SORCERER INSIGHTS

The sorcerer playbook represents a mage who is untrained, tapping

into powers beyond their control, and ostracized by others (magical or
not). They don’t learn spells the way a cook learns recipes. Instead,
they draw on elemental power both within and around them,
channeling it into crude and wild expressions of their will.
The sorcerer playbook can be roughly divided into three aspects:
spellslinger, worldwaker, and pariah. Thinking about all three as you
evolve your character will help you be more than just another
pyromancer or DPS hose.

Power flows through a sorcerer like steam under pressure, waiting to

burst forth. Sometimes the sorcerer retains control, but it’s a perpetual
struggle. Keeping their emotions in check is key, and you can play
this up in your sorcerer’s choices and personality.
Maybe they avoid conflict to stay calm, or have prayer beads to
fend off their rage. Do they fear losing control, or enjoy it? When
your sorcerer calms down from an elemental fury, do they remember
what they’ve done? Do they feel guilty? Look for opportunities to
play up these tensions.

A sorcerer’s power is so vast that it spills out and awakens the world
around them. These awakened familiars can obey simple commands
and carry out the sorcerer’s will, though often with chaotic or
unintended consequences.
Think about how this affects your sorcerer. Do they seek out the
chance to summon familiars, or is it an unwelcome side effect of their
power? Especially for a novice, it might be frightening or even
harmful to toy with these elemental powers. How do you see your
familiars? As servants? Allies? Or even friends? Are they alive, or
simply magical constructs obeying a word of command? Do they
appreciate your summons, or resent it?

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A sorcerer is defined by their struggle to retain control. A key part of
that struggle is failure. As you craft your sorcerer’s history, decide
who or what they’ve destroyed as their power has violently awakened.
Did they level the town hall? Freeze their family solid? Boil away the
ocean? It wasn’t your sorcerer’s fault, but the world won’t see it that
way.
A pariah is someone who is reviled or cast out. Your character has
no place left to call home, no family to rely on, and no past to return
to. You’re seen as dangerous or valuable or both, and anyone who
knows what you can do will have ulterior motives in their dealings
with you. Decide how your sorcerer deals with these stigmas. Do they
seek to calm society’s fears, or leave it burning in their wake?

Included with the sorcerer playbook are three documents

encapsulating the spellslinger, worldwaker, and pariah. They are
written as specialties in the style of Johnstone Metzger’s fantastic
Class Warfare supplement for Dungeon World.
If you’re not familiar with Class Warfare, it deconstructs each
Dungeon World class into three thematic compendium classes called
specialties. For example, the classic Dungeon World thief could be
thought of as a character with specialties in backstabbing, trap finding,
and poison brewing.
You can use the included specialties to mix aspects of the sorcerer
in with other classes and create entirely new playbooks. For example,
mix in the pariah specialty to create a fighter who has been outcast
from society, or use spellslinger to build a fiddler bard who really
does have fire flying from his fingertips.
Another exciting aspect of specialties is that they are usable as
compendium classes in classic Dungeon World play. Each specialty
includes an example move for earning it as a compendium class. By
using these, you can let your players unlock sorcerer moves naturally
during a campaign, without needing to build or use custom classes.

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A sorcerer’s chosen element defines them. It defines how their power
appears when they wield it, and what natural forces they can awaken
in the world. Your familiars will be crafted from this element, your
spells will hurl it at foes, and when you lose control it will literally
wreathe your features in its form.
You should choose an element and decide its features yourself.
What does it look like when you encounter it? What tags does it grant
your attacks? What personality does it have when you awaken it? If
you need inspiration, the following sections outline examples for a
number of obvious choices.

The primal element of fire is among the most dangerous and

expressive that a sorcerer can harness. It occurs often, both naturally
and artificially, providing plenty of opportunities to confront and
awaken it. Fire familiars can be capricious and dangerous, but they are
also beautiful and expressive. If you aren’t careful with their
commands, they will burn entire villages to the ground.
Casting a fire hex can work as either a near-range fireball attack, a
close-range blast, or even a burning punch. Appropriate tags for fire
include messy and dangerous.
When you lose control of your fire magic and cause a cataclysm, it
could manifest as a wildfire, a flow of lava bursting from the ground,
or a solar flare that burns away the sky and withers the earth. As a
gameplay tool for the GM, fire cataclysms can add danger to the
players’ surroundings and give them a new environment to react to.

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Ice makes for a subtler element than fire. A snowy world, winter
campaign, or iceberg dungeon might present you with plenty of
options, while other environments require you to create your own ice
or bend the definition to include water, fog, and steam. Likewise, ice
familiars can take many forms: snowmen, ice golems, crystalline
hawks, or even wisps of snow and light. Their cold and dispassionate
nature might make them more predictable but less loyal than other
familiars.
Ice hexes allow for plenty of creativity, too, as they can not only
freeze enemies but also sculpt solid objects to interact with. The stun
tag is a great choice for ice magic. Your spells might take the form of
glittering blue light which freezes on contact, or shards of icicles
which are used to impale foes.
Cataclysms for ice might be a flash frost, snow in the middle of
summer, water freezing in pipes, or a glacier which springs up and
partially entombs something. The world might even be cast into a
magical winter which must be made right.

Less glamorous but no less useful, earth magic presents a slow and
steady option for any sorcerer. It is always underfoot, ready to be
awakened into familiars that crawl, dig, or roll. Earth magic also has
room for interpretation: for example, many things are inextricably tied
to the earth and could fall under your domain, such as sand, iron ore,
molten lava, or even trees and plant life.
Your earth-based hex might adopt the forceful tag as it sends
boulders and rock shards hurtling at your enemies. As for cataclysms,
they can be huge: a mountain bursting forth; a mudslide drowning a
town; a sinkhole that unearths ancient ruins.
An earth sorcerer is in nearly constant contact with their element.
That gives you a great reason to play up the withdrawal that comes
when separated from the earth. Flying, airborne travel, and floating
terrain can all give you roleplaying fodder as your character is denied
access to the comforts of their element.

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Like the Force, air surrounds all living things. This makes wind magic
among the most versatile and universal. Familiars can be formless and
invisible, or wreathed in thunder clouds and morning mist. The
domain of wind and air can also encompass more abstract concepts
such as silence and light.
Casting a hex of wind is limited only by your imagination. It works
well with ranged tags such as far, and could also serve to disrupt
enemy movement or aid your own while defying danger.
When the wind rises in anger and unleashes a cataclysm, it can
form tornados or howling storms. Changes in air pressure might
flatten buildings or douse fires; they can also drive walls of dust and
water with terrifying effect. Remember that a lack of air can be felt,
too. Few things are more terrible than a sudden inability to breath.

Lightning may not be a true element, but it still offers plenty of

options for a sorcerer with imagination. It can be encountered in
thunderstorms or static discharge. In more technologically advanced
campaigns, electricity might be present in power conduits, artificial
constructs, or even the potential energy within atoms.
As a hex, lightning is usually one thing: fast. Consider giving it
tags like far or precise to reflect this. You can also use the reload tag
to give it a charge-and-release feel. Lightning hexes might ignore or
pierce armor, strike from unexpected directions, or blind foes with
their brilliance.
The cataclysm triggered by lightning is usually self-explanatory:
storms. However, the storm’s behavior and tendencies still leave room
for creativity and choice. Perhaps the storm writhes to life with an
obsession for uprooting trees, or drains all power from a local source
of magic.

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Water is often overlooked in favor of flashier elements like fire and
ice. However, it can be a rewarding choice for sorcerers who prefer
grace and finesse. Water is powerful without necessarily causing
harm, making it a tool as much as a weapon. Familiars awakened from
streams and raindrops are mobile, elegant, and remarkably resilient.
Play up their tendency for playfulness, or their ability to change from
calm to menacing in a heartbeat.
Water hexes are often most interesting when they manipulate water
in the environment, instead of summoning it into being. Send out
tendrils and shards from a nearby basin, or congeal airborne moisture
into jagged projectiles. Water works well with the forceful and reach
tags.
When your elemental fury activates, consider having rain or mist
emanate from your hair and eyes, or draw on related imagery such as
sea foam, coral, and driftwood. Your cataclysms might include
tsunamis, waterspouts, floods, and surging rivers.

The darkness itself can be awakened to create silent, stealthy servants.

They might manipulate the physical realm directly, or indirectly by
touching another object’s shadow. Your familiars may despise not
only the sunlight but those who walk in its warmth. Or maybe they are
empathic, knowing that all things cast a shadow.
When you cast a hex using the shadows as your energy source,
what appearance does it take? Is it a torrent of black, or slivers of
purple energy which hiss through the air? Can you form shadows
from nothing, or do you bend existing ones to your design? There are
nearly limitless options for tagging a shadow hex. Ignoring armor
might be one easy place to start.
Shadow cataclysms are varied and ominous. The sun turns dark, or
day ends abruptly and spews forth night. Shadows on the ground
writhe like beasts, attacking their casters. Perhaps gates open, pulling
people through the darkness and spitting them out in strange new
worlds.

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Some sorcerers would rather journey in search of power than have it
handed to them. Starlight can call to them. It is distant and
intermittent, but also cold, beautiful, and mysterious. Awaken starlight
familiars to do your bidding as night falls, knowing that they will
evaporate with the dawn. Do they value the tasks you give them? Or
resent you for tearing them down from the heavens?
Your hex is cold and beautiful. Its power might abandon you
during the day, but shine twice as harsh and brilliantly by night. It
could emanate from your hand in an aurora of colors, or plummet
from the sky, wreathed around a chunk of celestial iron still hot from
its journey. Starlight’s effects can be as inventive and varied as the
constellations in the night sky.
Much like your hex, the cataclysms you trigger can take many
forms. Meteors crash to earth, devouring cities. The northern lights
appear by day, driving men mad. A being from beyond the stars is
granted fleeting access to the earth.

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Familiars are defined by three things: their elemental composition, the
tags which describe them, and the commands you give them. As
you’re wielding them, draw on all of these for inspiration in how they
behave and interact with the game world.
A familiar’s composition can give you cool ideas for how it looks
and what it can do. For example, maybe your sorcerer awakens the
earth into serpents of dust and sand, which pour themselves into
crevices to scour enemies from within. Maybe they’re frightening or
impressive, letting you use their very appearance as a tool.
Tags are there to help you and the GM decide when a familiar has
reach its limits. The default tags are creative, short-lived, and volatile,
encapsulating the idea that familiars are driven into glorious acts of
self-sacrifice for dramatic effect. Familiars aren’t mundane hirelings
who hang around doing drudge work. They want to act, to show off,
and to go out in a blaze of glory.
Work with the GM to let your familiars interpret commands in the
most wild and imaginative ways possible. Short commands provide an
opportunity for fun misunderstandings or unintended consequences,
which can give the GM a useful tool when coming up with effects for
someone’s 7-9 roll. Long commands can be intricate and precise,
letting a familiar express their personality as they struggle to carry out
all the specifics.
As a special mention, the advanced move Say Hello To My Little
Friends plays up the individual nature of your familiars, letting you
name and re-tag them to craft truly distinctive personalities which can
be awakened again and again.