Copyright 2011 Wizards of the Coast.

Thay is an island nation located somewhere outside of our regional map. It’s ruled by wizards who like to wear red.

Now, if you’re only familiar with them from the Neverwinter Nights games, like I am, you might have a somewhat ambiguous view of them. Sure, sometimes a Red Wizard of Thay will be involved in evil schemes elsewhere in the world, but #NotAllRedWizards are evil. There’s even a Lawful Neutral companion in NWN2: Mask of the Betrayer who will praise the orderliness of her nation while helping you save the world.

I’m here to tell you that this view is wrong. The Red Wizards of Thay are basically Nazis. Their mechanical “thing” in 3e was that they overspecialized in a single school of magic, but the edition change made the mask fall all the way off and now nearly all of them pick Necromancy as their special school. So they’re necromantic Nazis.

Thayan society values magic power above all else, so the Red Wizards are at the top. The use of undead labor is widespread. Their rulers are a council of liches led by one Szass Tam, one of those annoying epic villains the Forgotten Realms are famous for. Most of the population thinks this state of things is natural. Dissidents get zombified.

If you are a PC with the Renegade Red Wizard theme, you too grew up thinking all of this was normal. You were pretty happy when your aptitude for magic was discovered and you were admitted into one of the island’s prestigious Red Wizard academies. You remained happy right up until your best friend made a tiny mistake during a ritual, and your teacher was so enraged that he killed your friend on the spot. Then he had the body brought in to be reanimated by your class as a group project. You were completely horrified, but you looked around you and saw that everyone else still thought all of this was normal.

You ran away the first chance you got, as fast as your feet could carry you, and went as far as Neverwinter before you stopped and took stock of your situation. You decided to stick around and help the reconstruction of the city.

And then you discovered the Thayans were here, doing something unspeakably evil somewhere in the Neverwinter Wood. You’re done running. Time to do something about these dang wizard Nazis.

This theme has no ancestry restriction, but its features only make sense for the Essentials Wizard (also known as the Mage). The associated background skills are Bluff, Heal, Religion, and Stealth. That seems like a lot, but it’s still balanced because you still only get to pick one of them to boost or add to your class list.

Features

This theme has no optional powers, but it makes up for that with extra features. To understand how they work we must first know a bit about the Essentials Wizard (known as the Mage from here on out).

Mages specialize in specific schools of magic as they level up. Heroes of the Fallen Lands has three of them: Enchantment, Illusion and Evocation. Each has an Apprentice, Expert, and Master feature, and a set of paragon-tier powers.

At levels 1 and 4 the mage chooses an Apprentice feature for two different schools (one at each of those levels). At levels 5 and 8, they gain Expert features for these same schools. At level 10, they gain the Master feature for a single school and go on to pick paragon-tier powers for that same school as they level up even further.

In olden times, Red Wizards were known for specializing in a single school to a greater degree than most others. Nowadays, they always pick “necromancy”, but the Renegade PC has used their basic teachings to pick something else. So one of their magic schools is Enchantment, Illusion or Invocation like a normal mage, but the other is replaced by the extra features of this theme. The other features usually relate to your experience hiding from and fighting your former compatriots.

Starting from level 1, every time you attack from hiding with an arcane power and miss every target, you remain hidden. Enemies can still try to make Perception checks to find you, but you’re no longer automatically revealed.

At level 4, you don’t get to make a second Apprentice choice. Instead, when one of your spells causes a save-ends effect, the target has a -2 penalty on those saves.

At level 5, you can switch one of your prepared spells at the end of a short rest once per day, as long as its from your specialist school. Usually Mages can switch spells only at the end of a long rest. Spell-switching is less of an issue in 4e than it was earlier, in my experience, so this isn’t a very large benefit.

At level 8, you don’t get your second Expert choice. Instead you gain a +2 bonus to Bluff and Intimidate. The bonus is untyped, which is the least they could to do compensate for the lack of another Expert magic feature.

At level 10, you gain an extra +1 (untyped!) bonus to attack any Red Wizard or undead creature that grants combat advantage to you. As a ranged controller, you can’t get combat advantage quite as easily as a melee striker, but this is still pretty nice. Several of your spells should inflict conditions that make enemies grant CA.

Impressions

Out of all these features, I think the level 4 one is the best. Since wizards are controllers, a very large number of their powers are of the save-ends type, so a -2 penalty to all enemy saves is huge. The attack bonus against all undead is also pretty cool, but it comes in very late in the campaign.

If a non-Mage picked this theme, I’d rejigger is so they still get the Level 1 and 10 features as written, but get the printed Level 4 feature at level 5.

Now, about the story: As I mentioned previously, the Red Wizards are responsible for the volcanic eruption that half-destroyed Neverwinter. Their original intention was to fully destroy it and use the deaths to power the Super Necromantic Fortress they were building in the Neverwinter Wood. A band of novel protagonists foiled them 30 years ago, but now they have returned to the site of the incomplete fortress to try and finish the process. This is what the Renegade has found clues about.

Therefore, I would be inclined to include an NPC Renegade if the party has none, just so they can point the PCs towards the Red Wizards. Punching them would as satisfying as punching Hellknights and Nazis.