Make Wild Magic Truly Wild
Session Zero's Ralph Levi Clark was kind enough to give us the rundown on their latest project: a card deck that greatly expands Wild Magic.
How were you introduced to role-playing games?
Back in middle school my cousin (who lived with me at the time) was telling me about this really fun game he had played with some friends one weekend. He was playing a wizard with a long white beard who was knocked out by magical sleep in a bed inside some ruined castle. The friends of ours threw a grappling hook into the room and hooked his beard, physically dragging him from the bed and into the hallway where the magical bed didn't have any effect. They found weird creatures, barely survived dangerous traps and almost got set on fire! It was wild and I had to see what it was all about 🙂
The next weekend I was over there rolling up my first character "Neo Chives" the Thief, we were playing 1st Edition D&D at the time, that was the first time I ever saw the Red and Blue box. After rolling up my character and picking his gear and talking about his story for hours I got to sit and watch a more experienced party fight a minotaur atop a plateau. Once they had killed it I was cold introduced as a guy climbing up the cliff following the party. They of course accused me of being geared up like a thief and asked why I had followed them. My response? "I was bored, I don't want to live in that boring place anymore." They promptly threw me off of the cliff! First edition was harsh! We called the game at that point and when I came back a few weeks later my character sheet had been lost. I rolled up a Cleric and joined the party with little problems the second time around.
It was pretty wild that I got tossed off the cliff as a thief and came back up a cleric but what can I say, I had changed my ways! It was pretty wild and I've been playing ever since!
What is Session Zero?
Session Zero is a company my friends and I decided to start together about a year ago. Some time back I had moved away from my home town and everyone I knew, got a good job and had the opportunity to work with some really cool people. I branched out and met new groups of role players, went to some conventions and made a few things with Kickstarter when it first started getting big. I had a blast and some good experiences but eventually moved back home.
After taking a break to get my family settled we started gaming again and got a few of our old friends back at the table, it didn't take long for us to brainstorm up a few new ideas. I decided that I wanted to use my previous experience with Kickstarter and production to do something fun with my friends. We have a lot of things that are starting to finally come together including a series of adventures that we're working on specifically to introduce new people to table top role playing games and Truly Wild Magic is one of the things that came out of one of our sessions.
We've decided that the first step to getting Session Zero out there is to really throw what we know and can do behind a simple idea, what would basically be a 2 page thrown together home brew rule set if you looked at any other forum. We're taking it and making it the most professional product we can. We're going to be doing this with everything we put out!
We want to share what we have with other table top role players just like any good DM does. The difference is that we want it to not only be fun or useful but to be the highest quality we can possibly produce. We want people to be blown away that a small group of guys can put out something that looks like 100 staffers have been working on it, something they can look at and say "Man, if those guys can make that why can't I?" Wizards of the Coast makes some amazing stuff and they put their love into the game, why shouldn't we?
Tell us about A Truly Wild Magic Deck for D&D 5E and why did you create it?
Well first I need to tell you what Truly Wild Magic is before I can explain what the deck is. Truly Wild Magic is a replacement (or repair, if you would rather call if that) of the Wild Magic rules and Wild Magic Surge tables found in the Player's Handbook for D&D 5E. Wild Magic is one of those things that everybody stops at and says 'Wow that looks cool. But it looks too crazy for me, fireball on myself and the party? Turn into a potted plant and get stomped to death? There's no real benefit that I gain to equal out how bad this can get, I'm not playing it but it looks fun."
Every time I suggest to others that they should give it a shot I hear the whole party moan and groan about it. I thought it was wild that there was a class in the book that almost everyone I met didn't want to play and they had some good reasons for it but I really thought the idea behind the Wild Magic itself was really fun and could be super cool to have in your game.
I sat down with some friends, we discussed what we liked, what we didn't, what we should do.
- The random tables were too crazy, some useless stuff would happen that wasn't fun and some crazy deadly or wild stuff would happen that was too game changing in the moment. We removed and edited almost everything in the original table and made our own, something more role playing oriented with some good and bad but without the game breaking stuff.
- The ability didn't trigger at a certain time it was up to the DM to decide when to have a player make a roll. We gave it more solid triggers.
- It didn't happen as often as people would like, I mean mathematically like never. Once when the DM wants it to happen and then only 1 in 20? I've read forum posts where people have played through to level 16 and never once had a trigger happen. We made it happen more often since our new table wasn't as insane as the original table, having it happen more often didn't mean every time a spell was cast.
- AND we really liked the idea of being able to manipulate fate with the ability Tides Of Chaos, that was part of how we imaged wild magic sorcerer's and that's how they were explained. Messing with power they don't understand? We wanted to make that more of an important core feature of the class so we reworked that and added "Stranger Things" as a fun role playing effect that occurs when you manipulate fate like that 🙂
With all that being said, the Truly Wild Magic Deck is a set of cards that are custom illustrated by an amazing artist that feature all of the effects present in our new Truly Wild Magic Surge tables. Wicked cool art, funny descriptions, cards you can draw instead of having to roll on a table. We thought all of these were so funny that it would be really cool to see these things in action and we're all fans of the extra decks you can get like spell cards in 5E, crit/fail decks for pathfinder, anything that you can do to change up how you play and add more to the game at the same time.
Once we had the rules and the table it just turned into something natural to present them on cards for players to use. We thought it would also be a cool way to get the rules into peoples hands along with the cool art that goes with them 🙂
When does the Kickstarter launch?
It is live right now! Here's the link:Â Truly Wild Magic Deck
How can people learn more about this project and more?
You can check our profile as stated above to see our Truly Wild Magic Deck has launched but you can also see my previous Kickstarters there. If you have questions or ideas you want to toss our way feel free to contact us on twitter here https://twitter.com/Session_Zer0 which is our only form of business communication open to the public at this point.
We will be launching a website for our products after the conclusion of our Kickstarter but we want to focus all of our efforts and everyone's attention to our Kickstarter. 🙂
Many thanks to Matt and DiceGeeks for interviewing us, we look forward to working with you guys in the future!