I had the idea for a different magical-school pisstake game some time ago. Originally – as conceived – Wizkid wasn’t so much like this but as Ian began to develop it it became obvious that there was a rich vein of humour and satire to tap into there. Of course, we went with the private school theme and the existence of Wizkid now means there’s no real ‘room’ in our line up to do Cantrip Comprehensive but I may recycle some of the ideas from it into Wizkid-related blog posts or a Wizkid supplement – which will be the first time I’ve gone back to the Shadow World personally since Bloodsucker: The Angst.
Xpress is a very flexible system and Wizkid has a relatively freeform magic system which could be turned to good use in ’45 and some other – less serious – implementations of the system. If you wanted to take it more seriously you could easily use Wizkid to run more kosher and canonical ‘fan games’ of a certain series of popular books by a litigious author.
I think Ian’s writing and design skills have come on leaps and bounds, the whole Xpress reboot is a big improvement over the d20 version, it’s been interesting to see someone else’s approach to the game world as I’ve given over the line to Ian. He’s tended to step things up to a bigger scale than they started but Wizkid represents a return to form, back to the Bloodsucker level of wannabes.
I’m pretty much decided I’ll write up Cantrip Comprehensive as blog posts, so you’ll see some support for the game up here over time. Now of course I’m going to be in the weird position of hoping one of my freelancers likes what I do!