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The Circle of Life has no beginning, or end...Choose your faith, and write your own destiny.
"It is said that history becomes legend, as its events recede into the mists of time, and that memories grow dimmer in the slumber of peace. Thus the noble peoples of Urak languished in a thousand years of peaceful splendor, growing forgetful of the dark time their land once knew, heedless of the ancient enemy who yet labored in silence. And so Golgoth, the terrible god of death, beheld that the world was ripe for an era of terror and blood. He summoned Balkoth, the most evil of his sorcerers, and bestowed upon him a mighty artifact of power, that the necromancer might better serve his master in heralding the coming days of darkness. The wings of Balkoth's wretched steed beat the air like thunder, the land shook beneath the rumor of his mustering host, the air was filled with cries of his victims. Who can say what new perils may yet befall, as they struggle to defeat the ancient evil, to reunite the land, and to become... Lords of Magic."
Intro Narration

Lords of Magic is a 1997 computer game distributed by Sierra and developed by Impressions Games.

The player controls one of eight Faiths on the world of Urak, centered around various Elemental Powers. The world of Urak, once knowing a thousand years of peace, was broken when the worshippers of Golgoth united under the dark elf Balkoth to form the faith of Death, which rampaged across the world, shattering old kingdoms and desecrating the Great Temples of each Faith, leaving a world of violence and disorder in their wake. The player, starting out as an intrepid adventurer who seeks to rebuild their Faith to its former glory, sets out with a small band of loyal soldiers to cleanse the Great Temples, unify their Faith, and forge alliances or conquer enemies in order to gather a mighty host to defeat the armies of Death and destroy Balkoth.

Gameplay is familiar to any veteran of the Total War series: much of the action takes place in a Turn-Based Strategy map where you handle recruitment, research, resource management, army movement, and diplomacy. When it comes time to fight, the battlefield is depicted on a real-time battlefield where you can pause to issue orders and use magic/special abilities. Each Faith possesses its own unique units, magic, and strength and weaknesses. Classes and military units run off the Fighter, Mage, Thief dynamic, with units recruited from barracks, mage towers, and thieves' guilds. In addition, each Great Temple has its own unique powers and Legendary Creatures that can be summoned - assuming you have the tremendous resources required to recruit them. Armies are led by champions, who can also train the units trained at each facility to make them stronger.

Resource management is a complex affair involving five resources: gold (used to hire archers/thieves/scouts and buy other resources/mercenaries), ale (used to recruit melee infantry, cavalry, and warships) crystals (used to recruit mages, summon creatures, and crucial to maintaining Legendary Creatures), fame (used to barter for gold and attract followers) and followers, which are needed to man the various buildings in each Faith's capital as well as required to train loyal, low-upkeep troops. Resources are acquired either from structures seized on he greater strategic map, or from the various capitals.

The game is also notable for having an intricate system of interaction between the Faiths, as the player can engage in trade and diplomacy with allies, threaten or plead with enemies, and use thieves to spy upon and steal from enemy factions. There is even an option to capture and then interrogate, torture, execute or release enemy champions. The magical tech tree also allows for research along various avenues of magic, including defensive and offense spells, general utility magic, and overland spells that can alter the landscape, speed up army movement, or increase sight range.


Lords of Magic contains the following tropes:

  • All There in the Manual: While a player can get some details by reading spell and unit descriptions the majority of the game's backstory is confined to its lengthy manual.
  • Bandit Mook: The AI Faiths often send stealthy thieves roving around the map, either solo or accompanied by a small group of archers. These thieves will try to steal from your parties if they're controlled by an unfriendly Faith. Normally they'll steal a paltry amount of gold, crystal, or ale but an unlucky or careless player might be robbed of his artifacts. On the upside would-be stealers have a chance to fail, giving your party the opportunity to capture or kill the enemy thief.
  • Begin with a Finisher: Once a player using the Fire Faith learns Fire's ultimate attack spell, 'Inferno', he'll most likely start every fight with it. Inferno does 2 times the spellcaster's Level Fire damage to EVERY unit on the combat map. A Level 6 or higher mage can kill just about anything besides warrior champions in 2 casts of Inferno. Sure the mage will die with the second cast but you'll usually kill far more than their value in enemy units. Plus Fire has the benefit of relatively cheap Sorceresses and magic creatures that have 100% Fire Resist.
  • Covers Always Lie: Despite Golgoth, the God of Death, being the Evil Overlooker depicted on the game's cover art the player never fights or even faces Him.
  • Crutch Character: Magic Creatures available from the Mage Tower start off at their maximum Level and don't require a Follower to create. This typically makes them more powerful and easier to use than conventional units early in a game. However, once you start leveling up your other units they usually outclass creatures, or at least become more cost-effective. The exception are most Legendary Creatures which are instead a Tactical Superweapon Unit available near the end of a game.
  • Disc-One Nuke: Choosing a Custom start allows the player to start with any artifact in the game provided he spends enough Barter Points to get it. Some artifacts are definitely a Game-Breaker when given to the right Lord, or can quickly become one as the Lord increases his Level.
  • Dungeon Bypass: A player's party can ignore the enemies on the first floor of a multi-floor dungeon if all his units go straight into the entrance for the next floor. This is normally only possible with a party of thieves using Stealth but may also be possible if the player's units are so much more powerful than the enemies they take little or no damage from their hits, allowing his units to just ignore the opponents while walking past them.
  • Gameplay Randomization: On the default map the locations of dungeons and the encounters that wait within are slightly randomized, with the exception of unique dungeons like the Dragon's Lair and Lich Castle. The artifacts and other rewards from higher level dungeons are also somewhat random. Whether the AI Faiths have a warrior, thief, or mage as their Lord is also randomly determined for each Faith except Death.
  • Genre Mashup: Lords of Magic combines Dungeon Crawling roleplaying game elements,turn-based grand strategy and diplomacy, and Real-Time with Pause tactical combat into a High Fantasy setting and quest to defeat an Evil Overlord. While each individual genre is simplified the way they're combined leads to quite complex gameplay.
  • Ice Magic Is Water: 'Ice Bolt' is the Water Faith's only direct damage spell, for practical purposes, and 'Freeze' is their ultimate attack spell. Although Air also gets the spells 'Cone of Cold' and 'Ice' so this could be considered a Downplayed Trope.
  • Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: In most dungeons impassable terrain is represented with slightly different colored ground and there's no obvious reasons why only flying units can move over it.
    • Inverted for combat that takes place on the world map. Any units can move over any terrain except ocean without any penalty besides being slowed down, including pools of lava!
  • Lightning/Fire Juxtaposition: The Storm Giants and Fire Giants start each game with unfriendly relations and generally have a Red Oni, Blue Oni type relationship. The Storm Giants' magic makes extensive use of lightning while the Fire Giants' magic is themed exclusively around elemental fire.
  • Luck-Based Mission: Pretty much every one of a thief's non-combat special abilities are subject to random chance. While a thief's Level and Stealth Factor influences his chance of success for spying, interrogation, and stealing he'll always have some chance of failing. The only guarantee a player can get is guaranteed failure when sending a thief to spy on a party that's using 'Detect Thief' or steal more resources than the enemy actually has.
  • Luck Stat: Champions have a 'Luck' stat and luck is occasionally referenced in the descriptions of artifacts, such as the 'Luckstone', but it doesn't actually have any gameplay impact; likely due to the stat being Dummied Out.
  • Magikarp Power: Mage Lords can sometimes start out with decent support abilities but tend to have terrible damage output and very restrictive Mana capacity. They also die in a few hits from even the weakest enemy archers and can't confer experience to barracks or thieves guilds which leaves your military units behind the level curve. If you do manage to get your Mage Lord leveled up and learn your Faith's best spells he can usually annihilate a max size enemy party with just a few halfway decent units or creatures on his side.
    • The Life Elven Warrior Lord starts out as a Fragile Speedster that can be shot down by enemies as weak as goblin archers, even while he's using the 'Defend' command. At max Level he'll have the highest Defense possible for a Lord, 17, and he can use artifacts that will reduce enemies' Attack, heal him at both the start and end of combat while also providing gradual Regenerating Health during the battle, and do massive damage to Death creatures. With weapon artifacts his Attack can exceed a dragon's; with armor artifacts he can gain Resist against all magic and Defense that rivals the toughest Legendary Creature. Meanwhile he'll still have the fastest combat Speed and most Move points of any warrior, making him an undeniable example of a Lightning Bruiser. The icing on the cake is that the Elven Warlord reaches his max Level with much fewer Experience points than Balkoth and most other warrior Lords.
  • Odd Friendship: The Air Faith is comprised of both small, nimble, mischievous faeries and the tall, strong, solemn Storm Giants. The description of the Air spell 'Headwind', which slows a victim's speed, claims it was developed to hinder nuisance faeries. Nonetheless the two races cooperate effectively and have in-game stats that complement each other.
  • Our Monsters Are Different: Special Edition adds a monster named Grendel inspired by the creature of that name from the legend of Beowulf. Grendels in-game look like giant gray versions of the Creature From The Black Lagoon,have tendrils or small tentacles hanging over their mouth, have glowing yellow eyes and generally look like a humanoid Swamp Monster. Grendel, rather than being the name of a specific individual, is used as the common name for these monsters and they show up multiple times semi-frequently in high-level dungeons.
  • Projectile Spell: The basic damage spell for every Faith besides Chaos creates a homing projectile that doesn't deal damage until it strikes the target. However it is impossible for the target to avoid these projectiles by doing anything short of leaving the combat area entirely. Unusually, the Water spell 'Gift of Life' functions the same way despite healing the target. This can be annoying when your teammate is struck dead before the spell reaches him. More conventional examples of projectile spells are Fire's 'Fury Fire' and Chaos' 'Blades of Fury' and 'Vortex'. Those spells create persistent projectiles that fly straight from the caster to an area of the combat field and then circle that spot rapidly, damaging anything that gets in their way. These projectiles can get slower victims trapped in a Cycle of Hurting as they get hit repeatedly everytime the projectile touches them and can be used for area denial, but are usually easy to avoid.
  • Replay Value: The player's choice of Lord has a major impact on how each game begins and progresses. With 7 Faiths and 3 Lord types you get 21 different starting options for a standard game, and 3 options for a Gotta Kill Them All campaign using Death. Then there's countless possibilities with Custom Starts and Custom Maps.
  • Square Race, Round Class: Any player who has used the Earth Faith should know that dwarves have the worst speed and stealth around. Predictably, Fire's dwarven thief is the worst thief for any actions requiring stealth or espionage.
  • The Unfought: In addition to Balkoth, the Death Faith also has more typical options for warrior, thief, and mage Lords that appear on the Lord selection screen at the beginning of the game. Should you select one of these Lords you can play the Death Gotta Kill Them All campaign with him. The Dark Warrior Lord can actually attain higher Attack and Defense than Balkoth can! However, you'll never be able to face these Death Lords as enemies in a normal game since Balkoth always fills the role for Lord of Death.
  • Unusable Enemy Equipment: Very few artifacts can be used by both champions of opposite Faiths. For example Earth warriors and Air warriors can't use the same artifacts, with the exception of the most generic ones, like 'Ring of Protection', which can be used by any champion. The player will gain any artifacts enemies had when he destroys them in combat, which is where this trope comes into effect. You'll often kill the Lord or champions of a rival Faith and be 'rewarded' with the artifacts they were using, which your units can't equip. However if you completely conquer your rival Faith you'll be able to make their champions, who can then use such equipment.
    • In a Custom start even the cheapest units, spells, and artifacts will be impossibly expensive if they're associated with the opposite Faith. This can lead to things like a Seagull being priced at 9999 Barter Points if you choose a Fire Lord. A bit disappointing since Water's seagull is a much better scout unit that Fire's imp.
  • Useless Useful Spell: Earth's spell 'Turn to Stone' takes a lot of turns to research, is near the end of its spell book, has a high Mana cost, targets a single enemy, and also requires the spellcaster to have a higher level than his target. Slow reduces a target's Attack Rate and combat Speed and Entangle stops it's movement entirely, neither have a caster Level requirement, both are much quicker to research than Turn to Stone, and they can both be cast on the same target for less combined Mana cost than Turn to Stone. Sands of Sleep is another advanced Earth spell that disables the victims' movement and actions and it hits every enemy in a wide area while having no caster Level requirement. The only downside for Sands of Sleep compared to Turn to Stone is that once a victim gets hit by anything the Sleep ends. The only time Turn to Stone would hypothetically be the best choice is when you're facing an extremely powerful unit that's formidable with both melee and ranged attacks... which pretty much means only Dragons and Drakes. Problem is those creatures are Level 10, making it impossible for a generic spellcaster to be higher Level than them! To add insult to injury the Water spell Freeze also disables the target's movement and actions but doesn't have any level requirement to work. The only downside of Freeze compared to Turn to Stone is that it makes the target impervious to normal hits while in effect. This is mostly irrelevant when Freeze is cast on an enemy since the player's party can kill all the other enemies then swarm and overwhelm the one remaining enemy when Freeze ends. This odd attribute of Freeze can actually be a strategic asset by letting the player Freeze one of his own units to save it from imminent death.
  • Video Game Cruelty Punishment: A player that routinely razes villages he captures will quickly have AI Faiths develop hostile attitudes towards his Faith.
  • Video Game Delegation Penalty: Choosing to Auto-Calculate a battle can result in the player taking damage and losses he could avoid with basic tactics if he'd played combat manually. This is because Auto Calc results seem to be based almost entirely on the relative 'barter value' of the opposing parties' units. If your party is much more valuable than your opponents Auto Calc will typically turn out reliable results of you annihilating them with little damage taken. But, if the enemy has expensive units you could take some big damage with Auto Calc. This discounts every Player-Exclusive Mechanic, instance of Artificial Stupidity, and Game-Breaker tactic a player can easily exploit in combat. On the other hand, Auto Calc can occasionally let you win battles that would be impossible manually, such as letting an Earth Magician with practically no damage-dealing ability kill a small enemy group solo. Auto Calc is also useful for wiping out other Faiths' parties completely, as in combat AI units tend to flee when the battle turns against them.
  • Wide-Open Sandbox: The player is strongly encouraged to conquer his Faith's Great Temple ASAP but nothing forces him to. Want to take over a friendly Faith's Great Temple to gain their city while totally ignoring your own starting city? It can be done. Want to take your Starting Units straight into Death's homeland to fight the Final Boss? You can, although you'll probably need to exploit a Game-Breaker Custom start to survive, much less win! Want to take a ship to the Dragon's Lair and win a Greater Artifact before you conquer the Noob Cave? If you can afford to hire a ship and find a way to kill the dragons within, you sure can!
  • A Commander Is You:
    • Earth: Unit Specialist, leans towards brute force. Mostly focused around infantry, with some odd spells from their mages. Infantry is very tough and powerful, but the faction is the slowest in the game.
    • Air: Ranger/Guerilla faction. Fastest units in the game, with a lot of flyers, but generally weaker units than usual. Has strong champions, and ranged is stronger than melee.
    • Fire: Brute Force. Lots of high damage spells, and straightforward offensive melee units.
    • Water: Mario faction. Has strong cavalry, but otherwise units are about average. Also has the best naval units.
    • Order: Mario/Brute Force. Army units are quite strong, with wizard spells focused mostly on straight buffs and damage.
    • Chaos: Technical. Has lots of spells with unusual effects that, as fits the religion's theme, can sometimes be very powerful, sometimes not.
    • Life: Ranger faction. Strong archers and good mages, but melee units are weak. Is faster than normal, but not by much.
    • Death: Mario/elitist. Has strong units of all types, and Balkoth is probably the strongest unit in the game.
  • Abandoned Mine: Abandoned mines (and breweries, for ale) are the only consistent source of resource income each turn to supplement the income from a Faith's cities; at the start of a game they're all occupied by Marauders and must be captured by force to start producing resources. Cities usually have a couple Level 3 mines near them but, since a mine generates resources equal to its Level, the Level 8 to 11 mines in the borderlands are fiercely contested as a game progresses.
  • Action Girl: Water's Amazon Warrior is the only female warrior in the game. Even rank-and-file fighters are Always Male.
  • After the End: The game picks up after a brutal period of destructive chaos caused by Balkoth's rampage. Your people have no armies to defend them, their Great Temples are desecrated, marauders are everywhere, and no one is able to organize in the chaos. It's up to you to retake the Great Temple, be established as Lord, and rebuild your faith to its former glory.
  • The All-Seeing A.I.: When a player kills another Faith's Lord every other unit that Faith had will seek and attack the player's units as quickly as possible regardless of line of Sight and won't stop for anything until they're destroyed.
  • Alchemy Is Magic: The option at a city's temple that allows the player to convert Gold into magic Crystals is called 'Alchemy'
  • Alliance Meter: Each Faith's attitude towards each other Faith ranges from 'Pact' on the friendly end to 'Loathing' on the hostile end. Friendly Faiths may occasionally offer the player a gift of their units and resources. Very hostile Faiths may send invading parties to try to capture and raze your buildings, especially if their military might is superior. The player's Faith also has a listed attitude towards other Faiths but this has no impact on gameplay.
  • Always Accurate Attack: Most Faiths' basic damage spell creates a homing projectile that unerringly finds it's target. The only way for the victim to avoid such a projectile is to leave the battlefield entirely by fleeing before it strikes him. Being unavoidable is one of the main benefits of magic damage. The other advantage magic has is that it ignores the damage reduction of a target's Defense.
  • All Your Powers Combined:
    • Balkoth has the health and armor of warrior, the spells of a mage, and the ranged attack of a thief. He counts as a mage for the purpose of equipping items though. He even flies.
    • You, by late-game, if you focus on expanding your holdings and liberating/conquering other regions. You'll have access to other faiths' entire tech trees and units, allowing you to assemble a powerful military with the strengths of every faction.
  • Amazon Brigade: All of the Water units are Amazons, aside from the lizardmen. Although the heavy cavalry are Amazon men.
  • Amplifier Artifact: All artifacts besides restorative potions and spell scrolls work like this. Rather than having its own attack rating a weapon artifact typically just increases the baseline Attack stat of it's user. This means if the champion using it is weak to begin with an artifact is unlikely to make him especially formidable. However no artifact has a Level requirement so even the weakest champion can use any of them so long as he's the appropriate Faith and class.
  • Ancient Evil: The opening narration describes Golgoth, the "terrible God of Death" as "the ancient enemy who yet labored in silence" during Urak's "thousand years of peaceful splendor". The victory narration says Golgoth passes from the world after seeing he had "none left willing to serve him" but ominously hints that he may return yet again, possibly making him an Eternal Villain
  • Animated Armor: This is the appearance and description of Order's high-level magic creature, the 'Warrior Spirit'. The Spirit vanishes in a flash of white light when destroyed, armor and all, so it's armor may be illusory or magical.
  • Animate Dead: The Death spells 'Raise Skeleton', 'Raise Shade', and 'Walk Among Us' all do some variation of this provided there's a dead unit available. The undead units created by these spells are rather weak, so most Death players will probably only raise them to be sacrificial fodder for the 'Embrace of Golgotha' spell.
  • Anti-Air: A good number of Earth spells, including one that drags flying units to the ground and possibly kills them.
  • Anti-Armor: Fire's spell 'Heat Metal' does damage that increases the higher the target's Defense stat is. It's meant to be used against heavily-armored Earth and Order units.
  • Apathetic Citizens: While losing Fame and losing control of your Faith's Great Temple will reduce the number of new Followers you'll never lose your existing Followers unless your city is captured. Also if you capture an enemy Faith's city their Followers will start working for you immediately.
  • Appeal to Force: Unfriendly Faiths with superior military power will often send a party to the player's units with a Demand or a Threat for a tribute of units and resources. Deny a Faith's Threat and they'll immediately initiate combat.
    • The player can also use a Threat to characterize his request for goods from another Faith during parley. The more the player's military power exceeds his opponent's the more likely they are agree to the Threat. However threats will quickly make the other Faith more hostile when they succeed.
  • Arbitrary Headcount Limit: Parties are limited to three champions and nine units of one to three each, allowing for thirty individuals on the field at once, although the Ice Drake and Fafnir, legendary creatures of Air and Fire respectively, cannot combine at all, which is fine, seeing as both count as one man armies.
    • Also, only one instance of each Legendary Creature can be summoned in each campaign. So if someone else took a Great Temple and summoned the Phoenix or Fafnir ahead of you, you won't be able to summon them later. Doesn't apply to the lesser creatures that can be summoned at the Temples, like regular Dragons or Pegasus Riders.
  • Area of Effect: Several field spells transform an area to the type of ground that is advantageous to the faith that cast it.
  • Armor and Magic Don't Mix: Every artifact in the game that is a suit of armor or helmet is usuable only by warriors, never by Mages.
  • Artificial Brilliance: The game's AI is remarkably clever at exploiting your weaknesses and intelligently reacting to your actions. They'll soften up an area with a garrison by altering the terrain around it, send massive spam attacks of cheap units against invading armies to wear them down, sneak thieves into your territory to gather intelligence and swipe whatever valuables they can, and gang up on isolated units in combat. If your Lord is in battle, they'll do whatever it takes to take them down. On the diplomacy screen, they'll adjust their requests and demands based on relative strength (a faction growing too powerful will begin making "demands" instead of "requests" or offering trades and will get pissed if you don't accept). If you have thieves in enemy territory, they'll actively pursue the thief, shadowing their movements and continuously trying to take them out, and they'll do the same to your scouts to blind you.
  • Artificial Stupidity: While the AI can be fairly clever at maneuvering units around and in defending, one of the big areas it falls short in is that the AI controlled faiths will leave token forces in control of their cities and buildings, meaning if you do get over the massive wave of enemies or are early enough along in the game, you can pretty easily take over a faction simply by sending a moderately sized army at their stronghold, and force the AI to cobble their disparate units around the capitol together.
    • The combat AI has no idea how to deal with a thief using Stealth. They won't try to use Detect Thief or any other counterplay and if a thief is detected they'll immediately and completely forget about him when he reenters Stealth.
    • AI Faiths seem to negotiate trades almost entirely based on the value assigned the player's offer compared to their offer. The problem with this trading method is that most objects seem to have a set value for the AI that never varies based on context. This leads the AI to consider spells they can't possibly cast and buildings they can't possibly defend highly valuable commodities regardless. This makes giving the AI useless stuff a great way to improve diplomatic relations or get actually valuable resources from them.
  • Back from the Brink: The player's Faith starts like this, unless he cheats with the Custom start option. The Faith's most holy site has been desecrated and occupied by monsters, all magical knowledge has been lost, the only people willing to fight are mercenaries, the capital city is a defenseless village, and its shopkeepers charge extortionate prices. Of course, Death and the player's rival Faith start the game much better off.
  • Barbarian Tribe: The Chaos Faith consists of archetypical wild barbarians.
    • "Watch the dog! He's the only one here who doesn't bite." - Chaos Tavern
  • Baseless Mission: The Special Edition comes with Legends of Urak, a set of backstory scenarios that start without a Capitol.
  • Bat Out of Hell: Bats are Death's scout units. The Lord of Death also rides a giant bat.
  • Battle Cry: Warrior Lords and champions only unique ability is 'Rally', which can be used to give +1 Attack and Defense to military units of the same Faith in the warrior's group. When the Rally ability is used the warrior will shout a battle cry related to his Faith.
  • The Berserker: Chaos and Fire infantry are human berzerkers wielding two-handed greatswords nearly as large as they are. They have the highest Attack and Hitpoints of any infantry but the lowest Defense. Most melee units can become this with the 'Berzerk' command, which will increase their Attack stat by 50% of their Defense stat while reducing their Defense to zero. Ironically, Berzerkers can't use the Berzerk ability very effectively due to how low their Defense is to begin with.
  • Big Bad: Golgoth, God of Death, sets in motion Lord Balkoth and the dark elves reign of terror. He's also the Evil Overlooker portrayed on the cover art.
  • Beware the Skull Base: Death's city stronghold and Great Temple prominently feature giant skulls seemingly carved of blackened rock, just in case the player didn't pick up their Obviously Evil aesthetics beforehand.
  • BFS: Storm and Fire Giant warriors use them, naturally. And nobody else can.
  • Blood Knight: The Fire and Chaos faiths glorify war, while the Death Faith just likes to kill.
  • Botanical Abomination: The first magic creature Earth can summon is the 'Shambler', which is one of these. Their unit description calls Shamblers mindless beasts grown from fungus, muck, and rotting vegetation and mentions they used to be a danger to Earth's people until they learned how to magically control them.
  • Bottomless Magazines: Any unit with non-magical projectile attacks will never run out of ammunition.
  • Bows Versus Crossbows: Crossbows are mostly used by the humans that worship Order, but also by Fire's dwarven thieves. Bows are used by the more dexterous elves, faeries, and Halflings. In gameplay units using bows and crossbows have roughly the same Range Attack damage, but bow users get superior Range and quicker Rate of Fire.
  • But Thou Must!: All fights against Balkoth, even if he's close to death, surrounded, and completely without help, must be done with the player's input in the battle screens. He auto-wins any encounter that is Auto-Calc'd with a Champion under level 8, and turns tail and runs when Champions above that level survive.
  • Blood Magic: The Water spell 'Blood Lust' is described like this in it's spell book. Blood Lust raises the target's combat power but also causes him to take damage every few seconds.
  • Brainwashing for the Greater Good: The ultimate Order attack spell, 'Possession', grants the spellcaster's team total control over the target enemy until the end of combat, when he's immediately destroyed. Despite this, Order is presented as the most obviously heroic Faith, besides Life.
  • Breath Weapon: The Legendary dragons Fafnir and Ice Drake have a unique ability they can use once per turn called 'The Breath' that will One-Hit Kill all enemies in an Area of Effect in front of them. Generic dragons and drakes shoot fireballs from their mouths for their Range Attack.
  • Captain Ersatz:
    • One of the special Fire units is a Balrog (set as "Demon"), complete with a fiery scourge.
    • Earth Thief characters are essentially Bilbo Baggins. If clicked on, he says that he's hungry and asks if it's dinner yet.
    • The Chaos Huntress looks like Xena with a ponytail and fights with a chakram.
  • Cast From Hitpoints:
    • Water's healing spell 'Gift of Life' costs the spellcaster 4 Hitpoints in addition to it's Mana cost.
    • Death Mages can learn the Spell 'Embrace of Golgotha' which turns one of their unit's Hitpoints into Mana points for the spellcaster, destroying the targeted ally in the process.
  • Casting a Shadow: The Death Spells 'Dark Shadow', 'Lost Soul', and 'Raise Shade', all create a Living Shadow that can seek and damage enemies.
  • Character Portrait: Every unit in the game has a portrait that is displayed when it's selected. Champions (warriors, thieves, Mages) of each Faith and class get one of a few different, randomly selected, portraits.
  • Classical Cyclops: Chaos' high-level magic creature is a typical Cyclops. It stands out for having the highest Attack power of any normal creature but extremely slow attacks that are easy to interrupt
  • Color-Coded Armies: Each faith has a general set of colors that appear on most units. Life is yellow, Earth is green, Chaos is orange, Water has dark blue, Death is black/purple, Air is light blue, Order is cream-white, and Fire is red.
  • Command & Conquer Economy: Upgrades and unit training are specifically on your say-so.
  • The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: The computer has a certain disregard for the rules. In particular, one of the things it can do is seize only a mage tower and use it to make units (normally, the associated city also has to be taken to produce units). And it can also produce units that can only be produced from the Great Temple instead of the mage tower. Oh, and it can also produce as many of the top tier Great Temple unit (normally only one can be summoned per game, even if it dies) as it desires, and even field Fafnir and the Ice Drake with other units, where normally they are forced to act as One Man Armies.
  • Creepy Cave: Most of the low-level dungeons in the Chaos, Air, Fire, and Death regions are examples of these.
  • Critical Existence Failure: When two people of your three-person unit die, they come back if the unit is sufficiently healed. If that last person dies, however, all three are gone for good.
  • Character Alignment: invoked Of elements, not morals like in Dungeons & Dragons.
  • Chokepoint Geography:
    • Despite technically neighboring Death, Water is considered to have the most defensible starting position, being located on a peninsula with only two land routes to their capital, both leading to friendly neighbors (Life and Order). While Death is an issue, the natural sea barrier between them and Water having the strongest navy makes defending that front fairly easy as well. Starting as Water means that Fire, one of Death's two neighbors, starts off stronger than the other Faiths, strong enough to possibly withstand an early assault by Death (although the two Faiths get along fairly well in the early game). Water also has a sea border with another hostile neighbor, Chaos.
    • Air also has a sea barrier with Death, though Death can much more easily take the "backdoor" (through the coastline along Fire and then Chaos territory) to reach Air than it can for Water.
    • This of course means that Death itself is fairly well insulated from attack in the early going, having only two neighbors on land, both of which are friendly in the early game. This is helpful when playing as Death, since all enemy Faiths are much stronger than you at the outset and you'll need time to build your armies.
  • Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Just because they're allies doesn't mean they won't stab you in the back. One wrong trade deal, and that powerful ally you were trusting to watch one side of the map will suddenly decide to storm your capital.
  • Cowardly Boss: The Lord of Death, Balkoth, will always attempt to flee combat once he's lost most of his Hitpoints. Since he flies and is faster than most other units finishing him off can be tricky, possibly requiring the player use spells to disable his movement or deal unavoidable damage to him.
  • Cradling Your Kill: The Dark Elves, out of their love for death are known for doing this to their victims before delivering the final blow.
  • Crystal Dragon Jesus: The Order faith has many pseudo-Christian trappings, including the faith's most powerful buff spell being called "Crusade" (represented by a symbol of a cross), and the Order quest in the Legends of Urak expansion from the Special Edition is the Matter of Britain (based on Malory's Le Morte D Arthur), including the Holy Grail. The game's manual briefly describes the Order pantheon as "consisting of three Gods, whom they call the Triad, and worship as one entity", a blatant reference to (Trinitarian) Christianity. However, Order theology is clearly non-Christian, instead focusing on the Balance Between Good and Evil and closer to Taoism if anything.
  • Cycle of Hurting: Units flinch when they get hit, and someone with slow attack speed and poor hit recovery like a fire or storm giant can end up unable to attack all when surrounded, even if the individual blows are barely hurting them. The issue can be alleviated with items that improve attack speed or hit recovery. This can be pretty amusing with a high level and well equipped Earth warrior champion - they are the slowest attacking warriors and thus very vulnerable to this, but also the sturdiest. Many a battle can be won by sending the dwarf champion in by himself, watching him disappear under a swarm of weaker units and get stunlocked for extended periods of time while taking minimal damage, only for the occasional axe to swing up above the crowd and one-shot one of the attackers.
  • Damage Over Time: A few Faiths can learn damage over time spells such as Death's 'Decay' and Air's 'Poison Cloud'. Typically such spells deal damage very slowly over the course of a minute or more making them impractical in normal circumstances. This gradual damage does ignore all damage reduction though, even magic Resist. Some artifacts can also deal damage over time. The Greater Artifacts 'Staff of Drowning' and 'Staff of Asphyxiation' grant the user the unique, rapidly lethal, multi-target Do T abilities 'Drown' and 'Asphyxiate'
  • Damage Reduction: Almost every unit has some 'Defense' rating which reduces normal melee and missile hits by the listed amount. If Defense reduces the incoming damage to zero the unit struck will lose no Hit Points , and a different hit-stun animation will play showing him blocking the strike. If the struck unit will lose Hit Points the amount lost can still be reduced by the percentage 'Resist' the unit has to that damage type. There are ten types of Resist: one for normal melee hits, one for normal missile hits, and one for each of the eight Faith's magic. However if the unit has a negative Resist percent the damage from that type will actually be increased. Resist is the main defense against magic damage since magic ignores Defense. Nonetheless Resist is mostly irrelevant since very few units besides magic creatures have Resist to anything. But there are a few creatures, such as dragons, golems, and the Great Wyrm in which understanding Resist is essential to effectively countering them. They can be much easier to kill with the right type of magic damage than normal hits due to their negative Resist to some magic, their normal melee and missile resist, and their high Defense.
  • Dark Is Evil: Death is evil, as per the narration to the game's opening, while all the other elements are some variation of good. Even Chaos and Fire, which in many stories usually get lumped in with being associated with some kind of great evil. In-game, Death, Fire, Chaos, and Earth all start with good relations amongst themselves, while Water, Air, Order, and Life start with good relations amongst themselves, with few crossovers between the two groups, creating a sort of good/evil split.
  • Deadpan Snarker: Balathustrius, the travelling scribe who narrates most of the backstory found in the game's manual, often recounts his misadventures in this fashion.
  • Defeat Equals Explosion: When Death Lord Balkoth's Hit Points are reduced to zero he and his mount immediately vanish in an explosion of purple light.
  • Defeat Means Playable: You're required to beat Balkoth at least once before the game will allow you to play the Death faith in the main game.
  • Defector from Decadence: Inverted. Death's followers are largely elves who have become disillusioned with the purity of the Life Faith and were tempted to darkness, depravity, and decadence by Golgoth, forming the relatively young and violent Death Faith. Then this trope gets flipped right back around to being played straight with Earth's cavalry, who are more good-aligned dark elves who defected from the defectors.
  • Deadly Disc: The Chaos thief, the 'Huntress', uses one: her exclusive Greater Artifact is the 'Chakram of Entropy'. The Huntress has a fast Rate of Fire but only average Range Attack power and much shorter Range than most Missile units, so she verges on Awesome, but Impractical
  • Defog of War: A few spells increase your vision, and one even reveals terrain and the location, but not strength, of enemy units in a given patch of land. Interrogating prisoners can also reveal enemy locations.
  • Dem Bones: Skeletons are the first available Death creature and the cheapest. They're slow and have weak combat stats, except for a high Resist% against normal missile hits. On the positive side they can be created for free using a dead unit and the Death spell 'Raise Skeleton'
  • Devious Daggers: Many Faiths' thieves are shown using daggers for their melee attack. Death's thief, the 'Assassin', is unique for using daggers for both melee and ranged attacks. They are also the only champions who can use the "Knife of Life Stealing" artifact.
  • Difficult, but Awesome:
    • Order. They have probably the most unpleasant starting position in the game, being centrally located, and marauding parties run through their territory with regularity. There's also a substantial chance that even the Level One difficulty buildings in their territory will spawn with a Pegasus inside. Sometimes two. But if you can struggle through the challenge of simply holding your territory, you'll have an impressive Badass Army of elite knights, infantry, and crossbowmen led by very powerful wizards, paladins, and rangers.
    • Air. Low armor and attack power means they can't fight like regular factions and have to fight literally on the wing, especially against heavy-hitting Earth, Order, and Chaos units. But their speed is incredible, and they're the only faction that can easily field an all-flying army that gives them amazing strategic speed and mobility, and their magic is second only to Fire's for raw destructive potential.
    • Fire has some of the strongest individual units in the game, as well as the ranged units that do some of the highest damage, but they have pitiful defenses across the board...and one serious issue: they're right on the border with Death, so unless you're willing to pretty much be a vassal of Balkoth's empire for a large part of the game, expect to be constantly fighting Death incursions.
    • Water is also located beside Death, but has the benefit of a sea blocking direct passage between the two in the early goings. Once Death starts developing its navy this can become a problem, but luckily Water has the game's strongest navy to counter with.
  • Digitized Sprites: This is the method used to create unit sprites. Some fan-made Game Mod have been able to add new unit graphics to the game using this method.
  • Dispel Magic: Every Faith can learn a variant of the 'Dispel Magic' spell in their general-purpose Spell Book.
  • The Dragon: The necromancer Balkoth serves the Death God Golgoth in this way. Balkoth is the Lord of Death during gameplay and is the one who the player must actually fight and destroy before Death conquers the world.
  • Draw Aggro: The Chaos spell 'Blind Rage' forces a lower level enemy to target the spellcaster while neglecting other potential targets. A Chaos shaman can combine this with Teleport Spam from the spell 'Blink' to keep their victim on a wild goose chase across the combat map.
  • Dungeon Crawling: Clearing out the monsters within the many dungeons scattered around the world map is essential for gaining experience points and resources early in a game. Dungeons are also the primary source for stat-boosting artifacts and spell scrolls. Some dungeons have multiple levels an adventurous party can descend to, and the lower levels have more challenging encounters and greater rewards.
  • Dying Moment of Awesome: Invoked with the Order spell Heroic Demise, which greatly magnifies a unit's combat stats at the cost of them dying automatically once the battle ends.
  • Easy Communication: A parley can be initiated with another Faith so long as any one of the player's units moves onto the same space as any one of the other Faith's units. Furthermore, the party composition of both sides has no impact on the parley. This can lead to expensive trade deals and strengthened alliances being created by the negotiations between a seagull and a dog.
  • Early Game Hell: Unless the player spends most of his starting points in a custom start game to buy it, he won't have a city stronghold or control of his Faith's Great Temple when the game begins. This means the player can't train normal units (only inefficient level 1 mercenaries), has no reliable income, receives no Followers, and can't research spells until he kills all the starting monsters in his Great Temple. This can be somewhat challenging, especially on Hard difficulty, as there's a chance the Great Temple will be occupied by relatively powerful enemies, such as a necromancer or rock troll. Lose your starting units or have another Faith capture the Great Temple before you and the game can become practically unwinnable.
  • Earth/Wind Juxtaposition: Of the eight Elemental Nations, The Earth nation consists of an alliance of dwarves, gnomes and halflings, and its units generally have high attack and defence but slow movement, while the Air nation consists of a mix of faeries and storm giants. They naturally begin the game with poor relations with each other. Overlapping with Life/Death Juxtaposition, the Air nation has above-average relations with the elves of the Life nation, and the Earth nation begins the game with cordial relations with the dark elves of the Death nation (though this relationship will degrade and turn sour eventually).
  • Easter Egg: In the Special Edition version, there are 4 quests (Fire, Earth, Death, and Order) you can choose from. There's also a hidden 5th quest (based on the story of Siegfried, and complete with German accents) that can be accessed by clicking on the center of the quest selection room.
  • Easy Logistics: Every unit type besides scouts and magic creatures require one Follower to train and one resource upkeep per turn (scouts and creatures don't even require a Follower). Given enough turns any unit can travel anywhere on the map (besides impassable terrain) without any complications in maintaining it. A Follower assigned to a City building will immediately start producing one resource per turn and they can reassigned immediately and without penalty. Trading will also happen instantly if both sides agree to the trade, regardless of the number of resources, units, or artifacts exchanged. The only logistical complications are that Followers cannot be moved from one city to another and that a Faith needs to control a city in a region to use the buildings in that region.
  • Elemental Powers: Four of the eight faiths are based around the classic elements, and the other four have their own, more esoteric focus.
  • Elemental Embodiment: Fire, Air, and Water can all summon a roughly humanoid embodiment of their element from their Mage Tower. Predictably, these magic creatures are called Elementals.
  • Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: Creatures of the Elemental Faiths usually take less damage from Spells of their own element and extra damage from Spells of their opposite element. Earth is more damaging against Air creatures and vice versa, and Water is very deadly against Fire. The odd exception is Water: besides the Water Elemental, Water creatures are extra vulnerable to Air instead of Fire.
  • Elves Versus Dwarves: The Life-worshipping elves and Earth-worshipping dwarves typically begin the game with poor relations.
    • The Earth faction does have dark elves on its side as their cavalry.
  • Enemy Exchange Program: Liberating their temple while they are friendly or taking over another faith's capitol city allows you to create their units from their facilities. In addition, there are Villages that, when liberated, can be used to create buildings of the two faiths they border, and Towers that automatically release a random champion of the Faith it's closest to. However, you can only produce units from a village of a particular faith in their own territory, and only if you have followers in that particular faith's capital. Having fifty idle followers in the Chaos capital is useless if you want to make Order soldiers.
  • Entropy and Chaos Magic: Chaos spells have a degree of random chance that isn't present in other Faith's magic but are also capable of unmatched change and devastation. The Greater Artifact for Chaos thieves is the 'Chakram of Entropy' and can randomly teleport it's victims.
  • Escape Battle Technique: The Earth spell 'Earth Meld' causes the target unit in the spellcaster's party to flee battle instantly and creates a new escape point at his former location.
  • Evil vs. Evil: The descriptions of Fire's spells explicitly mention the Faith's adherents making use of slavery, torture, and suicide attacks yet they nonetheless must destroy the Evil Overlord of Death to win the game, just like the conventionally heroic Faith's.
  • Evil Gloating: Whenever another Faith's Lord dies a short video plays in which the Lord of Death, Balkoth, and God of Evil Golgoth celebrate their enemy's demise and proclaim themselves one step closer to taking over the world.
  • Evil Overlord: Balkoth's goal as the Lord of Death.
  • Evil Sounds Deep: Death Lord Balkoth has a much deeper voice than most characters or units.
  • Evil Sorceror: The intro narration describes Balkoth as "the most evil of His sorcerors". Balkoth in-game is considered the Death Mage Lord and has the highest potential Mana points of any mage.
  • Everyone Has Standards: No matter the alignment, interrogators and torturers are despised. even Death followers lose fame.
  • Everyone Hates Hades: And the other way around too. No matter what faction you are, relations with Death will always slowly deteriorate over time until everyone loathes Death, and Death loathes everyone else.
  • Expansion Pack: The 'Special Edition' added Legendary Creatures, Great Temple special buildings with unique functions for each Faith, additional monster types, multi-floor dungeons, and the 'Legends of Urak' which are single-player storylines that play out somewhat like conventional roleplaying games.
  • Fighter, Mage, Thief: Well actually the game calls it Warrior Mage Thief, but the principal is the same. All races get one "leader" unit of each type, all units are associated with a particular type of leader through the buildings they are trained at. Cavalry and Infantry are trained at a barracks by warriors, and built there along with ships. Ranged units and scouts are trained by thieves at a Thieves' Guild. Magic creatures are created at Mage Towers or the Great Temple. The three types of units also use different types of resources, almost always based on which type they are associated with.
  • Fixed Damage Attack: All damage spells deal a fixed amount of damage. This distinguishes damage spells from normal hits, which are reduced by Defense and can have their damage vary up to plus or minus 6 from the attacker's Attack stat based on the relative direction the target is facing (hits to the back are more likely to do increased damage) and random chance. Spell damage is only modified by the spellcaster's Level and the target's Resist% to the spell's Faith, if that.
  • Flaming Sword: One of the easiest Fire spells to learn is 'Flame Sword'. Rather than providing any Fire-type damage, it simply increases the Attack of a single teammate for the spell's duration.
  • Flavor Text: The spell books in every Faith's library include in-character anecdotes about or descriptions of the use of the selected spell. Unfortunately the actual gameplay effects of a spell aren't revealed until it has been researched, forcing meticulous players to seek out fan-made spell guides if they want to optimize their research order on the first try.
  • Fog of War: Every unit has a Sight stat which indicates how many spaces they can see on the world map, and this is the only way to remove Fog of War. Exceptions are Watch Tower buildings, which have Sight without the need for any unit, and the 'Seer' spell, which can reveal enemy locations in the casting area despite a lack of Sight. Parties outside your Faith's Sight can move around without your knowledge. Typically thieves and scouts have the most Sight while rank-and-file infantry and cavalry have the least.
  • Forced Transformation: The Chaos spell 'Polymorph Other' will transform an enemy into a creature, usually a harmless farm animal, until another Mage casts Dispel Magic or the victim is Exorcized at a city temple. However the spell can sometimes backfire and transform the target into a creature as powerful as a dragon.
  • Fungus Humongous: The Earth Great Temple consists of towering giant mushrooms. Many other Earth buildings also incorporate oversized mushrooms.
  • Fragile Speedster:
    • Air units usually fly and usually have fast combat Speed and a lot of Move points but low Hit Points.
    • Scout units from every Faith usually have more Move points and faster combat Speed than typical for their Faith but will die in one or two hits from anything besides perhaps another scout.
  • Game Mod: Lords of Magic's dedicated fans have created everything from simple game patches that let the player do things like use Sea Monster units on land to extensive rebalance and conversion mods that add brand new units, spells, artifacts, and artwork.
  • Garrisonable Structures: Interesting variation. Depending on how upgraded the capitol city is, the walls will be: Level one, not there, level two, there but with no gate, funneling the enemy to one spot with steps on your side to place ranged units so that they can fire down, and level three, where there is a gate that the enemy must destroy before they can get through, allowing your ranged units and mages time to whittle them down while they crowd in. Other buildings have specific areas of impassible land that can be used as walls as well.
  • Geo Effects: Each faith has a landscape tailored to their faith that gives them movement and attack speed bonuses to their benefits while in terrain, often associated with "enemy" faiths, their movement and attack speed is halved, each faith also have spells that turn the ground targeted into their particular terrain.
  • Giant Spider: Water's Legendary Creatures are man-sized spiders. Their combat stats are weak but they can disable an enemy's movement with their web and they're quite stealthy; these traits make them useful companions for thieves. They can also move on both ocean and land and their web disables enemy ships like any other unit, giving them a niche use in naval battles.
  • Glass Cannon:
    • Ranged units in general have weaker defense and hit points than other unit types, so high damage ranged types fit the category well. Longbowmen (the Life ranged units) are the strongest example, having the longest range in the game, among the highest damage of any unit, but among the lowest hit points and defense of any unit.
    • Chaos and Fire barracks units. They have the highest attack strength for units of their type, but while they have the highest hit points of their type as well, also have the lowest defenses of anything in the game.
    • Any barracks unit can use the "berserk" ability, reducing its defense to 0 to give itself some of its normal defensive strength as extra offense.
  • God of Evil: Golgoth, who the Death worshippers revere.
  • Golem: Earth's mid-Level magic creature is the 'Golem', and it fits the typical role of a magically animated humanoid servant made of stone. In gameplay the Golem stands out for having an extremely high Resist percent to normal attacks and both Life and Death magic.
  • Guys Smash, Girls Shoot: Of the eight Faiths seven have a male warrior (the only champion type that doesn't normally have a ranged attack).Thieves and Mages on the other hand are evenly divided between male and female.
  • Harmless Freezing: The Water spell 'Freeze' prevents the target from moving or acting but does no damage. In fact it actually makes the target impervious to normal melee and missile attacks until the spell subsides.
  • Haunted Castle: The 'Lich Castle' unique dungeon is inhabited by the most powerful undead creatures in the game, has a decrepit, foreboding appearance, and is isolated on a tiny island off the coast of the Death Faith's homeland.
  • Heal It with Water: Water's healing spells are second only to Life's. The 'Healing Water' spell is even more powerful than Life spells since it will completely heal the spellcaster's entire party. Water Mage Towers are also the only ones that can create healing potions.
  • Healing Magic Is the Hardest: While every Faith can learn a spell that either slightly or substantially increases units' passive Hit Points recovery each turn only Life and Water Mages can learn spells that heal immediately and during combat. Comparitively, damage spells are much more common since every Faith can learn them and the basic damage spell is usually on the first page of a Faith's attack Spell Book and can be researched within just a few turns.
  • Healing Spring: Water's special building the 'Holy Spring' will completely heal Water units. The Spring's owner can also buy the 'Potion of Rejuvenation' at it. This potion will completely restore the user's Hitpoints, Mana points, and Movement points when it's consumed.
  • Heal Thyself: The Water spell 'Heal Self' can only heal the spellcaster. Uniquely the amount healed by this spell is based on how many Hitpoints the spellcaster has lost, it always restores 50% of their lost Hitpoints. This trait makes 'Heal Self' useful to use in conjunction with Water's other healing spell 'Gift of Life', which is Cast From Hitpoints.
  • Healing Shiv: The Greater Artifact 'Staff of Drowning' can be used to cast a unique Spell that drowns enemies on land, quickly damaging them while the spell lasts. The same drowning spell will rapidly heal Water units, including the human Amazons.
  • Hero Must Survive: After a fashion. Each faith has a Lord, and if that Lord dies, the faith is out, although the remaining forces become marauding parties hell-bent on avenging their fallen leader, specifically going after units of the faith that killed their Lord. If you liberate the Great Temple of a friendly faith, they will swear fealty to you, and you get their Lord. If your starting Lord dies, as long as you have another, the game can continue. This restriction is waived to a degree if you are in combat with Balkoth (or the last remaining Lord if you are playing Death); if you manage to kill him after your own Lord has died in the battle, it still gives you the victory.
  • Hero Unit: Their Lord is the first unit every Faith starts with, the Lord has greater potential power and a higher maximum Level than standard champions of the same class, but the Lord's death means defeat for his Faith.
  • Hero with Bad Publicity: If you're not careful, your fame can plummet to rock bottom - generally by losing battles (especially capitals), demanding too much gold at the magistrate's office (essentially and literally cashing in your fame for money) or by failing an interrogation or torture session on an enemy champion.
  • High Fantasy: Lords of Magic applies a typical High Fantasy setting and plot to a strategy game.
  • Holding Out for a Hero: The voiceovers for several city buildings apathetically mention that many would-be Lords have died trying to reunite their Faith. Should the player's Lord succeed in liberating his Faith's Great Temple their city will immediately build him a stronghold and loyally follow him.
    • "If I had a gold piece for every Lord-to-be I've seen I'd buy a kraken to scrub the floors." - Chaos Tavern
    • "The Earth holds the bodies of many who sought to be Lord and failed. Do you think yourself their better?" - Earth Magistrate
  • Home Field Advantage: Every Faith's city is surrounded by terrain that slows down units from its opposite, rival, Faith.
  • Horns of Barbarism: Chaos berzerkers, raiders, and beast riders wear horned helmets as does the Earth Dwarf warrior. While most Earth units don't seem especially barbaric the Flavor Text of several Air spells does describe dwarf warriors as 'Battle Ragers' who are ferocious in combat. Only Chaos and Earth warriors can use the 'Helm of Asymmetry' artifact, which is depicted as a simple horned helmet.
  • Horse of a Different Color: Warrior heroes of Chaos, Water, Life, and Death ride tigers, ostriches, and two different types of lizards, respectively. In the special edition, orcish cavalry ride wolves too.
  • Hot Blooded Sideburns: Every Character Portrait for a Fire Warrior has impressive sideburns.
  • Humans by Any Other Name: Humans who serve the Chaos, Order, or Water faith are (respectively) called Barbarians, Archons, or Amazons.
  • Human Sacrifice: At the Death special building 'Altar of Sacrifice' prisoners can be used for this purpose, conferring bonus experience and Mana to Death Mages.
  • Immune to Fire: All Fire units, even the human 'Flame Berzerkers', can move over lava terrain without penalty. Fire Elementals and Dragons have a total 100% Resist stat against Fire magic damage, as does Life's Phoenix.
  • Incredibly Lame Pun: Many of the city buildings for the elemental Faiths make puns based on their element.
    • "You're just in time, we're having our biggest fire sale yet!" - Fire Market
    • "You can get any drink you like here, so long as it's on the rocks." - Earth Tavern
    • "If you can't reach a deal on something you like ask for a rain check." - Water Market
  • Invisibility: A thief given the 'Stealth' command will be invisible to all units besides his own Faith's until he takes a hostile action or is detected by other units.
  • Isometric Projection: This is the perspective used on both the world map and combat maps.
  • Instant-Win Condition: If the player kills the Death Lord Balkoth his Faith instantly wins the game regardless of how many other units or buildings Death controlled.
  • It's Up to You: NPC Faiths can kill Death units and may even reduce the Lord of Death to one remaining hit point but only player controlled units can strike the killing blow that wins the game.
  • Jack Bauer Interrogation Technique: Captured enemy champions can be questioned for information about their military, economy, or magical capabilities, but if the champion questioning them fails, the violence of the act will spark negative repercussions among both your own faith and the others. Thieves are generally best at interrogating, and only when they're substantially superior in level to their target.
    • Torture Always Works: You can also torture the prisoner, which is more effective, but has even more severe repercussions, and may kill them. But if it fails, your fame will vanish and everyone will come to hate you.
  • Javelin Thrower: Death's missile units are Dark elf Javelins throwers. At Level 5 they have the highest Range Attack and fastest Rate of Fire possible for missile units, making their fearsome damage output superior to their counterparts from other Faiths. Dark Javelins can also get the highest Defense possible for missile units and are overall one of the deadliest enemies you'll face in a typical game. Somewhat alleviating Javelins power is their slightly below average Range and weak melee Attack damage.
  • Knight in Shining Armor: The Order faction has knights, paladins, armored warrior spirits, and Sir Lancelot as its legendary creature.
  • Land of One City: Each Faith starts with one city, the control of which is essential to using every building in the region. Capturing a Faith's city is by far the most devastating blow you can strike against them, besides killing their Lord.
  • Large and in Charge: The Fire Giants and the Air-worshipping Storm Giants are the leaders and champions of their Faiths.
  • Lead the Target: Units with normal Ranged Attacks shoot rather slow projectiles in a straight line that must actually strike the target to land a hit. The units firing these projectiles will automatically lead a moving target but the AI or a micro-managing player can avoid them by changing their movement direction. Certain thief artifacts will increase the speed of the user's projectiles to somewhat alleviate this issue.
  • Leaked Experience: Winning a battle will distribute the experience points from destroyed enemy units evenly among all the units that started the battle and survived it... even the one that immediately fled and didn't land a single hit. This feature is rather essential to leveling up low level Mages
    • Champions can give a percentage of their total experience points to the same building type that creates them by resting in it for a few turns. Any new units created at that building will start with that amount of experience. This is essential to improving Barracks and Thieves Guild units since upgrading the buildings alone has no effect, it simply increases the percentage of champions' experience the upgraded building can receive.
  • Life Drain:
    • The vampire is a high-level Death creature that regains Hit Points every time he strikes an enemy.
    • The artifact 'Ring of Leeches', which can only be used by Death, grants an ability that damages a target while healing the caster by the same amount.
  • Limited-Use Magical Device: Many artifacts allow warriors or thieves to cast spells that are normally used only by Mages. Instead of costing Mana these artifacts allow the user to cast the spell a certain number of times per turn.
  • Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: Warrior Lords and champions start out as relatively hard-hitting and durable melee fighters and they remain like this as they increase level. Mages start out weak and fragile and must gain both levels and researched spell knowledge to be effective, but can eventually devastate enemy parties in seconds or provide their own party with decisive advantages.
  • Living Statue: Gargoyles created at an upgraded Order Mage Tower are quite tough for a level 5 creature, although they don't do much damage.
  • Lizard Folk: Water has Lizardmen and Slingers. Ironically the Lizardmen are the females of the species, the Slingers are male.
  • Logical Weakness:
    • Fire has the weakest naval unit, the ferry. Fire has very deadly magic creatures, but they're all vulnerable to water magic damage
    • Death has many uniquely deadly abilities but has some of the worst healing powers of any Faith.
  • Lost Technology: The various magical artifacts and scrolls you can find were crafted using techniques that have long since been lost. In fact, just about all magic has been lost, forcing you to restart research on magic from scratch using old accounts of ancient magical feats via the archives in the libraries.
  • Mage Tower: Every Faith produces their Mages and common magic creatures at their Mage Tower. Many high-level dungeons, such as the Witch Tower, are also magic towers said to be built or inhabited by spellcasters.
  • Magic Staff: Mages of all Faiths can use the more common magic staff artifacts and the most powerful 'Greater Artifact' for most Mages is an extra powerful magic staff that favors their Faith specifically.
  • The Marvelous Deer: The first magical creature Order can summon is the 'White Stag'
  • Mercenary Units: Any champion or military unit can be hired as mercenaries. Mercenaries have about 20% of the initial creation cost for their unit type and don't use up a Follower but have 5 times more expensive upkeep per turn. Unlike properly trained units, mercenaries will vanish immediately if you can't pay their upkeep. These traits make mercenaries mostly useful for turning the tide of a single difficult battle, hopefully getting killed off in the process so they don't use up experience points and resources. Mercenary ships can also be used but their upkeep is so costly it's advisable to use them for a single transport voyage and then disband them immediately when they reach their destination.
  • Mutually Exclusive Magic: Even a max Level Mage Lord will be totally incapable of casting the simplest spells from a different Faith. The only way to get around this restriction is by placing spell scroll artifacts in the spellcaster's equipment slots. Each scroll only allows one specific spell to be cast and your champions get two equipment slots, so you'll never get them casting a wide variety of spells from other Faiths.
  • My Species Doth Protest Too Much: The Earth faction's cavalry are dark elves who aren't evil.
  • Mystical Plague: The Death spell 'Golgotha's Gift' infects a target enemy who can then spread the infection to allies in his party, causing every victim to take minor damage every turn. Unlike most spells, which subside over time, Golgotha's Gift can only be removed by a mage casting Dispel Magic or by exorcizing it at a city's temple, which can be extremely expensive if multiple units are infected. Fittingly, the icon for Golgotha's Gift is a bacterium.
  • Nature Is Not Nice: Wild animals make up a good portion of marauding unit types roving the map or lurking in unconquered dungeons. wolves and bears are likely to be some of the first enemies that will be a challenge to overcome. More exotic beasts, such as panthers and tigers, can be a threat to even veteran military units. Like all Marauder faction units they'll raze any buildings they capture and attack any parties they come across.
  • News Travels Fast: When another Faith's Lord gets killed the player will immediately be notified with a message that also tells which Faith killed them. This is often your cue to swoop in and capture the defeated Faith's now defenseless buildings.
  • Nintendo Hard: It's made by Sierra. Expect a severe challenge even on the lowest difficulty setting.
  • Noob Cave: Every Faith's city is surrounded by Level 1 to 3 dungeons within a few turns movement. Unless you play on Easy or Custom clearing these dungeons will be necessary to get your Starting Units the experience and resources they'll need to conquer your Faith's Great Temple.
  • Non-Action Big Bad: The age of conflict during which the game takes place was orchestrated by the scheming God of Death, Golgoth. However Golgoth never fights himself, leaving that to Lord Balkoth and his followers. Judging by how Golgoth immediately abandons his attempts at conquest once Balkoth is destroyed and his followers stop serving him, he may not be capable of taking direct action himself.
  • No Recycling: A player can click the 'disband' button in a unit's menu to make it vanish from the world map immediately. This removes the units per turn Upkeep expense but upkeep for normal units is miniscule: one single resource per turn. The player does not recover the Follower or any of the resources that were consumed to create the unit. For this reason the only units that it ever makes sense to disband are mercenaries and sometimes scouts, once the map is already explored.
  • Non-Standard Skill Learning: Every unit is able to use all their abilities even at level 1. The exceptions to this are Mages, who's Faith must gain a spell through research, trade, or scroll artifacts before they can use it.
  • No Stat Atrophy: A few very rare artifacts can reduce a victim's total experience points. However the experience points a champion gives a unit producing building will permanently improve all the units created at it. This can actually become a problem for the player if an enemy Faith captures a building he put a lot of Experience into, as they'll be able use it to produce units that are already leveled up. The only way to counteract this is to raze the building, which reduces it to level zero and removes all it's accumulated experience.
  • One-Hit Kill: The Death Spell 'Lost Soul' creates a Living Shadow of the target that pursues it across the combat field. If it reaches the target it dies regardless of defense, resist, or remaining Hitpoints.
  • One-Man Army: Fafnir and the Ice Drake cannot be fielded with any other units, but are powerful enough to take on entire armies themselves.
  • One-Time Dungeon: Every dungeon on the map will remain monster-free for the rest of the game once it's been cleared. While you could reenter the dungeon's combat map if another Faith's party is occupying it, this is unlikely to happen since there's no strategic incentive to occupy a cleared dungeon besides the boost in per-turn healing units get for resting inside a building.
  • Our Dragons Are Different: Follows the traditional Western style of great flying reptilian beasts, although Fafnir is landbound. Thunder drakes and regular fire-breathing dragons can be summoned by Air and Fire respectively. There is also the Great Worm, a massive snake-like dragon that serves as Earth's legendary creature that tunnels underground, and the Hydra, which is Chaos' legendary creature and acts much like a traditional hydra.
  • Our Dwarves Are All the Same: Earth's and Fire's Dwarves follow the traditional style, save for the latter's lack of beards. They're still tough, forge excellent weapons and armor, and wield heavy axes (Earth) or crossbows (Fire).
  • Our Elves Are Different: Life's elves are traditional Tolkien-esque elves with strong archers, fast movement, and a love for life, although they're less haughty and prefer open plains to forest. The elves that serve Death are dark, twisted elves focused on violence and murder, and favor swamps. There are also a small number of elves that serve Air as light cavalry, and dark elves who serve Earth as heavy cavalry.
  • Our Giants Are Bigger: Several varieties show up, with Storm Giants leading the Air armies and Fire Giants commanding Fire. Ogres and cyclops are higher-end Chaos magical creatures, while Earth can summon Stone Giants.
    • The background fluff describes the elemental deities as Great Giants, with their descendants being the various "lesser" giants (listed above) who mostly serve the elemental faiths to this day. (The reason there aren't any Water giants is because only one Water giant - the goddess Synora - survived the wars of the elements and currently lives in seclusion in the deep ocean.) The newer arcane faiths seem to follow more familiar (and abstracted) pantheons: Life worships a pseudo-Druidic nature goddess (Llanwylln); Order (despite the Arthurian trappings) seems to be vaguely Taoist in its philosophy; Chaos is classically pagan polytheism, with a pantheon of animal deities; Death worships Golgoth, who is hinted to be even older than the elemental deities and a recurring menace threatening Urak ever since its creation.
  • Our Goblins Are Different: Goblins follow the usual rule of short, violent, green-skinned creatures. Chaos can summon them as magical creatures, but only sword-wielding ones. Crossbow-toting goblins appear as marauders.
  • Our Liches Are Different: Death's legendary creature, a death mage transformed into a tough, strong undead champion with the biggest mana pool in the game, and the only non-Lord who can reach level 12. The magic to do it can only be used once a millennium, so the marauder faction Lich living in a castle off the coast must have seen a lot.
  • Our Orcs Are Different: Traditional, hostile-to-everyone marauders exclusively. They come in both the regular kind with spears and the wolf-riding sort.
  • Opposing Combat Philosophies: Implied when training units. The further in alignment the faction you're training is from the faction of the trainer the less experience they gain, so a Fire champion who can train their own champions up to 10th level might only be able to train Water champions to 5th.
  • Order Versus Chaos: Two of the Eight Faiths are Order and Chaos, and they start every game hostile to each other. Order is a typical High Fantasy human empire based somewhat on Arthurian legend. Chaos consists of Low Fantasy mountain tribesmen that worship animal spirits and shamanic portents, along with humanoid monsters like goblins and ogres.
  • Increasingly Lethal Enemy: Death Lord Balkoth starts each game around Level 6 and can reach up to Level 12 like any other Lord, gaining increased combat stats as he levels up. Fortunately for the player, Balkoth takes about 10000 more experience points to reach his max Level than other Lords.
  • I Owe You My Life: Sometimes when the player clears a high-level dungeon he'll be informed that "a long imprisoned captive has joined your cause" and he'll gain control of a randomly generated champion from any Faith for free. The same message appears and the player gains two predetermined champions of his own Faith when he clears his Great Temple.
  • Palette Swap: All over the place. Your chosen Lord is set apart from the standard hero units by their differently colored armor or hair.
    • While most of the unit types in the game are unique to a single faction there are only four models for cavalry units each of which are used by two factions under different names. This is particularly jarring with the Death/Earth and Order/Water factions' cavalry, which are thematically matched to one of the two factions and look rather odd with the other: The Water faction consists of Amazon Heroes, Lizard Folk Infantry and Heavy Cavalry that were clearly copied from the Arthurian Legend inspired Order faction, while the Earth faction's Dark Elf cavalry looks decidedly out of place among the dwarves, gnomes, and halflings that make up the majority of the Earth faction. On the other hand, the Life/Air and Chaos/Fire cavalry (and the Chaos/Fire infantry, for that matter) look pretty well themed for both of their respective factions.
  • The Paladin: The Order Faith's warrior champion is the 'Paladin'. As usual they have superior Defense and several artifacts that provide a Status Buff to their allies.
  • Panthera Awesome: Chaos' Beast Riders ride huge tigers into battle.
  • Patchwork Map: Each Faith's city is surrounded by its home terrain type, with abrupt changes in terrain often occuring at the borderland between two Faiths. The greatest example on the default map of Urak is Fire's homeland of sandy desert and lava flows being right next to the verdant meadows of Life to the north and the fetid swamplands of Death to the south.
  • Pegasus: One of the Life faction's special units. They have butterfly wings rather than angelic wings.
  • The Phoenix: The Phoenix is Life's Legendary Creature. It has a unique Healing Factor that will fully heal it, even from death, so long as it's party wins the battle. It also has a 100% Resist to Fire magic damage which, combined with its speed, makes it a hard counter to Fire Sorceresses.
  • Place of Power: The Great Temple of each Faith is described as the nexus of that Faith's magic. In gameplay a Faith's most powerful magic creatures can only be created at its Great Temple.
  • Player-Exclusive Mechanic:
    • AI opponents will never use the 'Defend' or 'Berzerk' commands, and this limitation makes AI melee units much less versatile than a player's.
    • AI Faiths never use ships to transport their ground units. This is especially noticeable when the AI controls Water.
    • AI thieves will never use Subdue to disable the player's champions and take them as prisoners.
  • Power at a Price: The Chaos spell 'Crash' and Fire spell 'Frenzy' temporarily increase an ally's Attack, Ranged Attacks, and Defense but reduces his maximum Hit Points permanently. These spells are especially noteworthy as no other abilities in the entire game reduce Hit Points capacity in this way and can potentially reduce a unit to a One-Hit-Point Wonder after much repeated use.
  • Press X to Die: The option to 'Surrender' is questionable even in the best circumstances as it immediately destroys all the units in your party except champions, which become prisoners of your opponent Faith's party. However you at least hypothetically have a chance of getting those champions back. But if you surrender to a Marauder party your champions will die immediately too. Worse, if your Lord surrenders to ANY party it's an immediate Game Over
  • Primal Fear: One Death spell is named 'Primal Fear' and is described as instilling such fear in opponents. In gameplay Primal Fear will reduce enemies' Strength and Dexterity stats unless they have a very high Level.
  • Proud Warrior Race Guy: Chaos is the strongest example of this (with the Chaos barracks stating that you need to "Be prepared to proudly wear the scars you earn!") with Death, Fire, and Earth following close behind.
  • Rain of Arrows: The Life faction's Elven archers are their best unit so Life armies tend to use this as their primary tactic.
  • Red Oni, Blue Oni: Fire Giants and Storm Giants fit this dynamic. Fire Giants have orange hair and skin and are described as brutally destructive. Storm Giants have white hair and blue skin and are described as honourable wise men. The backstory in the game's manual says both are descendants of the original Elemental Giants that created the world of Urak. They start each game with unfriendly relations to each other's Faith's. In gameplay Fire Giants have the most Attack of any champions while Storm Giants have the most Hit Points
  • Red Is Violent: Fire is the Faith with the most directly destructive spells and creatures and the color of its banners is crimson red.
  • Ridiculously Fast Construction: The construction and upgrading of any buildings will happen instantly once the player clicks, so long as his Faith has the required resources. Units are also created instantly, although it does take a few turns for a champion to transfer his experience points to a unit-producing building.
  • A Round of Drinks for the House: Implied with the ability to convert Gold into Fame at a city's tavern by holding a 'Festival'. As the games manual observes, "Buying a round of drinks never fails to make one popular." This is by far the most expensive resource conversion available in a city.
  • And There Was Much Rejoicing: This is the main point of the victory video that plays after the player destroys Balkoth. Yet if other Lords are still alive you can continue playing until you kill them all and conquer the entire world
  • Real-Time with Pause: When the player chooses to direct a battle this is the interface used for combat. There's also the option to automatically calculate battle results which can lead to illogical outcomes, such as a mage with no spells or Mana defeating a small enemy group by himself.
  • Religion is Magic: There is no separation between the two in the game, each faith has spells based on what it worships.
  • Regenerating Health: Several Greater Artifacts will heal a Hitpoint every few seconds during combat and fully heal the user after combat. The Life spell 'Regeneration' will give gradual HP restoration to it's target so long as the spell lasts. All units except some magic creatures regain at least one hitpoint every turn, usually more if they wait idle.
  • Reptiles Are Abhorrent: Death's warriors ride giant lizards into battle that look like komodo dragons. However Life's warriors also ride scaly raptor creatures, and Water has Lizard Folk and is one of the more benevolent faiths.
  • Ribcage Ridge: Several of the ornamental doodads that appear in the wilderness are skeletal animal remains. If they're at all to scale with the map's buildings and units they're certainly large enough to qualify for this trope, although they appear to be spines and skulls rather than ribs.
  • Ring of Power: Many of the stat-boosting artifacts champions can use are enchanted rings. Unlike most weapons and armor, rings can be used in either or both of a unit's equipment slots.
  • "Risk"-Style Map: From the start, the whole map is yours to explore. Careful, though, your enemy faiths don't like you in their backyard.
  • Robe and Wizard Hat: The Order Wizard looks like your standard fantasy wizard, complete with gnarled staff and long white beard. Earth Magicians look fairly similar, albeit shorter. Because they are Gnomes.
  • Rock Monster: The Rock Troll is a marauder exclusive melee creature which is annoyingly resilient to normal attacks while also having high Attack. The Rock Troll isn't usually encountered until the player enters mid-level dungeons but with a bit of bad luck one may occupy the Great Temple, becoming a major early game obstacle that must be overcome to progess.
  • Salt the Earth: When you gain control of a village you have the option to Raze it. Doing so will destroy the village and prevent any new buildings from being built at it. Unlike other razed buildings a destroyed village is Lost Forever. This is actually a big deal strategically since villages are the only way to add new buildings to the map.
  • Save Scumming: The artifacts rewarded for clearing higher-level dungeons are randomly generated upon victory, so a patient player can reload and replay the battle until he gets what he wants. The game also auto-saves before each battle allowing the player to reset before a costly defeat.
  • Sea Monster: Both Water's first and last magic creatures are sea monsters: the Kraken and the sea Serpent. Both of them have a lot of Hit Points and Attack but suffer Crippling Overspecialization due to being confined to Ocean terrain when AI Faith's never use ships to transport units and rarely create them at all. Water's ship, the Corsair, also appears to be attached to the back of a giant manta ray.
  • Self-Damaging Attack Backfire: The Chaos attack spell 'Hand of Fate' has a random chance of doing its damage to the spellcaster instead of his target. This chance is reduced as the spellcaster's level increases but the potential self-damage also increases with level, making the spell risky unless the caster has a high Resist% to Chaos magic.
  • Shout-Out:
    • Most of the Earth buildings look like Hobbit-holes.
    • The Lich Castle unique dungeon contains an undead Lich named Valdenar. This is a reference to the Edgar Allan Poe story 'The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar' which is about the titular character being suspended on the edge of death.
    • Earth's Legendary Creature, the Great Wyrm, takes a huge amount of bonus damage from Water magic. This is a reference to the Dune novels in which the giant sandworms are poisoned by water.
  • Simpleton Voice: The Earth Stone Giant talks like this when issued commands. Wisdom is a useless stat on non-Mage units but the Stone Giant's is much lower than most creatures anyway, so the dull impression given by his voice is clearly intentional.
  • Sinister Scythe: The Lord of Death is the game's evil villain and starts with the unique and powerful artifact 'Balkoth's Scythe'. Balkoth also holds his scythe in the games opening video, where he's shown casting lightning from it while the narrator tells of how "the air was filled with the cries of his victims."
  • Suicidal Overconfidence: Parties controlled by another Faith will usually try to flee when clearly outmatched by an attacking player. Marauder parties though will never try to flee, always using aggressive tactics and fighting to the death against any opponent.
  • Sssssnake Talk: Water's Lizard Folk military units talk like this when issued commands.
  • The Spartan Way: Chaos actually trains units using a gladiator arena that injures most of the troops training there, and Death's barracks quote notes that "Countless have died to join our order, and countless more will continue to try!"
  • Spell Book: The four spell books in a Faith's library are the source of all spells it's Mages can learn. The player can choose which book his Mages research but the spells in it must be learned in order from front to back. Each page of the spell book has a vague description of a spell in English but the actual gameplay details about it are hidden by random arcane symbols until it's been researched.
  • Standard Fantasy Races: Lords of Magic contains most of the typical High Fantasy races portrayed in familiar ways.
  • Starting Units: Your Lord begins the game accompanied by three or four units. You cannot train more until you liberate your Temple and your people acknowledge you. You can, however, hire mercenaries or summon creatures from the Mage Tower. These units are cheaper to train, but cost a lot more to maintain, making them a short-term solution bordering on Instant Militia.
  • Stealth Expert: Thieves serve this role since they are the only units capable of putting themselves in Steath mode.
  • Stealthy Colossus: Water's Kraken and sea Serpent Sea Monster creatures and Earth's Legendary massive burrower, the Great Wyrm, are all one point away from having the best possible Stealth Factor. This is probably meant to reflect them moving underwater or underground. Water's Giant Spiders, which appear nearly as large as horses, have the best possible Stealth, for reasons that are less clear.
    • Inverted with dwarven units, who are shorter and smaller than average but always have the worst stealth in their unit category. Dwarf Infantry are somehow less stealthy than an Order Knight in Shining Armor!
  • Strength Equals Worthiness: In order to get your Faith to build you a city stronghold and become loyal Followers you must kill all the enemies occupying your Faith's Great Temple. If you have the misfortune of having another Faith clear your Great Temple before you do you'll lose your only chance to prove your worthiness and you'll never be able to get a stronghold built. When that happens your city will be stuck at level 0, you'll have little or no resource income, and you'll have no means of training units, usually rendering the game Unintentionally Unwinnable.
  • Stone Wall:
    • Units can add some of their attack to their defense at the cost of being unable to attack. For Fire and Death warriors this can be combined with their legendary armors, which cast harmful spells at those who hit them, to create someone capable of soloing vastly greater forces by blocking their way to victory.
    • Order's 'Gargoyle' magic creature is mid-level but has a weaker Attack stat than most low-level creatures. However, the Gargoyle has both high Defense and an innate damage Resist percentage against both normal attacks and elemental magic damage.
  • Storybook Opening: The game intro shows a book opening that then narrates the rise of Balkoth and how he disrupted the previously peaceful lands of Urak.
  • Summon Magic: All mage towers can summon creatures to support you in combat. While most of them (save Chaos' goblins) are only single creatures, their individual power is impressive and they can potentially stand up to enemy champions. Certain faiths can also summon creatures in battle, such as Order.
  • Squishy Wizard: All mages are relatively squishy, though how much depends on the faction. Fire, air, and earth mages have decent enough physical stats that at high level they can handle much lower level enemies in melee, while death and life mages continue to fall over if anyone looks at them funny. The only exceptions are Balkoth and the Lich.
  • Status Buff: Every Faith can learn spells that improve the target's stats in some way. Order specializes in this and the majority of Order spells are variants of a Status Buff
  • Swamps Are Evil: Death's home terrain is swamp and 'Pestilence' is a powerful Death damage spell that also turns the targeted area into swamp. Swamp can be traversed easily by Death units but will slow down many other Faiths' units.
  • Take Over the World: This is the goal of Golgoth and Lord Balkoth and the Death Faith in general. That's why they're elated over the destruction of any and every other Faith.
  • Take Up My Sword: There's only two ways a player's chosen Lord can die without it resulting in a game over: killing Balkoth in the same battle the Lord died in or having another Faith's Lord swear fealty and become your original Lord's heir.
  • Tap on the Head: Thieves' 'Subdue' ability is a close range hit that does no damage but nonetheless knocks the target unconscious for the remainder of combat and results in them being taken prisoner should the thief's party win.
  • Tech Tree: There are four different types of spell in each faith, and you can only research the simplest and work your way up, although which type you research is up to you. You can research offense up to, say, "Bless," then defense up to "Holy Visit," then go through the General. The speed at which your research proceeds depends on two factors: how many researchers you have and what level they are. Every level of researcher adds one man-day of research per day(turn), and one level one mage gets one man-day per day. Up to three mages can research at a time, and the maximum level is Ten, with an exception for the Lord who can be Twelve, maxing out at a possible 32 man-days per day. Some spells take up to two hundred man-days to research, so every level helps.
  • Teleportation:
    • The Chaos spell 'Blink' will teleport the spellcaster to a random spot on the battlefield then teleport him back to his original location after a few seconds.
    • The Chaos thief artifact 'Chakram of Entropy' gives it's wielder a chance to randomly teleport her target with every hit she lands.
    • The Life Warrior artifact 'Elven Chainmail' will teleport the wearer to a random spot on the battlefield when he is reduced to five Hit Points or less, hopefully saving him from whatever is damaging him.
    • The Air special building 'Shrine of Teleportation' can teleport any units that rest at it a short distance away on the map and can teleport Air units at it any distance, so long as there's an Air mage at the location to cast the summoning spell.
    • Every Faith can learn its own version of the 'Teleport Artifact' general-purpose spell. The spell teleports any artifacts in the spellcaster's storage to the first unit in the targeted party.
    • The Earth special building 'Holy Gateway' can teleport Earth units in it to any Great Temple their Faith controls.
  • Themed Cursor:After selecting a spell to cast the mouse cursor changes to something thematically appropriate for the spell's Faith: a skeletal hand for Death spells, rustling leaves for Earth, a swirling spiral vortex for Chaos, and so on.
  • Thieves' Guild: A Faith's Thieves Guild is the source of its thieves, ranged military units, and scouts. While the description for a few Guilds, such as Order's, claims they frown upon thievery in practice any thieves can attempt to steal from other Faiths.
  • Three-Stat System: Every unit has 3 primary stats that do nothing on their own but that will increase combat-relevant stats when the primary stats increase to certain points: increased Strength increases Attack, Dexterity increases Defense and Range Attack (for units that can shoot projectiles), and Wisdom increases Mana (for spellcaster's only).
  • Trigger-Happy: Ranged units can fall prey to this, as the default A.I. automatically attacks anything within range. This is particularly problematic with Life's archers, as their range can cover nearly the entire battlefield. Left unchecked they will often fire immediately at the start of battle and provoke the enemy into charging, necessitating a quick pause to order them to hold their fire should the player wish to reorganize their troops.
  • Troll Bridge: One unique dungeon on the default map is the 'Troll Bridge', which is a narrow bridge guarded by about two dozen Trolls. Unlike classic examples of this trope the bridge is easy to ignore and doesn't lead anywhere except another unique dungeon, the 'Troll Cave'
  • The Undead: Death, obviously. Undead are immune to several death spells, but are vulnerable to Life's Turn Undead and except for the vampire's life-draining attacks don't heal at all without magical aid. Order also uses them in the form of willingly-resurrected ancient heroes.
  • Turn Undead: 'Turn Undead' is a Life attack spell that damages every undead (all Death magic creatures and zombies) unit on the battlefield. 'Turn Undead' can become quite destructive thanks to having the best damage scaling with caster Level of any attack spell.
  • Unicorn: The unicorn is Life's mid-power magic creature. Notable for being a relatively powerful melee fighter compared to other Life units available so early in a game.
  • Units Not to Scale: This isn't normally a problem: a giant is taller than a man who's taller than a dwarf who's taller than a gnome. The exception is ships, which are about the same size as a single horseman. This isn't normally very noticeable since ships can only battle ground units that are positioned directly next to ocean.
  • Unlockable Content: Balkoth's death faction is available only once you've won the game by defeating him.
  • Unstable Equilibrium: The power of the player's Faith versus to the enemy Death Faith is largely dependent on how many cities the player can capture early in a game. Capturing other Faiths' cities will give the player's Faith a great resource advantage and also allow him access to more diverse unit production, potentially counteracting the weaknesses of his starting Faith's unit roster. If the player doesn't capture other Faiths' cities Death assuredly will, granting all those advantages to the enemy instead.
  • Upgrade Artifact: A few artifacts can increase certain champions total experience points when in-use, potentially allowing the user to increase in Level upon putting the artifact in his equipment slot.
  • Variable Mix: The combat music (a set of about 15 short .wav files) reacts to your army's (dis)advantage on the battlefield.
  • Video Game Geography: Type 1: Urak (and every map in Lords of Magic) is a torus. You can see this most clearly in the map editor, if you zoom out as far as you can.
  • Villains Act, Heroes React: Before Golgoth set in motion the Death Faith's campaign to Take Over the World the "noble people of Urak languished in a thousand years of peaceful splendor, growing forgetful of the dark times their land once knew."
  • Violence is the Only Option: Although a few Faiths start the game on friendly terms with Death and gifts and trade may allow such diplomatic relations to be prolonged Death will inevitably become hostile to every Faith over time and the only way a player can win the game is for his forces to kill the Lord of Death.
  • War Elephants: Hostile Elephants are one of the most rare Marauder creature types. The Elephant has a lot of Hit Points but otherwise isn't especially tough, and it has the slowest combat speed in the game.
  • White Magic: Life magic specializes in healing, increasing allies Defense, decreasing enemies Attack, and destroying Death creatures. Life is also the only Faith capable of true resurrection for a dead ally, all others offer some variation of Came Back Wrong for the revived unit. Unusually, Life's attack spells are more damaging than average too.
  • Wicked Witch: The enemy spellcasting unit the 'Witch' looks like the ugly green-skinned hag you'd expect from a fairy tale. The player can never create one, they only show up as hostile-to-everyone Marauders.
  • You Require More Vespene Gas: Gold, ale and crystals are required to hire your units, but each type of unit has a certain resource they want more than the other two: gold is required for ranged units, ale for melee, and crystals for magic. Fame pulls in followers, whom you can put to work in your capitol to rake in more resources or train into military units. All spells require a mage of that faith to cast, so any spells you don't have a mage for are Uselessnium and can be traded to other faiths for substantial return without the risk of them using those spells on you. In this manner you can also trade spells you can use, seeing as this is simply knowledge being traded and you keep the ability to cast them while they cannot without one of your mages, which you are under no obligation to hand over.
  • Tactical Superweapon Unit: A Legendary Creature can only be created once per game at the Great Temple of its Faith and requires a max Level City, a max Level Mage Tower, and the Great Temple's annex special building. With the exception of Water's 'Giant Spiders' the cost to create a Legendary Creature far exceeds any other unit of its Faith. Pay the staggering price and you'll gain a unit that is usually some type of One-Man Army often capable of killing the Final Boss alone.
  • Turn-Based Strategy: All non-combat gameplay is turn-based (each remaining Faith gets it's own round during a turn) on a single world map. If the player chooses the 'auto-calculate' option for combat pretty much the entire game can be played this way.
  • Visibility Meter: A thief who is detected while in Stealth will literally have a target appear on him.
  • Weaksauce Weakness: Fire creatures are the most powerful of any Faith and their ultimate creature, the Dragon, is the best unit in the game. Water magic is the second worst at dealing direct damage, exceeding only Earth. However every Fire creature takes two or even three times normal damage from Water magic and are especially devastated by the 'Rain' spell which doesn't even effect non-Fire units. This vulnerability to Water is especially obvious in the Legendary dragon 'Fafnir', since it is by far the easiest way to kill him while avoiding the massive unit losses brute force would incur against that One-Man Army
  • World-Healing Wave: The victory video that plays when the player destroys Balkoth shows a wave of light restoring life to the world of Urak.
  • Zerg Rush: The AI's response to having hostile units in proximity to a capitol is to rapidly create large numbers of weaker military units and spam them at the intruders. This can be devastating if the first army is defeated but you've expended all your mana and many of your troops are injured, and the second, or third, or tenth army shows up.
    • Zerging is a viable tactic with Chaos. Because Chaos' troops have such low armor but such high attack, they can pretty much swarm over an enemy force and bury them in a sea of axes and greatswords. Most notable is that their basic summoning creatures are goblins, who come in three-creature units like regular infantry, but don't gain experience and cost no followers to create, so losing a goblin unit doesn't have the same cost as losing an experienced, loyal soldier unit, which encourages using them as meatshields to keep a pesky legendary creature, line of archers, or horde of tough melee beasts busy.

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