Seven-Part Pact — Companions (Chapter 3)

Photo by Valdemaras D. on Unsplash

This is Part 3 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.
3. The Companions**:** The people who surround each wizard, and the wizard’s Isle and Sanctum.

Seven-Part Pact is coming to Kickstarter summer 2026.

Wizards are lonely, for there is no one who may understand a wizard’s great responsibility. He is accompanied by very few; his wife if he’s lucky, his friends if he’s even more lucky. The incredible knowledge and burden of magic drives them away from the common folk, into a deep seclusion. The only people who might understand a wizard’s feelings are his fellow wizards, who are obnoxious and insufferable creatures.

A common theme when discussing power is loneliness and isolation. Powerful people love to wallow in their own loneliness, miserable in their inability to connect with others. I’m not unfamiliar with that feeling — there’s a strange anxiety to intimacy when being a public figure means your personal life is the subject of public gossip. I often think about the song NDA by Billie Eilish, which perfectly captures the uncanny and nerve-wracking feeling of balancing interpersonal intimacy with discretion. That song in particular is noteworthy for focusing on boys, specifically, when Billie Eilish’s own big secret was that the people she was sleeping with were women.

Loneliness also dovetails neatly into one of the biggest contradictions of power — the invisible people necessary for its production. Whenever a character is impeccably dressed, there’s always the question — who is doing that character’s laundry? Who is feeding them? Who is looking out for them? When someone wields power alone, one must also wonder who else is silently working to maintain and produce that power?

Once each player makes their wizard, they then create that wizard’s Companions, Isle, and Sanctum. Companions in particular delve into one of the core tensions at the heart of Seven-Part Pact, and are one of my favorite anchor-points for some of my favorite parts of play.

Four Areas of Care

Each wizard has four Companions, each of whom are responsible for a different area of care. This care corresponds with each of the four Elements (which you might remember from last time, the stats each wizard uses to cast magic).

• His Earth Companion cares for his daily life, providing food, water, laundry, and a clean home.
• His Water Companion cares for his emotional life, providing physical and emotional intimacy, comfort, and touch.
• His Air Companion cares for his private life, protecting his Sanctum, keeping his secrets, and helping him feel secure.
• His Fire Companion cares for his creative life, engaging in conversation, wisdom, and advice.

The higher the wizard’s associated Element, the more the wizard values that Companion and benefits from their care. If a wizard doesn’t have a Companion’s care, he can’t access that aspect of his magic until he spends a week self-destructively providing care for himself. If a wizard has no Companions, he has no time to perform any magic at all, as he’ll be too busy caring for himself to do anything else.

Each wizard has their own list of possible Companions. Here’s the Mariner’s list:

Each Companion has information about their relationship with you and a question which you may answer at your leisure. Different Companions will take on different tenors based on the kinds of Care they provide your wizard. Many of them are explicitly women, and possibilities for ambiguous or unsettled readings abound. Some of them, like the Selkie, push your character into darker spaces narratively.

These Companions serve as a wizard’s “weak spot” — people who know his secret names and who support him through darkness. They are vulnerable to seduction by the Devil, injury from magic gone wrong, and temptations that lead them away from their wizard. As the game goes on, Companions are both sources of social relationship and areas of intense vulnerability.

Protagonists Without A Viewpoint

In _Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell _by Susanna Clarke, women and people of color are relegated to the sidelines. Jonathan Strange’s own wife, Mrs. Strange, is clearly as talented a thinker as he is (if not more), but cannot practice magic of her own accord. Emma Wintertowne and Stephen Black are stuck fighting against a fairy prince in his twisted kingdom, but the protagonists are too arrogant and self absorbed to hear their cries for help. There’s a sense that there’s other stories hidden behind the walls of Clarke’s novel, accessible only to those who listen. Women speak through the cracks in the wall, calling out from history and begging the players to hear.

Tehanu by Ursula Le Guin delves deep into the perspective of Tenar, a widow and former priestess of the nameless dark, dwelling in the shadow of Ged. While the wizard Sparrowhawk is off on his fantastical adventures, Tenar experiences a harsher and more mundane world. She is intimately aware of the ways men wields violence against her and how she has to build her own life beyond the stories of the ostensible protagonist. Her viewpoint, obscured by Ged’s presence, reveals the challenge of living in a patriarchal society.

Scenes in Seven-Part Pact are very strictly defined. It’s impossible to have a scene without at least one wizard present, and the entire world is seen through the eyes of the Pact. However, over the course of the game, some Companions will inevitably be fleshed out further by choices made during play. Sometimes a sense will develop that these characters are just as, if not more, interesting than the wizards who have become our viewpoint. But the game traps us — we can only see the world through our limited perspective.

The game can’t force players to explore this topic, but instead the invitation is left on the table. Personally, my favorite moment in any playtest of** Seven-Part Pact** is when we start finding out these forgotten and set-aside characters have interiority that goes against our self-conception and enables us to see the setting from a different angle.

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.