Wizards in Close Proximity (RPG Blog Carnival)

This months blog carnival from Codex Anathema has the topic of Magic in the City. For this I want to riff off Grumpy Wizards ‘how many wizards‘ post to talk about how many I ended up calculating my wizards-per-city numbers – and what I did with that flock of wizards once I had them.

A second inspiration for this was the great blog-post on wizards as concentrators for everything by Polar Frosty – dragons just do treasure but wizards hoard traps, monsters, whatever, for their own reasons. (The original Kill The Wizard (AWAB) gone but All Wizards Are Bastards is the current version I believe.)

On Wizards as Concentrators

Wizards focus, obsessively so – and depending on their focus they are more or less of a hazard.

Not every wizard is a terrifying abomination unmoored from reality. Those that are dwell far from the eyes of most folk. The wizards you will meet are either happy to dwell among mundane folk, like someone with a houseful of cats, or are at least good enough at masking their feelings so as not to spook the ordinary folk .

The utility of a wizard that can be steered such that their focus is, say, the integrity of the ruling house or the pride of their nation, is so great to the powers of the realm that the low rate of success and significant hazards posed by wizards focussed on unhelpful things get overlooked. Wizards concentrate, including bringing other wizards in their wake; once the “ways of wizards” have been established in a place you can often get wizards to conform, even if only through status-seeking competition over things that are give importance only by the wizards themselves.

From a social point of view – everyone else but the wizards – there are wizards who have bought into the power structure and are esteemed within it, there are wizards who have chosen ‘acceptable’ vices and are permitted to go about their business as dealing with them is too troublesome, and there are wizards who are shunned – tolerated to dwell in the wilderness as long as they leave well enough alone, dealt with severely if they show signs of the wrong kind of interests. The infernalism, necromancy or casually deployed evoking will need to be egregious to get people to overcome the terror in dealing with a high level wizard.

On Estimating Wizard Abundance

I built a leveled characters curve from the D&DBeyond and other datasets of the players and compared that with old school and RL progression curves. This was broadly 1/3 drop off for every level. For my home game I combined this level progression with a 3.5e class breakdown below to get a sense of what magic users are about in a large settlement. The ratios of classes might change with your game but what I was using for my 3.5e home game is:

From this you have 10% of all adventurers are magic-slingers – 8% wizards, 2% sorcerers – and for the purposes of all this we will lump them together; whether it is book learning or the fire in their blood, their tendencies are the same. If you want to adapt this for 5e you can use the class/race tables I cooked up in data driven Appendix P: 3xd100 NPC party generation tables.

I used a whole-realm demographic break-down with people in the wilderness and all the settlements of various sizes, added the different chances of finding levels of PCs in different sizes of settlements and tried to work around the fact that somewhere in the realm of ~30 million folk there ought to be a very high level wizard but they are not going to appear automatically on any of the smaller scales.

Put it all together for the home province of ~ 3m people and I got ~65 magic users of 10th level and up somewhere in the province, concentrated in the major cities. The top 10 wizards by level (16+) all lived in the ‘big cities’ of which there were two. Between these two cities I had ~360 arcanists, ~250 level 5 or below.

Batching Wizards

For my next step I wanted to box these up so that all the highest level wizards were accounted for (heading up a guild, their own retinue, whatever) and then chuck in whatever other groups were known to exist (adventuring parties, noble houses) and have them soak up more of the bottom of the pyramid.

By the time I got to crunching this out, the party had already encountered a bunch of named wizards so this was more an exercise of checking how many other serious players could be out there. I knew we had a Mage University, an Artificer, those wizards who served the Duchy and a fearsome tower dwelling Wizard. I tagged one of the highest level wizards to all of those which left a couple over that were available for other power bases. For the moment I put them in an Enchanters Guild collective.

All these high level named wizards got a retinue of lower level wizards – students mostly – and then all the rest of the lower levels got boxed off into some other organisations – a rival guild to the Enchanters, the collective wizard employees of the non-magic noble houses, a magic noble house and adventurers in general.

This last was the next interesting slice – after clipping off the known organisations and then splitting out who was left among groups we see how many of our wizards are mercenaries for hire – and also what kind of spell casting can be bought no questions asked.

All this left 10 ‘groups’ of wizards hanging around the major cities of the campaign home province, with all of the ‘serious’ level 16+ wizards in just six of them:
* The Wizard University – 2 serious wizards, relatively new, noted for being meritocratic and accepting people from non-noble origins. This is a bunch that are obsessed with pushing the boundaries of magical puissance, breaking ground on bold new magics and showing up the Enchanters Guild for ossified decorations who have no understanding of principles.
* The Enchanters Guild – 3 serious wizards, the traditionalist bastion, beholden to the Guild motherhouse at the Royal Capital. For them every wizard is a dangerous radical one bad day off cracking open the hells and they need to be brought to the one true way of doing magic. Orthodox, structured and controlled by the Guild Heads.
* Ducal House – 1 serious wizard serving the ruling house, plus staff. Focussed on cult-hunting, monster-fighting and the extraction and storing of dangerous artifacts, they are one one of the premier builders of dungeons in the name of keeping all the dangerous detrietus of yesterdays magicians away from the populace.
* Seers Tower – 1 serious wizard with entourage, dwells in the immediate region of Thenya. Attempting to build a more perfect understanding of the future, by whatever means necessary.
* The Observer – 1 serious wizard, artificer, abides in their tower in the city. Never leaves their tower room, acts only through advice to supplicants or scrolls and magic items dispensed.
* The Evoker – 1 serious wizard, borderline hazard, cruising towards needing to be dealt with. Teetering on the edge of attempting to start a one-man war with the dragons to prove they can win.

Behind those are wizards serving (or belonging to) noble houses throughout the province, wizards serving non-arcanist guilds, adventurers and an arcanist noble-house that is effectively a small-scale guild of its own right.

I shared out the wizards between all this by giving the four minor groups ~10-12% of the total share then hand crafting the levels within the Evoker, Seer and Observer entourages to reflect how… reasonable they would likely be as bosses (more for the Observer, less for the Evoker) and then split the remainder between the Enchanters Guild and the University.

Concentration of Wizards

For the point of view of working out the wizards hanging around in the primary city, we have about 162, mostly lower level, mostly at the University or working for the Ducal House. Assuming a good portion of the adventuring wizards are going to be out of town adventuring at any given time, most of the rest are working for the arcanist noble house or for the Observer. These last two are particularly focused on their own goals so it is the University (and its rivals the Enchanting Guild) that are going to be driving most classic wizardly status-fighting and our immediate theme looks like the Ducal House attempting to secure and seal away dangerous artefacts and the Wizard University being the classic ‘tower go ka-boom’ experimental arcanists has a pair of fracture lines – the University building new dangerous things the Ducal House wants locked away and the University sponsoring expeditions to grab things “for research purposes” that the Ducal House view as too dangerous.

This is nowhere near as weird as it could be since wizarding conflict is not the focus of this campaign, just a backdrop strand. Figuring out how many groups are about and how numerous they are will give a sense of the level of backdrop scuffling or worse that should be going on.

Conclusion

Altogether the math of figuring out how many wizards there are hanging around serves as the base wood from which to whittle the exact shape of the concept. Turns out we do not actually have a huge amount of high level wizards and when you assign a few to the big groups to allow for some political pushing and shoving within them plus a figure-head each for minor groups, then you swiftly get a sense of shape of it all.

Doing all this, the things that jumped out at me
– that any wizard above level 14 really sticks out and will be identified with ‘their thing’
– that if guilds and noble houses are looking for wizards the number of adventuring wizards becomes quite small
– what looks like a giant pile of wizards rapidly winnows down when you start splitting them up into groups.

Overall I am perfectly happy to wing the first couple of ‘of course there is a wizard interested in whatever’ but after a few it is worth doing the numbers to ground it – or see what are the parameters that need to be true for your situation to be the truth.

Variants that could be tried are fiddling with the class mix, the level progression curve, the levelled/commoners split and the difference between rural/urban concentrations.

The curve I used is below – rewritten to be ‘as per leveled population’ – built using 2.8 as the step between levels:

Use the second column with whatever your levelled population is to tweak how high-powered your world is – more levelled folk lead to more high levelled folk.