Wizard Law.

Original Post on Wizard Gangs here.

What usually happens to people when the Wizard Law is involved.

(Credit: Adventure Time)

I'm imagining a campaign based in a Wizard City. It's about being wizard criminals. Wealth Gained = XP. Get the wealth however you want. Heists, hit jobs, robbery, larceny, money laundering, you name it.

There's this strange mix of Anarcho-Capitalism and Orwellian Totalitarianism. There's a wizard arms race between the Wizard Gangs and the Wizard Law. There are absolutely no moral compunctions about power and magic. The Wizard Police are notoriously corrupt. There are rarely-seen wizard overlords with unconscionable powers and secret puppet strings all over the City, penetrating every and all institutions.

There are no clerics, no gods. Only wizards and not-wizards in Wizard City.

Credit to Whurf

These are some ideas for the not-wizards.

AMWAT (Anti-Magic Weapon and Tactics) Officer

The SWAT team, but for targeting wizards. Only get called in for the worst situations. Trained for assault and siege. Strong Counterspell abilities.

Their armor and weapons are made out of Thorium. Yes, the radioactive kind of Thorium. It sucks. To protect them, the Thorium is surrounded by lead. That sucks, too. AMWAT armor is horrible, but at least it deflects spells. Definitely worth the cancer.

Class Features:

Stats as Fighter

Heavy Armor and Weapons

Incapacitation and Mind Befuddlement Weapons

Counterspell, Dispel Magic, Detect Magic

Mo-RON (Mobile Reconnaissance Operating Nerve)

A brain in a jar, compatible with several types of interchangeable robot bodies: giant man-golems, lithe spiders, tentacle squid-things, strange mobile obelisks that project giant holographic Wizard of Oz style heads and shoot lasers out of their eyes.

They are highly discriminated against, seeing as they are merely brains in jars. The jerk that made them ironically called them “morons”, and the name stuck.

Class Features:

Stats as Dwarf

Interchangeable Robot Bodies

Inorganic Body Immunities

Requires maintenance

T-Man

A special agent of the Bureau of Space and Time, colloquially known as “T-Men”. They’re the spooks of Wizard City, responsible for dealing with rogue wizards that screw around with The Continuum. They’ve got magitech from the future to grant them limited control over time and space.

Class Features:

Stats as Thief

Short-Term Time Reversal Powers

Hyperspace Adjacency Glove

Teleportation

Multiverse Probability-Shift

Men-In-Black Memory Wipe Stick-Thingy

Spell Shark

Like a loan shark, but for spells. Basically a mind thief that deals in extortion, secrets, torture, and mind reading. Lesser spell pool but can steal spells from wizards. Able to create magically-binding contracts for “loaning out” spells to wizards, then reaping the high interest.

Class Features:

Stats as Elf

Spell Sharking

High-Interest Magic

Secret-Learning Touch

Mind Reading Touch

Thoughts on Counterspelling

If your entire campaign is going to be designed around wizards and spells, it's probably a good idea to not have Counterspell and Dispel Magic be boring. As it is currently written (for 5e, anyway) these spells are basically giant wet blankets: someone tries to do a cool thing, the counterspeller prevents the cool thing from happening, and sometimes doesn't even do that. This has a novel appeal if it's a rare occurrence, but if this is your whole game it's going to quickly get boring.

So how do we change it? Some incomplete musings:

Don't Prevent Spellcasts, Redirect Them.

Counterspell no longer prevents a spell from being cast. Instead it has a chance (based on class or caster level or Arcana Skill or whatever) to redirect it. If you roll very well you can choose the redirection target.

Mediocre rolls send it to a non-initial-caster random target.

Poor roll and the spell hits you.

Every person in the battle can only do this once per round (if they have the energy/spell slots/whatever), and only when it's directed at them. If it comes around to the same person again they're screwed.

I imagine this as a cross between Hot Potato and the Dead Man's Volley from the Legend of Zelda.

See: Dead Man's Volley

It needs to be quick to not become tedious.

I'm thinking a static d6 or d8 roll would work best. Maybe throw some quickly-determine-target mechanic into the dice throwing itself. 

Police Officers have a high chance of targeted successful redirection and a low chance at random redirection (3 in 6 and 1 in 6 respectively), while other classes have no chance of targeted redirection and moderately-high chance of random redirection (0 in 6 and 2 in 6 respectively).

Maybe Critical Redirections will be a thing, where you can send the spell right back at the caster.

I'm hoping this drives one particular behavior, and that's a run-and-scatter approach to fighting the wizard police. People with high-random Counterspell abilities will fight better when outnumbered as there's a higher chance they can uncontrollably redirect hostile spells onto enemies. People with low-random Counterspell abilities want to fight large groups because they can focus spells on high value targets.

Wizards want to fight isolated, Wizard-Police want to fight as groups.

Wizard-Police also want to fight around collateral targets. Better it hits the old lady crossing the street than an officer of the law.

Hence the metagame resolves around the po-po trying to box in and round everyone up, while the wizards want to escape and fight in outnumbered small groups. It's like playing Go if one player said: "Fuck it, next piece is going on the Moon" and then did it.

(Note to self: do more research on Go. Also, police envelopment tactics.)

I'm not sure this makes sense yet. Needs testing.