May 27 | 2017Storytime, with Evil Wizard Mordak
Evil Wizard Mordak is the main man of the story. He’s the source of conflict, and also the main avenue for comedy in the game. He is the ultimate all-time super-villain. He’s the turn you into a newt, push you into a bottomless pit, Tie you to a railroad-type of comic book villain. NAY. He is a Tie you to a railroad, then turn you into a newt right as the train is about to strike, then send both you AND the train careening down the bottomless pit together-type villain. Well you get the point: He’s over the top.
I am working with two close friends of mine, Ryan Biddulph and Kevin Houle to help me build out the world in Minions of Mordak and the characters and story there-in. They’ve done such a great job breathing comedic hooks into the game’s every corner. For your reading pleasure I’ve included Mordak’s back story below:
You are Evil Wizard Mordak, so named for your father, Evil (who abandoned you to your grandfather), your Grandfather, Wizard (who left you to the orphanage the day following), and the brand of soap the nuns used to scrub you down,
Mordak’s Astringent.
Somehow, given your family history of ill chosen names, no one had given serious consideration to taking up the dark arts until you, you stark raving mental lunatic.
Good for you!
Through the long years of your early life, and in spite of your squeaky clean sounding name, the peasantry have marked you Mordak the extremely unwashed, lover of goats, father of stoats, charlatan, deflowerer of…gardens and altogether horrible human being. As such, you discovered you were particularly suited to work in government and found it astonishingly easy to worm your way into the halls of power. You find this easy because if anyone notices you’re a few gold pieces short of a platinum you just trigger one of the many trap doors you’ve been secretly installing and they tumble into the labyrinth below, there to be devoured by forty-six scorpion men. After being devoured by forty-six scorpion men they would later be fired for mysteriously abandoning their post, enabling you to enthusiastically volunteer for promotion, you clever boy.
Employing this strategy judiciously and often, you quickly found yourself Advisor to the Throne, a mere trap door away from seizing power most absolute from the most absolutely powerful and rightly-beloved King Hawke Shapiro. And yet somehow the King’s squad of no-goodnik do-gooders, The Order Without Borders, have thwarted your every effort to squash, maim, mangle, crimp or otherwise inconvenience the King’s mortality. The King, student of human nature and philosophy that he was, dismissed the Order’s every allegation of your regicidal ambition as ‘silly’, believing you instead to be distressed about ‘this thing we call life’.
Finding you alone, muttering to yourself, and rocking back and forth in your room one hot summers day, the King invited you up to the castle battlements for a real heart to heart. There, to your surprise, a legitimate and freak catapult accident interrupted his motivational speech, rocketing him over the horizon and into the world beyond in full view of the diplomatic corps biannual summit and luncheon.
‘FOOLISH MORTALS! RULE OF THIS KINGDOM IS RIGHTFULLY MINE’ you shout down at the astonished crowd before legging it through a hastily conjured portal and into the WORLD OF ETERNAL AND UNCARING DARKNESS. There you wait and plot the demise of The Order Without Borders, to bring terror to their kingdom, and to sit in it’s ruined throne because, as we’ve established, you’re completely bonkers.
So I wanted to illustrate a man who was totally bonkers. Who was a classic looking Evil Wizard. But who was also somewhat laughable. (Hence the silly dink cap he is wearing). I’ve only depicted him in this one image so far, though many more are yet to come. At the moment I do honestly wonder if there will ever be an occasion where I won’t want him to be cackling maniacally? Why I built his 3D model with the ability to close its mouth, I may never know. Anyways if you want to know more about how Mordak’s art was made, check out this post. Otherwise I’d love to hear what you think about his art and his story in the comments below. Thanks for joining me in this wild ride of board game creation!