The Wizards and the Wastes is a game of arcane bargaining. Nominated "Most Innovative" for its unique spellcasting system, wherein you create spells from your personal spell source; a painting, a book, a collection of poems, a graphic novel, or an album.

You circle passages, lyrics, words, images, panels, and turn them into spells. Then you bargain for those spells using the various currencies the game chokeholds you with. Trading years of your life, insight, toxicity, and corruption to cast spells as you see fit.

Inspired by Howl's Moving Castle, Bloodborne, and Puella Magi Madoka Magica, The Wizards and the Wastes is a social roleplaying game where you take on the roll of a state-sanctioned wizard with the impossible task of servicing a village and its rulers.

In June 2020, The Wizards and the Wastes launched on itch.io with 20 physical copies available. And since that day I've had a particular vision for the game that included a hardback book similar to the trade hardbacks that were always lying around my parents' house as a kid.

Here we are in January of 2022 and I'm ready to give this game what it deserves. Both in layout and writing. In book design and printing.

Every single piece of text has been rewritten with the nearly two-years of questions about the game in mind. This includes expansions on the pricing of spells to give players a centralized way measure bargains. As well as Insight charts that allow you to navigate your spell source and the labyrinthine brain of your spellcaster.

If you liked the original release, this will serve as a great upgrade. If you never played the original release, this will make it impossible to resist.

My dad had tons of old hardback laying around the house growing up, most of which had lost their wrap-around covers. Because of that, there's always been something magical about the aesthetic of those books. Thanks to Sheridan Books, The Wizards and the Wastes second edition will be coming to you as one of those old-school, Smyth sewn, hardcovers. With a three-piece case cover, a black cloth spine with gold foil stamping. 120 pages of that trade hardback paper texture , so it'll have that new-book smell, that new-book feel. Unlike the first edition and the original printing, it will feel like a Spellbook.

If you're looking for something a little extra, the Explorer's Pack comes with 4 post cards as well as two posters: one of a city for your players to explore and another of the wastes! Mockups coming soon. There will only be 100 copies of this package.

The funding goal covers the printing of 500 books and the ordering of shipping materials for fulfillment. I'm not offering any stretch goals at this time. Any extra money goes back into keeping me housed and future projects.

If funding is not reaching by the end of January, full refunds will be issued. We're going to do an all-or-nothing model, since that's how we'd do it on kickstarter. Any books that you buy alongside TW&TW will ship with TW&TW during fulfillment.

I've been fulltime for a little over a year, and Kickstarter was a huge part of that. But their recent embrace of blockchain tech and refusal to listen to their customers makes it difficult for me to use them anymore. I won't support or be apart of anything NFT-related and unless Kickstarter actually sees and listens to the folks who use their site? I won't be going back.

We all know of shipping delays and production delays that are happening right now. We're looking at fulfillment to be sometime in June or July. This is a late estimate. Working with Sheridan books will make this go smoother due to their client-based structure. I have a direct line of communication with them and several years experience working in the logistics field, so we speak the same language essentially, haha.

Funding also allows me to get a slipcase (water protection), bubble mailer (general protection), and a cardboard mailer (extra protection) for each book. I want each book to leave my place with the guarantee that it will arrive undamaged.

My website allows me to make blogposts which I will use to keep everyone up to date on the development of this project. Also feel free to throw your name in the fire of the mailing list to receive updates that way, or follow me on twitter (@johnbattle117).

The Wizards and the Wastes

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