Wizards' War

Muggle Prime Minister: But for heaven's sake — you're wizards! You can do magic! Surely you can sort out — well — anything!
Cornelius Fudge: The trouble is, the other side can do magic too, Prime Minister.

— Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

A full-scale conflict between wizards, where combatants wage war by unleashing the full force of their spells and magical creations against each other.

A distinguishing trait of these conflicts is that they often don't usually involve regular armies or really anyone besides the wizards, or at least not for very long. Instead, a Wizards' War most commonly consists of powerful wizards in their towers hurling as much magical destruction at each other as they possibly can, such as bolts of force, rains of fire, and far more bizarre and deadly things. When something like troops is needed, this will usually take the form of legions of golems, bound demons, monsters, and elementals, hordes of the undead, and the like; regular soldiery, if used at all, will be relegated to cannon fodder and often entirely overshadowed by the terrifying monsters and arcane destruction that it will face. The result is something not unlike a magical form of nuclear warfare, and indeed a lot of works make this comparison fairly explicit. Fantastic Nukes will see significant use, and may well be the primary weapon-spells employed. Fantastic Fallout is also common and may leave vast areas crawling with twisted monsters, burning with deadly energies, or simply uninhabitable wastes long after the war ends. Particularly destructive wars may be responsible for World Sundering events.

These wars are most commonly part of a setting's backstory, having happened long before the story's time. Their primary impact is thus in their legacy and aftereffects, which continue to linger in the world many ages after their end. This is a common cause for the downfall of the Precursors' civilization, which will have destroyed itself in magical conflict at the height of its power and plunged the world into a long dark age. In the modern world, many areas may still bear the scars of the ancient wars, dotting the edges of the map with blasted wastelands, bizarre ruins, and areas still twisted and unsafe from ancient magical residue. Entire species of monsters may trace their origins to these wars when they were created as Bioweapon Beasts or arose from wildlife and people mutated by out-of-control magic.

Contrast Military Mage, where magic-workers are drafted to take part in more mundane conflicts, and Wizard Duel, when a more localized conflict occurs between two, or just a few, participants. For the next step up in supernatural warfare, see Divine Conflict.

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Examples

Comic Books

• The Books of Magic: The last issue of the original mini briefly depicts a Bad Future where our hero Tim Hunter went evil and sparked off a war involving pretty much every magic-user in The DCU.
• Doctor Strange: Doctor Stephen Strange partook in a Great Offscreen War known as the War of the Seven Spheres between the Vishanti and the Trinity of Ashes, with Strange acting as the general for the Vishanti's army. Not much is known besides that it lasted for thousands of years, but what is seen in Doctor Strange (2023) tells us that it was not pleasant. Not only did Strange commit war crimes, he likely created one when he made a spell to use the corpses of his enemies to fix their own.

Literature

• The Ascendant Kingdoms Saga: Meroven starts to use mages in its war with Donderath at the start of Ice Forged, which is viewed as a significant escalation, and Donderath is forced to reciprocate. This culminates in the use of a Fantastic Nuke called the Great Fire against the noble houses of Donderath, not knowing that several of those families were Cosmic Keystones that kept magic under human control. Their destruction causes Wild Magic to burst its bonds all over the world, collapsing human civilization.
• The Darkness Series by Harry Turtledove is a Fantasy Conflict Counterpart of World War II in a world where magic is commonplace. Muggle soldiers use magic-based Boom Sticks, Dragon Riders play the role of fighter airplanes, and both sides use Human Sacrifice for Blood Magic, but actual wizards are a minority of the population and military. The equivalent of the Manhattan Project, the Naantali Project, is a secret lab of a hundred or so mages who end up developing a devastating Fantastic Nuke.
• Discworld: In the ancient past, when magic was much wilder and more plentiful on the Disc, wizards warred against each other ceaselessly and apocalyptically. There are areas mentioned repeatedly throughout the series rendered permanently uninhabitable by the fallout from the ancient Mage Wars. Modern wizards see it as central to their job to learn how to do magic and then never to do it, or at least not any of the seriously reality-warping stuff, as they are well aware of the Mutually Assured Destruction that the Mage Wars had always ultimately caused. Pratchett generally tended to write magic as a stand-in for nuclear power and radioactivity, and the Mage Wars take the place of thermonuclear exchange in this metaphor. Sourcery deals with exactly this scenario: a super-powerful wizard called a sourceror (being a source of magic in himself) arises in Ankh-Morpork and his first action involves suborning or destroying all wizards on the Disc to his will. A full-scale magical war breaks out between Ankh-Morpork and the wizards of Klatch, who are quite prepared to go down fighting rather than surrender.
• Harry Potter: The Wizarding World went through several major conflicts within the 20th century.
  • The conflict that is often referred to as the Global Wizard War began with Grindelwald's rise to power in the 1920s, and lasted until the mid-1940s, coinciding with the Second World War.
  • The First Wizarding War of 1970-1981 started with Lord Voldemort's and the Death Eaters' rise to power and their attempt to take over the Wizarding World and subjugate the Muggle World. The conflict ended with Voldemort's defeat and his soul being split into the seven Horcruxes, the capture and disbandment of the Death Eaters, and the disappearance of Harry Potter, "the Boy Who Lived".
  • The prelude to the Second Wizarding War began in the early 1990s, when Harry Potter began attending Hogwarts School of Wizarding and Magic, and there was an attempt to steal the Philosopher's Stone. The Second Wizarding War began, officially according to Ministry of Magic, in 1996 when Voldemort returned and the Death Eaters, secretly, made gains within the Ministry of Magic with the ultimate goal of accomplishing Voldemort's vision of wizard supremacy. The Second Wizarding War ended in 1998, at the culmination of the Battle of Hogwarts when the Death Eaters were ultimately defeated and Voldemort was killed in a duel with Harry Potter.
• Heralds of Valdemar: The Mage Wars ended with the Great Mages Urtho and Ma'ar causing the Cataclysm, an event that shook the world so hard that it left two giant craters in the landscape over a hundred miles wide, and strange magic mutations even farther out. It was so great in fact that, three thousand years later, the event rebounds like a rubber band, causing the whole mess to happen again in reverse.
• Into The Broken Lands: Mages being inevitably power-mad, reality-warping Persons of Mass Destruction, a disagreement between a handful of them created the Broken Lands — a death world plagued by ever-shifting terrain, Fantastic Fallout, Bioweapon Beasts, carnivorous roads, region-wide magical booby traps, and further horrors.
• Magical Warfare naturally had one in its backstory, called the Great Magic War, between the peaceful Wizard Brace faction and the wizard-supremacist Ghost Trailers. In the wake of the war, a group of powerful mages put up a barrier which separated the wizarding world from the muggle world and punished anyone who used magic to attack a muggle. The Ghost Trailers eventually massacre the mages who sustain the barrier, lowering it and allowing them to begin the Second Great Magic War.
• Mogworld: A gag has the characters descend through geological strata that go from the modern day, to primitive sticks and rocks, to magical superweapons. There are at least two of these strata of superweapons, and right above them are stone age tools, implying this has happened at least twice.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: One of these occurred in the ancient past between the Valyrians (an advanced civilization of Dragon Riders who could use fire magic) and the Rhoynar (another advanced civilization who could use water magic). Although the Valyrians effortlessly conquered most of Essos, the Rhoynar were a Worthy Opponent that managed to put up a fight for centuries. The Rhoynar even managed to kill three dragons and defeat an entire Valyrian army after most of the kingdoms banded together and utilized water magic to drown their enemies. However, the Valyrians responded to this defeat by sending over three hundred dragons, resulting in a Curb-Stomp Battle that saw the Rhoynar civilization annihilated. Rhoynar culture/people were only able to survive through the brave efforts of Princess Nymeria, who knew that going against the Valyrian Freehold was destined to end in her people's destruction; she led thousands of her people out of Essos and, after many setbacks, eventually settled in Dorne.
• The Tough Guide to Fantasyland: In the distant past, the wizards fought a terrible war against one another. Modern wizards in a foul mood can do things like throw bits of the landscape about, wave storms into existence, move or destroy mountains and cities, summon and unleash demons, and pollute vast chunks of land with magic. The Wizards' War seems to have come about when too many wizards got into foul moods and started doing these things at one another all at the same time. Their battles' remains are still to be seen in the form of wasteland areas full of magical pollution, glassy slag, carnivorous monsters, carnivorous plants, carnivorous slime, and so on.
• The War Gods: The backstory contains two wizard wars:
  • Not much is said about the First Wizard War, thousands of years ago, except that it was won by the forces of Good, under the command of the wild wizard Ottovar the Great. In the aftermath, Ottovar established "the Strictures of Ottovar" to make it illegal for any wizard to wield dark magic ever again. There was only one penalty for violating the Strictures: death.
  • The second Wizard War was both conventional and magical, with the dark wizards of the Council of Carnadosa using both magical and mundane weapons to destroy the Empire of Ottovar. They threw huge destructive spells, an army of mind-controlled warriors, and thousands of undead and summoned monsters against the Imperial armies and the good wizards of the White Council. But it was the white wizards who ended the war, using a series of monstrously powerful spells to "strafe" the entire continent. What did those spells do? Well, think nuclear armageddon, just without the radiation afterwards.
• The Wheel of Time: The war that ended the Age of Legends had global Magical Societies throwing the full force of their powers against each other. In particular, Balefire, an attack that retroactively burns away the victim's past actions, became a Dangerous Forbidden Technique because its indiscriminate use almost caused reality to unravel from the strain.

Tabletop Games

• Ars Magica: The Order of Hermes has formalised the rules of these conflicts, in order to prevent the disastrous consequences that usually come with this trope. Any magus in the Order may declare a Wizard War against another member. The attacker must give a month's notice to their victim, the war lasts precisely a month, and both sides are required to follow certain restrictions designed to minimise collateral damage. Disobeying these rules will get you Marched — essentially, the whole order will go after you until you're dead.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Greyhawk: Thousands of years ago, the Suel Imperium and the Baklunish Empire fought a magical war. The Baklunish Imperium destroyed the Suloise with the Rain of Colorless Fire, which turned the lands of the Suloise into ashes and dust.
  • Mystara: Such conflict occurs in Wrath of the Immortals campaign for Second Edition, between the Principalities of Glantri and The Empire of Alphatia. It involves both A thousand of Alphatian Archmages storming Glantri City and Glantri firing a weapon that accidentally sinks the entire Alphatian continent.
• Mage: The Ascension: The Ascension War is a global conflict fought between the world's Mages for control of human culture and beliefs, which in turn shape the paradigms that nature and magic operate by — the ultimate prize is the ability to determine what rules the world will follow. The main combatants are the progressive but highly controlling Technocratic Union and the traditionalist Council of Nine Mystic Traditions. Other factions include the Disparate Alliance, the alien force of Threat: Null, and a number of independent actors such as nihilistic Nephandi and insane Marauders.
• Mage: The Awakening: An important event in the backstory is the Fall of Atlantis, which involved one of these (even if the Fall wasn't a result of the War itself): when the Awakened that would go on to become the Exarchs built the Ladder that led to the Supernal, their opponents assaulted the Ladder with magical military force. Come the modern day, however, this trope is mostly Averted, as Sleepers witnessing magic tends to make said magic get dispelled — at best — or causes Paradox and results in all sorts of nasty things (like spells going horribly wrong or summoning gribblies from the Abyss) at worst.
• Magic: The Gathering: The Brothers' War was an apocalyptic war between Urza and Mishra, brothers and artificers who did not realize that they were doing magic. They began as artificers for warlords that craved power, and due to the death of the two separate warlords they each became the de facto rulers of their sides, increasing the use of magical constructs against each other and, in Mishra's case, allying with otherworldly demons. Their battles would leave devastation across the plane of Dominaria and concluded when Urza detonated a Fantastic Nuke which killed Mishra, annihilated a continent, and plunged Dominaria into an ice age that lasted for more than two millennia.
• Pathfinder: The nations of Geb and Nex suffered a brutal Forever War under their namesake Archmages, including multiple Fantastic Nukes, huge waves of undead, and armies of mechanical and biological constructs. 4000 years later, most of Geb is undead, much of Nex is desolate, and the no man's land between them is a magically depleted wasteland.

Video Games

• Age of Wonders: The story focuses on powerful Wizard Kings who serve as both prominent characters in the plot and leaders of their factions; as such, the series' conflicts take the form of magical wars between these kings and their armies of summons and monsters.
  • Age of Wonders (1999) enables some spectacular (and cruel) acts of magical warfare as your wizardly leader grows in power, such as raising or levelling mountains and volcanoes, raising the sea level to slowly flood the map, and blighting the earth to poison armies and kill crops.
  • Age of Wonders 2: The Wizard's Throne: Newly-realized wizard Merlin wages war against conspirators within the Wizard's Circle, who betrayed and murdered the leader of the Circle because he had sought to curtail their tendency towards self-declared godhood and magical war-crimes.
  • Age of Wonders 4: After being absent in the Low Fantasy-leaning third game, the Wizard Kings return, waging petty wars for control over the realms of a cosmic multiverse. This time, Mass Transformation magic is added to the mix, as the wizards physically alter their followers to gain an edge.
• Beyond Oasis: The backstory of the first game is that two sorcerers, Raharl, commanding the light, and Agito, with power over "chaos and destruction", waged a "devastating battle" against each other, which destroyed the realm of Oasis.
• Final Fantasy XIV: The War of the Magi was a cataclysmic conflict between two ancient city-states, Mhach and Amdapor. Mhach was the birthplace of Black Magic and bound fiends from the void in an attempt to conquer all of Eorzea. Amdapor was the home of white magic and created golems to battle the voidsent sent against them. There was also a third faction caught in the middle, Nym, who deployed its magical scholars and unparalleled navy to repel attempts to conquer it. The battle between these magical factions drained the land of aether until the balance was tipped in the direction of water, resulting in a flood of biblical proportions that wiped out both Amdapor and Mhach. Following this, magic became seen as a heretical form of study for years until attitudes changed around the beginning of the Sixth Astral Era.
• Master of Magic: The entire premise is a war between factions all led by different wizards.

Western Animation

• Oggy and the Cockroaches: In "The Magic Pen", an unorthodox version occurs. A pencil from a witch's purse falls to Oggy's house. Everything that is drawn with this pencil becomes real. Oggy and the Roaches fight over the pencil and end up splitting it in half. Oggy conjures up medieval warriors, giant elephants, and unicorn-rhinoceros hybrids, while the cockroaches conjure up soldiers, military vehicles, mechas, and a dragon. The two armies duke it out.

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