The Seven Part Pact is a roleplaying game
The Seven Part pact is a LARP
The Seven Part Pact is will get you into astrology
The Seven Part Pact is a series of minigames
The Seven Part Pact is an examination of societal power structures
The Seven Part Pact is a cognitohazard
The Seven Part Pact is Jay Dragon's Wizard Madness Simulator
If you're a particular kind of RPG sicko, or if you follow the Possum Creek Games Patreon, you may have heard rumblings from some TTRPG creators over the last few years joking about interacting with Jay's new game and then catching Wizard Madness, suddenly becoming unable to articulate how when pressed directly but being very vehement that The Seven Part Pact had consumed their mind. Surprisingly, given how many people I know have played a version of the game so far, there is frighteningly little written about the game that is publicly available: Rascal has a post about it, but it's only available to the higher tier monthly subscribers. Darling Demon Eclipse has a four episode playtest preview up on her YouTube channel which is at this time currently the only way to see how the game might be played, and of course at the time of this article the version of the game they played had been out of date for some time meaning you may only glimpse a shadow of the current shape of Wizard Madness as it exists today. No, indeed the potentially the only quickly digestible way to learn anything about The Seven Part Pact would be to read Dwiz's recounting of his Shapeshifter's Duel with Jay Dragon directly - a duel in which I attended, sat upon the Celestial Council, and helped shape Dwiz's ultimate fate.
My friends, I too have the Wizard Madness, and I'm going to do my best to make sure you catch it.
What Does A Day of Wizard Madness Entail
7PP (which will be how I refer to the game for the rest of this) is an unholy marriage of one of the genre of LARP-adjacent boardgames and a TTRPG. The rules of the game are spread across seven zine-length character-specific rulebooks accompanied by their own individual boardgame, plus a main rulebook and a Grimoire which contains the spells available to you at start of play. If that sounds like a lot to interact with - it is! But the good news is that the game is structured in such a way that you really need to only care about what's in your specific rulebook, because everyone is working together to ensure that everyone knows the parts of the rules that are relevant for whatever comes up during the course of play. It's fascinating, because you can go an entire game having no idea what anyone else is actually doing outside of what they tell you about in any scenes that you have together, and yet a small thing that happens in a single scene may cause ripple effects across everyone's corners of the game and when that happens the veil gets pulled back and you get to see how the whole machine fits together.
Months of Wizardry
In terms of what actually happens in gameplay, an Orrery is set up that tracks the location of the planets across the sky. This is updated each month (or if a Wizard uses their power to modify it), and the location of the planets and the Sun as they move across the map of the astrological houses have different kinds of impact on everyone's board state and upon the ability to cast magic itself. Everyone takes a moment to update their board state at the beginning of each month, and then they are given several tokens that they can use to indicate how they will spend their time that month: Will they spend time with their family or loved ones in order to gain a bonus to their ability to cast spells? Will they spend it interacting with their board game, harvesting resources or preventing societal collapse or maintaining trade routes? Perhaps they will spend the time visiting another Wizard to discuss their wizardly affairs and cast spells? This phase is both the longest part of each month of game time and also where all the best bits happen, because you will very quickly see exactly how shakily the world holds itself together and how little time you have to act to stop it - and where you get to roleplay as your horrible little magic blorbo with everyone else. And you just keep doing this while the world hastens towards destruction and Wizards begin fulfilling their ultimate, secret destinies.
A Council of Wizards, A Celestial Audience
As many of Jay's games are, this game both is and is not GM-less. It is, insofar as you are largely responsible for your own boardgame and managing your own affairs through play. It isn't, however, because in any scene in which you are not an active participant (or if all Wizards are present and you are called on to assist) you assume the role of the Celestial Audience - essentially, you're there to provide rules adjudications as they come up throughout the scene as they pertain to what your Wizard is responsible for, or sometimes broadly. For example, the Sorcerer maintains both the Lore of the setting as well as tracking the current stability of magic across the setting, meaning that if someone were to cast a spell from a school that had fallen out of balance then it would be the Sorcerer's responsibility to warn them of the consequences, and has final say on rulings where the results of magic would be ambiguous. The Celestial Audience is also how you make sure that a room full of people doesn't devolve into side conversations and chit-chat - even if everyone isn't the focus of the scene happening, they may still have important context to add to it.
What Can 1001 Imps Do For You?
You may have noticed I haven't really talked about casting spells in this game where you are Wizards doing Wizard things which should, ostensibly, be about casting spells right? Herein lies the real "What Are We Even Doing Here" of it all: this game is about seven men who have incalculable power and use it to enforce their will upon the world while everyone hopes that they will do the right thing when the time comes. Most of the Wizards present could play the game without casting a spell at all, which is something that the Lore of the game even touches on - most of the Wizards do surprisingly mundane things in their own domains: The Mariner maintains shipping routes and keeps tabs on pirates and giant beasts in the world; The Sorcerer removes unsanctioned magic users from the realm and keeps the traces of magic corralled to innovate on magic itself; The Warlock basically just gets to play Game of Thrones off in their little corner; The Necromancer travels around banishing the souls of the dead so that they don't get out and cause havoc; The Hierophant functions as a religious leader that mostly tends to the needs of the people; The Sage simply exists to guide the world back into equilibrium and guide the other players towards their fates. Only The Faustian has an immediate call to potentially use magic - because they deal directly with The Literal Actual Devil (less the Christian concept of The Devil, more of the folkloric trickster Old Scratch) and both try to curtail The Devil's schemes while also kind of acting as a foil to The Sage by trying to get other people to act in certain ways.
But the thing is, the call of power is a loud one, and sometimes you really, really don't want to do something the hard way. Sometimes, you just want to Summon 1001 Imps to solve a problem for you, and that's where it gets ya - because the moment you begin interacting with magic, the moment everything goes off the rails in ways you will not be able to predict. That's not to say complications won't arise in other ways - but once you start using magic to solve your problems the only way to solve the problems that those problems cause is with more magic, and you're gonna keep doing it until you figure out how to stop.
A Play Report, Of A Sort
I agree with Dwiz in that trying to produce a full and accurate play report of our game would likely be unhelpful and boring to read. I would, however, like to hit some of the high points of the day - and I do mean a day, because it was a huge nine-ish hour long marathon session - starting with the Wizards In Attendance:
-myself as The Sorcerer
-Dwiz as The Warlock
-Jay as The Sage
-Natalie as The Faustian (and also host of the event, for which we are eternally thankful)
-Alan as The Necromancer
-Cass as The Hierophant (who very graciously agreed to play last minute, and who we are eternally thankful for)
-Simone as The Mariner
Aside from Jay, everyone other than Natalie was coming to this game completely fresh (Natalie had previously played a game as a different flavor of Wizard). It was very nice to have Jay acting as our Facilitator for this because I think that we may have been quite lost with the intricacies of our individual boardgames. In terms of gaming backgrounds, I feel like we had a good spread between folks with more trad game backgrounds and those who focused more (or exclusively) on the LARP side of things, and I think everyone did an amazing job both in and out of character. This is very much a game that encourages people to jump in and play NPCs as they become relevant and to pass them around troupe-style which I think we did to great effect - me and Alan each got a time to be The Devil, and an NPC knight named Sir Gabriel showed up early on but ended up gaining more importance each time a new person played him. Because the in-game timeline was only about three months, we didn't get a whole lot of time to see the impact of what we were doing boardgame-wise, really with The Mariner and The Warlock's games being most visibly relevant to the narrative - but then, that's also kind of the point, because the more time each Wizard dedicates to solving issues in their own domains, the less visible any of those problems become to the rest of the Wizards.
There were some really stand-out character moments: because misogyny and The Patriarchy are core themes that this game deals with, the scene where Natalie and Cass got to get together and be like "Hey yeah actually we're both women and we're both cool with that and also The Sage is going to try to use this to destroy us" got to be way more important and cool than I can render in words. Any time someone got to have a scene with Jay was moving - in the setup of the game, after Jay had told us that her character was still a teenager and suspected that one of us had killed her character's master, the previous Sage, we all just kind of collectively agreed that we all cosigned that and had picked this kid to serve as a patsy to make sure we had a full seven Wizards to maintain The Pact, and boy howdy let me tell you that would already be enough reason for some intense roleplaying if it wasn't also for the fact that Jay was trying to manipulate all of us to achieve our destinies which had an impact on the outcome of the stability of the world.
For my part in all this, I had two big scenes - once, where Simone and I agreed that it would be good for The Mariner to cast a spell to try to beautify the plants at a junkyard we had met at only to have the complications for that spell cause the fruits of that plant to become poisonous, which The Celestial Audience decided would mean that while not too many people immediately died from eating that fruit, it did end up getting bottled into wine which was then sent to the wedding of the princess which caused ALL KINDS of issues for The Warlock and The Hierophant for the rest of the game. Another time, speaking of The Hierophant, early on an NPC occultist appeared in Cass' realm which I needed to go deal with and decided that I would spend my monthly Big Time RP Scene to find this heretic, descend from the heavens and stab him to death to eliminate him as a problem in this realm - only to find out that there are actually combat mechanics in this game and suddenly and unexpectedly have to figure out how to strike this man down without killing a bunch of civilians with magic. (I did try turning him into a pillar of salt, for the bit, but sadly he resisted.) This in turn caused enough chaos that I would end up dealing with the RP consequences of that for the rest of the game - but lemme tell ya, it was cool as hell.
Actually, I'm gonna take a second to expand out that fight because it has a lot to do with Dwiz's duel with Jay which he described in his blog post I linked up near the top, and which you should really go read. I was not expecting this game to have combat mechanics. I had seen The Shapeshifter's Duel spell and knew that that was an option for Wizardly Battling, but I figured mundane violence would be abstracted. Not so! Essentially, you end up establishing a number of Things That Are True about you and the person you are fighting, and then it just goes back and forth - either you attack them, and they parry with something they have (which could be as nebulous as "You cast a lightning bolt at me, and I command your bodyguard to jump in front of it), or else you try and destroy some of the Things That Are True about them so that they have nothing left to defend with. I quickly realized that this both incentivizes being very thorough about prepping for Doing Violence, but also that especially if a Wizard is involved and tried to bring magic into it that things will go out of hand extremely quickly. I was very lucky that my attempt to Petrify this occultist into a pillar of salt failed - had it not, the complications would have been such that the effect would have spread elsewhere in the temple, potentially affecting innocent people and going beyond the battlefield itself. Ultimately, I drove the Occultist away, but had we played for longer he may have come back to be a particular problem.
Final Wizardly Musings
7PP is a game that is unabashedly and openly about confronting the expectations of masculinity and how that plays into global power structures. Through this, you can explore gender, famine, unjustness and how much it sucks that a small number of weird men rule over us all in ways that are sometimes hard to understand until it is too late. The thing is though, at one point Jay told us that her character could "either be a good person, or good at the game." And that really is what it boils down to - because let me tell you, if you want a power fantasy? You can absolutely indulge in a power fantasy. Do you want to create a world-ending beast? Do you want to summon long-dead wizard kings to do your bidding and reshape the world? Do you want to ascend beyond what the game is asking you to do and attempt Apotheosis? Do you just really, really want to summon 1001 imps? You can do all of these things and many, many more. Our playthrough didn't even touch on half the mechanics available in the game because we were on such a tight timer - there were things we could have researched, we could have gone beyond the Isles of Isha out to other parts of the world to bring back hidden knowledge, we could have had to fight Sick-Ass Undead Dudes Who Cause Problems On Purpose. This game is truly infinite in a way that a lot of RPGs are not but reigns that in by giving you a number of things on your individual boardgame that you HAVE to care about. You can't just explore everything and do everything - if you do, your realm will fall to chaos and hasten the end of the world. You have to care about your community - if you act selfishly or carelessly, you will doom the world so you can get what you want.
If you, dear Wizard, have a chance to partake of the Seven Part Pact, I would offer you these warnings:
-If you come to this game with your own agenda, you will be foiled.
-If you come to this game to cause mischief, great ruin will be visited upon you.
-If you come to this game to do great deeds, know that everything has a cost - whether it is immediately visible to you or not.
And finally: if you find a problem that Summoning 1001 Imps cannot solve, I recommend you summon another 1001 imps.
Stay wizardly out there.
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