Seven-Part Pact — The Wizards (Chapter 2)

Art by Pam Wishbow

This is Part 2 in an ongoing series of articles.

1. Origins**:** The origins of Seven-Part Pact and how its design came to be.
2. The Wizards**:** Influences on the seven wizards and how character creation works.

Seven-Part Pact is coming to Kickstarter summer 2026.

The council of wizards is a staple of fantasy fiction. It’s at least as old as Tolkien, when Gandalf told Bilbo of the white wizards who defeated the Necromancer. It shows up again and again across different stories — the gaggle of wise old men who safeguard the cosmos. It has parallels with the hebdomad of the archons in gnostic esotericism — seven cosmic emperors ruling over the material world, fashioning themselves false gods of creation. This appears again (with varying degrees of malevolence or compassion) with the Endless of the Sandman comics, the Masters of Roke in Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea Cycle , and the Trustees of the House from The Keys To The Kingdom series by Garth Nix.

I’ve always been fascinated by these archetypes. They range from patronizingly paternal to actively dismissive, often more concerned with their own internal politics than the safety of the people they ostensibly serve. I saw in them a strange mirror to my own relationship to authority figures, this sort of archetypal father figure who both haunted and fascinated me.

This fascination grew only more profound when I began the complex process of socially and medically transitioning alongside the equally-winding process of self-actualization and adulthood. I wasn’t a teenager anymore, and I also wasn’t a man. And yet, all throughout my life, power and manhood were inexorably intertwined. This tension — between self-actualization and the pressure of power, the paradox of authority and responsibility, the entangled internecine conflict between those who were responsible for safeguarding the industry I worked in — it all weighed on me.

When I began work on Seven-Part Pact, and I was thinking heavily about agency and power, I knew I wanted to lean into that council of authority that had captivated me for so long. I decided to theme the seven wizards around the seven classical planets, and build into each wizard different tensions and conflicts based on their Domain, their area of responsibility over the world. In this article, I’ll talk about how the seven wizards came to be, the process of creating a wizard in play, and the role gender plays in their self-conception.

The Seven Wizards

Some wizards came together instantly. Others took me a bit longer to figure out. The final seven wizards that I established are:

1. The Necromancer. He’s in charge of the Gates of Death, and is inspired by Sabriel by Garth Nix and Skulduggery Pleasant by Derek Landy. I had the idea for the Necromancer early on and he remained pretty much the same through all of design.
2. The Hierophant. He’s in charge of the Temples of the Immortal Flame, and by extension the common folk of the archipelago, who come to him for aid. He’s inspired a lot by the monks of The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco. He went through a number of changes over the years, going by Townwright and Prelate before I settled on Hierophant.
3. The Warlock. He’s in charge of the nobility of Isha, the King and his court, and manages power and masculinity. He’s also the Pact Executioner. He’s inspired by knights and battle-mages across fantasy. He was previously called the Chevalier, but his concept has always been pretty consistent.
4. The Mariner. He’s in charge of the sea ports and trading routes in Isha, and protecting the wild places. He’s inspired by Captain Ahab in Moby Dick and the Mariner in The Keys To The Kingdom. He was previously known as the Druid, and he went through a number of changes before I settled on his current form.
5. The Faustian. He maintains the Pact’s relationship with the Devil, and is inevitably (and fashionably) doomed. He’s inspired a lot by his namesake Faustus, the real-life piece of shit Alistair Crowley, and any number of fashionable bargain-making fast-talking con artists from fantasy. He’s remained basically the same.
6. The Sage. He maintains the future of the Pact, their far-future destinies and what is to come next. He’s inspired by Merlin, Gandalf from Lord of the Rings , Yoda from Star Wars , and any wise old man in the woods handing out destinies to unsuspecting young heroes. He went through a number of changes (previously called the Anchorite) especially in regards to the next wizard, and I’ve swapped their positions a number of times trying to find the right balance.
7. The Sorcerer. He maintains the firmament of the Pact, the structure of magic, and the research and refinement of future magic. He’s inspired by Saruman from Lord of the Rings, the Masters from the Earthsea Cycle, and Dumbledore from…some book series. He’s also been through a number of changes, beginning as the Librarian. It took a lot of work to help him find his creative niche.

Creating a Necromancer

The best way to talk about the wizards is to talk about the process of creating a wizard. Each player has their own Codex, a book of rules which governs how their wizard engages with the world. Part 1 of each Codex governs the creation of that player’s wizard. Each wizard follows the same structure for questions, but has their own set of possible answers provided in picklist format. Here, I’m going to walk us collectively through creating a Necromancer (discussing the creative choices behind each picklist). The other wizards have similar questions but very different possible answers.

This is straight from my playtest documents, which means it’s not formatted the way it’ll look in the final book.

The character creation process is divided into thirds — **Humour & Temperament, History & Secrets, **and Might & Trappings.

Humour & Temperament

To begin, each player is presented with the following questions to flesh out the personality of their wizard.

These questions are provided before players have any context for what these Elements are for(they’re used to determine spellcasting, which is a process for a later article). The idea is that players make choices about the personality of their wizard first, and then see what their elements are downstream of that. Two wizards who both have high Fire aren’t necessarily similar to each other, beyond a preference for certain kinds of answers of their own description. This process of stat assignment via binary choices comes directly from The Wizard’s Grimoire series by Meguey and Vincent Baker.

Players then choose the form of their Pact-Fragment and the nature of their Familiar. The goal here is to just help flesh out the vibes and position of their wizard, making him feel cool and strange. It’s important to go into this game feeling like a badass, and these choices help shape that.

History & Secrets

Unlike the previous section, which was more about broad-strokes personality, this section is about deep secrets and core qualities of one’s character. The first question is about the wizard’s relationship with the previous wizard, and what happened to him:

Your relationship with your old master is complicated, entangled between public perception and your own experience. Was he publicly a kind soul and privately a piece of shit, or vice versa? Did you actually need your master, or did you learn on your own? What actually happened to him?

This is obscured further by your age. For a young wizard, the death of their master could have been caused by one of your present peers, whereas for an old wizard, perhaps your master’s demise is the stuff of history.

No matter how old you are, if you’re the Necromancer, death has its claws in you. Different wizards have different issues around age — the Hierophant, Warlock, and Sorcerer are concerned with obligation and public perception, the Mariner is more concerned with ability and physicality, and the Faustian and Sage are concerned with destiny and the inevitability of time. But no matter how old you are, your age is never a comfortable topic.

I added this picklist later in design due to a glut of younger wizards in playtesting. It’s intentionally rigged to incentivize making your wizard older, measuring one’s age in 20-year increments. “A young fellow, not yet forty years old” is one of my favorite little concepts. (A fun detail: practitioners of qabalah in Orthodox Judaism are also expected to be at least 40 years old. While I actively avoided appropriating real religious studies and mysticism into Seven-Part Pact, I think that coincidence is compelling — to be a wizard is to be old!)

Magic changes you. An important process for developing this picklist was to balance obvious and subtle changes. I wanted to make sure that if you’re younger than eighty, there’s enough non-physical changes that you can still “pass” as a regular human being. The older you get, the more obvious and intrusive the magic becomes, until the oldest wizards are hardly human at all.

This is another reward for playing an old man in the game — choosing to be young means fewer cool monster mutations.

This picklist helps wizards feel cool and unique. One of the goals of character creation is that each player comes in feeling like their wizard is their specialist little freako, with his own personal complex lore and interiority unlike anyone else at the table. This makes it even more engaging when they slam into each other later in play.

Here we go, some gender. In Seven-Part Pact, all wizards are expected to be men. But that expectation is a fraught one, even if you’re “actually” a man. I wanted to very explicitly get away from modern notions of gender and break away from a cis/trans binary. I’m especially bored of settings that depict gender as something neutral. I don’t particularly care for escapist fantasy where anyone can be any gender without remark. The structure of this picklist is consistent across the Pact:

• The first two options both embrace masculinity, but point at different ways it can be difficult to live up to masculinity. Even cis men in the 21st century struggle with feelings of inadequacy, of loneliness, of incompatibility with manhood. To be a man is to have expectations placed on you, and all men are scared that on some level they can’t live up to the ideal man that lives in their head.
• The third option complicates that. It says something is wrong, somehow, although it’s hard to give that problem a name. This is based on my own experiences with being a repressed egg trying to fill the shoes of manhood and failing, but I wanted to leave it flexible and ambiguous.
• The fourth option is an explicitly feminine one. You live some kind of double life, although not everyone knows it, and it would be embarrassing if people found out. This might be because you’re a transfeminine woman, or a crossdresser, or some other relationship with womanhood. The ambiguity is once again intentional — historically these lines were not as clearly drawn as one might expect.
• The fifth option is an ambiguously transmasculine one. Your manhood is an explicit farce that you were not always expected to perform. Just as with the other options, ambiguity here is fruitful — perhaps you enjoy being a man, but perhaps you still consider yourself a woman. This mirrors the ambiguous tension of many trans men throughout history.
• The sixth option breaks past the gender binary into something strange and monstrous. Magic has warped you and left you less a man, although you are still expected to be one. Your context has shifted such that you can no longer recognize the shape of magic itself.
• The final option is your personal secret. As a game designer, I always know there will be options I can’t wrap my head around, and it’s good to leave open that space.

Unlike previous picklists, this one doesn’t tell you how many choices to make. You could choose one, or multiple, or write in your own. The goal here is fruitful ambiguity, prompting players to think about gender without forcing them to commit to a certain path or feel obligated to frame their gender in a static way in relation to the current discourse around gender.

To complete the metaphor, the “pronouns” section of each character sheet is pre-filled with “he/him.” You’ll need to cross that out and replace it if you’re going to write in anything else.

The final choice is your character’s name. I provide some suggestions here, but with the idea that players will choose a lot of different names for their wizard.

Might & Trappings

This last section of character creation involves making some limited choices about the treasures you begin with. It mostly serves to inform you of your powers, humble magics, and possessions.

You don’t need to make choices here, you just have these.

However, you do still choose certain Treasures to begin with:

These options are a mix of powerful tools to use in play and decorative elements to inspire your character’s appearance. They also help flesh out your wizard’s relationship with the world around him, and the people who inhabit that world.

Combining All This Together

The goal of character creation is to smoothly guide each player from “I chose a codex but I don’t know what I’m doing with it” to “I have a badass, powerful, eccentric, tortured, and interesting wizard to serve as my avatar in this imagined world.” When dealing with a game as complex and interwoven as Seven-Part Pact, it’s important that the actual process of making a character is as comfortable and smooth as possible.

This process results in some really compelling and iconic characters right out the gate. Here’s some of the many fan illustrations of Necromancers specifically that have emerged following playtests of Seven-Part Pact:

Fanart by Mart (@mart_apreliy on X), used with permission.Fanart by Alanah (alanahsart-blog on tumblr), used with permission.Fanart by Ira Prince (on Bluesky), used with permission.

One of the biggest goals of Seven-Part Pact is to show, not tell. I’m not interested in telling you to make an arrogant, self-absorbed wizard. I just set up conditions where you feel compelled to focus on your own interiority and make yourself as cool as possible, so that each of you feel like the protagonists of your little worlds. Of course, the rest of the game unsettles that notion — sure, you might be the coolest wizard at the Wizardmoot, but so is everyone else. What happens when the illusion of the badass lonely man is disrupted?

Seven-Part Pact is coming to Kickstarter summer 2026. You can sign up now to get notified when it launches. The playtest documents for Seven-Part Pact are also currently availabe on my Patreon here.