Lords of Magic Fansite

In my opinion, the most underrated PC game of all time is a 1997 game by Sierra called Lords of Magic. It has a beautifully organized system of factions called "Faiths," spectacular music, fascinating outside-the-box lore, and a unique gameplay style that involves a mix of turn-based exploration and real-time combat.

My INTJ brain just loves the intricate organization of the factions, with each having a specific set of units (champions (heroes), melee, ranged, mounted, scout, three mythical mage tower units, and a legendary unit) and their spells and artifacts matching their faiths so perfectly.

I've been wanting to raise awareness of and celebrate this game from my childhood for many years now. I did end up finding a refreshingly active community on Reddit, and I ended up becoming an admin for the subreddit and a co-creator of its accompanying Discord channel, but ultimately I wanted to make a fansite for Lords of Magic that gave more details about all the aspects of the game. There were some websites in the 2000s that started what I wanted to accomplish, but they're dying of old age and were never quite as detailed as I hoped they would be.

After a TON of research and deep-digging, I finally figured out how to extract all the text, sound, and image files from the game, and with it I was able to make the Lords of Magic fansite I've always dreamed of.

🔗Click here to check it out

I took my usual approach to this website: Being absolutely excessively thorough about every detail. I enhanced each faction's page by adding in lore from the manual, organized everything completely, and even standardized and reworded the artifact and spell descriptions so that they were easier to understand.

I didn't just list the units in each faction—I categorized them by Barracks, Thieves Guild, and Mage Tower; put in their game sprite as well as their portrait, listed all the names that each hero had, and transcribed every voice line from the sound files for each unit.

As usual when I reverse-engineer something, I learned a lot in this project, including mistakes that the developers made with organizing their files and unused "cutting-room-floor" graphics for interesting speculation.

The only thing the site is missing is sound and music. I may end up just embedding some videos from Keith Zizza's soundtrack. Also, just for the heck of it, I looked up all the credits for the game in the manual and tweeted them, asking if they would be kind enough to answer some questions in an interview. They didn't respond.

A lot of old games are getting remasters, and I'd give just about anything to see this one get the remake it deserves. It's old with clunky controls, and even just smoothing it out to work better on modern computers would be awesome. Even a spiritual successor would be something.

The Lords of Magic setting of Urak and its eight faiths are the primary inspiration for my latest D&D homebrew setting, Luzeon.