Malgrin! Little Big Wizard

Bad Wizard Design Presents: Malgrin! Little Big Wizard.

No one knows precisely when Malgrin the Puce was born. Ask him his age, and he narrows his eyes, pulls thoughtfully at his beard, and says only:

“Old enough to know that questions like that usually end badly.”

Historians have learned to accept the answer.

Most place his birth in the late fifteenth century, in a small stone cottage overlooking the Muttering Marsh—a place where frogs complained louder than villagers, and mosquitoes were rumored to carry magical licenses. His father, Marvin the Beige, was a dependable wizard who enchanted roofs against rain and persuaded goats to stop eating laundry. His mother, Loretta, was a brilliant hedge witch whose remedies drew travelers from distant kingdoms. She believed every problem had a solution. She did not anticipate that one of those problems would be her own son.

Malgrin was unlike other children. By six, he was the shortest boy in the village—and already possessed a magnificent beard halfway down his chest. The village barber resigned. His classmates called him Pocket Wizard, Stump Beard, Garden Gnome, and Grandpa Baby. Malgrin pretended not to care. He cared tremendously.

His parents’ talent created great expectations. But practical magic and Malgrin had a difficult relationship. When he tried to levitate a chair, the table rose instead. When he attempted to turn a frog purple, the mayor’s horse learned opera. A rain spell produced seventeen confused ducks. He burned the family barn twice, then extinguished it with strawberry pudding. Once, he enchanted his trousers instead of his boots. They ran away.

Teased for his height and exhausted by failure, Malgrin withdrew into the one place that never laughed at him: the library. He read history, engineering, poetry, maps, cookbooks, and every magical manual he could find. Behind a shelf untouched for centuries, he discovered a hidden chamber filled with ancient scrolls. There, among disciplines abandoned and forgotten, he found Pictomancy—the lost art of traveling through paintings. Scholars called it impossible. Malgrin simply kept reading.

Despite his dreadful spellcasting, he earned admission to Balthazar’s School of Wizardry and Shenanigans, whose motto was: “Question everything. Especially authority.” On written examinations, Malgrin was brilliant. Spell theory. Runic mathematics. Potion chemistry. Arcane engineering. Magical history. Advanced—and theoretical—shenanigans. In practice, disaster followed him. He levitated an examiner instead of a candle, summoned a furious goose wearing spectacles, and exploded three classroom windows while attempting to make a small light.

The students mocked him by day, then knocked on his door at night to borrow his notes. Malgrin understood exactly what they were doing, and helped them anyway. After years of persistence, and an astonishing number of accidental explosions, he graduated. Not because he had become a powerful wizard. Because he refused to quit.

The real world was less forgiving. Guilds rejected him. Royal courts wanted experience. Wealthy patrons hired famous names. Malgrin discovered the magical economy was controlled by the top one percent of wizards, while everyone else competed for scraps. He accepted the only position available: Fanny Puffer.

At royal banquets and dances, Malgrin carried brass bellows, enchanted tape, emergency valves, and an embarrassing hat. He watched noble trousers for soft spots, chased aristocrats whose fashionable breeches began to deflate, and pumped air into ceremonial pants while children laughed. He had studied the deepest mysteries of magic—only to become the kingdom’s leading authority on inflatable trousers.

Eventually, the humiliation broke something in him. He stopped reading, stopped inventing, and stopped caring. Then, in a forgotten gallery, Malgrin found a painting unlike any he had seen. It showed a joyful giant woman on a mossy throne, eating a roasted turkey leg while tiny people danced at her feet. Fairies floated through golden sunlight. A half-man, half-sheep creature grazed beneath ancient trees. The image radiated impossible warmth, peace, and belonging.

Malgrin whispered the forbidden Pictomancy spell. The canvas rippled like water. He stepped through—and vanished from history.

Centuries passed. Kingdoms rose and fell. Magic faded into folklore. The painting changed hands until it appeared at an ordinary garage sale, where the founders of a small creative studio bought it simply because it looked interesting. They hung it in their workshop.

Near midnight, purple smoke drifted from the canvas. A terrible odor filled the room. The painted figures vanished, and the surface became a shimmering doorway. The designers feared a demon, a monster, or some ancient imprisoned evil.

Instead, a ladder unfolded from the painting. Two tiny leather boots appeared. A short, bearded wizard climbed down, surveyed the room with disappointment, and delivered his first words in hundreds of years:

“Honestly, whoever hung this thing couldn’t use a level if their life depended on it.”

He criticized the lighting, reorganized the furniture, corrected a prototype board game, edited a comic script, sketched a better cover, and disappeared back into the painting. He returned the next morning. Then the next. No one hired him. No one could fire him. Eventually the studio simply accepted that the grumpy little wizard was part of the operation.

Today, Malgrin is Bad Wizard Studio’s unofficial mascot, resident curmudgeon, and accidental creative director. He curates board-game ideas and playtests prototypes with merciless honesty. He builds game-night experiences through Set the Scene. He illustrates comic covers, restores ancient art, and sometimes enters unfinished paintings to repair the perspective from inside.

At Bad Wizard Design, he produces podcasts while complaining about microphones, appears in promotional films while insisting he hates cameras, and helps turn strange ideas into stories, games, and digital experiences. He still teleports into the wrong painting. He still animates furniture by accident. Every now and then, he sets something on fire. The studio keeps three enchanted extinguishers close at hand.

Malgrin may never become a conventionally great wizard. But the qualities once treated as failures—his stubbornness, imagination, sharp eye, and refusal to quit—made him an exceptional creator. He was mocked for being little. He became indispensable by thinking big.

And perhaps that is the true legend of Malgrin the Puce: not the story of a wizard who mastered magic, but of a creator who finally found the world where his particular kind of magic belonged.