Finally.

Mages & Mooks, ready for your hard magic enjoyments… all of them.

Finally.

I started work on this game in, I think, August of 2020. I came at it off-and-on, and even released other stuff. I stripped it down to its bones, all the way down to concept, a few times, and built up mechanics each time, and now it is done enough to share with you, and you, and you. And I’m glad to see the back of it for a while.

It’s not a full-service ttrpg. It’s narrowly focused on a central question: what if magic resents being wielded? In the game this isn’t actually articulated, but in my mind, magic isn’t (in this game, anyway) a natural resource and it isn’t a technology, and it isn’t an intelligence. The resentment is more implicit in the hard way it comes and goes for mages.

It’s more broadly focused on “how to gamify the kind of unexplained magic we often see operating in fiction?” So a lot of the text is about making magic items and designing magical effects.

Guidance on mooks is lighter-touch, but those cats have a lot of opportunity for gameplay, I think. I tried to make sure that, even though mages get most of the rules, both character types get plenty of opportunity for player action.

https://shannonmcmaster.itch.io/mages-and-mooks