All Wizards Are Bastards
What is a Wizard?
A Wizard is a multitude. A scholar, a scientist, a slaver, a tyrant, a thief, a murderer... all in the pursuit of arcane magical knowledge. They are obsession manifest - as they dive deeper into ancient tomes and obscure rituals, their morality humanity sloughs off as a snake's old skin. They have utterly outrageous goals that often offend the sensibilities of honest folks as often as they confound those who try to understand, though the Wizard cares not. At best, they care only how other Wizards see them and at worst, not even that.
Wizards vs. Magic Users In Adventure Games
Obviously, there are magic users in Adventure Games that do not sink to the levels of depravity of the capital-W "Wizards". Players often assume the role of a magic-user, or a sorcerer, or a warlock, and some even call themselves "wizard", but an honest-to-God WIZARD would not be found in the field adventuring. That is work that can be pawned off to a vagabond and their research, after all, can only be completed by they and they alone.
Magic users draw power from material components, magical phrases, and rituals, but their understanding of the forces they wield is surface level. Consider, in our modern era, the difference between the script kiddies and the sages of the Deep Magic of Computing who created said scripts. Magic users seem awe-inspiring to the uninitiated, but the real power lies in the minds of those who cracked the code of the world around them and put it into usable form.
What Problems Do Wizards Solve in Adventure Games?
A non-zero amount of digital ink has been spilt trying to make sense of dungeons in D&D and similar games. Gygaxian Naturalism exists as a means of having a "realistic" ecosystem within and around dungeons, following natural "cause and effect" type feedback loops designed to present the fantasy landscape as something that exists in a sort of "grounded" way. The Mythic Underworld eschews these constraints (and natural laws) and instead paints the dungeon as a growth of hatred and evil, spewing forth from the depths of the earth because it hates you, shutting doors behind you, shitting monsters out of the ceilings, and just generally existing as an antagonistic force.
I believe the existence of Wizards combines the best of these approaches, providing a sort of "sense" to the abnormal and Weird environs of the dungeon. What we call "dungeons" are actually the laboratories of Wizards, and painting them as such answers a few common questions, such as:
- Why is this place even here? (Wizards need weird settings for their research.)
- Why is this place inhabited by monsters and Weird humanoids? (Wizards need gophers and test subjects.)
- Why are there traps everywhere? (Wizards need to protect their research.)
- Why is there treasure everywhere? (Wizards transcend the needs for mundane treasure, so rarely bother storing or cataloguing it appropriately.)
Wizards as Capitalist Analogues
Much as real world capitalists hoard ungodly amounts of wealth and deprive others of the benefits of property, land, and material, the Wizard hoards magical power on a scale unimaginable to your average adventurer. A Wizard may have tens of thousands of spell slots worth of magical effects locked in their dungeon - more than they could conceivably use in their lifetime, but deny the benefits of that power to those who could best use it.
Additionally, the accumulation of such large amounts of magical energy is inherently harmful to the surrounding environs, often warping the fabric of reality in both subtle and blatant ways. Beyond that lies the possibility of actual catastrophe, should some sort of magical mishap lead to a cascading eruption of all the Wizard's pent up spell energy.
Invading the home of a goblin tribe and killing all their fighting-age males (or maybe more!) to poke around and look for treasure has unfortunate parallels to real-world colonialist projects and understandably makes some folks uncomfortable. For all the problems Wizards solve as listed above, perhaps the most significant is this - when you raid a dungeon and stick a flintlock into the teeth of a deranged, power-hungry psycho that has exploited the land and the people for too long, you can feel good about pulling the trigger.