The Game 

You are the Last Magus, out of your tower, witnessing the world you once knew crumble, fall to pieces...

The shadows grow long, and in these final days of this Age of Magic, you sense a familiar presence beckoning you from the shadows, calling you to rest.

It is Death. It is patient.

Your work is not yet done. This is the world that you loved for all your long life, filled with marvelous places and the most precious of people. Uncertainty reigns. You can bring order to the world, even as your magic dwindles. This chaos strikes like birthing pains, so you must deliver the world into another Age, one where you will be absent and they will live on, remembering.

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In The Last Magus you take on the role of a powerful sorcerer of your own creation, with your own past and motivations. Travel through the provinces of the Empire, and in each province uncover a crisis waiting for your intervention. Control the weather, summon demons, create elaborate illusions, or boil the blood in your enemies' veins. Restore peace using sorcery, limited only by your imagination, or bring order with more worldly, diplomatic means.

And yet your time is ending, Magus. Another force stalks these roads. It is Death, who you will meet in many guises, and with whom you will bargain for time. So little time...

Getting Started

The Last Magus is built on the Carta SRD for Carta Jam! I've replaced the standard deck for the mysteries and intricacies of the tarot. An online tarot deck can be used here, or print out Luciella Scarlett's scans here. Both are the Rider-Waite version, but this game works wonderfully with any tarot! The game also requires a six-sided die, which you can emulate by searching "roll d6" in Google.

For an inventory of all the Carta Jam submissions, take a little journey over to the jam page. No spells required.

My hope is that something, even something quite small, connects with you in this game. The Last Magus is an exercise in whatever kind of imagination you want it to be.

If you'd like, take each new province as an opportunity to worldbuild. Think about the geography and industry of each province, and tie that into the emergent crisis. Think about power structures, magic systems, races, ideologies, cultures, languages, and foods. I was inspired by the tabula rasa of the Empire presented in Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, the infinite possibilities described there.

Maybe you'd prefer to use this as an exercise in characterization: How does each disaster affect your Magus? Does it bring up old memories, and regrets? How can someone live while the world around them falls apart? After all, the Magus is not just a piece on the board, but an empathetic intelligence moving across beloved landscapes, visiting gorgeous and beautiful cities, interacting with complex people and cultures. They are a part of this world, and doing everything they can to heal it.

The Game Master 

Thank you so much for playing this game and supporting this small piece of art! I hope it made you feel something, made an idea light up in your brain, and made you consider a connection you have to our very real world.

I'd like to take a small space to plug some of my other projects. If you enjoyed this experience then I invite you to try my survival game with a similar reliance on your brilliant imagining brain, The Settlers Print-and-Play Adventure. If you're intrigued by my writing style, I made a Twine edition with microfiction anchors. And actually, I write Twitfic/microfiction that I think you'd enjoy at @The_Settlers_!

Last but certainly not least, I'm enamoured by art that makes more art (the way this game is a matrix for infinite stories), and I've built four lovely bots that spin bombastic stories, interrogate history, and play around with words. You can find those in my itch.io profile and my Twitter @ThePringularity!

Thank you so much for your time and brainpower!

- Ewan Matthews | @ThePringularity

The Last Magus is based on the Carta system (found at https://peachgardengames.itch.io/carta-srd), from Cat McDonald and Peach Garden Games, and licensed for use under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/).