Chapter 1: Wizards

The wizard may well be the most important character class in the AD&D game. Whether or not a particular player character wizard is the most powerful member of a party, it seems that every AD&D campaign has at least one great archmage or master wizard who holds supreme power. Wizards are responsible for the creation of all kinds of adventures and works of magic that other characters later become entangled in or discover. In many adventures, the party’s wizard is the only character who can use his magic to provide a means to cross a barrier or solve a riddle. In fact, in some cases, the only way to resolve the entire adventure or quest is through the inventive use of the wizard’s spell arsenal.

Given this fact, it only makes sense to begin an examination of magic in the AD&D game with a thorough look at the wizard character class. In this chapter, we’ll examine all the varieties of mages and specialist wizards available to a player character. Several new varieties of specialist wizards are also described in this chapter. In addition to a long look at the existing wizard classes, we’ll also present a point-based character design system that will allow a player to select his wizard’s abilities and limitations in order to customize his own character. This system is an expansion of the character class rules from Player’s Option: Skills & Powers , although you don’t need that book in order to use this material.

The information in Player’s Option: Spells & Magic replaces or revises the Player’s Handbook , The Complete Wizard’s Handbook, the Tome of Magic , and the material on magic from Player’s Option: Skills & Powers . In other words, if you have this book, you should use the rules presented here when creating your wizard character. However, there is one notable exception to this case—if you are using an AD&D campaign setting that includes its own rules on character generation, such as the Dark Sun or Al-Qadim® game settings, you should continue to create wizards for those settings using the appropriate rules.

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