You are the Magus, the wizard of the lonely tower, and with these pages you will remember your story.
In The Magus, you use dice and pen to write the unique history of their quest for arcane mastery. You will navigate strange encounters and confront complex opportunities for learning spells, or cultivating tenuous bonds.
Everything comes at a cost: will you spend your scant remaining time to acquire more powerful spells, or nurture the few connections keeping you human?
The Magus combines crunchy mechanics with narrative control. As a journaling game, it gives you the structure, the tools, and the prompts to spark a story that you narrate in a journal.
Use the power of dice and cards to chart your journey. You will use all six polyhedral dice to manage the Magus' traits: Focus, Power, Control, and Scars, which shape how the protagonist overcomes challenges and meets their denouement. An unlucky roll might bring you closer to calamity... But if you balance your aspects right, that may only be a faint possibility.
Shape the story with your ideas. The game's prompts evoke details for your spells, your bonds, your events. These details can be used to write a story, powered by serendipity and your imagination.
Along your journey, you will be guided by the Oracle: a companion deck of cards that reveal parts of a spell's true name alongside images and keyphrases that incite layers of meaning for your story. As well as meetings with unlikely creatures that may just leave their mark on the solitary heart of your Magus.
Every card features five different types of prompts: evocative Adjectives and Nouns you can combine to discover new Spells, interesting characters to form Bonds with, and Moods to set the tone for an encounter…
And last but not least, momatoes' art to spark your imagination at the back.
Combining the storytelling power of solo journaling RPGs and the revelation & inspiration from the Oracle, The Magus tells the story of a sweeping journey for power, ambition, and arcane mastery at great personal and interpersonal cost.
An archipelago of games
momatoes is a Philippine game designer best known for creating ARC: Doom, a cataclysmic tabletop RPG where heroes embark on heart-racing adventures to slay the apocalypse, as well as The Marvelous Children of Inang-Uri, a worldmaking game of tension, treason and a living chimera you call home. She also works hard to foster community between players and put them in touch with diverse games by maintaining Across RPGSEA, a site where anyone can explore tabletop RPGs created by local and diaspora Southeast Asian creators.
This campaign is a crossing of boundaries, beyond just the scope of The Magus: the Oracle deck is designed to chart a new course and connect all momatoes games.
With support from the Italian peninsula
NessunDove is a game design and localization lab(yrinth). We're the authors of the chamber larp anthologies Crescendo Giocoso and Crescendo Giocoso Ritornello, winner of the 2021 Indie Groundbreaker Award for Game of the Year. Aside from producing our own games, we like to put our skills in service of authors from all over the world, adapting their games into Italian and beyond: our ZineMonth 2023 project was the first-ever international edition of French epistolary rpg On the Way to Chrysopoeia.
Our Italian edition of Magus was the first ever to turn momatoes' intricate design into a physical book and the first step of a friendship across seas and timezones. NessunDove has curated the Italian edition of ARC: Doom, written the ARCtype adventure The City of Flesh and Stone, and is currently working on the Italian adaptation of The Marvelous Children of Inang-Uri.
Hours-long chats at weird times of the night gave us the idea for this new, special edition of The Magus, available in English and Italian.
The campaign will finance the redesign and production of the first-ever English edition of The Magus in softcover, as well as the design and production of the Oracle inspiration deck.
The Magus
The Oracle
Add-ons
Stretch goals
The generosity of our backers will allow us to provideVTT support for the Oracle, develop duet rules for The Magus to turn your journal into an exchange of letters, and so much more.
