The Evolution of a Fantasy Heart Breaker

With my first hardbound copy of Olde School Wizardry finally in hand, a Kick Starter offering pre-sales later this month, and print-on-demand coming in January, I was inspired to look back at some earlier incarnations of the book.

Olde School Wizardry has always been the game that we played ... not a rules set at first, but a collection of rulings arrived at by congenial consensus through the course of play.  The mechanics evolved ad hoc, right along with the story lines.  

While there are notes going back perhaps a year earlier, here is one of my first efforts to compile them for reference with some vague idea of sharing them beyond our own gaming table.

The "Nine Ancient Runes of Magic" had already taken shape by this point.  Most of the mechanics also fit nicely into about 20 pages.  The game mechanics, now with art on nearly every page, still only occupy only the first 60 pages of the book; the remaining 312 or so being devoted to scenarios, monsters, and charts to springboard stories. 

 Pictured above is part of the glorious mess that becomes Magical Formula ... the aspect of the game that allows wizards to tailor each spell in terms of range, effect, and duration.  This replaces the conventional or "Vancian" approach to spell casting where casters learn entire magical spells as fixed blocks of effects.

Within a year, things had grown enough that a Table of Contents was in order!

Oddly, it was when Josh grabbed a Gustave Dore image to create a front cover mock-up that the idea of seeing Olde School Wizardry all the way through to some sort of publication finally clicked.  It wasn't the right image ...    

... but I knew what the right image was ... a public domain illustration by Gustave Dore, created for Ariosto's 16th century epic poem Orlando Furioso.  

I had seen it in only one place: the July 1987 issue of Dragon Magazine where Art Director Roger Raupp oversaw its use to illustrate an article by James A. Yates, "The Mystic College".  

I couldn't remember anything about the article except that I thought there was perhaps a map of a pyramid ... which I disliked ... and this brilliant image of tottering men, dwarfed by the very institution that they helped create.  I could hear them wheezing and gabbing and arguing incessantly over minutiae ... and that sense cemented in my brain what a college of wizards must be like.

And so the Collegium Mysterium and its absurd customs, rival houses, rites of initiation, and other idiosyncrasies wax large in the book's campaign source material.

While we were still hammering out art and layout, I managed to get a couple spiral bound copies printed for use at the table and in games club with some of my middle school students.  I love the practicality of spiral bound books at the game table ... but man are they ugly on the shelf!

It wasn't until I felt the heft of our own hardbound copy that I was fully sold on the chunky hardbound format.  

Anyway, that's a quick glance backwards at the eight years or so that describe the evolution of Olde School Wizardry from collected notes to nerdy magnum opus!