The descriptive text on the book paints a picture of the wizard as someone who’s very smug about being smart and about wielding magic that doesn’t rely on fickle supernatural entities. So at least on the fiction front, it’s business as usual.

They do have plenty to be smug about. Their spell list includes everything that’s not specifically part of the cleric’s or druid’s central niches, and there are many situations that can only be solved with the help of a wizard. However, “an entire fight” usually isn’t one of them, as we’ll see below.

Wizards become delvers more to find buried arcane secrets than to find money (though the later always helps). Because of this, they’re often the delvers with the best training to identify and handle those secrets.

Basic Stats

Wizards start with ST 10, DX 12, IQ 15, and HT 11. Their Perception is lowered to 12 and their Speed bumped to 6.

This is the highest starting IQ of all professions, and the most specialized “caster” stat block we’ll see here.

Advantages

Wizards start with three points of Energy Reserve (Magical) and Magery 3. Magery is their “power talent”, and unlike most of the others doesn’t have a separate pre-requisite advantage because it has a “level 0” that acts in that function as well. Magery 0 is enough to learn most spells and lets you detect nearby sources of magic, but doesn’t add any bonuses to spells like subsequent levels do.

Energy Reserve acts as a “parallel” pool of Fatigue Points that can only be used to power spells and arcane powers. It costs the same as Fatigue, and the main advantage is that it recovers concurrently with Fatigue. The other casters all have their own variants of ER as part of their optional advantages, but it’s factory-standard for wizards. It fits their theme to have vast reserves of magical power but to get winded easily from physical exertion…

Discretionary advantages include mental stat boosts, more Magery or ER, stuff that makes you smarter than your IQ indicates (like Intuition and Language Talent) and stuff that makes you more magical (like Spirit Empathy or some custom traits we’ll see below).

Disadvantages

That Per reduction takes up some of our disadvantage budget, so we only need to pick -35 points of further problems. Part of these make you less physically strong, a few others make your nerve break easily in combat, and a bunch make you into different flavors of eccentric genius. Are you an absent-minded professor with a heart of gold, or a fantasy mad scientist?

Of note here is Weirdness Magnet, which gives the GM carte blanche to come up with extra weird things during adventures that feel inexplicably drawn to you and generally make your life harder. If you need -15 points to reach your limit, take that and let your GM have some fun!

Skills

Wizard melee weapon packages are the classic “staff” and the somewhat novel “wand and shield”, which is such a good idea I have to wonder about the quality of the curricula of magic schools in other games. Wands in this game are a little heftier too, and can be used as light sticks with the Smallsword skill.

For ranged combat, they can choose to go old-school and throw darts, wield a sling, or learn Innate Attack, which is what you use to attack with missile spells. Most wizards who have those spells will want the latter.

Their primary skills are all about lore. They can teach, compose well-written texts, speed read, make proper use of research libraries, work with alchemy, dispose of magical hazardous material and recall all sorts of knowledge about a variety of magic-related subjects. Their optional secondary skills include the usual delver basics and also further intellectual pursuits, including Cartography for drawing those dungeon maps on the go.

Spells

You get to choose 30 different spells here, with a point spent in each.

Wizards have access to nearly all of the full glory of the classic GURPS magic system. If you compare their spell list with the one present in the Magic supplement for core GURPS, you’ll see a few omissions. These are mostly stuff that the authors of Dungeon Fantasy thought didn’t fit with their intended flavor: Enchantment spells because magic items should be found as loot, and most teleportation because having casual access to that lets you skip too much of the game. And obviously, anything that’s part of the cleric’s and druid’s core niches is exclusive to those professions.

We’re also back to dealing with prerequisite spells here. Spells are divided into Colleges, and each College has a prerequisite tree that’s a cross between a college curriculum and a skill tree from a game like Path of Exile or Diablo. If you want to learn Fireball, for example, you must know Create Fire and Shape Fire. The more complex and powerful a spell is, the more prerequisites it has.

Bards have to deal with this too, but they only have access to a limited set of colleges. Wizards obviously have access to all of wizardly magic.

Special Wizard Traits

This is where you get the official description of Magery, which I gave you above. Magery is the whole reason to even play a wizard in the first place, but they do have a few other special tricks available to them.

  • Gizmos (5 points/level): Like the thief version, but for wizard-themed minor gadgets instead of thief-themed ones.

  • Improved Magic Resistance (5 points/level): Like the base Magic Resistance advantage available to everyone, this penalizes any spell cast on you. Unlike the base version, though, it doesn’t interfere with your own spells.

  • Wild Magic (21 points/level): Once per session per level of this trait, you can cast any wizardly spell as if you knew it at a level equal to IQ + Magery. If you succeed, have a point to spare, and already know the spell prerequisites, you can also permanently learn it then and there, though you’ll get a small penalty to cast it for the next month as you get used to it.

Customization

It’s all about spell selection! There are so many to choose from the sample builds mention whole colleges instead of individual spells. Examples given are artillery mages with area damaging spells, controllers with a large collection of save-or-suck effects, or thaumathologists that specialize in meta-spells and magic knowledge skills.

Every mage wants extra Energy Reserves, and those quirk points can be used either for an expensive and high-capacity Power Item, or for more spells.

The “This Ain’t D&D Section”

As said above, wizards have plenty to be smug about, but this isn’t the same set of things that makes D&D wizards feel smug. The hardest thing for habitual D&D players to get used to here is the fact that they won’t be able to win an entire battle by snapping their fingers.

Yes, DFRPG wizards have access to plenty of strong damage-dealing spells. And yes, they also have access to plenty of control spells that can stop a monster on its tracks. But casting spells takes time and energy.

To cast that classic explosive fireball, a wizard needs to spend one turn casting the spell and from 0 to 3 additional turns growing it to the desired size and aiming it before they can attack. If the party is readying for an ambush, that big firebal is a great opening move. But if you start casting it during a fight, it’s likely the Knight and the Barbarian will have killed all enemies by the time you’re ready to throw it. Big area-effect control spells take a similar amount of time and even more energy to cast.

DFRPG wizards really shine in the “utility magic” department. That’s where you’ll find most spells that are both relatively cheap and quick to cast, and do stuff that no other profession can replicate. The wise wizard keeps an open mind regarding their spell selection, and plans explosions in advance.

The upside here is that you don’t have to worry about “spell slots” or any of that nonsense. You always have access to all the spells you know, and recovering your energy when it runs out results in “fifteen-minute rests” instead of “fifteen-minute workdays”.