Wizard Arena!

A spellcaster from your world has been transported to an inter-dimensional gladiator arena! Your spellcaster retains all of their magic and capabilities, but must step into the tournament and battle other wizards/witches/sorcerers/mages/warlocks/etc to the death.

Describe your spellcaster. Their background/role in your world, what they would focus on in combat, what the limits and strengths of their magic are, etc. Feel free to just explain a generic spellcaster (like I’m doing), or a specific character from your lore.

Once you’ve left a comment, find someone else's spellcaster in the comments and explain how you think your character would approach fighting them. What would they struggle with? What would be their first thought in that fight?

NOT WHO WOULD WIN (unless you the commenter agree you wanna talk about that). Let’s avoid getting upset over made up power scaling, I just wanna brainstorm some cool wizard fights!

———-

Now for mine-

The spellcasters of O.M.E.N are almost certainly gonna end up the weakest on this whole post, as I was aiming for a semi realistic take on magic in my world— being a modern urban fantasy setting and all. Most of the powerful magic/spells in my world are locked behind long, complex rituals that can very easily go wrong, leading to horrible consequences- IE Ritual Failure.

Wizards or witches can develop a “catalyst” though a specific alchemy ritual, basically being wands, staffs, necklaces, etc. that allow them to produce magic with only verbal incantations and symbolic gestures. This is much more stable than producing magic via a ritual, however the magic they produce with catalysts is usually much, much weaker.

The only saving grace here is that my “Magi”- the occult-trained field operatives of O.M.E.N, also commonly carry guns, as again, it’s a modern urban fantasy setting, basically meant to be our own world but with a hidden world of magic and mythology.

Still though, even without a catalyst or a firearm, wizards in my world can be pretty tricky, mostly dependent on how many rituals they actually have memorized.

For example, the infamous sorcerer (wizards are just people who studied magic, sorcerers are basically savants for magic- same way there are savants for mathmatics, music, science, etc), “the Count of Saint Germain” once escaped containment by slowing time to a complete stop. He did this through an unknown ritual involving the erasure of a pencil, a pinch of dust, and a symbol he wrote into the interregation room table.

Tl/dr. Powerful magic in my world requires the spellcaster to have memorized specific rituals and have the components to perform the ritual on hand— and even then, if they mess up the ritual there are potentially fatal consequences. They can also perform magic via a catalyst (wand, staff, etc), but that magic is usually much weaker, at the trade off of being much more stable. Good thing they also carry firearms! Magic allows them to do a ton of crazy reality bending stuff, nearly anything you can think of, but they need to actually know the ritual to perform it, so a lot of their “limits” are more dependent on their own intelligence, and the time/resources at their disposal.