Review: The Magus

Hey, how have you been? Yes, I still haunt this space, especially when my brain desires to share something that tickled its fancy in a way that Twitter isn’t suited to convey.

A short while ago, I was looking for a way to break the encroaching creative inertia preying on my brain. I decided to dig into my PDF library of RPGs and look at “The Magus“. I had bought it last year during a Twitter-driven “Sell me an amazing Indie RPG” thread but I hadn’t gotten to reading it yet. All I remembered was that it looked gorgeous.

The Magus is an award-winning tabletop solo journaling RPG…

Wait Chatty, WTF is a solo journaling RPG?

The tl;dr version of it is a roleplaying game you play out alone by interacting with its rules and whose output is a series of multimedia journal-like entries. You are roleplaying with yourself by reporting the story of your character in an analogue or digital medium.

The Magus was created by designer Momatoes, a Souteast Asian designer and published on itch.io in January 2021. Among its many qualities, it’s the first RPG designed with Power Point using AI generated art. As far as I know, this was considered one of the design challenges behind the game.

Fine, what’s it about?

Playing The Magus makes you chronicle the rise and fall of a powerful, yet isolated wizard, a character who craves power for reasons you explore through a series of semi-scripted events made of randomly generated writing prompts intertwined with difficult questions to answer. 

As you progress through up to 7 events and a few periods of reflections, you meet characters with whom you form bonds. Bonds you can either reinforce or outright betray for more power in later events. You also learn spells with randomly generated, yet profoundly evocative names, to further your goals. Each spell requires you to roll dice against your character’s stats to test if you correctly learn it and conquer the challenge that comes with it.

Failure brings consequence that invariably start a downward spiral that might lead to world spanning calamities. Partial successes leaves you scarred, subjected to complications that might come back later to make your life worse.,  

If your Magus manages to make it to the end of a 7th event, they retire and you envision how they spend their future and what how they handle the burden of their actions.

The game is somber and tackles heavy subjects like solitude, betrayal, and one’s care for others. It can go from “One to Dark” pretty fast. Fortunately, the game document has a section about the validity of skipping parts or how you should keep writing journal entries as long as you enjoy it and stop when you no longer do.

I recently played one session. Being the verbose writer that I am, I clocked in a 3000 words story I’m pretty proud of. I really had a lot of fun writing it.

Turns out I can write arrogant bastard pretty well. 

More importantly, this game gave me the desire to write creatively again, something I have not felt in more than a year. I’m really happy I bought it.   

Game Design Elements

The game is advertised as “crunchy”, a term I’ve grown leery to acknowledge.

In The Magus‘ particular case, this declaration by its designer rests in the use of several polyhedral-based mechanics. After establishing your Magus’ origins by answering a few key questions including the possibility to roll on some tables, you get to engage with events documented in the game’s 55 “slides”, which are mostly made of events you navigate by rolling a d6 and a d4 and “advancing” by the absolute value of their difference. So if you last played Event 3 and then rolled a 2 and a 4, you’d advance to Event 5 and play it out.

Each event is a one “slide” description for one of two types of events: Bond or Spell.

Bond events introduce a new NPC you are invited to describe as someone you create a new relationship with. Using dice prompts, you pick a name for them and determine who they are. Alternatively, whenever you have the opportunity to create a new Bond, you can decide to invest yourself into an already existing one, strengthening it.

Spell events describe a moment in your Magus life when they attempt to acquire mastery over new magic to further their goals. Evocative spells names are generated on tables and you’re prompted to describe what effect the spell has in the world you Magus occupies. But that’s not all, learning the spell comes with a challenge, something that tries to interfere with your casting it. That challenge, which you are asked to described based on specific prompts, requires rolling a series of dice based on your character’s “Power” stat. The further you progress with the game, the harder it becomes to learn and cast a spell without having to pay a cost.

Yes, that’s 100% the kind of thing I like in modern RPG design.

Total or partial successes and failure drive the game onwards. Your Magus might gain Focus from tremendous successes, allowing them rerolls in later events. Partial successes will come with a cost in the form of a narrative scar that forever marks your Magus unless a future success cancels it. Failures affect your Magus’ control over themself. Failure to control a situation gone awry leads to a Calamity, some apocalyptic event that leaves the whole world changed. When that happens, or when your Magus loses control over their own power, you must retire them, writing an epilogue based on the wizard’s remaining bonds and consequences of their actions.

How Was it, Then?

I loved it and I look forward to trying it again. I’ll soon share the whole journal in blog form for you to see how the game went. Stay tuned!

Thanks for reading.