# The Wizard Problem: Souls, Remembrance and Grilled Cheese

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## A Thesis Statement From The Lore-Dev
Wizards are a problem.

The Wizard Federation and general Wizard gameplay (murderbone) are often antithetical to our lore designs and gameplay loop. This article is a first attempt to align them with our lore principles while both providing RP information for admin events and players alike.

The general premise, in a few words, is thus: Wizards are individuals who have, in our traditional Inscryption-cult fashion, sacrificed something in pursuit of power in a bit of metacommentary on the players of the wonderful game that is SS13. In this particular case, they have sold their souls and their ability to be revived from the dead in exchange for great power. In so doing, they have formed their core motivation: to be remembered. In a world where death is often cheap and they have willingly signed their ability to take advantage of that fact away, Wizards are either careful and paranoid to an often ridiculous degree or chaotic berserkers who seek their goals with reckless abandon. After all, when the dust settles, no one revives a Wizard.

This impulse, this desire to be remembered, manifests itself in a few ways:
- You have your traditional murderboner: a Wizard who studies their spells and carefully selects a collection of artifacts and abilities that best suit their purpose of mass murder. Desiring to be remembered for feats of great martial might, this is the kind of Wizard (player) who goes on a ridiculous spree and posts the footage on YouTube for everyone to ooh and aah at.
- You may also have the total other end of the spectrum: the wacky, friendly gimmick players: those Wizards that use the tools that have been presented to them to manufacture a wild and bizarre gimmick, often innocuous but always totally weird. This is your Wizard (player) who wears a bizarre outfit, takes a name that no sane man would ever utilize, and does their best to make the shift memorable (and by extension, themselves).
- And lastly, you have the middle ground, the trolls: Wizards who eschew both wild killing and innocuous gimmickry in favor of being a total pain in the ass. They are the Wizard (player) who believes they've figured out exactly how ephemeral the life they have is, as they sell it away in order to mess with people. You may not remember the random schmuck that fireballed you and you may not recall the friendly wizard who ran around with a healing staff and named themself "Ronald the Cheese Wizard", but you'll definitely hold onto that annoying bastard that kept logging into the command console with a stolen ID and saying "The Captain is a big dumb idiot who smells".

Regardless of their methods, these spellcasters have found that life shouldn't be taken too seriously. What happens while you're here doesn't matter to Wizards, too much; what matters is what the survivors remember after the fact, what they tell their fellows about and what they carry with them the next time they encounter a Wizard. As long as that legacy survives, a Wizard can die happy. And they will die, and stay there. Because no one revives a Wizard, for more ways than one.

## What Does This Mean In-Game, Though?

Design-wise, this allows us to design ships for small groups of like-minded Wizards (with a small faction consisting of a loose coalition of these), as well as providing fodder for admin events. Administratively, we can direct players primarily towards the second and potentially third categories, while reserving the first category for heavily-overseen piracy or entirely admin-run events. Precedent for this already exists with the Gorlex Mauraders, which have the 2nd Battlegroup and the Hardliners to represent most players while the Ramzi Clique allows for violent Syndicate-aligned pirates and for admin events of a similar bent.