Did you know Wizards had plans to publish a Magic: The Gathering tabletop RPG in 1996? I certainly didn’t. At any rate, it did, and now an unpublished draft is up for grabs. American game designer and ex-WotC employee Jonathan Tweet has put the game up for auction, with plans to donate the proceeds to the non-profit Planned Parenthood.
The tabletop RPG is called Manastorm: The Magic Adventure game, and honestly it’s difficult to find much concrete information about it, not least because many other games have come out in the decades since with very similar names.
Aside from Tweet’s social media posts, the most I could find was an RPGNet forum post from 2007 by someone claiming to be on the original playtest. According to this user, the game was canned after WotC acquired TSR in 1997 and shifted focus away from its own roleplaying games. This seems to line up with what Tweet has said as well.
Based on screenshots and comments made by Tweet on Bluesky, Manastorm seems to have been a card-based TTRPG, with hero decks used by players and adventure decks that affect what happens during play. The version Weeks is selling was written by Wolfgang Baur (Kobold Press), and Teeuwynn Woodruff and Mike Selinker (Lone Shark Games) during their time at Wizards in the 90s.
According to Tweet, the content available in this version of the game includes 68 pages of rules, 165 pages of appendices, and some loose character sheets and handouts.
On March 9, Tweet said that $1,872 had been raised so far but that the remainder of the auction would be silent and secret, with bids made via personal DMs. He added that it “hasn’t really started yet”, so we’ll just have to wait and see what the final figure is.
Do you know of any other card-based tabletop RPGs? Let us know over on the Wargamer Discord.
Source: Wargamer
