This is RPG-ology #81: Wizardry, for August 2024.
Our thanks to Regis Pannier and the team at the Places to Go, People to Be French edition for locating a copy of this and a number of other lost Game Ideas Unlimited articles. This was originally Game Ideas Unlimited: Wizardry, and is reposted here with minor editing [bracketed].
Axelrod Faces the Wizard
from a piece written November 24, 1992
Axelrod rounded the corner and approached the stairway. Somewhere in this castle was the princess; somewhere was the wizard. It would be fortunate but unlikely if he could rescue the one without facing the other. He hesitated at the foot of the stairs.
Suddenly light flared ahead. The wall at the head of the stair was ablaze. Before it stood a menacing silhouette, a robed figure towering above him. They faced each other for a moment, silent and unmoving.
“Leave this place and never return!” The voice boomed, echoed, seemed to come from every direction at once.
“I am Axelrod the Straight,” he replied. His own voice seemed to be carried away into emptiness. “I have come for the Princess Darmani of the Royal House of Ceil. I will not leave without her.”
“I do not wish to harm you. If you will not leave, I shall be forced to use my magic to transport you away from here.”
Axelrod waited defiantly, assessing what to do next. The light ahead made it difficult to see the steps; they could easily be trapped. But he would not be easily beaten, and he would not leave.
The shadow on the steps stretched toward him. The silhouette had raised its arms. Next came words, strange words, almost alien words.
Axelrod felt the room spin. He closed his eyes, and lost touch with the floor.
His eyes opened. He had been asleep; probably he blacked out passing through the void. He knew little about magic, but this answer made sense to him. He saw that he was in a wood, in a small clearing. Several paths led in different directions.
He stood up, adjusted his breastplate and belt, and picked up a few things which had fallen from his cloak. As he turned around, he saw the castle, less than a mile off.
Counting his blessings that the wizard had not been too angry, he shuddered to think where he might have found himself, and picked a path headed roughly back to town.
*****
The intruder was just coming to the bend in the hall. Everything was designed to lead intruders this way; it was time to execute the trap. He lit the wick with a piece of kindling, released the trap door, and stepped onto the landing. His opponent was already standing below, looking up the steps. Could he see his shadow? Soon it would not matter.
The mixed powder behind him suddenly flared. It would not last long, five minutes at most; but he had tried to make it burn longer once, and had almost been killed in the explosion.
He studied the man at the base of the steps. Strong, tough, handsome–it would be a shame to destroy such a hero. It would also take time for the gas to overcome someone that big. But there was no turning back now. “Leave this place and never return!” This stairway had been carefully crafted to focus his voice at the intruder; passages through the walls and ceiling reflected the sound down at him, and around behind him to echo off the back wall. The wizard merely looked at the opening just in front of him, and projected his voice into it. The intruder, already a bit confused by the gas, could be frightened into fleeing. But perhaps not this intruder.
He called himself Axelrod, and he wanted the princess. It would have been so much easier if he just told everyone the truth: the princess was free to go whenever she wished. She wished to learn the magic arts–illusion, alchemy, prestidigitation, astronomy–and was his best student. But she said that her parents would be infuriated by such a thing. Better they should believe her a prisoner of a formidable wizard and send heroes to risk their lives than that they formally demand that their recalcitrant daughter be turned over to them. He had to agree reluctantly. It was much easier to frighten a few heroes than to win an argument about how kings should raise their offspring.
“I do not wish to harm you.” That was true enough. A frightened but unharmed hero was much less a threat than an injured hero seeking vengeance, or the brother of a dead hero coming for blood. “If you will not leave, I shall be forced to use my magic to transport you away from here.” That was also true after a fashion. Anyway, it kept the fighter standing in the area of the gas cloud. It was starting to have its effect, but the adrenaline-driven warrior didn’t know it yet. Of course, the stairs were trapped, but even if he tripped it, it was far less effective a deterrent than persuading him of the power of wizardry. He raised his arms, and began the slow drone of monotonous pure-toned nonsense syllables. Axelrod swooned and collapsed.
He shut the trap door, venting the gas to the chimney. Lighting two torches, he handed one to an apprentice. The lad knew that he had to go around the other way to the basement lab, and douse the fire creating the gas. Two other students were waiting with a litter. “Wait a moment for the gas to clear,” he said. “It should pass up through the sound holes quickly.”
The powder at the top of the steps fizzled and went black. They would have to reload that when it cooled. Reaching the bottom of the steps by torchlight, they rolled the sleeping warrior onto the stretcher, and three of them carried him out the back door–”In case he has someone waiting for him out front”–and into the woods several hundred yards. Dumping him gently by a tree aside a clearing, the wizard made certain he was still breathing, and returned to the castle. This was one less hero who would bother them.
*****
I recently watched pieces of Willow again. I noticed these things before, but they only coalesced into a coherent picture this time.
Willow saves the day with his disappearing pig trick. It may be the least magical trick in the story, a story filled with polymorph spells, love potions, spirit banishment. Willow hides the baby behind the table, but convinces the evil witch that the child is in the blanket. He has the power, he declares, to put the child beyond the witch’s reach. She does not believe in such a place, but he is undaunted, and begins pronouncing his spell. With a flourish, he shakes out the empty blanket, and the witch, fooled by the trick, is off balance, makes a mistake, and falls into her own prepared banishment.
But Willow’s bluff is taught to him, very subtly, by the wise wizard of his own village. Perhaps sometimes he can read the bones. But this time the bones tell him nothing. He uses his own wisdom to decide what course is best, and credits the bones. He has the power to turn a rock into a bird, which flies away in a random direction. But he suggests that the direction the bird chooses is meaningful, a portent of which way the brave mission should go. Only when the bird goes in the one direction which does not make sense–back home–does he drop this pretense.
Therein lies the secret of the great wizard. You are not powerless. You have secrets others do not share, and can do things they will see as magical. What you do with that is simple. You suggest that you have the power to do greater things, that indeed you are doing greater things. Then stage it to appear genuine. Perhaps you can only control a puff of smoke with a flaming center; but if as it passes one of your companions, he screams that it is a monster, and falls unmoving from its blow, your opponents may lose heart long before it reaches them. Shards of suspended mirror may make it appear that you are passing through the fire which is actually all around your path. If you set a dummy on fire in the midst of it, your opponents may not look for a path. The great magic often lies in exaggerating the effect of the little magic.
Next week, something different.