Thoughts on "The Wizard's Grimoire" (and similar games) by Vincent Baker

Somehow Vincent Baker keeps creating incredible games.  I’m never shocked by what he puts out, but I am often in awe.  There are artists in every medium whose work you feel resonates with your soul more powerfully than other works, and something about the way I think about stories and gaming is deeply thrilled by the work Vincent puts out.  But if you’re here on my website, you undoubtedly already know that.
 
If you follow Vincent’s Itch.io page, or if you back his patreon,  or if you follow his Twitter, you will have seen that he has put out a set of games recently that have one player and a pair of “volunteers” who take several of the jobs of the traditional GM.  The first such game he published was “The Wizard’s Grimoire,” which he created for a game jam.  Shortly after that he created “The True and Preposterous Journey of Half-a-Fool” for another game jam, and then “The Barbarian’s Bloody Quest” as a complementary piece to “The Wizard’s Grimoire.”
 
In “The Wizard’s Grimoire,” the player creates a “conjurer, scholar, rogue, and ambitious minor wizard” (that’s one character) who is “bold, cunning, virtuous, and ambitious, in measure,” and who has come into possession of “The Signature of Aibesta of the Two Courts,” being the grimoire of said Aibesta. To create your character, you have to answer a set of six questions.  Each question presents a situation and a pair of responses, and which stat you mark is determined by which response you choose.  For example:

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Suppose that you come upon an enemy helpless and alone.  Do you strike swiftly, or announce yourself and give your enemy an opportunity to explain themselves or make right?  If the former, tally 1 to bold. If the latter, tally 1 to virtuous (1)

​In this way, because of the options the questions give you, you end up with having scores that range from 0 to 3 in four stats, with the points between them totaling 6, and no more than one stat having a 0 and no more than one stat having a 3.  When I played, I ended up with a wizard who had a virtuous of 0, bold of 1, ambitious of 2, and cunning of 3.  It is a super cool way to create stats because you have something specific to look at (your imagined character reactions to imagined situations) as opposed to just juggling numbers.  If you don’t like the numbers, of course, you can go back and retool your answers, but in doing so, you have to be able to imagine your character taking those actions, so your image of the character will necessarily have to match the numbers as they fall on your character sheet.  It’s fun, easy, and effective.  What more could you ask for?
 
Your character has 7 “exertions,” or what would be called “moves” in Apocalypse World:

You are able, as are all living things, to exert yourself upon your surroundings, against your enemies, and alongside your allies (1).

Essentially, you can read a person, use magic, read a situation, exert yourself physically, do something sneakily, act violently, or endure whatever befalls you, which Vincent calls “submitting to circumstance.”  Each move uses your stats to calculate your move score, and each ends up being between 1 and 5.  When you exert yourself (make a move), you roll a single six-sided die.  If you roll your target number for that act or lower, you hit.  If you don’t, you miss.  For example, all wizards start with an exert yourself magically rating of 1.  So if you attempt to use magic, you have to roll a 1 to hit.
 
Each exertion is written out as a move, telling you what to do on a hit and what to tell your volunteers on a miss (more on that in a moment).  One of my favorite features of this system is the clever way that Vincent uses pick lists with this single die roll.  When you exert yourself empathetically to study and understand someone (i.e. read a person), you have a pick list of four questions you can ask.  But you can only ask as many questions as the number you rolled.  So, if you have an exert yourself empathetically rating of 4, you hit on a 1-4 and miss on a 5-6 and ask a number of questions on a hit equal to that roll.  But if you only have a rating of 2, even on a hit, you can never ask more than two questions, because your character is just not that good at exerting themself empathetically.  It’s awesome and clever and I love it and want to name it George.
 
Your goal as a player (it’s a Baker game; of course you have a stated goal) is 

to see yourself into danger in pursuit of ambitions, and maybe back out again.  Not only to take the bad with the good, take setbacks with accomplishments, but to seek danger, failure, and misadventure out, play toward it (1)

Yes, that’s just a more fun way to play, but for this game it is absolutely necessary, because in this game, the player is driving all the action, and the volunteers are tasked with merely responding to what you do.  It is never incumbent upon them to say anything unprompted.  Here’s how the text explains it:
 
For each session, you’ll need to find two friends who’ll volunteer to play against you.  They can be different volunteers each time; it’s your responsibility to bring them up to speed and give them what they need to know in order to play.  Be sure to hand them a copy of the ‘Volunteer’s Guide,’ and put ‘A Bestiary’ out for them too (2).
 
In that Volunteer Guide, volunteers are thanked for playing, and told:

You’re doing me a favor just by playing, so you don’t have to worry about winning or losing the game.  Your goal is just to say things that you personally, find honestly entertaining. . . .
 
Almost your only job is to get with the other volunteer and make up answers to my questions.
 
I’ll ask things like, ‘I’m set upon by raiders.  What are they like?’  You and your fellow volunteer can imagine any raiders you want, exactly the raiders you find most fun, and tell me about them together.
 
If you want to ask me any questions before you answer mine, to make sure you’ve got all the details right or whatever, please do! 

Play then is driven by the player saying “I do x,” and then asking questions, leading or otherwise and letting the volunteers make up whatever they want.  The player has to seek out trouble because it’s not incumbent upon the volunteers to create trouble.  In fact, the player needs to come up with fun trouble to entice her friends to come up with fun responses.
 
This act of flipping the wheel on the narrative car so that the players are by default the drivers and the “GMs” are by default merely responding is what makes this game so amazing.  It’s like the perfect training ground for players to make their character a true protagonist driving the action.  And it’s the perfect way to bring in friends who are RPG-curious by asking them to play with zero pressure and letting them just make up fun stuff and quit whenever they want out.  And they have another volunteer with them so there is no pressure on them to be entirely responsible for anything.  You could of course play this as a two person game with someone who doesn’t need the extra volunteer (which is how my wife and I have been playing), and I can see this being played with 4 or 5 volunteers each enjoying the sport of getting the player’s character into a worse and worse bind.
 
The other brilliant part (so many brilliant parts!) of the game is that it is designed for, essentially, campaign play.  The titular grimoire has sections that you as the player aren’t allowed to read until your character unlocks them.  Presumably your skills at magic improve, what you can do with magic expands, and you run into all kinds of story seeds and trouble.  The grimoire pages have specific things you need to do to unlock each section, and merely unlocking a section will take several sessions of play, which means that you have a LOT of playing you can do from these mere 11 pages of game.  To make matters even sweeter, Vincent released an expansion grimoire called “The Three Scrolls of Jorvelte of the Wild Crown,” which comes with the game if you purchase it on his itch.io page.
 
The other bit of brilliance is the page of “Spawning Circumstances.”  These are 14 starting situations that you pick from for the first 14 or so sessions.  Each one puts your wizard in the middle of action facing a situations that demands a reaction from you.  In this way, the creative burden of getting things moving is lifted from your shoulders by the game so you can start giving your volunteers things to react to without sweating about it.  Once you are underway, of course, you can create your own starting situations as your wizard has progressed and knows more about the world and what they want.
 
It is a perfect pick-up-and-play game with tons of fun, inspirational material to get everyone on the same page and having a blast.  My wife and I are taking turns, she playing the Barbarian version of the game (“The Barbarian’s Bloody Quest,” which also comes in the same itch.io purchase, and in which the barbarian is hunting down wizards in search of the wizard who killed his parents) on her turns, and I playing the wizard on mine.  Both our characters exist in the same world, but our paths won’t be crossing (at least not for a long time).  We have some sessions that are only 20 minutes long and some that are an hour and a half, depending on your energy and the way the dice rolls and our luck holds out.
 
I’ll tell you what I want, what I really really want.  I want to be able to play this game in restaurants with my friends.  I want to be able to play it with folks when we meet up to have a picnic and throw a frisbee.  I want a card version of this game in which all the information is broken up into cards so that I can carry them around in a pack with a d6 and bust it out whenever there’s the time and inclination.  A card for each exertion.  Printable card-sized character sheets.  The Volunteer Guide and Bestiary information on cards.  A card for each section of the grimoire.  A card with each spawning circumstance.  Look at the cards, tell a story, roll the die, laugh, ad infinitum.