Thought for a Ancient Gnomish Divination Wizard
I wanted an incredibly ancient gnome granny. BUT. I wanted an incredibly ancient gnome granny who has only started learning magic in the last decade or so, because she was bored out of her tree in semi-enforced retirement and decided learning to be a wizard would be a great, non physically demanding hobby in her elder years. Because you see an ancient wizard, you expect an archmage, someone who’s been wizarding their whole long life, but you can start learning magic at any age. So I wanted a granny who’s level 1, because this was just her hobby she started this last little while.
I also specifically wanted her to be learning magic via correspondence course. By letter. Because she’s not going to get up and toddle off to some strange new city and sit in classes with all these kids a literal fraction of her age. She’s not able for that. So she found a (potentially dodgy) old wizard willing to teach magic by letter, and set up a correspondence with them.
And then. While these thoughts were percolating. I love the gnomish massive extended family thing, I love the idea of a four-hundred year old gnome matriarch. But I was thinking what her background would be. What she’d spent those four hundred years doing. What her massive extended family was likely still doing. And I thought.
What if they’re a massive crime family. What if her background is criminal?
Because. In Ireland there’s this thing called the mammy mafia, which is the cultural idea of the small-town coalition of grannies who know everybody’s goddamn move, on account of all the ‘little birds’ that told them. And. Make that a literal mafia, or at least a literal criminal clan. And this horrific old biddy at the root of it. She’s four hundred and something years old, thrice widowed (once by her own hand), with an absolutely ridiculous number of cousins and descendants and assorted relatives who stayed in the family business. Her criminal contact is that one grand nephew who knows how to get in touch with everyone in the family, and who’s friendly enough with gran to pass her ‘suggestions’ along.
Because. See. She’s ancient. She hasn’t been a direct part of the business in decades. Not all the family are willing to listen to the old biddy. But she still has enough of a spider’s reach to make life difficult for a lot of people. Especially since her specialty, back in the day, was blackmail. And that much she’s only gotten better at. A word in the right ear does wonders, even when you’re about as physically lively as a four day old corpse.
Which is why her school will be divination. Because she’s a nosy old biddy.
And. She’s also lonely. She wanted someone to talk to who wasn’t one of those innumerable relatives who are all, aside from her favourite grand nephew, varying states of fed up with her, the family’s moved on, gran, it’s not your day anymore, let me run my murder-and-blackmail ring my way, I’ve only been doing it for two centuries at this stage! So. So she decided to learn magic, and she found some perhaps financially struggling hedge wizard, and she’s spent the past decade or so exchanging incredibly vicious and snarky letters with someone who is a genuine wizard, and who does have opinions on the correct way to learn/do magic, but is stuck in a circumstance where he’s teaching some ancient harridan by correspondence course to make ends meet. And she’s become sort of genuinely fond of him. She’s never met the young man in her life (though naturally she’s had some great-great-grand-whatevers spy on him and steal all his information, just for safety’s sake), but their letters have become sort-of-friendly in between arguments and increasingly exasperated ‘lessons’, and she’s just become a bit fond of him.
Which makes it both a) inconvenient and b) worrying that he’s recently stopped responding to her letters. Or any letters. And her familial spy network can’t find any trace of him anymore. He’s up and vanished, and possibly in the wizard way, or possibly in the buried in a shallow grave way, and she’s deeply upset about it.
Upset enough to actually get up and go out and find out what the hell happened to him. Herself. In person. Because she may be only a starter wizard, and she may be an irrelevant old biddy so ancient that her bad shoulder and bad knees and bad lungs won’t let her murder people the good old fashioned away anymore, but she has four hundred years of evil experience of the world, and nobody gets to ‘disappear’ a friend of hers and get away with it.
And if it’s his own magical idiocy that’s done this, then she’s gonna find him, dig him out of it, and laugh in his face about it while saying ‘I told you so’. Because that’s what friendship means for wizards, right? And ancient old harridans.
(Some mechanical character notes:
Is it blasphemy to have a wizard who isn’t proficient in arcana? Because I feel like four hundred years of criminal and blackmail experience will incline her more towards insight and investigation. And, well. This is a hobby to her, that only got serious when her teacher slash pen pal slash best friend went missing. I think I want her to pick up the Observant feat as well at some point.
For her subrace, I’m going deep gnome, because they’re stealthier. So imagine this vast, occasionally genial clan of greyish gnomes who are involved in the criminal underworlds of like half the continent.
I did debate both illusion and scribes for her subclass, but, well. She’s a nosy old biddy, so divination. I think there’ll be a healthy amount of practical spells among her actual arsenal, though, good old Knock and Misty Step and Invisibility, because she’s not ideological about her school, she just likes having tools, and blackmailer instincts die hard.
She will also have Find Familiar. Purely so she can have a literal ‘little bird’ spy. The preferred form would actually be like a sparrow or a house martin or equivalent, a ubiquitous small urban bird, but maybe I could reskin a raven for it?)
I just wanted an evil old biddy who picked up magic as a hobby in her twilight years, and then had a reason to go out and about with it. You know?
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