Chaos

How to Add Chaos to Magic 

Step 1 - Find a group of players

Step 2 - Start playing

Step 3 - After 3-4 turns have elapsed, turn on Chaos. At the start of every player's turn, they roll on the table. Resolve the effect and play as "usual".

If a player would be eliminated, they roll on the Vengeance Table before leaving the game.

A Brief History of Chaos Magic 

I first started playing Chaos Magic in 1997 with my play group in high school. I cannot claim that we were the originators of the concept, as things like this have arisen in different forms for different games and the early World Wide Web was starting to unify the global community. Our group played AD&D and were big fans of the Wild Magic surge effects introduced in the Tome of Magic. This was a table of 100 effects that would be rolled if casting a spell resulted in a “wild surge”. The table had widely varying effects, many of which were quite silly. We adapted this to a table of effects applicable to Magic and over the next year or so slowly expanded it to 200 effects. Some were weird: tap target player; others were devastating: all creatures take 8 damage; some were very specific to our playgroup: trade life with Stu, gain protection from Ryan. Over the years, I’ve continued to expand and revise the list with bits from others I’ve found online, suggestions from friends and community members, and a pile of new effects inspired by all the mechanics that have been introduced in Magic over the years.

Now, the list sits at over 700 different Chaos Effects. It includes effects that span the history of Magic, inside jokes, goofy antics, references nestled within references tucked within clever wording, mechanics that might horrify a Magic purist, keywords and “rules”, balanced effects, unbalanced effects, votes, choices, coin flips, dice rolls, token generation, counters all over the place, and so. many. terrible. puns.

Included above are several versions of the Chaos List.

• Micro is 5 effects, originally intended to be printed on a custom d8.

• Lite is 120 quick effects: no tokens or effects that last longer than a turn.

• Exemplar is 200 main effects and 142 more in a set of themed sub-tables: choose a theme and whenever it comes up roll on the sub-table. This version has a set of printable assets - Exemplar Printables.

  • This PDF contains Draw-It-Yourself Tokens, Emblems, Proxies, Effects, Reminders, and Counters for the Exemplar tables. If you want to use less paper, print pages 1-38 (Effects, Tokens, and Emblems) back-to-back. Page 39 is two Reminders. Page 40 is the double-sided Sheep (it's awkward). Page 41 is the Power Nine Proxies. Page 42 is Counters, and if you want them double-sided print it twice back-to-back. I recommend having players draw art on the effects when they're rolled and signing their name in the artist's line to create a neat legacy set for your playgroup.

• Legacy is the "updated for '97" list: the earliest extant version with 200 effects and terrible wording. Let's be real, none of us knew what we were doing with this game.

• Full is, well, everything. Its kind of a mess, frankly. I'll get this uploaded.... later.