So, first, you might notice the filename attached to those doodles. I had the thought that, if wizards don't exist on morbit, well, we can decide what wizards will be. So why not say it's a creature? But "wizard" didn't sound quite energetic enough for tiny magic clown people, so I adjusted it and called them wizits. One wizit, two wizits. It's kind of silly, but that's what I got used to thinking of them as, and silliness is kind of a key element of the whole concept.

The culture, then. Why clowns? Perhaps morbitians would think it's camouflage, like a butterfly having wing patterns that look like a predator's eyes. Personality-wise, though, or psychologically, how would you get a culture of tiny magic clown people doing clown things? So, the wizit heart is driven by two conflicting drives: first, an affinity for trickery, deception, misdirection, secrets and mystery. They love it! And those things are important for such little people, after all, to keep themselves safe. But they're also very social, and have a deep urge for attention and affection. Did they inherit this from some resonance with their creator's domains and motifs, or is it the result of some awareness that there just wasn't that high of a purpose or meaning to their creation? Either way, the answer is a life of performance. To use tricks and secrets and foolery to get love and attention. Wizits learn sleight of hand, stealth and secret magic spells to do hidden things, but in the end it's all so they can put on a show! That's not to be overstated, of course; wizits are still their own people, and they can eat and drink and have fun and hobbies and like things other people can. It's just that their performance persona is a big part of their lives. Coming up with a grand or strange or silly name for themselves and picking out their own special look and style and face are important parts of growing up for them. If a wizit ever puts aside their persona to talk straight to you, you know they think you're a very intimate friend - or something so horribly serious is happening that they need to be direct. That said, there are differences among wizits: some might not invest too much importance in their persona beyond its usefulness and the pleasure it can bring themselves and others, while some others subscribe to odd metaphysical ideas, believing that they only exist through others' perceptions of them.

Either way or in between, there are different ways of achieving these goals, and they loosely classify into three types. I was thinking of how old the idea of a clown is, and fools and minstrels and so on, and how the fancier kinds of clowns usually derive from a sort of late medieval to renaissance aesthetic. So what I came up with is a sort of class system, though also sort of not really. There are three: Buffoons, Jesters and Harlequins. Buffoons (or Pierrots, or just "clowns") are the most common type, and are your classic bright, fun, playful party circus clown sort! They usually like the most straightforward kinds of humour, and their magic tends to be visual and physical - lights and noise and conjuring and making themselves and other things appear and disappear, though the other two groups usually know a little of those as well. They’re also fond of arts and crafts, and will make banners and props and costumes and food for their shows. The philosophy of the buffoon is to just give people a good time and make them laugh! Jesters (or Fools) are more like comedians: they usually tell a lot of jokes and funny stories in addition to other kinds of performance, but there's often some element of trying to get a point across or to say something people wouldn't listen to any other way. Humility is important to them, themselves' and others', and their philosophy centres on a desire to watch and learn and to teach people important things. Most Jesters learn fortunetelling and divination magic. They might tell you they can tell the future: they can't, but they can maybe see things about the present and the past and can use those to make pretty good guesses. They have a habit of wearing floppy, two-or-more-pronged hats. Finally, Harlequins are... well, you could sum it up by calling them the most pretentious type. Harlequins might say they have romantic souls that want to bring beauty and passion and grand ideas to their audiences, and usually choose distinctive, striking costumes and behaviours to reflect this. They don't really focus on making people laugh, instead broadening their performance repertoire into more general artistic displays. They are usually very athletic and acrobatic, and are generally the type of wizit most willing and able to fight, though usually any wizit fighting is just about tricking the enemy into bad positions and escaping. Few wizits learn spells that are any direct use in combat, though Harlequins come closest with illusions and with spells that let them move better and faster. They might also pursue an artisanal type of craftsmanship, and put some magic into that, becoming enchanters or alchemists. Wizit-made potions can be effective on non-wizits, though for most the bottles will be extremely inconveniently tiny. Wizits usually scavenge for materials for anything they make; conjuring objects using magic is possible, but most such items will disappear during a moment when no-one’s looking at them soon after being made. Conjuring something permanently takes much more effort and energy, though many wizits do seem to have a particular affinity for colourful cloth, a useful exception that lets them make plenty of clothes and tents to live in.

As mentioned, the three-kinds arrangement seems like a class system with the harlequins on top as a sort of noble class and the buffoons on the bottom as a kind of peasant class, and most wizits seem to play along with this. In truth, however, this is a kind of performance as well. Any wizit can learn any of their spells - a good wizit of any type will know a few spells usually associated with the others - and any wizit could craft their performance persona along any of the three directions regardless of upbringing or parentage. They idea of three classes is, in the end, mostly just part of the grand performance of wizit society. Almost every wizit can sing and dance and do various tricks. Jesters are often straight men to buffoons, and harlequins can be straight men for both jesters and buffoons. Buffoons often believe jesters need to lighten up, jesters that harlequins should be more grounded, and harlequins that buffoons are shallow, but there's generally no serious tension. The real measure of rank and status among wizits is skill, magic and, most importantly, how good of a show you're known for. Wizits strive for their own fame and the collective fame of their troupe, and troubles between them are usually about stealing tricks or spells or audiences from each other. Wizits can do more than perform - their magic or their skills can be useful to advise you on your actions or to make you a dress or find your lost watch, or any number of other things. But you'll pay them two prices: one the money or the food or the goods, and the other the little bit of chaos they'll add to your life, just so you'll remember them.

Most wizits live a wandering life, traveling around with tents or in little wagons and setting up to collect resources, put on a show and leave their mark on the place and the people there before setting off again. If they find a place they like a lot, though, for its beauty or its busyness or some other reason, they might build more permanent homes. Generally they do this by moving into hollow spaces, either existing ones or ones they make themselves. Inside the trunks of trees, in hidden little tunnels or in the spaces below the floors and in the walls of larger people's houses are their favourite sorts of places to make a longer-term home.

Wizits will tell other people that anyone could learn the spells they cast, but when asked to teach them, the casting of the spell usually involves some uniquely bizarre sequence of wiggling your tail, flapping your ears and beeping your nose that non-wizits have a very hard time replicating. Since wizits usually don't seem to go through such rituals when they use magic themselves, who knows what the truth is? However, wizits take the time to learn a lot of mundane illusion and stage magic, so it can be hard to tell when they're using real magic and when they're not. The key is to look at their tail. The large puff at the end of a wizit's tail is actually a sort of storage balloon for a strange juice with healing properties: when a wizit uses real magic, they absorb some of this juice to restore their strength immediately, giving them much more capacity for magic (and more durability than you’d expect for their size). When a wizit is in good health, the juice in their tail puff gradually replenishes. Wizits can regain full storage even faster, though! Wizits experience a sort of empathy when near another sentient being who's crying. If the wizit is the one who actually caused them to cry, a connection is formed that allows them to absorb the overflowing emotion as energy for themselves. Wizits love tears of laughter most. Tears of darker or more agonized emotions are painful for wizits to experience, causing enough harm to balance out the energy they gain and the healing effect it has on them, though some wizits - usually harlequins - can develop a resistance to a particular feeling. Wizits keep their empathic “feeding” ability a secret - they don’t want to be known for benefiting from people’s tears.

These advantages come with downsides. The healing juice stored in a wizit's tail can benefit anyone, if they can get it: cruel or greedy or desperate people might catch wizits to cut off their tail and eat it to heal themselves, or sell it to others. Besides that, their ability to regain health and energy by causing intense emotion has a strange side effect. Death, it seems, causes a release of something that this ability picks up on, the same way it picks up some sort of psychic essence from genuine tears. Just being near a death causes an experience wizits find impossible to describe but clearly horrible for them. A wizit who causes another sentient being to die, themselves... usually also dies. A few survive, but are left with an odd magical disability: they become totally incapable of making any sound. Though wizits can often seem to speak only nonsense, jokes and riddles (particularly buffoons and harlequins), they all deeply value their voices and consider it a deeply crippling loss. Rumour suggests that silenced wizits may gain powers that other wizits don't have... but if so, they don't consider it anywhere near worth it. Silenced wizits will make large changes to their style and persona, if they manage to recover mentally, usually adopting stark blacks and whites and tear marks under their eyes. Because they’re afraid of this state, in addition to just wanting people to like them, most wizits tend towards pacifism or, at least, non-violence. On their own behalf. Wizits are not always so reluctant about causing trouble between other people, and they don’t necessarily shy away from less violent sorts of crime. Most wizits, especially buffoons, love pranks - and a good few wizits think making some small item disappear, or making some scandelous secret reappear (to the right/wrong people) to be a perfectly acceptable prank, especially if it’s targeted at someone they don’t like.

Finally... wizits are, in some ways, actually pretty shy. They tend to wear poofy or baggy clothes, usually with large cloaks. Unlike TCPs, who they're in about the same size range as, wizits are flesh and blood and can have children and are presumably equipped to do so, but it can be hard to tell who might have what. Female wizits seem to tend to have heart-shaped ears, and males to have fuzzy ears, but plenty of wizits have ears that are heart-shaped and fuzzy, or neither. Wizits tend not to explain (except in the form of implications in dirty jokes) and in general seem reluctant to discuss or acknowledge any aspect of themselves not presented in their performance persona.

That’s about all the thoughts I’ve had about them. I considered it in large part theorising what they would be like if they lived past the session and got introduced into morbit, rather than just limiting myself to the session itself, and I have little idea what requirements or needs there are going forward with the quest or the morbit setting, so I don’t know how much of this would have to be tossed or adjusted. Mostly I just had fun thinking of it all. My main inspiration was the thought that in a lot of ways we seem to be almost trying to turn Voidsy’s session into a saturday morning cartoon, and I kinda drew from that - wizits as I wrote them up here have a lot of influence in them from fraggles, smurfs, gummi bears, a couple of old british children’s shows, the somehow entire genre of movies and shows featuring tiny civilisations of mouse-sized creatures living under humans, and general fairy stories. As well as trying to tie them into Voidsy’s themes, of course. And part of me just wanted to give the TCPs some potential friends who are their size! So: there you go. And if you read all that, sorry for taking up so much of your time.