Lords of Magic Fansite

In 1997, Sierra released a PC game called Lords of Magic. It was really hard, had some awkward bugs, and in general was forgotten among most of the PC gaming community, but it was an amazing game! The setting was classic fantasy, divided into eight faiths: Fire, Water, Air, Earth, Chaos, Order, Life, and Death. Each had a different primary race makeup and personality, and each was organized into champions (warriors, mages, and thieves), cavalry, infantry, ranged, scout, three levels of mythical creatures, and a legendary creature. I always loved the unique interactions between the barracks, the thieves guild, the mage tower, the capital, and the Great Temple of each race. Each race also had its own set of spells and artifacts, all of which fit their respective faith perfectly.

In the 2000s, several fansites were made for Lords of Magic, but the sites have since gone the way of all Geocities sites and are hard to access now. So I made my own!

lordsofmagic.wordpress.com

My aim with this project was to make all the assets of Lords of Magic as accessible as possible—like a wiki but cleaner and more attractively presented. I datamined all the assets from the game, and then organized them into buildings, units, spells, and artifacts. I even transcribed all the voice sound files from the game, which I may release as a YouTube video to accompany the site for further access.

I also used text from the game's manual, and I edited this text as well as the text in all the spell and unit descriptions in the following ways:

• Fixed spelling and grammar errors
• Added subheadings where they might be useful
• On the spells, I standardized the language and separated the "mana cost" from the description.
• I made a style guide of capitalization, capitalizing specific champion names (Mage, Thief, Warrior), the names of the faiths, specific statistics (Hit Points, Strength, Dexterity).
• I made the language of spells easier to read. Instead of saying "The unit takes one third the caster's level plus three points of damage," I said "The unit takes damage equal to 3 + 1/3 the caster's level."
• I bolded specific stat changes, spell names (along with hyperlinks) and numbers in artifact and spell descriptions.

A game like this deserved all these hours I put into it, and I'm not finished yet. I still have some neutral units to put onto the site, some story content from the manual, as well as any other assets I happen to find over time.

Lords of Magic is very inspiring. I included a tab of all the artifacts from Lords of Magic in my D&D 5e Magic Items document, as well as all of the Lords of Magic spells in a Homebrewery page. I'm also starting a new D&D group as DM and basing the world heavily on Lords of Magic's eight faiths, which I'm excited about.

I'm having issues running Lords of Magic on modern computers as of just a couple of months ago, but if you want to see more about Lords of Magic or try your luck at actually playing it, the game is offered on GOG.com and on Steam.