Wizard OPINION: Please, dear gods, Just let me Loot a Spellbook

Opinion by Balthazar Raddenzak

I have been an adventurer now for several months, and an accomplished wizard for many years before. I spent countless hours late in the night devoted to my study of the arcane arts, slowly filling my personal tome with the spells that my mind could hold in place while under the rigors of battle. I understand that spellbooks are not some sort of mass-produced commodity. But still, I feel like I should have been able to find one by now after the trials and tribulations I have gone through.

We have fought grave necromancers, cackling witches, even a conniving palace vizier, and yet upon defeating each of these foes, their spellbooks seem to come to some disastrous ruin. Did the necromancers truly not think to prevent against mold rotting their pages? Did the witches not realize they had been mis-tanning human hide? And who could have foreseen the vizier tripping and falling so that his spellbook tumbled into an open brazier. Why were the braziers lit on a hot summer day? One would think that after facing so many magical enemies that a scrap of paper of two would have survived enough for some sort of intellectual reward.

It’s not even about the power I could attain. As a wizard, I have many tools at my disposal to ensure that I am prepared for whatever obstacle may lie in my path. It’s about the pure joy of discovery that I have had dashed time and time again before my eyes. Just once, I would love nothing more than to be able to sit down to a nice book and copy it out in very expensive ink. Because without that sense of discovery, there comes a time when it is tiring be at your peak. To know that there are no more worlds to conquer. But I know there are more worlds, and if this interdimensional archmage we face in the morning has somehow let stardust fragment his spellbook, I shall purposefully turn myself into a nothic.