A small Wizzard Tower devlog, and also an introduction, since most people here probably havenât heard of it before. Iâm the person making the game, just to get that out of the way.
Iâm currently putting together the fifth playtest version and have started another full campaign run.
I also got impatient, printed all 200-plus pages in their fairly terrible draft layout, and hand-bound the whole thing. I wanted to find out what itâs actually like to play from a real book instead of a PDF. How easy is it to jump between the combat rules, enemy profiles and some obscure injury table? Where do I keep losing my place? How many bookmarks does it take before the book starts looking like an angry paper porcupine?
So, what is Wizzard Tower?
Itâs a miniature-agnostic solo campaign wargame. You start with a wizard, a rather poor tower and something that can generously be called a retinue.
From there, you improve your mage and followers, add new rooms to the tower, make friends or enemies among the local factions, hunt for grimoires and prepare to face the campaignâs Big Bad.
There are currently 100 spells across five schools of magic. Magic is powerful, unreliable and dangerous. A good cast can turn a battle around. A bad one can fail at exactly the wrong moment, or leave you with a problem worse than the one you were trying to solve.
The game is deliberately very random. It uses lots of recurring rolls on nested tables. One table sends you to another, which adds a complication, which leads to another roll for the consequences. A fairly ordinary campaign turn can slowly turn into a small disaster that somehow makes perfect sense by the end.
The tables take the place of a GM and an opponent. Enemies use simple behaviour routines on the battlefield, so you donât have to play chess against yourself while pretending you donât know the other sideâs plan.
You can use whatever fantasy miniatures are already sitting on your shelf, and the game only uses d10s. There are no hit points. Fighters become shaken, exposed and defeated.
The battles themselves arenât really the main point, though. What matters to me is what happens between them, and what each battle leaves behind.
A failed raid might come back several turns later as a siege. A fighter you saved might gradually become a veteran. A grimoire stolen in one battle might contain the spell that saves the tower in another. Injuries, losses, loot and bad decisions donât disappear when the miniatures go back on the shelf.
A campaign takes somewhere between 6 and 20 turns, with each turn lasting around half an hour. You can play through one over a few busy evenings, or leave the tower on a shelf and come back to it over several months.
The thinking between sessions is part of the game too. What should I build next? Which spell is worth learning? Do I send the injured veteran on another mission? How am I going to pay this collection of strange people?
You can also finally build a wizardâs tower from a Pringles tube, add new rooms as the campaign progresses, and then defend it from an actual siege. Honestly, that may be what the entire project was secretly about.
The setting is grim, but not hopeless. Thousands of years ago, alien molluscs came to this world. They hide inside suits of knightly armour, control much of the human nobility, and have been slowly remaking the land to suit themselves ever since. They caused the ancient magical catastrophe and released the miasmas that still poison entire regions.
Somewhere in the middle of all this stand the wizardsâ towers. They arenât shining citadels. Theyâre stubborn little pockets of order that have to be built, supplied and defended. The world is openly hostile, but itâs still worth trying to make a home in it.
The campaigns are the main reason the book has grown so much. At first they were simple frameworks connecting a series of battles. Now each one has become its own way of telling a story and changes the game a little. I want different campaigns to have their own pace, objectives and problems, rather than just swapping one enemy table for another.
The main inspirations are Five Leagues from the Borderlands, X-COM and Battle Brothers.
The last photo shows the much smaller version I made for a game jam last winter. Back then the book was a third of its current size, but it already had a nice cover and some fun temporary AI-generated illustrations inspired by old OSR rulebooks.
Since then, the rules have grown enormously and the entire visual design is being replaced. An illustrator whose work I really like has recently joined the project, so the finished book wonât contain any AI-generated art.
A couple of practical notes:
- âWizzardâ with two zâs is deliberate.
- The current playtest version is only available in Russian. I want to stabilise the rules before starting an English translation. Otherwise the translation would be chasing a game that keeps changing underneath it.
- If you read Russian and would like to join the playtest, feel free to message me. And a huge thank you to everyone whoâs already helping me test this enormous thing.
