What is Wizardry

Wizardry is a video game that was first released on apple 2 at the beginning of the 80ies. It became very popular and they even made various ports on the NES and SNES. Today it's probably the best way to play the original games. The original creators leaved the team after wizardry V, which made Wizardry 6-8 go into another direction that made the franchise crumble. Surprisingly, Wizardry was very popular in Japan and they continued to made other series of games similar to the classic games. And even today, they continue to make wizardry games. For example, a PS3 game has been released lately. Unfortunately, they are only available in Japanese and at most a partial translation is supplied with the game.

What makes Wizardry unique and interesting? In the old days, being able to explore a 3d maze was something somewhat special. Wizardry is truly an exploration game, they even gave you guide lines in the NES rule book to teach you how to draw your own maps. That looks weird to say, but mapping is fun. Second, the original Wizardry rules were very similar to dungeons and dragons, so any D&D player was familiar with the terminology (like Armor Class) and rules related to it. Third, the game is extremely challenging which seemed to increase the interest of the game because there is something at stake, so you are always on the edge since you never know how your party could die. When your party get's anihilated, it's time to make a new one since you cannot just reload your game.

What is Wizardry Legacy

Wizardry Legacy is a project that tries to remake the original classic Wizardry Games so that players could create and play various adventures. I want to use a design model similar to Zelda Classic which has a database of adventures that the players can play. To goal is not to make an exact copy of the original game, but rather create a game that has the same look and feel

The project was started in 2002 when I have just finished learning Allegro. I thought that having an animation less, turn based game would make it easy to implement. I worked on the project until 2004 and decided to shut it down and stop programming. The main problems what that I used an unrealistic rule system that took too much time to implement and I was seeing the game with too many useless feature that simply made the game heavier to manage.

In 2012, I decided to start programming again and reopen the project to finish it once for all. After taking some comments from the surveys on my old web site, I decided to massively simplify the game and increase resemblance to D&D and the original wizardry games. I am now using and SQL database to store my data and I am trying to implement the combat system as soon as possible since this is the core of the game. I want to get a working game first, and then I could focus on implementing features and improving the game.

So this is briefly the history of Wizardry and Wizardry Legacy. In the following pages, I will explain how the rules of the game works. There is not really any tutorial in the game, so I have to rely on rule books to teach how the game works ... like in the great old days. But instead of using a fixed rule book that I could distribute as PDF, I decided to use a flexible updatable rulebook as a Wiki.

Enjoy and have fun!

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