Designing Deth Wizards
Vince here: I have always loved Necromancers. As a concept, as a thing to play in games, as a character. The contradiction of it all — it is sacrilege and blasphemy and yet super cool. One of my most prized possessions is my copy of the Necromancer’s Handbook, a blue book from D&D 2nd Edition, an incredible treatise on the idea of Necromancers in the world of Dungeons and Dragons. Over time, I have played dozens of such characters in RPGs, some good and misunderstood, some evil and understood quite well. But the idea of having the power over life and death is one that holds great appeal for obvious reasons.
For our game, when Adam brought me the idea (yes, this was his original brainchild, including the spelling), I was immediately on-board. I had a few conditions though, and I was intractable on them. First, the Necromancers were not going to all be old grizzled men. I hate the stereotype and it's been played out so many times as to become a parody of itself reflected in a hall of mirrors. I wanted different species of necromancers, I wanted them wearing armor and fighting with the undead, I wanted them to have different takes and points of view on necromancy - in short, I wanted them to be people.
Certainly some of the aesthetic of the decrepit, wizened man comes from the idea that trading in the magic that calls the dead back to the world is damaging to the soul, but I find that limiting and silly. Games will gladly allow characters to utilize magic to control another’s will, enchanting them into submission, or idly tossing low-yield nuclear spells that kill dozens or hundreds of people without consequence - and I find both of these realities far more grim and terrifying than someone making a corpse that no one was using stand-up and walk around. My second requirement was that the Necromancers themselves had to be immortal. They would not be just another figure on the table that would be stabbed and killed by enemies, but something wholly different. They were, even at baseline, immortal beings of tremendous power. Many later decisions in the game came about from these two ideas.
As I moved into the early design principles and brainstorming on the game, the idea of proactivity became apparent. In most games, you are embodying the heroes - or something analogous to them. Heroes don’t proactively do things - they react to the scheme of villains who move the plot forward. Alternatively, in the case of many wargames, whether you are the good or bad guys, you have no agency. Your two armies just happened to show up on this field and now decide to have a punch up. As I looked at the lens of Deth Wizards, I realized here we were taking the role of the villain. Now they may be sympathetic, they may be misunderstood, but they were the ones with agency - they were the proactive party. Everything else in the game would react to their choices.
Very quickly the idea of heroes and story missions came into focus. The concept that as the player, your scenarios would be all of the classic villain plots - attacking villages, raiding cemeteries, stealing magical power from a school of the arcane, and so on. So when it came time to actually design the mission system, I thought of it almost as a hub mission set in a video game. You could try any mission, you have a clear understanding of difficulty, it’s simply a question of what type of villainous activity you want to undertake and in what order to what ends.
At the same time, the heroes became the main antagonists. They are the reactive party, responding to your evil schemes and trying to stop you from achieving your dark goals. They are the tropes of classic fantasy here to oppose your schemes. The next thing that immediately followed from that was the idea of raising those heroes as undead servants bound to your will once you defeat them. The idea of the paladin that falls and rises as a death knight is simply one of the coolest things. Like ever.
One of the things that sets Deth Wizards apart is the equal emphasis on all parts of the play experience. Solo, Co-Op and Versus play are all interwoven equally into the experience and when playing a campaign, you can easily jump from one experience to the other, all the while advancing your necromancer, building your horde and expanding your power. I wanted people to be able to have fun no matter which experience they wanted that day and I think we have achieved that better than we have with any of our previous games.
Most of the decisions in Deth Wizards flowed from these initial ideas and goals. This was a very top-down design experience and that flowed all the way through to the art and the aesthetic. A dying world, bereft of hope where the only sane choice is to embrace the darkness and the death. This is also why we built so much depth into the game with a list of varied undead, lots of necromantic powers, special abilities to gain, lairs to build and more. As the undead themselves were so static, I really wanted to focus on the journey of the necromancer themselves, of their role as the protagonist in your story.
I hope you have an awesome time in the land of death as you build toward your own Dark Apotheosis.