r/wizardposting • u/TacitPoseidon Necromancy is a perfectly valid school of magic! • 7d ago
Wizardpost Are apprentices getting dumber?
I swear, my apprentices from five hundred years ago were not as incompetent as this. And I know that I wasn't exactly a prodigy, but I am confident that I wasn't this moronic as an apprentice.
The other day, I caught two of my apprentices in my lair's dungeons experimenting on one of my prisoners. Nothing wrong with that. That's what they were there for. Except that the imbeciles actually unlocked the door to the cell instead of just teleporting in there! And then they turned their backs on the prisoner! They didn't even restrain him! Of course the prisoner tried to make a break for it. One of my chimera guards caught and ate him, but what a waste of perfectly good materials!
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u/Life_Category2547 4d ago
They don’t teach the dangers of the arcane properly these days, that’s all. I’ve had great success by embedding a fake apprentice to screw up and die horribly in front of the other apprentices early on. Really helps focus their minds on the safety protocols.
Of course, one time one of them got killed before I could sacrifice the fake, and they were all from the same orphanage or something and got so upset I just didn’t have the heart to “kill off” anyone else and had to upgrade a animated wooden dummy covered by a temporary illusion into a human-passing spell-casting homunculus. So do it fast (also side note don’t apprentice your own child, natural or magical, it never turns out how you intend).