spell your Wizard might have is the power to turn into a wolf and bite people or maybe through some paralyzing voodoo powder in their face.

Your Wizard is a witch, wise man, shaman. Most of your powers revolve around healing or causing sickness, and are deeply tied with nature and magical laws. You don't conjure random blasts of energy as you trap them in jars and throw them (rarely), and commune with spirits instead of summoning monsters.

Trust me, this will rekindle your love of Wizards. Under this kind of system your Wizard's most impressive magical feat will be breaking their magic staff of fire, which up to this point has only been able to deal 1d4 points of fire damage, and unleashing all its magic at once to turn a dragon's fire breath back into its face. Your entire table will be hype as fuck for it and all it took you was to scale them down and make them grounded.

...

God I can hear the chest slapping and frothing trough the screen.

>Trust me, this will rekindle your love of Wizards
It really didn't. The whole "Oooh, magic is mysterious and weird and subtle and dangerous" got tiring as quickly as chucking fireballs did.

Self-experimentation

Make them like real life wizards, disgusting to both morals and the senses and given to insane feuds

Then do you just not want Magic Users at all? Or do you just want to argue instead? I'm more then willing to help people with problems they have about games but you have to at least tell me what you want.

>Anything you give to players is going to become mundane and boring

shit GM confirmed

>this is why elves aren't special anymore

this is a good thing

No, thats going to the other extreme of creative bakrupcy, gimping magic doesnt makes it more interesting, its retarded and boring

Nah, I solved my problems a long time ago. I modeled my wizards after people like Aristotle or Imhotep. Polymaths focused on studying and understanding the world and employing their knowledge for the benefit of many, works well enough for me.

I'm just pointing out that making magic weak, weird and subtle is about as overdone as flinging around fireballs and summoning walking skeletons.

>gimping magic doesnt makes it more interesting, its retarded and boring
>I'm just pointing out that making magic weak, weird and subtle is about as overdone as flinging around fireballs and summoning walking skeletons.

Putting casters down to the same level as non-magic classes =/= gimping them.

Make them a support class. Fixes literally every problem with magic users, and it's a fresh and unique spin.

This picture is cool. I looked it up and it's a bishop from Roman times.
So that's what a Roman lich cleric looks like.

I don't know what you looked up, but you're wrong. These are reliquaries from the Waldsassen Basilica in Bavaria. I've seen them with my own eyes. Dressing up skeletons and putting them in reliquaries is an old Bavarian tradition, though usually they make them wear silken masks with human faces drawn on them.

Make it so that if you can only be a wizard if you are completley obsessed with whatever magic you are trying to learn. If you want to be a pyromancer you have to be a borderline insane pyromaniac with fire tatoos and symbols everywhere.

Here you go friend

You just know he's gonna mind control and fuck her

>tfw I just now realized he's wearing ducks as shoes

>nerfing casters
>instead of buffing martials

You are doing it wrong

These are penguins.

>Magic does strange things to ones body and mind.
This really. Although it might make it a bit harder to fit into a roleplaying system.

any enterprising wizard should invest into self modification at some point.
You dont want to have to cast a spell to animate your hair every time if all it takes is a thought do ya?

Magic potential is directly inverse to the concept of "how much you have left to lose". And it scales terribly. They also still need to learn to use their power and to practice a lot. It also requires an unbelievable amount of dedication and willpower, to the point that their might only be ~20 of the most powerfull wizards in existence at a time (although more of the less powerfull ones, e.g. due to industrial accidents and stuff)

For example, a person who loses one limb might get enough magic potential to ignite some kindling, or heal a scratch slightly faster than normal, or project a fairly weak light.

A person who loses all their limbs, their home, and their family might be able to cast fireballs or lift moderate weights telekinetically, or other "decent" feats of magic.

And then there are the scary near-invincible high wizards, who stride around on magic-formed limbs and can pull vulcanic eruptions out of the ground, or other tremendous feats. These wizards have paid enormous costs though (and not cliched shit like giving up their soul), and are deeply fucked up as a result - to the point that their motives are basically incomprehensible to regular people. They've long lost sight of everything except whatever originally motivated them to discard their lives for power.

The trick would be implementing such a system without making it impossible to defeat a wizard.

why would you want fighters, who are defined by their mundanity, strange, which is the realm of the magical?

Extensive mutation tables/wild magic tables and encouraging players to do their own shit.

I mean, you're channeling elemental change through your brainmeats, even with the insulation provided by a pointy hat, you're gonna get some spillage.

Finnish wizards are ridiculously high power, though
>creating a swamp
>summoning a battleship full of fully armed warriors
>rapidly growing a forest with golden leaves
>stealing the sun and the moon

>who are defined by their mundanity

speak for your own setting faggot

Who told you fighters are defined by their mundanity?

>finnish wizards

this is pretty neat. I'd like to hear more

user probably doesn't know the difference between Roman and Holy Roman Empire

Forget about kalevala and read on the more down to earth stuff. It's really close to slavic shamanism. The basic stuff would be helping crops grow, aid/maim livestock, charms against hostile spirits, cursing with bad fortune, miscarriage etc. There is a really cool thing relating to shamanistic spirit journeys. If a shaman gets lost on a journey, he might end up in a place called "kalan suoli", meaning the gut of the fish. I think it's a primitive explanation for a psychosis maybe caused by the amanita piss they drink.

you're a retard. In a game about adventure and exploration, mystery is the bread and butter. It's neither 'good' to gut a whole race of enigma to unravel just to have another statblock, nor is there anything creativly bankrupt about giving magic more room to be special in the context of the system.

no I'm speaking for fighters in general, you idiot, not my fault you're doing it wrong.

Make them Constantine or Dresden type deals where they just are eccentric and goofy guys who act like drawing pentagrams with goat blood isn't something only crazy people do.

These singer guys were almost god like folks man. The stuff in kalevala is epic tier, more interesting stuff was happening as late as early 1900's.

Depends on the kind of game.

If you want low fantasy or more down to earth games, nerf casters and keep Fighters similar. Don't let Wizards be able to teleport around everywhere and summon powerful creatures and such, keep them mysterious and subtle to keep the theme of the campaign consistent.

If you're going for high fantasy? Buff martials and let them throw mountains at each other and do Wuxia jumps and other crazy shit.

Just don't do what D&D does or what a bunch of faggots on Veeky Forums think is good where it mixes high fantasy do anything wizards + low powered "realistic" and """mundane""" fighters together in the same setting and expect you to believe it is balanced.

>In a game about adventure and exploration, mystery is the bread and butter.

Ah but of course, only the ashole GM is allowed to harness those mysteries, fuck players having any kind of footing over the workings of the setting amirite?

>It's neither 'good' to gut a whole race of enigma to unravel just to have another statblock

It is when players insist on playing it

>nor is there anything creativly bankrupt about giving magic more room to be special in the context of the system.

making magic into a bunch of vague "realistic" gestures of good will is not creative, an old lady in the curiosity market can do that for you

Sounds more like you are doing it wrong, Fighters are supposed to be exceptional warriors

>man with zero facts convinced he is correct

Check out Ior Bock, the last famous finnish wise man.

>Ah but of course, only the ashole GM is allowed to harness those mysteries, fuck players having any kind of footing over the workings of the setting amirite?

Won't even adress that because it's not in the least what I said, mong

>It is when players insist on playing it
Then you can give in if you think it'll be conducive for the fun of the group, but the general demystification of elves has been a detriment, not an advantage.

>making magic into a bunch of vague "realistic" gestures of good will is not creative, an old lady in the curiosity market can do that for you
Oh, you just take an opinion you don't like to its absurdest extreme and think that's an argument? Okay great, this surely will be a worthwhile argument!

Im not arguing that, my point is that low-fantasy magic isnt necessarily more interesting than high-fantasy magic

yeah, they're adventurers, which are defined by being exceptional. AMONGST adventurers, they are defined as being mundane

>I'll better greentext, that's a good trick!

your point is that nerfing casters instead of buffing martials is doing it wrong. That's the whole of your fucking post

>Take magic out of the hands of players. Anything you give to players is going to become mundane and boring

"I swear Im not a shitty asshole GM"

I was not the one who brought balancing into the argument

>AMONGST adventurers, they are defined as being mundane

[citation needed]

They're called runesingers, they cast spells by singing to the spirits of the land and the gods, asking them for favours. This might be why music is so extremely important in the Finnish culture, even to this day.

Then you're using the wrong terminology. What you are describing are real life witch doctors, who were similar all across Europe. In Finnish mythology, wizards were these epic level bards.

Might well be mixed in my words, you're right. I'm more interested in the ones called tietäjä (wise man) and voimamies or väkimies (someone with connections to the fae).

...

Is...is he sitting ontop of a giant spider?

No. No, man, that guy is on another plane entirely. He’s so far beyond normal human thought that an idea like “mind control her and fuck her” wouldn’t occur to him, and he wouldn’t see the point if you suggested it. This is very clearly a person who has been doing magic for so long that he’s forgotten what social conventions are, let alone what they’re for. He doesn’t see anything wrong with his penguin boots beyond the fact that you don’t have a pair. He finds his spider chair convenient. He doesn’t go anywhere without a cephalopod in his pocket. He doesn’t understand why anyone would bother wearing a shirt. Mundane considerations like sex fled screaming decades ago and they’re never coming within twenty miles of him again.

>Magic only works if you are sexually aroused with the more aroused you are the more powerful it is.
>If you climax while using magic it's like a perils of the warp and you are injured quite badly if not killed.

Done, wizards fixed.

Have wizards become more and more like their specialty. You're all about fire? Then their hair starts getting more flamelike, they smell like smoke, etc. You a summoner? Parts of your body start to become like the things you summon. Diviner? Your third eye is open, and it's clocks. Acid? Slightly slimy, green tinge to skin, smell like lemons.

Magic isn't a toy, and it corrupts all it touches. The more you use it the more it changes you.

There was a shitty old Diablo clone called Dawn of Magic that was all about it. Using magic turned you into a gross mutant.

They start out as normal humans, but as they delve deeper and deeper into arcane lore they begin to change.
First, their minds start drifting away from the concerns of mere mortals. Socializing and carnal pleasures are usually the first to go, followed by empathy, conventional morality and most other qualities of the human mind.
At this point most Wizards will be interested in modifying their own body to better suit their new needs. Usually starting with a limb or an eye, the modifications slowly build up, until the Wizard no longer resembles his former self at all.
The end result varies a lot depending on the type of magic, the Wizard's goals and many other factors, from vaguely humanoid golems to biomantic, mutated abominations to beings too abstract for the human mind to fully comprehend.
At this point, the Post-Wizard is free to pursue whatever goal it has in mind, be it achieving godhood, leaving the mortal plane or something completely different.

The more you harness magic, the more your body starts to crystalize. At first, it's just a finger, then your entire hand. To become a truly masterful wizard, you have to conduct a ritual that robs you of your last semblance of humanity, and turns you into a floating mass of crystals.

That's his mount,

been there done that

Give them pants instead of a robe. I still remember how someone in my play group was flipping out because I dared give my mage pants and a shirt instead of a robe.

Yeah, grey order looks kinda bland, but it's kinda keeping with the theme

But they also have a a lot of different orders who look pretty unique

...

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naked old men covered head to toe in magic runes & sigils

c-can you post some more? I love this shit.

serch catacomb saints on google

Time to fill up my spoopy skeleton folder.

Thanks user, have some... interesting stuff.

At the end of Kalevala, a woman gets pregnant from eating a lingonberry and gives birth to Jesus. Väinämöinen sentences Jesus to death, but Jesus beats him in a debate and is crowned king of Karelia. Väinämöinen fucks off on a boat, vowing to return.

>alchemist
>necromancer
So where are those unique designs?

>Hat with dicks on it
>fannypack filled with spiders
>penguin boots

Hmmm...how about an armoured wizard
Okay it's a sorcerer, but what's the difference really?

At least post the nice one.

Necromancer that does no necromancy, the amethist order works the lore of death, they do no necromancy at all. Also there's a couple orders of knights dedicated to death who guard tombs and cemeteries while offduty from warring chaos and whatnot.

My theory is that he found a woman who didn't mind being married to a godlike sorcerer despite fact that the sorceror in question is aeons old

Actually Väinämöinen doesn't really count; he is a demigod older than humanity (and older than trees, actually).

I like those best. Mythological wizard types are one of the most fragil and also the most dangerous.

If you want a different take on wizards and how they affect world around them, read The Magicians Nephew by C. S. Lewis, especially the parts relating to Charn and Jadis

Every notable character in the Kalevala did some impressive wizardry, not just Väinämöinen.

Make them not all-powerful.
Wizards do or know about one thing really really well, like actual fucking scholars.
They tend to be reclusive. Like actual fucking scholars.
They spend most of their time doing research instead of risking their lives. Like actual fucking scholars.
They often have eclectic tastes or strange behaviors. Like actual fucking scholars.
They can't magically fix all your fucking problems because they're actual fucking scholars instead of gods.
If they overstep their bounds, they cause long-term issues like actual fucking scholars.
Pic related.