Whether your wizards are aloof scholars, quirky inventors, or cosmic dreamers, these different traits will help you craft characters brimming with charm and intrigue. Here are one hundred eccentric traits for the whimsical wizards of your fantasy world.
| d100 | Entry |
|---|---|
| 1 | You wear a hat lined with gold leaf foil. To “prevent other mages from reading your mind and stealing your spells”. |
| 2 | Inspired by the great archmages of old you've decided to create your very own entirely new spell. You just haven't exactly figured out how it is supposed to work or how to cast it yet. Nevertheless, you insist it is only a matter of time before you learn its secrets. |
| 3 | Something about casting spells makes you feel slightly intoxicated. |
| 4 | Preparing spells for you is as religious an act as a cleric or paladin beseeching their god for strength and power. |
| 5 | You think your magic abilities come from psionics, and that your arcane studies are just a means to prime your brain to it's latent magic capacities. |
| 6 | You are convinced that the stars are other far away wizards trying to communicate with you. You’ve been trying to figure out a way to talk with them ever since you realized. |
| 7 | Anytime you see a pattern that resembles a face, you believe it to be a real person. There are a lot of very rude people who staunchly refuse to talk to you. |
| 8 | You always scream the name of your spells when casting them in battle, it that draws good luck. |
| 9 | Every spell you cast you believe decreases your lifespan slightly. You are more frugal with how often you cast spells and reason with yourself furiously on whether you should cast the spell or not. |
| 10 | Whenever you end a spell that requires Concentration you sing a little song to yourself to make sure your concentration is truly broken. |
| 11 | You keep seeing subtle arcane symbols in everyday objects like clouds, trees, or pitch-black darkness. You've catalogued those findings and believe you may be onto a new powerful spell. |
| 12 | You're always wearing a different hat. Same hat, actually, it just keeps shapeshifting. |
| 13 | Why spend one gold, when you can spend 1d3? It is only gold, after all... and if it gets spent to further increase your wizardly power, it isn't wasted.. one gets what they paid for, after all. |
| 14 | You pepper your speech with phrases from a language you invented personally. You often offer to teach it to people but they aren't interested. |
| 15 | For some reason all of your spellcasting verbal components come out as pop song lyrics, product jingles, and slogans for things that don’t exist in your fantasy realm. For example, the verbal component for casting Fly is “Come Fly the Friendly Skies”, and for Blade Ward is “duh nuh nuh nuh, can’t touch this”. |
| 16 | Insists on a certain renowned wizard title at the end of their name whenever introduced or referred to. |
| 17 | You insist you are a cleric of Mystra and every spell you cast is a prayer to her. |
| 18 | You will wear a unique outlandish hat for each day of the week. You are convinced they are good luck and will give you favor as you use arcane spells. We all know what happened the day you didn't follow through with this habit. |
| 19 | You love to smoke, but only do so armed, just in case magical residue turns the smoke into an imp. |
| 20 | Casting any spells makes you start briefly cackling maniacally. |
| 21 | You believe you have been sent by the gods to fulfill an epic destiny, but you can't for the life of you figure out what that is, and any possible options feel wrong. |
| 22 | You are convinced your evil twin is out there, waiting to get the jump on you. If you actually do have an evil twin, you think you're one of triplets, and they're both evil. |
| 23 | You believe that lying will make your magic less potent. You believe the more you lie the less real your words become. |
| 24 | You refuse to eat nonmagical food, or food that isn't magically touched in some way, as that would taint your magical aura. |
| 25 | You get really sweaty after using magic. |
| 26 | You keep having arguments with your shadow over mundane things like what to cook tomorrow for dinner. |
| 27 | You refuse to use magic whenever it's not absolutely necessary, as you saw a bad wild magic surge once, and you think that could happen with any instance of magic use. |
| 28 | You take notes with a dry quill, leaving the parchment unmarked. |
| 29 | You are absolutely sure you hail from a different plane of existence, and your childhood memories adapt to conform to that belief. Magic that would prove otherwise must be the works of a manipulative god or a mistake on the caster's part. |
| 30 | You've developed a taste for raw insects and earthworms after having spent 3 months polymorphed as a newt due to a slight mispelling of a spell once. |
| 31 | You try to speak in rhymes as much as possible, as you think that will improve your domain of language, and therefore your magic skills. |
| 32 | Like how some people sleep walk, you sleep cast. On multiple occasions, you have awoken to your sleeping area fully reorganized based on dream logic. |
| 33 | You use your body as a canvas to avoid forgetting new spells. Every bit of skin on your body that you can see without the use of a mirror is completely inked with descriptions, incantations and lists of spell components. |
| 34 | The biggest reason you’re a wizard is because your spell book (and weapon if bladesinger) is “possessing” your body, which will last even if destroyed because it’s actually fused with you due to a ritual in the past. |
| 35 | You are convinced a spectral duck is always staring at you, just out of sight. Magical means to detect said duck only fail because the duck is too powerful. |
| 36 | Anytime you encounter an attractive (insert desired sex/race), you brag about how you were top of you class and how you can “Pretty much cast any spell”. |
| 37 | Your spellbook sometimes plays music, appropriate to the situation. You aren't sure how you enchanted it this way. |
| 38 | You believe that you're living in a time loop, but your memories get reset every time you wake up. |
| 39 | You feel uncomfortable preparing the same spell two days in a roll, as that makes your casting stiff and rusty. |
| 40 | While speaking, you make absolutely no hand gestures, because you fear accidentaly casting a spell with a somatic component. |
| 41 | You are on your way to becoming a Nothic and are starting to get strangely obsessed with people's secrets. |
| 42 | You are extremely paranoid about your school of magic being used against you (e.g. divination wizard being scried on, enchantment wizard being charmed, etc.) |
| 43 | You feel like many of your actions are decided by dice rolls. |
| 44 | You actually tried to tattoo your spell book onto your body at one point. You still have the nasty magical scar. Turns out the human body is closer to a spell scroll than a spell book. |
| 45 | You insist that all spells actually belong to your school of magic and that all other schools of magic are just lies. |
| 46 | Every time you cast a spell of higher level than a cantrip, you must first cast at least one cantrip for reasons of universal balance and vast significance that mundane mortals could never hope to fully comprehend. |
| 47 | You obsessively collect seemingly mundane, ordinary, nondescript pebbles. But not all pebbles. Most pebbles you pick up, look over, and contemptuously cast aside. Maybe 1 out of every 20 you keep, gingerly putting them into a felt pouch. When people ask what you're going to do with all these pebbles, you just smile and say, 'You'll see.' |
| 48 | You wear a gag (of the DMs choosing) at night because you fear mumbling the words to a spell while sleeping. |
| 49 | Using magic makes your feet really cold. |
| 50 | You use a different name for your familiar every time you address it. It responds anyway. |
| 51 | The hand that you usually cast spells with has a tremor and often acts on it's own volition when you are stressed. |
| 52 | For the longest time, you’ve been trying to convince your magical peers (or whoever will listen) that birds, fish and worms are all just variations of the same animal. |
| 53 | You are a devout worshiper of the goddess of magic out of fear that she may become angry with you and remove your magical abilities. |
| 54 | When casting a spell with verbal components, you have an accent. You don't otherwise have that accent, however. |
| 55 | You are convinced you know how to speak to owls, they all just choose to ignore you. |
| 56 | You believe spell casting is way more complex than what typical wizards do to cast a spell. You add an extra layer of [dramatic performance, dancing, or hand gestures] believing it will make the spell more potent and powerful. |
| 57 | You are irrationally afraid of spherical objects. |
| 58 | You attend arcane research conferences only to discourage other wizards from writing the topic you're planning on publishing. |
| 59 | You randomly mix spell structuring words into sentences. It does grammatically make sense, if you understand it. It’s the equivalent of saying half a line of code in a conversation. Other wizards might understand it, depending on how fluent they are magically and in the language. |
| 60 | Pages in your spellbook tend to rearrange, completely ruining the numbering. |
| 61 | You are convinced that your completely prosaic household servants are actually demons that you summoned and keep controlled with powerful magic. |
| 62 | You really want to breed winged goats. You keep an eagle and a she-goat in a comfortable enclosure together and are convinced that eventually you'll find the right aphrodisiac. |
| 63 | You believe that upcasting your spells to a higher spell slot is a waste of your magical energies and it gives you a lot of anxiety whenever you do. |
| 64 | You think you are a polymorphed metallic dragon. You refuse to transform back because you like your opposable thumbs. |
| 65 | You don’t trust birds. As such, you never open your spell book when it’s pages would be visible from the sky. |
| 66 | You avoid anything that moves counterclockwise. It throws off your magic! |
| 67 | You can't stop explaining ALL the rules, history, and statistics to Marvelous Magical Marbles Maneuvering League to anyone you meet, including them as aphorisms of daily wisdom, and meticulously explaining how competing rules interpretations may be applied to non-Marbles-League life, and also how the sport differs in so many way from the Stupendous Sphere Sliding Squadrons Sport, which is a totally inferior sport. ALL THE RULES. |
| 68 | You do not actually rest during long rests. The whole night is spent rehearsing spells. |
| 69 | You are convinced that writing your spellbook in a very specific way enhances the power of your spells (it does not). |
| 70 | Your hair changes color every time you cast magic. The color tends to be more vibrant when powerful spells are cast. |
| 71 | You are convinced your spellbook is sentient and somewhat hostile. |
| 72 | Sometimes pages from your spellbook spontaneously fold into origami and attempt to escape. |
| 73 | You obsessively clean any surface before placing your spellbook on it. |
| 74 | Whenever a new spell comes to your mind, you hastily scribble it down on the nearest available flat surface, be it a page of an already written book, a wall, or an ally's shield. |
| 75 | You have a suspicion of all cheeses, especially the aged ones, as you have yet to disprove their sentience. |
| 76 | You constantly talk to your wand, giving it compliments or scoldings. |
| 77 | You always wake up singing a song. This dictates the spells you know that day. |
| 78 | No matter what you do, your magic always has a pink aura with star shaped sparkles. |
| 79 | You CAN NOT resist a good deal or opportunity for free spell components. Regardless if it’s a spell you know. |
| 80 | You’re overly paranoid about your spell components. You constantly check to make sure they haven’t been stolen or that you are not out of anything. |
| 81 | You hate a very specific type of creature with a passion. Every part of your place is riddled with ways to repel or hinder them. |
| 82 | You greet every sizable furniture piece in a room you walk into, you know you do not want to be rude to a mimic. |
| 83 | You use a cantrip to keep your hair neat and combed, but it only works on the right side. The left side is a hopeless rat's nest. |
| 84 | Using magic causes your hair to grow an inch per spell used. Epic beard. |
| 85 | You have an obsessive habit of testing any mirror you encounter no matter how small or large, making sure it's not a portal, life trap, or duplicate inside. Lesson learned. |
| 86 | Every night, you check the stars to attempt to obtain information about the near future. This doesn't result in any reliable info, but you sure act like it does. |
| 87 | You use your staff like a microphone and you extend it towards people's faces when they talk. You are convinced your staff is wise and will help guide you with making friends. Anyone who refuses to use it you will immediately mistrust and be skeptical of. The opposite effect if they accept to use it. |
| 88 | You've developed an unnerving level of fondness for trying to magically enchance blackpowder. As a consequence, your laboratory has exploded on at least 5 separate occasions. |
| 89 | You refuse to tell anyone you do not trust your real name. After all knowing a being’s true name grants you power over them. |
| 90 | When casting spells, you completely lose track of time. You think spells that require more than an action to perform are way shorter than they actually are, rituals only adding one minute to the casting time. |
| 91 | You write into your spell book with blood as ink, you are convinced anything else is a gross disgust to the practice of using your spell book. The smell or taste of the blood is the most appropriate test to ensure it is of good quality. |
| 92 | If you have a familiar, you feel the need to change its form every single day to keep things fresh. If you don't have a familiar, you make do with a pet rock you change every day. |
| 93 | You don't actually remember how to cast your cantrips anymore. You just do it from muscle memory. |
| 94 | You believe there is a devil living inside your head, influencing your every action. Any attempt by others to convince you that this devil is merely your 'thoughts' is futile. |
| 95 | A cat follows you around and you are convinced it is your familiar. You are sure that it speaks to you with its eyes and you often make decisions based on what the cat does. It does not follow your commands, because you think you are not strong enough yet. (It is just a normal stray cat, it has no abilities of a familiar) |
| 96 | Whenever possible, you use Mage Hand to perform actions. If you don't know Mage Hand, you really feel like you should, since using your physical hands feels wrong. |
| 97 | You’re never quite able to tell whether your dreaming or not. Throughout the day you perform a variety of little spells and rituals to attempt to discern whether or not you’re awake. |
| 98 | You are constantly paranoid about about some malicious entity trying to snuff out your genius intellect with the use of poison. Just to be safe you cast detect poison on any food or drink you eat whenever it is possible. |
| 99 | You have a stutter which doesn’t effect the casting spells, but visually causes them to look as if they are lagging, stuttering, or skipping. |
| 100 | You constantly feel like there are tiny fingers pulling at your hands and face. Using magic makes it go away. |
