Magic can be many things in a fantasy role-playing game, but most often it is a powerful force within a game's world. However, the codification inherent in games also takes much of the awe and mystery out of magic that you see in fictional sources. The old school fantasy role-playing supplement Wonder & Wickedness attempts to re-inject a sense of the fantastic into gaming magic.
Wonder & Wickedness isn't a large volume. It is roughly digest sized, and less than 100 pages in length, but the book outlines an interesting take on magic that has already been echoed in the works of other publishers. The book is published by the UK-based publisher Lost Pages and designed by Brendan Strejcek. However, the book packs a lot of punch into those pages demonstrating that you don't need a lot of mechanics to add impact to your games.
Nothing in this book is really rooted in the old school gaming movement. You can just as easily use these rules with a Dungeons & Dragons 5E game or The Nightmares Underneath as you could with the Blueholme or Labyrinth Lord retroclones. The intent of the rules would be to add a new system of magic, regardless of the base ruleset that you use for play.
The book contains just over 50 spells. One of the things that I like about this supplement is that it takes magic in more of a "weird fantasy" direction, while not sacrificing the Vancian inspiration upon the D&D stream of fantasy role-playing games.
The mechanics are fairly simple. Wonder & Wickedness continues to use the basic Vancian assumption of "fire and forget" magic, so conceptually things work the same way. Because of the smaller spell list, magic-using characters, called Sorcerers in the book, start with just three spells. New spells are learned through discovery, through spellbooks or scrolls encountered in the wild, that the character must then commit to memory. In an old school inspired game, learning could be as simple as making an Intelligence check, and in games with more involved systems like Dungeons & Dragons 5E you could instead make an Arcana check to see if your character learned a new spell.
Spell preparation and durations are both based upon the character's level. They can utilize a number of spells each day equal to their level, and spells last a period of turns equal to that as well. If your ruleset of choice allows multiclassing, you might want to base these off of caster levels instead. However, keep in mind that these rules don't actually specify that your character needs to be of a magic-using character class in order to be a spellcaster. This allows you to create characters that better fit the fictions tropes of being able to use magic and still be able to fight.
The spells in the book do not have a level. The author states that if you want to convert these spells to a more traditional game, you would then consider them as first level spells in the system that you are converting to. This doesn't mean that these spells are weak. Spells like Death Ray and Circle of Protection scale up with the character as they progress, and of course any spells with a duration more than instantaneous will have a longer effect as the character goes up in level.
The effectiveness of spells are balanced out by catastrophes. These bad happenings are triggered when a spell's use is interrupted, an untrained character attempts to use magic, the sorcerer dies before a spell takes effect, or a few other occurrences. Each magic school has a table of catastrophes that are rolled upon when something bad happens.
The book is rounded out with a section of weird magical items that can be dropped into your games. Like with the list of spells, the mechanical element of the magical items are minimal. This gives a GM the wiggle room to interpret the items within the idiom of their game world.
Wonder & Wickedness was not produced under the OGL, so these rules cannot be recycled wholesale in a commercial product without at least asking for permission first, or at least acknowledging the inspiration of these rules within your own ruleset. Where I think these rules would really shine would be in a game like Sine Nomine Publishing's modern horror role-playing game Silent Legions. The spell lists for Diabolism and Vivimancy would be particularly fitting for that game. My preferences are more for horror than fantasy anyway, but I think that that the spell mechanics of Wonder & Wickedness would combine well with Silent Legions for a Hellblazer-inspired world.
There is also an expansion available called Marvels & Malisons. Unfortunately this is currently not available in print (a limited print edition from Lost Pages sold out, and they have not yet offered this up via POD through OneBookShelf). The Marvels & Malisons supplement is by Lost Pages publisher Paolo Greco, having grown out of his use of Wonder & Wickedness at his gaming table. The supplement adds five new schools of magic and a total of 40 new spells. While the magic in Marvels & Malisons can be thought of as being more "clerical" in its scope, the book does continue the idea from Wonder & Wickedness that there is only one form of magic, and it is arcane in its scope. There is cleric character type in either of these supplements, and it really isn't missed. The spells of Greco's Physiurgy school are closest to what gamers would expect from the cleric's toolkit of spells, and the Cunning Craft school provides an interesting take on folk or hedge magic.
I think that if you are going to introduce Wonder & Wickedness into your games, that you should just go for the whole hog and pick up Marvels & Malisons as well and give characters the full scope of the options available for this wonderful set of rules. However, these spells do cover a lot of ground, so while there is space for expansion, you may find that you do not necessarily need to expand them. This is part of what returns a sense of fantastic mystery to a game that uses Wonder & Wickedness for their magic rules, by having a limited list of spells it not only forces players to have to be more creative in how they use magic, but the limited spell list also helps to keep magic from being too commonplace in a game's world. For me, this gives magic more meaning in a game.
There is still room for expansion by clever GMs using these rules. With both supplements together you get just under 100 spells, much less than you would find in even the shortest of OSR-styled retroclones.
If you want something different from the magic in your Dungeons & Dragons inspired game, I suggest giving a look at Wonder & Wickedness. It is a solidly designed supplement that will bring new elements to your fantasy games. The book isn't going to be for everyone, and if you aren't interested in a rules light approach to game mechanics then you likely won't like Wonder & Wickedness either. But the text is flavorful and fantastic. I think that any fantasy role-playing game would benefit from their inclusion.
Wonder & Wickedness isn't a large volume. It is roughly digest sized, and less than 100 pages in length, but the book outlines an interesting take on magic that has already been echoed in the works of other publishers. The book is published by the UK-based publisher Lost Pages and designed by Brendan Strejcek. However, the book packs a lot of punch into those pages demonstrating that you don't need a lot of mechanics to add impact to your games.
Nothing in this book is really rooted in the old school gaming movement. You can just as easily use these rules with a Dungeons & Dragons 5E game or The Nightmares Underneath as you could with the Blueholme or Labyrinth Lord retroclones. The intent of the rules would be to add a new system of magic, regardless of the base ruleset that you use for play.
The book contains just over 50 spells. One of the things that I like about this supplement is that it takes magic in more of a "weird fantasy" direction, while not sacrificing the Vancian inspiration upon the D&D stream of fantasy role-playing games.
The mechanics are fairly simple. Wonder & Wickedness continues to use the basic Vancian assumption of "fire and forget" magic, so conceptually things work the same way. Because of the smaller spell list, magic-using characters, called Sorcerers in the book, start with just three spells. New spells are learned through discovery, through spellbooks or scrolls encountered in the wild, that the character must then commit to memory. In an old school inspired game, learning could be as simple as making an Intelligence check, and in games with more involved systems like Dungeons & Dragons 5E you could instead make an Arcana check to see if your character learned a new spell.
Spell preparation and durations are both based upon the character's level. They can utilize a number of spells each day equal to their level, and spells last a period of turns equal to that as well. If your ruleset of choice allows multiclassing, you might want to base these off of caster levels instead. However, keep in mind that these rules don't actually specify that your character needs to be of a magic-using character class in order to be a spellcaster. This allows you to create characters that better fit the fictions tropes of being able to use magic and still be able to fight.
The spells in the book do not have a level. The author states that if you want to convert these spells to a more traditional game, you would then consider them as first level spells in the system that you are converting to. This doesn't mean that these spells are weak. Spells like Death Ray and Circle of Protection scale up with the character as they progress, and of course any spells with a duration more than instantaneous will have a longer effect as the character goes up in level.
The effectiveness of spells are balanced out by catastrophes. These bad happenings are triggered when a spell's use is interrupted, an untrained character attempts to use magic, the sorcerer dies before a spell takes effect, or a few other occurrences. Each magic school has a table of catastrophes that are rolled upon when something bad happens.
The book is rounded out with a section of weird magical items that can be dropped into your games. Like with the list of spells, the mechanical element of the magical items are minimal. This gives a GM the wiggle room to interpret the items within the idiom of their game world.
Wonder & Wickedness was not produced under the OGL, so these rules cannot be recycled wholesale in a commercial product without at least asking for permission first, or at least acknowledging the inspiration of these rules within your own ruleset. Where I think these rules would really shine would be in a game like Sine Nomine Publishing's modern horror role-playing game Silent Legions. The spell lists for Diabolism and Vivimancy would be particularly fitting for that game. My preferences are more for horror than fantasy anyway, but I think that that the spell mechanics of Wonder & Wickedness would combine well with Silent Legions for a Hellblazer-inspired world.
There is also an expansion available called Marvels & Malisons. Unfortunately this is currently not available in print (a limited print edition from Lost Pages sold out, and they have not yet offered this up via POD through OneBookShelf). The Marvels & Malisons supplement is by Lost Pages publisher Paolo Greco, having grown out of his use of Wonder & Wickedness at his gaming table. The supplement adds five new schools of magic and a total of 40 new spells. While the magic in Marvels & Malisons can be thought of as being more "clerical" in its scope, the book does continue the idea from Wonder & Wickedness that there is only one form of magic, and it is arcane in its scope. There is cleric character type in either of these supplements, and it really isn't missed. The spells of Greco's Physiurgy school are closest to what gamers would expect from the cleric's toolkit of spells, and the Cunning Craft school provides an interesting take on folk or hedge magic.
I think that if you are going to introduce Wonder & Wickedness into your games, that you should just go for the whole hog and pick up Marvels & Malisons as well and give characters the full scope of the options available for this wonderful set of rules. However, these spells do cover a lot of ground, so while there is space for expansion, you may find that you do not necessarily need to expand them. This is part of what returns a sense of fantastic mystery to a game that uses Wonder & Wickedness for their magic rules, by having a limited list of spells it not only forces players to have to be more creative in how they use magic, but the limited spell list also helps to keep magic from being too commonplace in a game's world. For me, this gives magic more meaning in a game.
There is still room for expansion by clever GMs using these rules. With both supplements together you get just under 100 spells, much less than you would find in even the shortest of OSR-styled retroclones.
If you want something different from the magic in your Dungeons & Dragons inspired game, I suggest giving a look at Wonder & Wickedness. It is a solidly designed supplement that will bring new elements to your fantasy games. The book isn't going to be for everyone, and if you aren't interested in a rules light approach to game mechanics then you likely won't like Wonder & Wickedness either. But the text is flavorful and fantastic. I think that any fantasy role-playing game would benefit from their inclusion.
