Welcome to the tenth post in a series of Design Diaries for Rangers of a Broken World by the creator Leon Richardson:
…
The Magus seemed obvious to me at first, but the more I worked with it, the less obvious I wanted it to be. The desert is a difficult place to survive, certainly, but the world is full of people and creatures who survive and thrive in dry climates, and I wanted to bring something new to the conversation.
The Magus pays homage to two things. The natural migration of creatures and people who live in the desert, and the history of the SWANA region as the cradle in which our modern understandings of culture, mathematics, chemistry, and astronomy were nurtured in the world’s early history. So, the Magus is a historical figure, a preserver of ancient knowledge (this is where the Starlight Archive came from, the idea that the Magi keep a legendary library in the desert). The people of the desert, too, are preserving an ancient way of life even as the world changes – to me, post-apocalyptic fiction is as much about what we keep as it is about what we throw away.
That’s why the special ally of the Magus is the Stars, mysterious spirits that watch over Amylte from the sky. The precision of the stars in our own history gave direction to sailors and travelers around the world, and it wasn’t difficult to imagine that they would do the same in Amylte. As a result, the stars are characterized as having an icy cold perfection, like the mechanisms of an enormous clock. A Magus who leans too much on their guidance runs the risk of disappearing into their pursuit of perfection and losing touch with the warm reality of the world.
The migration of creatures in the desert was of special interest to me personally, as at the time I kept a Hermann’s Tortoise as a pet. I could observe his spiny forelegs up close, I could watch the look in his eye when he decided he was going to try to bite something, and most interesting, I could watch the way he scrambled around, an ambitious little creature who needed to be king of his domain.
This was the origin of Wandering Hector, the god of the Magi who sits embedded in the back of a giant tortoise. Hector is the only one of the Deiliths that moves around, meaning that an aspiring Magus not only needs to survive the desert, but also needs to be able to find him. In other words, they need to know the ways of magic and energy well enough to find a creature who belongs in the desert.
Hector is named after Hector of Troy, from The Iliad. The Trojans were known for their riding skill, so this is just me being a little bit cheeky with my naming. And if you want to find Wandering Hector for yourself, and learn a little bit about the perfection that lies above this world, then maybe playing a Magus is for you!