Class Review: Deus' Three Primes School
Artist Unknown. Coat of Arms of Theodore Zwinger III. ~1658-1724.
There are so many GLoG classes! More than you could playtest in a lifetime and more being written all the time. I want to comb through them and write critical reviews, gradually curating a list of suggested classes for my table and honing my sense of how exactly a GLoG class works.
Wizard School: Three Primes
Our first wizard! At last! Wizards are a real highlight of GLoG, but I think they are tricky to review properly. Writing a viable wizard school can be as simple as penning 10 or so spells and filling in the blanks for a perk and a drawback. The reason that works, however, is that they almost always rely on a paratext - a hidden set of features expressed in a rules document like Arnold Kemp's original wizard rules that cover how learning and casting a spell works.
It's not entirely clear to me what paratext Deus is pulling from here. The class has many of the hallmarks of Skerples' wizard schema, but I can't be sure. As a principle, if a class is going to rely on other rules for its basic function, I'd love to see a link to those rules. Even if its for something as fundamental as Magic Dice.
The Wizard of the Three Primes (as I'm choosing to call the individual here) is introduced alongside two other classes (to be reviewed at a later date) and some short introductory remarks that situate the trio in the context of the Thieves World books. Deus argues that the setting of a game can be piecemeal or incoherent as long as the classes "speak for themselves" - that is to say they are sufficiently interesting or provocative as to suggest the world that they live in. I'm inclined to agree, though that's no surprise. I'm cited in the text after all. I'm only familiar with the Thieves World novels by reputation, so I'm not sure if this ethos is the only thing we're pulling from the books or if these classes reference specific characters or stories.
I appreciate the tantalizing fiction that leads off the class. The Lord of the Three Primes is presented as a sort of Faustian patron that as a GM I'd keep in my back pocket for a future appearance. We never get a direct portrait of the wizard, only the perceptions of others. The rich and officious think the Wizard of the Thee Primes is a "gentleman-medico." Peasants and children identify them as a horror. Presumably the truth is both.
The class' cantrips cement this horror doctor vibe. The wizard is incentivized to be infected with diseases, needing to clean up spilled blood, and doing slightly veiled harm to small animals. The latter two have direct practical uses that would fit into any adventuring party's toolkit, but disease can be tricky at the table. Some tables want to elide it into "poison but with stat maluses" or use fantasy diseases like mummy rot that don't have the sting of real world illness. Other tables lean into a sort of penny dreadful black humor of plague and venereal diseases. As a player, I'd want to double check with the rest of the table where they landed on that spectrum.
The Three Primes spell list has some solid entries, but appears to be incomplete. Abstemious Supply, Carrion Compass, and Know the Enemy provide adventuring utility and information gathering. Dirty Needle seems staggeringly powerful to me, summoning an epee with a [dice] bonus that inflicts targets with debilitating long term illnesses.
Ant Haul jumps out at me as a singular piece of rules fiction. The idea of some number of copies trailing behind a person, carrying their stuff feels like something out of a dark Studio Ghibli film or a surreal lithograph. The idea that when the spell ends I might want to eat them just doubles down on the grotesquery. It really speaks to the promise of that introductory paragraph.
If I had one criticism of the spell list here, it's how inconsistent it is in that regard. Variety is nice, but they don't add up to anything for me. Where are the "cruel secrets" I was promised up front? The weird doubling in a few spells points to something, but it feels under-specified. At the same time, spells like Furious Rat (which summons a rat berserker) are funny but act as deflationary gestures. I never want something in a class to persuade me to take the rest of the element I read less seriously, especially when the description of the class is leaning so heavily into mystique.
As a final note, I'd love to see a dooms / miscasts list. I'm not sure if those are universal to all of the popular wizard chassis, but they appear frequently enough for their absence to feel surprising here. It feels like characterizing text left on the table.
I'm seriously reconsidering the rating system I have applied up to this point based on some recent Discord conversations, but based primarily on the school's incomplete spell list and emphasis on disease, I'll flag the School of the Three Primes as Core. It might be more at home in an urban game along the lines of Skerples' Magical Industrial Revolution than a typical dungeon fantasy adventure, but there is nothing here that couldn't be massaged into most tables' settings. I'd also absolutely steal the most evocative spells here as potential loot.
12/15: Since publication, I have amended my rating system. I would now rate this as medium effort to bring to the table for the reasons listed above.