From the start, I wanted to make it easy to use enemies in combat, while providing interesting options to make battle scenes more memorable. Some enemies might be fought in numbers, such as the green gorger, or fought alone, such as the dragon that appears after.
As I tinkered with the magic system in Weird Wizard, I found that I wanted to make spells and other magical effects expressions of specific paths, rather than having chunky traditions.
I discovered that having access to several different token pools, with no way for those pools to interact, created a fair amount of mental load. In the final iteration, I have distilled nearly all tokens into combat tokens and magic tokens. This way, the options for player expression and cool bonuses stay varied without becoming overwhelming.
When you crack open Shadow of the Weird Wizard, you might be surprised to find that the only option for ancestry in the character creation chapter is human, especially when the cover shows an assortment of interesting characters swarmed by goblins. But have no fear…
I never had doubts about carrying the path system forward into Weird Wizard from Shadow of the Demon Lord. Let’s take a closer look at how they work.