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Video Game / Battle for Wesnoth
aka: The Battle For Wesnoth

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The Battle for Wesnoth is a free, open-source Turn-Based Strategy computer game, available here or on Steam. It boasts heavy community development, being almost entirely developed by people who are essentially just dedicated fans. Wesnoth has a large and active multiplayer community, including a competitive ladder, with skirmishes or custom-made scenarios being the main multiplayer game types. Apart from that, there are lots of single player campaigns, both 'mainline' (i.e. shipped with the version available for download) and user-made, available from the add-on server, giving it impressive replay value for a freeware game.

It was designed to feel a lot like a console-style Tactical RPG (such as Master of Monsters and Langrisser), but while taking advantage of the PC's inherent user interface advantages. It differs from them notably by having a large luck-based component, and by being extremely well balanced. The game's setting is traditional High Fantasy, heavily Tolkien-inspired, by the admission of the dev team.

Wesnoth's main multiplayer "era" features the following major playable factions:

A few of the game's more major mainline campaigns are the following:

  • Heir To The Throne, the original campaign around which the game was first designed. An exiled prince joins with a group of rebels to overthrow his corrupt aunt, the queen.
  • The South Guard, a campaign that serves as an "introduction" to Wesnoth. You play as a young knight appointed to lead the South Guard and eventually fight bandits, ally with elves and fight undead (and necromancers).
  • Liberty, set within Heir to the Throne, in which a group of peasants-turned-outlaws face off against the tyrannical Queen.
  • The Hammer of Thursagan, in which, following the formation of the Northern Alliance, a group of dwarves set out to discover what befell another clan in Kal Kartha.
  • Northern Rebirth, in which a group of former slaves form La Résistance, and overthrow their former masters, creating a new power in the world, the Northern Alliance.
  • Descent into Darkness, in which you play a junior necromancer Anti-Hero, who gradually ruins his entire life through the course of the campaign through his own arrogance. Again, does Exactly What It Says on the Tin. An example of Gray-and-Gray Morality, at least near the middle.
  • The Rise of Wesnoth, a prequel campaign detailing how the titular country was formed by refugees from a mid-ocean isle. Does Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
  • Under the Burning Suns, in which you must lead a group of elves not quite like the usual variety from their desert home to a new island, slaying evil undead and orcs along the way. Notable for introducing Medieval Stasis enforcement on far-future Wesnoth via an Class 1 or Class 2 on the scale.

The game's community is constantly expanding upon it, by improving its mainline spec, and by developing user-made content. Numerous well-used add-ons exist, including additional campaigns and additional multiplayer eras which add new races, factions and species to the game. At times, mainline contents not considered good enough would be dropped from mainline and became add-ons, such as The Dark Hordes and An Orcish Incursion campaigns (dropped in 1.1 and 1.15 version, respectively). As with much open-source software, the game is in continual development in many aspects, including artwork and music, user interface, adding campaigns to mainline and many others.

So, welcome to Wesnoth. Enjoy!


The game features, among others, the following tropes:

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  • Absurdly Spacious Sewer: The Sewers of Southbay in The Rise of Wesnoth is a big enough sewer for the player's entire troops to pass through while fighting monsters along the way.
  • Acceptable Breaks from Reality: The guidelines for suggesting changes include "WINR" which stands for Wesnoth Is Not Realistic.
  • Acronym and Abbreviation Overload: The community has a lot of this. HttT, TSG, AoI, SoF, THoT, DA, HI, WM, ZoC, CtH, HAPMA... almost all campaigns, units and gameplay elements are abbreviated; see also here.
  • After the End / Crapsack World: Under the Burning Suns takes place long after the fall of men and elves. The only groups fit enough to survive in a world where the days are scorching hot and the nights are hauntingly cold are the orcs, who use brute force to occupy areas with more favourable conditions, small groups of elves, who had to abandon their old habitats and adapt to the climate, the occasional human wanderer who moves from ghost town to ghost town, scavenging whatever one can find and playing a losing game of hide-and-seek with the undead that roam the land, remains of humankind who are eeking out on sparsely populated settlements with a few turned to raiding and a Eloh/Yechnagoth worshipping cult with a well-organized army, and the dwarves and trolls who may have evaded the suns' wrath in their underground tunnel networks, but have become ensnared in a Forever War against each other. The user-made campaign Invasion from the Unknown and its sequel, After the Storm, take this up to eleven, adding strange biomechanical aliens (the Shaxthal), demons, and a Nigh-Invulnerable Big Bad, the Master of Darkness, who is, in fact, only a minion of a greater evil: Uria the ruler of Hell.
  • The Alliance: The Knalgan Alliance, a union of the Dwarves and some human border states.
  • All of the Other Reindeer: The reason for the eponymous Start of Darkness in Descent into Darkness, depending who you ask.
  • All Trolls Are Different: A mixture of the "rocky" trolls of the Discworld and the regenerating giants of Dungeons & Dragons.
  • Ambidextrous Sprite: The game does not have separate east and west-facing sprites and simply flips sprites, so their handedness changes with their facing.
  • Anachronic Order: The official campaigns are not released in chronological order. For instance, The Rise of Wesnoth, set right at the very beginning of Wesnoth history, was released after the original Heir to the Throne campaign, which is set 517 years after The Rise of Wesnoth. In addition, prior to version 1.14, official campaigns were listed by order of difficulty, with no option to list them in chronological order.
  • Animate Dead: Most of the Undead are supposedly created this way, though for obvious balance reasons it takes gold to raise new undead using your leader unit. The only exception of the Plague ability, which can be used to raise free Walking Corpses from slain enemies. However, they are level 0 and only ever advance to level 1.
  • Anti-Cavalry: The loyalist Horseman unit is weak to pierce damage, but also his "Charge" ability causes him to take double damage (in addition to dealing double damage). This should make the player think twice about attacking units with spears, especially since most of them get First Strike (and can kill wounded cavalry in a couple of hits anyway).
  • Anti-Magic: 'Arcane' attacks tend to do additional damage to most units of a "magical" nature, such as the undead, elementals, woses, and elves, and conversely tend to do less damage to more mundane units like humans and wild animals (often also including fantastic animals like griffons).
  • Anyone Can Die: In the final scenarios of Dead Water, The South Guard (on the outlaw branch) and Under the Burning Suns, you don't need to keep anyone alive except your leader. Even allies you've had to protect for the entire rest of the campaign, such as Nym, are expendable.
  • Apocalypse How: The Wesnoth universe has seen several apocalyptic events that fit within Class 0 of the scale.
    • The Green Isle undergoes Species Extinction on a Continental scope when the orcs overran it, forcing Haldric I and Lady Jessene to flee with their people—essentially every last human being who could still flee—to the Great Continent and establish Wesnoth over the course of The Rise of Wesnoth.
    • Near the conclusion of Delfador's Memoirs, the eponymous mage's warning to his allies that undead were easier to summon as a result of the Big Bad's fell magic is tantamount to Societal Disruption on a Regional or Continental scope.
    • During Eastern Invasion, Mal-Ravanal and his army of undead waste a considerable chunk of Wesnoth, causing Societal Disruption on a Regional scope.
    • A combination of the second sun changing its diurnal course and the humans' failed attempt at raising a third sun caused the entire Great Continent to begin undergoing Societal Collapse on a Continental scope; the results of that are established, and can be seen, in Under the Burning Suns.
  • "Arabian Nights" Days: The fan-made downloadable campaign To Lands Unknown let you play as the "Summoners", a race of magical Arabs complete with scimitars, flying carpets and summonable djinns. Back in mainline - while they are unfinished and have no official campaigns yet - there is the Dunefolk, a faction composed of nonmagical and vaguely Arabic soldiers.
  • Armored But Frail: Ghosts and their promotions have stellar defenses against everything but arcane and fire damage and high evasion on all terrain, but they also have a tiny hitpoint pool that allows even a few basic mages or dark mages to quickly dispatch even fully promoted ghosts; in fact, they can be dispatched easily by larger quantities of high level physical attacks, especially archery.
  • Arrows on Fire: Primarily used by the Orcs, who shoot incendiary arrows/bolts from their bows and crossbows, often with devastating effect against the undead (primarily ghosts) and Woses. One wonders as to why the other races (except the Dunefolk, who don't have magi) never thought of using burning arrows and torches (which the Orcs also use) as a simple and easy way of combating the fire-weak undead without having to train expensive and delicate mages...but the reason rears its ugly head before long. And the other reason follows soon after.
  • Art Evolution: the first releases had decent art for a free game. As time as gone on, an entire community of artists has sprung up around the game, and almost every release has seen major improvements in the pixel art, animation, and portraiture. Compare an image from v1.0 with an image of almost exactly the same spot in v1.9. Another major change was that early versions had an animesque style to their portrait art, prior to the adoption of a more realistic art style.
  • Artificial Brilliance: AI-controlled units will ruthlessly exploit exposed and vulnerable units if it can get to them, such as sending melee cavalry to attack wounded units being sent to a nearby village to heal. AI units will also maneuver on your flanks to attack more vulnerable units in the back ranks, or carry out hit and run attacks, as well as surround units in your formation that are not supported. Wounded AI units will also rotate back to villages and cavalry will sneak around and seize unprotected villages from your side if you're not careful or dither about.
  • Artificial Stupidity:
    • The AI can, however, be drawn out by clever, if obvious, tactics. For example, if the shortest route to your army is to cross a river, they'll attempt to cross it, even if you've fortified your side, and non-elvish units will assault elves in forests (with only 30-40% chance to even hit them) from less protective terrain like fields and swamps if they can't get to anywhere better.
    • The AI's tendency to aggressively chase lone units can also be used to trick it into splitting its army. It will often send two or three units to chase a lone cavalry unit, allowing you to lead them away from the rest of your force and letting your main group gang up on, outnumber, and wipe out other enemy units.
  • Attack Failure Chance: All attacks have a chance to hit that depends on the terrain type of the hex the defending unit is standing in. Some Abilities and Weapon Specials change this — for example, Magical attacks always have 70% chance to hit, Marksman attacks have at least 60% chance to hit when used offensively, and the Diversion ability causes flanked units to lose 20% chance to hit.
  • Attack of the Monster Appendage: The Tentacles of the Deep, seen in some campaigns, is simply a tentacle that could attack other units, but its description says that it is a part of a bigger creature hidden in the deep.
  • Authority Equals Asskicking: Downplayed. A unit with the Leadership ability will only confer bonuses on units lower than its level, thus it is necessarily stronger than any of the units it "leads". However, for balance reasons, these units often trade off some other combat ability, or have lower stats than a non-Leadership unit of the same level, so the latter will kick more ass than the former in a fight. As an example, the Elvish Captain, a Level 2 unit, is stronger than an Elvish Fighter (Level 1) in every respect, but does less damage per hit and has less HP than an Elvish Hero (Level 2).
  • Back Stab: This is actually a special ability in-game available to a few unit lines like human thieves and undead shadows, in which if you or an ally (or an enemy of your enemy) has a unit next to your target, then a backstabber can go around to the back of the enemy unit (so as to get the target between itself and the ally) and deal double damage upon attacking.
  • Badass Normal: Tallin, The Hero of the campaign Northern Rebirth. Just a young slave-turned-rebel leader who throws off his orcish masters, forges an alliance with dwarves, elves, and a pair of (un)dead mages, and forges the Northern Alliance, one of the dominant powers in the Wesnoth world. His personality fits the role of The Hero perfectly.
  • Ballistic Bone: The undead Bone Shooters' and Banebows' arrows' shafts are bones, not wood.
  • Battle Cry: The Dwarvish call to arms, "Up axes!"
  • The Berserker: The Dwarvish Ulfserker and... well, Berserker. Regardless of if they're attacking or defending, Ulfserkers and Berserkers, along with any other unit using an attack with the "Berserk" attribute will fight either until they die, their enemy dies, or thirty rounds of combat have passed with neither unit dying.
  • BFS: Several melee units wield really big sword, enhanced by the disproportional nature of the sprite artwork.
  • Bigfoot, Sasquatch, and Yeti: Another very powerful but rarely-seen Level 4 campaign monster. Good thing is that Yetis usually attack your enemies too. Best engaged by mobbing one with ranged units and/or Slowing it. If you do kill one, they are worth a ton of XP.
  • Bilingual Bonus: Coupled with Genius Bonusinvoked for various portraits, particularly the dwarves, for whom the artists often include little messages and jokes in Futhark runes. See Knuckle Tattoos, below. Other real-world scripts are also used, though not so blatantly, including cuneiform. Indeed, a variety of Conlang fonts and scripts have been created for many of the races and species.
    • The runes on the armour of Karrag, The Hammer of Thursagan's Big Bad, spell 'hot'.
  • Binary Suns: Irdya only has a single natural sun, but some time between "Northern Rebirth" and "Under the Burning Suns", the mages of Wesnoth created a second sun to banish the darkness and vanquish various disruptive forces like orcs and the undead. However, Wesnoth became stagnant and went into a decline, during which a king attempted to showcase his greatness by raising a third sun, but Wesnoth's mages were no longer up to the task of creating a new sun and it came crashing back down, bringing an end to the kingdom of Wesnoth in an instant. By the time of "Under the Burning Suns", the orbit of the second sun has shifted somewhat, creating the era's distinctive fifteen-turn day-night cycle with long days and alternating short and long nights between them.
  • Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism: Elven females who attain enough magical power will grow faerie wings. This also comes with an aversion to iron, meaning they don't wear armor or wield weapons. It's stated that the males can do this too but it's exceedingly rare for them to do so.
  • Black Mage: Mages and Dark Adepts specialize entirely in offensive magics, though Mages may become white mages and gain healing abilities.
  • Blade Below the Shoulder: Used straight by Drake Flares/Flamehearts. Drake Fighters/Warriors use a cross between this and Wolverine Claws - they have a single blade, but it's mounted perpendicular to the wrist like a claw.
  • Bloodsucking Bats: The Vampire Bat line appropriately enough sucks the blood of their victims when they attack. This is reflected in gameplay by the bats healing with every successful hit.
  • Boring, but Practical: Elvish Shamans aren't too impressive in direct combat thanks to their weak attacks, but their "slow" ability cripples enemy mobility and damage, which combines nicely with their healing to make your army hard to kill. While the Sorceress advancement packs more punch, their entangling attack remains an example - not as flashy or destructive as faerie fire, but highly useful for weakening dangerous enemies.
  • Bow and Sword in Accord:
    • Most Elvish units, the Orcish Ruler line and the Orcish Warlord. Some Loyalist units, like the Duelist, Dragoon and Lieutenant, also use swords and crossbows.
    • Almost every archer unit in the game has a short sword or dagger for retaliation against melee attacks.
    • This is a popular combination for protagonist units in campaigns, including Konrad in Heir to the Throne, Haldric in Rise of Wesnoth, and Tallin in Northern Rebirth.
  • Breath Weapon: Drakes. All of them can breathe fire, though the Clashers can't do when wearing full armor, and hence, the Clasher-line units have no fire attack in-game.
  • Burn the Undead: Skeletons are weak against fire and ghosts have lower resistance to them compared to other types of attack except for arcane.
  • Cannon Fodder:
    • Level 1 units hired in campaign missions to draw enemy flak away from your veterans, with any lucky survivors possibly leveling up to become veterans. Also, every unit in multiplayer with the exception of your leader, leveled or near-leveled units, and certain expensive and/or hard-hitting units like Mages or Gryphon Riders whose survival is critical to the success of your attack. Played straightest by the Orc Grunt, Spearman, and Elvish Fighter, all of which are cheap and efficient units that appear in practically any battle which their factions are involved in, taking heavy losses, and frequently being replaced.
    • The less-common Level 0 units are even more this. Since they are cheaper, but weaker and harder to level-up (some couldn't even reach Level 2) than any other unit, their main purpose when recruited is to provide cheap distraction.
    • Some scenarios twist this around to make it inadvisable to use swarms of cannon fodder. For example, battles against the undead can result in your own slain soldiers being raised as undead the same turn, so throwing expendable troops against them is counterproductive. Also, many maps have chokepoints (especially caverns, sewers, and mountainous terrain) which can only best be contested/defended with your toughest units, as the weaker units will just die or clog up the chokepoint.
  • Casting a Shadow: Dark Adepts have a secondary spell called "Shadow Wave". Its base damage is lower than their "Chill Wave" spell, but it can hit hard against units weak to arcane damage (including Shadows, ironically enough).
  • Cataclysm Backstory: The campaign of Under the Burning Suns takes place long after a cataclysmic event has turned a good portion of the world to a desert. The previously forest-dwelling elves now live amongst the sands, eking out a meager existence. It's later revealed that during an age of prosperity, a powerful magic ritual was used to create a second sun so the days would be longer to diminish the power of evil creatures in the world. The world fell into decadence and when an attempt was made to raise a third sun it backfired horribly, crashing into Wesnoth.
  • The Cavalry:
    • This happens in Northern Rebirth, when the player is fighting through the above-mentioned Inescapable Ambush. Krash, after having flown off unexpectedly at the start of the mission with Tallin & co. thinking that he had had enough of them, reappears with a horde of Drakes a few days later, ready to break the siege.
    • Another Cavalry-moment occurs, literally, in the Legend of Wesmere scenario, 'Human Alliance'. The elves and Wenothian humans have been duking it out non-stop against endless hordes of Orcs for nearly three days in the Battle of Tath, when suddenly, King Haldric II arrives with a Paladin, several Knights and a squadron of Horsemen. The Orcs retreat simply out of fear(and have still not managed to break the defenses of Tath), and the scenario ends there and then with victory for the player.
    • Yet another very similar Cavalry-moment occurs in the Son of the Black Eye scenario, 'Clash of Armies'. Earl Lanbec'h and his elvish and dwarvish allies Thelarion and Durstang have been besieging the Orcish city of Prestim for four days when the Shamans of the Orcish Great Council show up, with the Great Horde behind them ready to steamroll the opposition. Lanbec'h retreats immediately, and the player wins the mission by simply having held out that long.
  • Character Level: Not only main characters, but pretty much every unit, can go through a few level-ups. In each level-up, units get changed to a more powerful or specialized evolution with new abilities. Eventually, they reach their maximum level, after which they cannot gain any more levels and instead get small HP bonuses and heals upon collecting more XP.
  • Cherry Tapping: If you get the upper hand on an enemy, you can have great fun slowly picking them to death with low-power units like Elvish Shamans. This has strategic benefits as well - it lets you milk more experience out of them before they die and helps level up your weak units.
  • Cincinnatus: At the epilogue of Legend of Wesmere, Kalenz is unanimously chosen to be the High Lord of the Elves since the Council were killed by Landar. After preparing the elves for any potential war against the orcs, Kalenz quickly retires once he feels his work is done.
  • Cock-a-Doodle Dawn: Whenever the time of day becomes dawn, the sound of a crowing rooster plays.
  • Color-Coded Armies: Each side in the game is normally color coded, with the main player's side being red. Naturally from this comes the Color-Coded Multiplayer trope in multiplayer. The game doesn't actually enforces this as a rule though.
  • Color-Coded for Your Convenience: Units have parts of their armor or weapons color-coded to match their faction's livery - which doesn't mean anything except for being able to make out who's who on the minimap.
  • Color-Coded Wizardry: The Mage line units can take several different color-coded paths based on the magic they prefer to use. Red mages focus on raw attack power, shooting fireballs at the enemy. Silver mages can use a teleport spell to quickly travel between villages you own. White mages heal your troops and are especially effective at destroying undead. The Dark Adepts and Elvish Shamans are black and green respectively, but they come from different factions.
  • A Commander Is You: The Wesnoth factions follow the trope to an extent, but most of them are hybrids of the various categories:
    • Loyalists - Generalist faction - completely lawful, terrain independent, highly versatile, but with limited mobility. Stronger than anyone else at daytime, but weaker than everyone else at night, the Loyalist play-style is often characterized by a time-of-day based cycle of attacking and retreating.
    • Rebels - Balanced/Ranger faction - slightly lawful, Forest-preferring, with extensive ranged combat abilities, also fairly versatile. Among the Rebel units, the elves are neutral, while Woses, mermen and magi are lawful. All Rebel units except for the Wose have ranged attacks.
    • Drakes - Elitist/Ranger faction - mixed lawful/chaotic, terrain independent, excellent mobility, follows a hit-and-run style of combat utilizing the day-night cycle, with great attack strength but poor defensive ability. Heavily immersed in Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors. The Drakes all have some aspect of Glass Cannon and are lawful, while the Saurians all have some degree of Fragile Speedster and are chaotic.
    • Knalgans - Brute Force/Elitist faction - somewhat chaotic, with terrain independent Outlaws and Hill/Mountain-preferring dwarves. Has a duality between the chaotic outlaws and the neutral dwarves. Possesses no elemental weaponry, no poison and no magic, but does have units possessing unique abilities, like the backstabbing Thieves and the relentless attack of the Dwarvish Ulfserkers. Except the Ulf, all of the dwarves have some aspect of Mighty Glacier, while the Outlaws are faster and cheaper, and are sometimes played as an independent sub-faction in themselves, called "Hodor".
    • Northerners - Spammers/Brute Force faction - highly chaotic, somewhat hill-preferring, melee-oriented, utilizes cheap yet tough units to overrun the enemy force with sheer numbers. Except for the Archer and Assassin, all Northerner units are melee-focused, and are thus easily attacked by enemy ranged units. The Northerners have a time-of-day based attack-retreat cycle, but are not as heavily dependent on it as Loyalists and Undead, and can often use their numbers to simultaneously put pressure on different fronts and wear down the enemy.
    • Undead - Technical faction - completely chaotic, terrain independent, slow-moving, and highly resistant to some attacks, while being very weak against others. Very deeply immersed in Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors, with a complex system of weaknesses and strengths and a variety of special abilities. All units except for the Bat and Adept have the "undead" trait, which means they are immune to poison, draining attacks, and zombie-plague. The Undead are, like the Loyalists, heavily time-of-day dependent, very strong at night and correspondingly weak at daytime.
      • Of course, this all is at best a generalization, with many individual units and different match-ups altering a faction's play-style. The Loyalists certainly have Brute Force units, the Rebels can be quite Technical (using Slow, Ambush, etc.), and so on.
  • Convection, Schmonvection: Usually averted as lava hexes may be purely aesthetic on the map, but one scenario in Under the Burning Suns has you fighting through a room filled with lava. Units in the room take two points of damage every turn they're in the room and twenty five points of damage if they end their turn on a lava hex. Notably downplayed from what the real life consequences would be still.
  • Court Mage: Delfador was the advisor mage to King Garard before Garard was betrayed by his wife and son.
  • Crippling Overspecialization: Largely averted by most melee-only units, which tend to make up for what they lose in ability to return ranged attacks in kind with an edge in toughness and raw damage potential over their "mixed" counterparts once their turn comes up. Played rather more straight with the ranged-only Dark Adept (which thus instead has no ability to strike back at attackers in melee) and the Horseman and Dwarvish Ulfserker (plus their higher-level Lancer/Berserker counterparts) with their respective exclusive death-or-glory type attacks, however.
  • Critical Existence Failure: Units are not dead until they're dead. Even a unit with 1HP will still fight at full strength. Only units with the "Swarm" trait are weakened by damage, having fewer attacks as their health declines but this doesn't apply to any of the vanilla factions in multiplayer.
  • Crutch Character:
    • In Heir to the Throne, it's best to just avoid giving Delfador experience—as a Level 5 unit with no advancement options, he only gains 3 HP whenever he maxes out his XP, as opposed to basic units, or even Konrad, who will advance to more powerful units and gain stronger attacks and abilities. This is easier said than done in the beginning where he one-shots most other units in the game.
    • Units with the Leadership ability, such as Elvish Captains, tend to be this in general. They give a damage bonus to nearby units of lower level, which is valuable when most of your army is still inexperienced. However, they're not as good in combat as other units of the same level, and as a campaign goes on, more and more of your troops will out-level them and make their leadership useless. If however your leadership unit can advance to level 4, which very few troops do (Grand Marshals of the loyalist faction, and a few kinds of mage) then they will remain valuable.
    • Subverted, however, in the later parts of Legend of Wesmere, where your army, save for the loyal units and units from the Shaman line, abandons you; because of that, units with leadership are still very much useful. More generally, they're also handy for boosting the effectiveness of the raw recruits you'll inevitably have to bring in to replace your casualties.
    • Subverted by Garak in Under the Burning Suns - he starts as a fully advanced unit, but he has a unique Teaching ability that causes him to redistribute all XP he currently has at the start of each turn to adjacent units, so any experience he picks up always goes somewhere useful.
    • In long campaigns, units with the Intelligent trait. They promote faster, but once a unit is already fully promoted, Intelligent brings almost no further benefit, while other traits have more durable benefits, especially those that increase damage per strike for units with many strikes.
    • Prestige Class units give up their ability to advance further in exchange for a big boost to short-term power or utility. While some have enough extra abilities to remain at least situationally useful in the long term, others ultimately fall behind their fully-advanced counterparts - for instance, Deathblades can dish out more damage than Revenants, but they're overshadowed by Draugs in every way aside from being slightly faster.
  • Curb-Stomp Battle: The Pebbles In The Flood mission in The South Guard, where you're just trying to hold off an unbeatable infinite swarm of undead for as long as possible.
  • Dark Is Not Evil: Helicrom, one of the allies you find in Liberty, is a firm believer in this, and helps you out against necromancers despite being a dark magician himself. His unit description, however, says that few mages manage to remain in the dark arts without going completely insane.
  • Dark Lord: There are quite a few across the various mainline campaigns, and most Lich Lords would probably qualify, especially Mal Ravanal of The Eastern Invasion.
  • Death Is Not Permanent: Averted. Even vital game-loss units cannot be brought back to life, let alone generic units. Two White Mages in the Northern Rebirth campaign play this one straight, though, resurrecting one another if they're killed.
  • Death or Glory Attack: Certain weapon abilities invoke this:
    • Attacking with a weapon with the Berserk ability or attacking a unit that would retaliate with such a weapon causes the two units to repeat combat for thirty rounds, which nearly always results in one or the other dying.
    • Attacking with a weapon with the Charge ability doubles the damage both sides do.
    • User-made content may add other such abilities, such as Frenzy, which is a downplayed version of Berserk, only pressing the battle for three rounds instead of thirty.
  • Decapitated Army:
    • Killing the leader(s) of an enemy force usually automatically wins the game, though on some occasions mission-specific conditions still need to be fulfilled.
    • In games with more than two players, killing any of the leaders doesn't stop their forces from harassing you. It is only when you kill the final enemy leader that you instantly win.
  • Dem Bones: Standard-fare Undead in this case, wielding axes and bows and completely under control of the necromancer who raised them. Largely immune to piercing weapons (spears, arrows) and cold elemental attacks, and highly resistant to bladed weapons, but are vulnerable to fire and arcane elemental attacks and impact weapons.
  • Depending on the Writer: As an open-source project, development is decentralized, and so pretty much all the campaigns are user-created by a fairly wide variety of people who may not be directly collaborating. Although campaigns that blatantly contradict established facts are generally not admitted into the canon, there are still several things within the canonical campaigns that vary depending on the writer, such as the portrayal of Orcs and Trolls, and the extent to which they are or aren't Always Chaotic Evil.
  • Developer's Foresight: In Descent into Darkness, Malin Keshar normally gets exiled from his hometown at the end of the first scenario for summoning undead. If the player doesn't train any undead and finishes the mission with only Malin and what human forces he has, it results in a different scene where Malin leaves of his own accord. It also results in a different scene when he returns later in the campaign, though ultimately it still ends in disaster.
  • Devious Daggers: The Thief line uses knives for attack, at first for melee only, later to be thrown as a ranged attack too. Its level 3 unit, the Assassin, Dual Wields daggers and throws poisoned knives.
  • Deus Exit Machina: After spending the early scenarios of Heir to the Throne as a Crutch Character, Delfador goes to take care of other business so that Konrad (and the player) would have to retake Elensefar on his own.
  • Dialogue Tree: Appears in several campaigns. Usually the player will use it to decide whether to ally with one or another party, or it may be used to decide if you want to engage a certain group of enemies over another.
  • Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: In the final scenario of Under The Burning Suns, Kaleh, Nym and Zuhl take on Eloh/Yechnagoth and kill her.
  • Difficult, but Awesome: Drakes, and Undead, if played well in multiplayer, generally for the very same reasons that lead to them being Poor, Predictable Rock otherwise. All the factions have potential for awesome, but some are more straightforward and generally easier to get used to than others.
  • Difficulty Levels: Nearly all campaigns have three difficulty levels, often named for three tiers of one of the protagonist faction's units.
  • Discard and Draw: Certain advancements take away one or more of a unit's abilities, but improve the unit in other ways. For instance, a Spearman who becomes a Swordsman or Pikeman grows much stronger in melee at the cost of his ranged attack, and an Elvish Shaman who becomes a Sorceress gains a powerful arcane attack in place of her healing ability.
  • Draconic Humanoid: The drakes, as previously described, are a race of anthropomorphic quasi-dragons.
  • Dual Wielding: Several melee units (e.g. Orcish Warlord, Elvish Hero, Naga Warrior) dual wields their swords. Deathblades dual wields their axes instead.
  • Dwindling Party: Many campaigns have characters die for story reasons, sometimes even in spite of you helping them survive on the battlefield.
    • Since units who survive a scenario can be recalled into another scenario with their previous levels and experience you can amass a powerful army of elite units. The trouble comes when they die and you have to start over leveling up a basic unit to replace them. If you're not careful you can find yourself at the final mission with nothing more than a bunch of basic units.
    • This goes double for non-mission critical unique characters you may encounter along the course of the campaign. Losing them doesn't end the scenario, but you'll never be able to replace them and they can sometimes fill a unique role your army can't compensate for. This can also result in permanently missable content if getting them to survive up to a specific point in the campaign results in a bonus.

    E-M 
  • Easter Egg: In certain campaigns, accomplishing particular challenges or exploring unusual areas will reward you with extra units or special equipment.
    • Descent into Darkness has a secret ending that is only accessible if you do specific things in certain scenarios, winning the final, endlessly repeating, scenario 5 or more times, and only then losing to see the ending.
  • Eldritch Abomination:
    • The unit description for the Final Boss of Under the Burning Suns, Yechnagoth, as well as her summons, simply states, "This thing is impossible to describe, no one has seen anything like it before."
    • The downloadable Nightmares of Meloen faction has monsters of truly Lovecraftian looks. However, they are quite easy to kill.
  • Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: With certain units being extremely weak to or strong against various of the six damage types, like Arcane attacks against Undead, Cold attacks against Drakes.
  • Elite Tweak: Some unit level-ups, instead of just improving the unit's existing stats & abilities, dramatically change the role and function of that unit, and are often priorities to level-up in campaigns. For example, the Level 1 Mage can level-up into the White Mage, going from being a magical Glass Cannon to an Undead-dispelling medic. Or the Ghost upgrading into the Shadow, going from a low-damage draining support unit to a skirmishing, nightstalking, backstabbing killer.
  • Elves vs. Dwarves: Usually played straight, as elves are a common enemy in campaigns where you play dwarves and vice versa. However, Heir to the Throne, Legend of Wesmere and Under the Burning Suns subvert this by allowing the player's elven forces to form reasonably strong alliances with the dwarves they meet.
  • Endless Game: Descent Into Darkness ends in an infinite loop of the last scenario, appropriately titled "Endless Night". The player character even hangs a lampshade after this scenario is finished a few times.
  • Enemy Civil War:
    • In the first scenario of Northern Rebirth, the orcs who enslaves Tallin and co. are attacked by orcs working for a conqueror. Tallin exploits the opportunity to rebel.
    • In Legend of Wesmere, after realizing that the orcs are too strong when they are united under a Great Chief, Kalenz and Landar assassinate him in secret, causing a civil war between the remaining orcs.
  • Epic Flail: Morning star is used by the Heavy Infantry line (though he starts with a mace) as well as the Mage of Light. Both of those unit lines make up most of your army if facing undead, in order to smash skeletons.
  • Eternal Equinox: Days and nights are always of equal length. On the associated fora, it was first justified as the result of the granularity of the turns, but then pointed out that at its apparent latitude and granularity, there should still be a noticeable change, but kept as one of the game's Acceptable Breaks from Reality.
  • Evil Is Deathly Cold: Three base-level units and (in the last case some of) their advanced versions are capable of inflicting cold damage — the Dark Adept, the Saurian Augur, and the Ghost. In other words, two practitioners of "dark" magic and one type of undead, all of chaotic alignment...
  • Evil Laugh: If a Dwarvish Ulfserker or Berserker attacks a unit that doesn't have melee weapons (meaning he gets thirty rounds' worth of nonstop attacks on someone who can't fight back), he'll laugh maniacally before whaling on his helpless opponent for an all-but-guaranteed kill.
  • Evolution Power-Up: As your units level up they can gain more attacks, weapons, or abilities.
  • Experience Meter: Even color-coded for how much experience a unit needs to level - you can tell by sight whether they need to kill a level 3, 2 or 1 unit, and whether it can level further or not. If it cannot go further, collecting experience will result in an After Maximum Level Advancement (AMLA), which is nothing but a small HP gain and an on-the-spot heal - significantly less powerful than a true level-up.
  • Exposition Dump: Scenario 9 of Under the Burning Suns drops a staggering amount of exposition about what happened in the last thousand years, why there are two suns, where the Empire of Wesnoth went, and what the Big Bad really is.
  • Eyepatch of Power: Highwaymen wears an eyepatch and is the highest advancement of Thug. Skeleton Archers mostly averts this since they are usually just mooks despite their eyepatch.
  • Face–Heel Turn: Landar turns against Kalenz in the last act of Legend of Wesmere and most of your army follow him.
  • Faction Calculus: Six factions, all of them very different from one another.
  • Fantastic Caste System: The Drakes. The Glider caste are hunters, the Fighter caste are warriors, the Clasher caste are law-keepers, and the Burner caste are leaders. Sometimes the distinctions are blurred, though - the highest-ranking members of the Glider caste, the Hurricanes, fulfill military roles instead of hunting, and the Thrashers and Enforcers, while still technically part of the Clasher caste, prefer to act as shock-troopers on the battlefield instead of being law-keepers.
  • Fantastic Race Weapon Affinity:
    • Elves are strongly associated with bows. Their Fighter and Scout lines use bow in addition of sword while the dedicated archer line are better with their bows compared to non-elves counterparts, both in-lore and in-gameplay, especially if they have the elves-only "dextrous" trait that gives them extra ranged damage.
    • Although their units have variety of weapons from spear to thunderstick (which is treated as a uniquely dwarven weapon), the main meat of dwarves side is the Dwarvish Fighter line, which only uses axe and hammer before adding a hatchet at their highest level. The axe is also used by the Scout and Ulfserker line.
    • Trolls are associated with simple blunt weapons, be it their fists, club, or hammer, fitting them being a rather crude race.
    • Mermen has three main unit lines with different weapons each, but the one most likely to be seen, Merman Fighter, uses a trident like typical fictional mermen.
  • Fantastic Racism:
    • The Masked dwarves in The Hammer of Thursagan are prejudiced against any non-dwarves and want the Knalgan dwarves to have the same line of thinking.
    • During the Southern Guard campaign, if you side with the elves you'll still spend the last couple of missions fighting a splinter group of them because they are trying to take revenge on all humans for the actions of a single group of bandits, and the elvish fanatics will explicitly state that all humans are the same and they will show no mercy to the "tree-killers."
    • Malin Keshar in Descent into Darkness hates orcs to the point of wanting to genocide them.
  • Fantasy Gun Control: Averted by the dwarves, who, in this instance, are mostly technologically-oriented and possess very little and very rare magic in form of runecrafting. They have mastered steel-making and gunpowder technology, and the Thunderer unit line wields a hand-cannon similar to the early gunpowder weapons from real-world history. Realistically, it does more damage per shot than any bow or crossbow unit of the same level, but due to the long time it takes to reload and prepare, it only gets a single attack per round of combat. It is never actually explicitly confirmed whether the "Thundersticks" are guns - the in-game descriptions vaguely make them out to be some kind of magical device - but it can be assumed that said in-game descriptions are made from the point of view of an in-world Wesnothian scholar who wouldn't know what guns are and the procedure described sounds very much like the process of loading a muzzleloading gun.
  • Fantasy Pantheon: While not explicitly discussed much, there are mentions made of the "bright gods" and "dark gods" in several campaigns, implying there does exist a pantheon of deities worshipped by the denizens of Wesnoth.
  • Fictional Document: The hints and tips on the main game page are attributed to in-world tactical manuals and character journals, though some of them refer to game mechanics which the writer shouldn't have known about.
  • Field Power Effect: Lawful units fight better at day, and chaotic units fight better at night (and both fight worse at the opposite daytime). As well, the Mage of Light unit can illuminate an area with their presence, being a Field Power Bonus for lawful and a Field Power Drain for chaotic units at the same time.
  • Fighting Your Friend: In the final chapter of Legend of Wesmere, the elvish civil war forces Kalenz to fight former members of his own army, including Landar, who has been corrupted by Crelanu's philter. The last scenario has special dialogues when your veterans kill former units from your side or vice versa, with both sides lamenting that it has come to this.
  • Filler: Rogue necromancers are often thrown into campaigns for pacing's sake or to give the player some extra gold or XP. They rarely have any effect on the overarching plot and you usually only fight them because you stumbled upon their army by accident.
  • Final Battle: Most of the campaigns end in a big, climactic Final Battle, which usually involve Storming the Castle and killing the Big Bad. Exceptions include:
    • Descent Into Darkness, in which the last scenario keeps going on and on in an infinite loop until the player loses.
    • Sceptre Of Fire, in which all the protagonists die in a Heroic Sacrifice protecting the Sceptre, by triggering a volcanic eruption.
    • One possible ending of The South Guard, in which you just have to bring your Elf ally to a certain location to convince your Knight Templar opponent to stop wantonly attacking you.
    • The last mission of Liberty, in which you storm the fortress of Halstead and destroy its supports, collapsing the entire fortress.
    • The last mission of To Lands Unknown has you invading the holiest temple of your former allies and steal the MacGuffin that you need to join your people into the Abyss.
  • Flaming Sword:
    • There's one hidden in one of the branching maps in Heir to the Throne. Unlike the Scepter of Fire, it's not the Sword of Plot Advancement, but is arguably the Infinity +1 Sword in that campaign.
    • If you keep Elyssa alive in Under the Burning Suns, she makes you a flaming sword as a parting gift when she stays behind in the underground city.
    • You get one in Dead Water, and lay waste to your enemies. Exceedingly useful to stop enemies attacking your more vulnerable units like Priestesses in melee.
  • Flavor Text: Right clicking on a unit gives you the option to look at a unit's description. This includes stats, weaknesses, and abilities, but it also has some lore information about the unit itself that has no real effect on gameplay.
  • Flesh-Eating Zombie: The Ghoul line unit is said to consume the bodies of the dead. After it levels up into a Necrophage any enemy it kills is devoured, permanently raising its HP by 1.
  • Force Versus Discipline: Within the Drakes' Clasher caste, Thrashers and Enforcers embrace Force, while Arbiters and Wardens embrace Discipline. The former are blood knights who arm themselves with all manner of melee weaponry and spend their time fighting or training for war, while the latter act as strict and pious keepers of the law, training exclusively with a single weapon, the halberd.
  • Fragile Speedster: There are two types of Fragile Speedster:
    • Scouts: These are units with a lot of movement points, used to scout out enemy positions, capture villages, threaten the enemy's flanks, etc. They usually pay for their mobility by having high price, low durability, and/or poor offensive abilities. The Vampire Bat, Drake Glider, Elvish Scout, Gryphon Rider and Wolf Rider fit this trope. Loyalist Cavalrymen are an exception though; they are unusually tough and strong in melee for scouts. However, they can only move and fight effectively on plains, and get slowed down everywhere else.
    • "Elusive" Units: These are units who rely on evasion to survive instead of armor. They are usually quicker than normal infantry in terms of movement points, and are much harder to hit. However, if they do get hit, they take a lot of damage because of their poor resistances and low hit points. This leaves them vulnerable to magical attacks, poison, and marksmanship(i.e, units skilled at hitting moving targets, like Elvish Sharpshooters). The Fencer, Footpad, Thief and Orcish Assassin fit this trope.
  • From Nobody to Nightmare: Malin Keshar starts as a mage of limited ability before becoming one of the most dangerous liches to ever exist in Wesnoth.
  • Game Level: Nearly always linear, with a single beginning and a single ending, although there are frequent portions which become a bit more lattice-like with various options.
  • Game Mod: Some downloadable add-ons (labeled "Modification" on the menu) are meant to change how the game is played, such as changing how the RNG works. Of course, given the game is open-source, there's nothing stopping anyone to check out the code and modify it, at least for themselves.
  • Gardening-Variety Weapon: Human Peasants can fight using pitchforks, although they are very weak compared to most actual weapons.
  • Geo Effects: The terrain occupied by a unit affects how easy it is to hit. In fact, almost nothing else does. Exceptions include the Marksman ability, which gives at least a 60% chance to hit, and the Magic weapon descriptor means that that particular attack will always have 70% chance to hit. Various abilities in various add-ons affect that too.
  • Ghostly Glide: The Ghost line unit and its leveled forms all float along the ground and seem to lack a lower torso of any kind.
  • Giant Flyer: The flying and winged Gryphons and Drakes are said to be huge compared to humans.
  • Giant Spider: These are a rarely-seen but irritatingly powerful campaign monster often found in underground missions. In some of the larger and more elaborate cave missions of a few campaigns, you can expect to walk into a room infested with these things.
  • Glass Cannon: Several different kinds of units fit this trope.
    • Nearly every spellcasting unit with a decent offense, as they tend to be very much Squishy Wizards.
    • Overspecialized extreme-damage units like the Ulfserker/Berserker or Horseman.
    • Slippery Backstabbers like the Thief and Shadow units.
    • The Deathblade and Gryphon Rider simply have a lot of raw damage capability in exchange for a small hitpoint pool.
    • Drakes are also considered to be Glass Cannons since they have impressively high offensive power yet, despite having high hitpoints, have difficulty holding a battle line because of their pathetic evasion abilities, high price(and thus low numbers) and glaring weaknesses to Cold, Arcane and Pierce damage.
    • Very broadly, any unit with the Quick trait and either the Dextrous or Strong trait, as Quick reduces their hitpoints by 5% and Dextrous and Strong add one to the base damage of a unit's ranged and melee attacks respectively.
  • Global Currency: Gold, which works for recruiting new units, recalling veterans, paying for upkeep, and even in magically raising undead units. Silver also apparently exists as a currency (as shown in The Scepter of Fire), but is lore-only and has no effect whatsoever on the game mechanics.
  • God Guise: In Under the Burning Suns your party follows what they believe are visions from Eloh, an elven goddess. It's revealed that Eloh is in fact Yechnagoth, an eldritch monster pretending to be her who also serves as the final boss of the campaign.
  • God Save Us from the Queen!: Asheviere in Heir to the Throne is a brutal tyrant who only cares about her own continued reign.
  • Good Princess, Evil Queen: In the Heir to the Throne campaign the villain is Queen Asheviere, who has been turning Wesnoth into a wasteland. By contrast, the party has Princess Li'Sar, who joins following a Heel–Face Turn and eventually marries the hero Konrad and becomes Queen.
  • Graceful in Their Element: This is played straight with the Mermen units who suffer penalties moving on land but move very quickly in water, although many units will suffer severe movement penalties when out of their element but move just fine in ones they specialize in.
  • Gratuitous Ninja: The human Assassin unit (the level-3 version of the Thief), which both looks and works like a ninja, with the ability to bypass enemy zones-of-control and backstab or poison its opponents.
  • Grim Up North: The Northlands are hard lands to live in for humans because of the marauding orcs, at least up until the formation of the Northern Alliance.
  • Guys Smash, Girls Shoot:
    • Among core units, most of the close-range fighters are exclusively male, both of the female-only unit types are mages who fight at long range, and units that can be either gender tend to be either strong ranged attackers or mixed.
    • Inverted by the heroes of Heir to the Throne: The only female main character is a hard-hitting melee specialist who doesn't even have a ranged attack unless you give her a certain artefact, while two of the male heroes have a mix of melee and ranged capability and the third is a Squishy Wizard.
    • Inverted by the Saurians: The magic-wielding Combat Medic Saurian Augur line is male-only, while the melee-oriented Saurian Skirmisher line is female-only.
  • Hammer of the Holy: Healer units tend to have impact weapons like staves (White Mages, Elvish Shamans and Druids, Mermaid Priestesses and Diviners, the Saurian Augur lines) and in one case flails (Mages of Light).
  • Healthy Green, Harmful Red: Unit's health bar is green when the unit is close to full health and red when it's close to dying.
  • Heel–Face Turn:
    • Princess Li'sar in Heir to the Throne eventually realizes that Queen Asheivere is evil and joins the heroes' side.
    • The Lady Outlaw/Jessene in Rise of Wesnoth starts out as a shady antagonist to Haldric before deciding to actively help Haldric since both of them actually have the same goal.
  • Hero Must Survive: Depending on the scenario. Such units are marked with a spiked team color disk and a silver crown. The leader, who is required to survive in virutally every campaign scenario, is marked with a gold crown and a spiked team color disk, and enemy leaders that must be killed will be similarly marked (if an enemy leader doesn't have to be killed, they'll still have the crown, but instead they'll have a standard circular team color disk).
  • He Who Fights Monsters: Malin Keshar from Descent into Darkness desperately fights orcs to protect his hometown, turning to darker and darker magics to do so, and eventually becomes more of a threat to humanity than the orcs ever were as the mighty lich Mal Keshar.
  • Hit Points: Every units have hit points (HP), shown both besides the unit and in the sidebar, which depletes when they are damaged and increases (until it hits the maximum HP) when they are healed. Units will die when the HP drops to zero or below.
  • Holy Backlight: Certain lines of units gain "Illuminate", which lights up the area around them, making lawful units more powerful at night. Unsurprisingly it tends to be healer/priest lines that do this. You often won't get this ability until their final level though.
  • Hopeless Boss Fight: The second-to-last scenario in The South Guard, if you side with the bandits over the elves, is a battle against undeads who simply overnumber and overpower anything the heroes have. The two necromancers you face cannot even be hurt by your troops. You only "win" once the leader of your side Sir Gerrick dies.
  • Horse of a Different Color:
    • The Undead Chocobones ride the skeletons of large flightless birds that are Chocobos in all but name.
    • Golbins ride wolves in keeping with the setting's The Lord of the Rings inspiration.
    • Dwarves ride gryphons.
    • Unlike default-era Elves who ride horses, the Quenoth Elves of Under the Burning Suns ride antelope-like creatures called dustboks and buffalo-like creatures called taurochs. Dustbok riders offer much the same mobility as regular horse cavalry, while tauroch riders have no better mobility than infantry but have superior damage resistance.
  • Humans Are Average: Humans are present in a lot of factions and can fill a lot of niches, but even at their most proficient, cannot match elves in archery or forest combat and are generally less magically inclined, nor can they match orcs, drakes, or trolls in melee combat. Humans may be more inclined to use and pursue technology than elves, drakes, or orcs, but they're nowhere near as scientifically advanced as dwarves. Furthermore, most human units do not have any particular damage resistances or weaknesses, and humans are generally less likely to have special abilities at either the unit or weapon level. One of the very few specialities of humans is necromancy, as necromancy generally requires the kind of adaptability and mental flexibility that also happens to generally make humans so unspecialized in the first place, and the pursuit of necromancy is largely linked to attempts to prolong one's life and escape the limits of mortality, which is generally less of a concern to other magically-apt races, as they tend to have significantly longer lifespans.
  • Idle Animation: When they're not near enemies or badly injured, certain types of units will periodically do idle animations, such as Elvish Archers adjusting their bowstrings or Saurian Skirmishers digging up worms with their spears.
  • Immortality Immorality: One of the most common reasons people dabble in The Dark Arts and become life stealing liches. Haldric suggests that becoming undead weakens any morals they may have previously had.
  • Improbable Aiming Skills: Units with truly exceptional accuracy, such as Elvish Marksmen and Sharpshooters, have their exceptional aiming skills represented by an attack with the Marksman ability, which causes the attack to never have less than 60% accuracy, regardless of the enemy's normal evasion chance, while still allowing higher accuracy if their evasion is poor on whatever terrain they're on.
  • Inescapable Ambush: A chamber in Malifor's lair from Northern Rebirth features this. When your unit steps on the upper half of it, the door they enter will close and two other doors will open, revealing Giant Spiders ready to attack all your units in the chamber.
  • Interface Spoiler: A map that will have additional objectives geographically beyond the original objective often has this spoiled by the game's inability to actually alter the size of the map on the fly. A revealed map that is only part of the minimap on a scenario that doesn't start predominantly shrouded and bordered with hexes that have impassible as a secondary type is a dead giveaway that the map will expand after some event, usually triggered by completion of the current objective, passing a certain hex, or a certain number of turns passing.
  • In-Universe Game Clock: There are two main variants used outdoors
    • Most campaigns and standard multiplayer use a standard six-phase day-night cycle consisting of Dawn, Morning, Afternoon, Dusk, and two turns of night called First Watch and Second Watch, then back to Dawn. This means each turn is four hours long and makes for two turns each of day, night, and neutral time, giving Lawful and Chaotic units equal time to shine.
    • Under the Burning Suns and a handful of user-made campaigns like Invasion from the Unknown and After the Storm are set in the distant future after an artificial second sun has been raised and follow an alternate fifteen-turn day-night cycle starting with First Dawn, then First Morning, First Midday, First Afternoon, First Dusk, The Short Dark, Second Dawn, Second Morning, Second Midday, Second Afternoon, Second Dusk, four turns of The Long Dark, and back to the First Dawn. Assuming turns are still four hours, this makes for a sixty-hour cycle that slightly favors the day (six turns day, four turns in between, five turns night) but gives a very long stretch of night for Chaotic units to run rampant.
    • Cave maps generally completely disable the normal day-night cycle and are functionally always night, though they may have open areas and spots where sunlight shines through. The latter shine all the time, rather than going dark during the night, and merely negate the advantages of Chaotic units and the disadvantages of Lawful units. Particularly deep or dark caves may go beyond this and give an extra 5% bonus to Chaotic units and penalty to Lawful units, which bright spots or units with the Illuminates ability cannot fully negate.
    • Maps that take place inside buildings may instead have the day-night cycle replaced with a permanent neutral time-of-day effect.
  • Injured Vulnerability: Attacks with the Swarm ability tend to be very powerful, but they grow weaker (by way of having fewer and fewer hits) as their user's hitpoints go down.
  • Javelin Thrower: The Loyalist Spearman have javelins as their secondary weapons, and one of their advancements, the Javelineer, focuses on them.
  • Kill It with Fire: Undead are weak to (or at least don't resist) fire damage making this an effective way to deal with them.
  • Kirk Summation: In Heir to the Throne, Li'sar, if she is the one who kill Queen Asheviere, will tell the queen that she is a monster and murderess driven by her greed before delivering the final blow.
  • Knuckle Tattoos: The Dwarvish Ulfserker/Berserker portrait has 'love' and 'hate' in Futhark runes.
  • Leeroy Jenkins: Expect to see a lot in multiplayer, as it takes some experience to learn that because I can is not good enough a reason for attacking. One has to take into account the day/night cycle, terrain, formations and the overall tactical situation. Also, the AI tends to be somewhat of a leeroy itself, at times.
  • Left-Justified Fantasy Map: The map of Wesnoth (the one used by most campaign and in the main menu) puts the Great Ocean on the left while lands fill everywhere else.
  • Lethal Joke Character: Although the balancing of the game prevents any units that can obviously be used like this, some units are much more powerful than they would appear at first. The Elvish Shaman has negligible attack power, but has the "slow" special ability that renders enemy units much easier to attack and largely incapable of retreating.
  • Let's Fight Like Gentlemen: In Eastern Invasion, Mal Ravanal eventually challenge Gweddry to a duel along with six of his champions. Miraculously he keeps his words, though when he summons some dead soldiers he reminds that reanimating corpses wasn't against the rules.
    • On a similar note in Under the Burning Suns Yechnagoth challenges Kaleh to a duel in her temple. Thankfully, Nym, Zhuul, and Grog/Rogrimir decide to go inside and help him against the creature.
  • Level-Up Fill-Up: Being healed is a tactically useful side effect of taking a level. AMLAnote  has no effect except this and giving you a negligible three more hitpoints.
  • Life Meter: A small bar next to every unit, friend and foe, lets you know how much life they have left. It even changes color as it depletes.
  • Lightning Bruiser:
    • Loyalist cavalry on the plains has the speed of most scout units while being stronger and tougher than most of them.
    • Dwarves in the mountains and underground are unaffacted by the terrain, making them relatively fast while keeping their standard high strength and toughness.
    • Elves in the forests can move as fast as they are in plains and have pretty nice attack power.
  • Linear Warriors, Quadratic Wizards: Downplayed. Wizard units like Mages and Dark Adepts are useful from the get-go, and deal a lot of damage, but their low HP prevents them from being overpowered outright. This weakness disappears once they hit higher levels, but that takes time - a Mage needs about one and a half times as much XP to level up as an Elvish Scout or a Ghoul. However, once your wizards are leveled up, they can become downright unstoppable, especially since they're almost the only units in mainline that can advance to level 4 - exceptions are either standalone monsters like Yetis or Fire Dragons, or other wizard-type units from other factions.
    • Averted with healer-type units, which need less XP to level to compensate for their low damage, and do not become overpowered on higher levels.
  • Luck-Based Mission: While luck can be managed to an extent by smart recruiting, positioning, and timing, the outcome of each individual clash between two units is still entirely up to the whim of the Random Number Gods with no further player input possible until both units' attacks have been fully resolved.
    • Save Scumming helps. Little-known fact is that one can save and load games during the enemy turns, allowing for obvious replays of individual attack resolutions (making retaliatory kills and survivals manageable), though the developers advise against this.
  • Magic Staff: All mage-like units have these, except the White Magi and Magi of Light (who use morningstars) and the Dark Adepts (who don't have a melee attack).
  • Magikarp Power:
    • Horsemen are next to useless when fighting undead. They are very vulnerable and their only attack is terribly weak against most undead. They become only slightly better when they become Knights - but Knights in turn can upgrade to Paladins that can simply devastate anything the Undead faction has to offer.
    • Elvish Shamans have virtually no offensive capability and only mediocre healing abilities. While they're useful utility units, especially for their slowing attack, getting them enough experience to promote is difficult, but once they do, they can eventually become some of the most powerful magical units in the game, rivalled only by Great Mages and Lichs.
  • Magitek: The cave entrance doors in The Scepter of Fire, and heck, the entire underground civilization of Knalga itself. All this is possible with modern technology, but the dwarves did it through their rune magic. Activating 6 glyphs to close the cave entrance is effectually the same as entering a password into the security computers.
  • Marathon Level: The Underlevels, the last scenario of The Hammer of Thursagan, has no turn limit and can easily take more than 200 turns to complete. For comparision, most other scenarios (of all mainline campaigns) last less than 30 turns.
  • Mauve Shirt: Most of your units are Redshirts, but certain units have a bit speaking part when they join up. They can still die like any other. In addition, many campaigns involve a kind of floating "Advisor" (only referred to as such in the code) speaking part. A Loyal unit or one of your higher-leveled ones usually fills this spot, and if they die the lines will be spoken by another unit, now likewise the "Advisor".
  • Medieval Stasis: The game's timeline from The Rise of Wesnoth to Son of the Black Eye spans about 860 years, and Under the Burning Suns is officially an unspecified but very long time after that and unofficially over a thousand years after Son of the Black Eye and over 1900 years after The Rise of Wesnoth. In all this time, no faction displays any technological advancement or regression from their medieval levels. Even the technologically-minded dwarves had their thundersticks in their earliest appearances and have not enhanced their functionality throughout the entire timeline.
  • Mighty Glacier: Every mainline faction except the Undead has a unit that fits the niche of a Mighty Glacier. These units are generally defined by reduced movement, lower evasion ratings, high hitpoints, being some of the few units with significant damage resistances, and having few but powerful attacks. In general, these units have high resistance to blade, pierce, and impact damage, but lack any outstanding defense from arcane, cold, or fire damage.
    • The Northerners have Trolls, which instead of having the high resistances of most such units, have inate health regeneration, and once they promote past Whelps, are able to keep pace with the rest of the army.
    • The Rebels have Woses, which can blend into forests and have passive regeneration, as well as high resistance to piercing and impact damage, but are very weak to fire and arcane damage.
    • The Loyalists have Heavy Infantrymen, which are able to do massive impact damage with their maces and are protected from physical damage by their armor.
    • The Knalgans have their dwarves in general and their Dwarfish Fighters in particular, which start sturdy and only get more resistant as they promote. While a freshly recruited Dwarvish Fighter is not as well protected as a Heavy Infantryman, by the time they're Dwarvish Lords, they've grown into very resilient units with great hitpoints and similar protection to Iron Maulers.
    • The Drakes have their Drake Clashers, which are still about as mobile as most other factions' infantry, but they are less mobile than other drakes and can neither fly nor use their fire breath due to the weight and constriction of their armor, with the former restriction being symbolically embraced by also encasing their wings in armor, and instead they fight with the small arsenal of melee weapons they carry, including being the only drakes to use spears, which are quite effective against other drakes. With promotion, they can either further embrace their defenses or increase their melee versatility.
  • Mirror Match: Difficult to balance in multiplayer. Some may consider mirror matches to be boring, as they reduce strategic depth to an extent; for example, in Drake-Drake mirrors, Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors makes Drake Clashers and Saurian Augurs significantly more useful than any other units, and thus are often the only two units used at all.
  • Monster Allies: A scenario in Eastern Invasion has you capturing ogres to use in the next fight.
  • Monster Compendium: Any unit you've encountered will be added to a list available in the help menu. It's organized by the race the unit fits into and comes with stats, progression trees, and flavor text.
  • Mook Commander: Units with the leadership ability make adjacent lower-level allies deal more damage.
  • Muck Monster: Mudcrawlers, a type of monster occasionally seen in campaigns, is simply a living, hostile pile of mud.
  • Multi-Melee Master:
    • The human Knight and their advancements wield both a sword and a lance as melee weapons. The former weapon gives them a safer non-charging attack which Horseman and Lancer do not have.
    • Dwarvish Fighters and their advancements wield both an axe and a hammer as their primary weapons.
    • Drake Clasher -> Thrasher -> Enforcer line don't just stick to a single melee attack unlike most units. At their first level, they use both war talon and a spear. When they advance, they add ramming as their third way of attacking.
  • Mythopoeia: The creator and fans of the game have done a great deal of world-building for Wesnoth as well as the wider world of Irdya. This likely comes from the admitted inspiration, Lord of the Rings, but even with orcs, elves, and dwarves at center stage the game has enough of its own identity to not be called a knockoff. Even some campaigns or factions you can download will have a surprising amount of lore all their own.

    N-Z 
  • Necromancer: Many, many of these. They show up as minor villains in just about every campaign, major ones in many of them, and as the Anti-Hero protagonist in one of them. The entire Dark Adept line, including the actual Level 3 "Necromancer" unit, represents this, though of course, only your actual leader unit (when playing as the Undead faction) can raise all forms of The Undead using gold, while other Necromancers under your command can only raise walking corpses during melee kills. Necromancy is difficult, and while exceptions exist, the vast majority of necromancers are human due to humans being the most flexible and adaptable race.
  • The Necrocracy: Long ago, the Wesfolk turned their best and brightest into liches to preserve their wisdom and form their ruling class. Their worst criminals were made into undead slaves. But in the end, the lichlords betrayed their living subjects by summoning the orcs, which would have killed all living Wesfolk, forcing them to join the natives of the Green Island.
  • No Campaign for the Wicked: Averted with Descent into Darkness, Secrets of the Ancients (where you play as a Villain Protagonist necromancer) and Son of the Black Eye (where you play as a bloodthirsty, though reasonable orcish sovereign), among others.
  • No Cure for Evil:
    • The first Undead campaign, Descent into Darkness, has no playable healers whatsoever.note  Even the Orc campaign has healers in the form of Saurian Augurs, while most other campaigns have Elvish Shamans, White Mages and/or Mermaid Priestesses. The one exception is Liberty, where you get no healers, but play as unambiguously-heroic outlaws.
    • The second Undead campaign, Secrets of the Ancients, averts this as you get one Saurian Augur in the middle of the campaign. On the other hand, the campaign's protagonist, Ardonna, is a little more sympathetic than the hate-filled Mal Keshar, so in a sense, the trope is still played straight.
  • No Experience Points for Medic: Largely averted since all healers (even the superficially weak-looking Elvish Shaman) can usefully engage in combat and XP are awarded for both simply going a round with an enemy unit and for actually being the one to finish it off. But still played straight in another way; actually healing other units doesn't provide any XP at all.
  • Not Using the Zed Word: Zig-Zagged; Walking Corpses are zombies in all but name - although they're called "zombies" occasionally as well.
  • Oddball in the Series: Under the Burning Suns differs wildly from the other mainline campaigns due to being set far in the future when the Kingdom of Wesnoth is but a distant memory, making heavy use of units that are not available in the normal multiplayer factions, using an alternate day-night cyclenote , and dealing with the religions of its characters in a way most content does not.
  • One-Hit Kill Death-or-Glory Finishing Move: This is how attacks with the Charge trait (and, by extension, the Horseman, Lancer and Grand Knight units) are generally used—the attacker does double damage when using such attacks, but also take double damage if they are hit in return. Therefore, attacks with this ability are either used against units which have weak or no melee attacks or are injured enough to be brought down in one hit. Of course, the latter can sometimes backfire catastrophically if the attacking unit misses and the enemy's retaliatory strike hits, or if the enemy unit's retaliatory strike has the Firststrike trait and thus will attack first even in defense.
  • One-Liner: Pre-set units in a scenario frequently get scripted lines too. So it's like—
  • One-Winged Angel: In some campaigns killed necromancer enemies sometimes comes back later as Lich. Yechnagoth reverts to her true form for the final battle.
  • Our Dwarves Are All the Same: Wesnoth's dwarves are largely classical short, beardy mountain-dwellers with Scottish accents and an affinity for technology, gold, horned helmets, steelwork, runecraft, and hammers and axes as melee weapons. In some content, they've even been depicted building steampunk helicopters.
  • Our Elves Are Different: True to form: they are supposedly unwarlike (despite the fact that they've taken part in many conflicts and have several times even been the aggressors), long-lived, pointy-eared and forest-loving. They are excellent archers and also have their own form of magic, Faerie magic, which humans cannot understand (and do not try to). They tend to be somewhat frailer than humans in combat, though, generally lacking resistances and actually being more vulnerable specifically to arcane attacks. A particular case of this in decription text comes from highest-tier human and elven archers. The unit description for the highest-tier elven archer is an epic three paragraph love letter about how they can shoot flying birds while blindfolded and other amazing feats of marksmanship. Whereas the description for the highest-tier human archer amounts to "Yeah, I suppose he's a pretty good shot for a human, but the elves are so much better at it because..." Because the game is open-source and fanmade, many homebrew campaigns are much less elf-friendly, often featuring a mission where you just roll in and wreck the elves' day for the sake of doing it.
  • Our Fairies Are Different: The elves who get better at Faerie magic and harness it to its full potential grow Faerie wings and gain a limited flight ability. The maximum-level advancements of the Elvish Shaman are the only units in-game who undergo this change.
  • Our Dragons Are Different: The Drakes and their ancestors, the rarely-seen Fire Dragons, are western-style dragons (miniaturized in case of the Drakes).
  • Our Ghosts Are Different: The ghosts in Wesnoth are semi-incorporeal ectoplasmic types enslaved by necromancers against their will, although some have been seen to break free and exist independently in the various campaigns.
  • Our Goblins Are Different: Wesnothian goblins are the runts of orc litters rather than a truly distinct species and generally serve as cannon fodder for orcish armies. Goblin infantry start at tier 0 and only promote to tier 1 and are saddled with negative random traits, unlike their full-sized brethren. Goblins are also known to ride wolves, and goblin wolfriders start at tier 1 like most other units.
  • Our Ghouls Are Creepier: Mutant-type Ghouls, converted from regular humans into Ghouls by necromancy, and not raised from dead corpses/spirits like the other Undead. Thus they're not weak to arcane damage, unlike other undead, and are used to hold positions and poison opponents.
  • Our Gryphons Are Different: In this case, they are used by the dwarves as mounts, and they are sentient, although they have difficulty speaking due to obvious physiological constraints.
  • Our Liches Are Different: Physically skeletal beings, are a slightly more dedicated ranged class than their Necromancer counterparts, focusing on increased strikes per turn and physical attacks that replenish their own life by sapping it from others. While unobtainable by levelling up a unit, the Level 4 Ancient Lich is one of the strongest offensive ranged units in the Default Era, with its most powerful ranged attack doing up to 65 HP damage without factoring in any modifiers.
  • Our Mermaids Are Different: Merfolk are common inhabitants of the oceans and rivers of the Wesnoth-verse. They prefer shallow water instead of the deep sea, and mostly live in coastal settlements.
  • Our Ogres Are Hungrier: Another infrequntly-seen campaign monster. Sometimes they are tricked into working for the Wesnoth army, in a manner not very different from how Orcs recruit Trolls into their forces.
  • Our Orcs Are Different: Orcs, half-orcs, and goblins are all part of the same species - orc mothers give birth to many children at once, with most coming out as weak goblins, some coming out as the smaller, more physically frail half-orcs, and one or two coming out as the archetypical orc.
  • Our Zombies Are Different: Walking Corpses are Type-P zombies - slow, shambling, falling apart, and converting anything that they kill into another zombie.
  • Outlaw: The protagonists of Liberty were simple villagers before Asheviere becomes the queen and tries to rule their lands with an iron hand. They promptly declares themselves outlaws after killing the first squad sent by the queen. At the end of the campaign, they commit their biggest "crime", toppling down the Halstead fortress, then flee to the empty Three Sister islands.
  • Overly Generous Time Limit: In most scenarios, the turn limit doesn't serve to pressure the player, but rather to prevent the player from trivializing the campaign by deliberately sitting around after a battle has effectively been won to farm gold indefinitely while gathering XP by spawn camping the enemy castle. In the scenarios where the turn limit is relevant, it's usually a Hold the Line mission where you have to survive until the turns run out. Even the most stringent turn limits can often be cleared with a good deal of leeway by a typically leveled party, as the campaign missions are designed to be winnable (even if just barely) by a player with the minimum gold and no pre-leveled units to recall.
  • The Paladin: One of the three possible final advancements of the Horseman is the Paladin, who uses holy sword and is capable of healing magic.
  • Parabolic Power Curve: Played straight in that each successive level-up is about equal in terms of strength increase but costs an increasingly large amount of XP, and once you hit max level, the AMLAs you get from additional XP are negligibly small gains. So it's easier to assemble an army of leveled characters than to blow large amounts of XP on a few units.
  • Path of Most Resistance: In campaigns, when faced with a choice between which way to progress, the more difficult path will usually be the most rewarding.
  • Permanently Missable Content:
    • Various loyal characters throughout the single player campaigns. A few (Burin and the three Heavy Infantrymen from TRoW) render the remainder of the campaign essentially Unwinnable.
    • In Heir to the Throne, you can miss out on two types of recruitable units if you're not careful:
      • If your enemies kill the Mother Gryphon in "Gryphon Mountain" before you do, you can't get Gryphon Riders.
      • Letting your ally die in "The Lost General" means you don't get access to Dwarvish Guardsmen.
    • In Secrets of the Ancients, if you don't find a bird skeleton, you won't get to recruit Chocobones. Downplayed since it can be found on two maps, giving you another chance if you missed it the first time.
    • In Son of the Black Eye, if you don't save enough saurians in "Saving Inarix" or Inarix dies at any point, you can't recruit Saurian Skirmishers or Saurian Augurs.
  • Phantasy Spelling: Battle for Wesnoth pluralizes "mage" as "magi", rather than the far more common "mages"note .
  • Plague Zombie: The Walking Corpse line is your typical zombie that turns anyone it kills into another zombie.
  • Player Creation Sharing: The game has an "Add-ons" feature that can be used to download many user-made campaigns, multiplayer maps, and factions among other things. Unsurprisingly there's a lot of them, since they can be made with a text editor and Gimp.
  • Poisoned Weapons: The Poison weapon special used by Ghouls' claws and Orcish Assassins' throwing knives in mainline.
  • Poor, Predictable Rock: The main example is the Drakes, whose pretty easily-exploited weaknesses (pierce, cold, arcane damage) make them Glass Cannons when combined with their low evasion, despite actually having high HP. They can try to avert this by exploiting their mobility and their mix of Drake and Saurian units. The Undead also count, especially in campaigns, where you can specialize your recruits/recalls more easily to deal with them, and have better access to arcane damage.
  • Power Gives You Wings: Once an Elvish Shaman advances fully to a Shyde or Sylph, she gains a functional pair of faerie wings.
  • Power Up Let Down: Defied by one of the development mantras - "Reduction in Power on Level Up is Bad", or simply put, unit promotion should never force a unit to lose capabilities and if it can, there should also be an option that does not, hence for example Loyalist Spearmen branching into Javelineers as well as the melee-only Pikemen and Swordsmen.
  • Praetorian Guard: Level 3 units like Royal Guards, and sometimes Iron Maulers, are often found defending Wesnothian royalty in the campaigns. The Northern Alliance takes up this tradition too, with the Lord Protector having a personal company of Royal Guards and Gryphon Masters.
  • Prestige Class: Several common Level 1 units can advance to prestige classes upon reaching Level 2, instead of following their regular advancement paths(which usually go up to Level 3/4). This gives them more power and/or more specialized abilities at an earlier level, but sacrifices the long-term potential of full advancement. This includes the Lancer, Javelineer, Deathblade, Goblin Pillager, and Troll Rocklobber. Prestige classes are generally more useful in multiplayer games, which usually aren't long enough for full advancement.
  • Primal Stance: Troll Whelps crawl like this, justified by them being babies.
  • Protagonist Journey to Villain: Descent into Darkness sees its protagonist Malin Keshar go from a young mage who was willing to do anything to protect his hometown to Mal Keshar, one of the most powerful lich lords in the history of Wesnoth as he turns to darker and darker magics to try to stop the orcs who had been assaulting the town.
  • Punctuation Shaker: The most prominent is Li'sar, the Princess from Heir to the Throne. Son of the Black Eye has various characters with Punctuation Shakers, including Kapou'e, Flar'Tar, Al'Brock and Earl Lan'Bech.
  • Purely Aesthetic Gender: Most classes are all male, and there are a few that are all female , but there are also a few that overlap. As far as the mainline campaigns are concerned, there is absolutely no difference between a male of one class and a female of the same class aside from the sprite and voice clips. Some addons allow for level-ups that are different based on the unit's gender, or abilities that work differently based on the target's gender, however.
  • Random Number God: The chance to hit is a percentage, governed by a random number generator, which can either be the cause of unexpected joy (when your 30% chance Thunderer scores a kill) or frustration(when your 80% chance Sharpshooter misses all 5 shots). Needless to say, it has a lot of superstitions attached to it...
  • Red Is Heroic: Red is the default colour for the first player and as such is the heroes' colour in most campaigns, with the exception of Liberty (where Baldras's side starts out blue before switching to black when they become outlaws) and Descent into Darkness (where Malin's side is dark blue throughout).
  • Resource-Gathering Mission: An add-on called "Cities of the Frontier" requires gathering 1000 pieces of gold; given that getting gold requires investing it and protecting from several armies, this becomes quite the task.
  • Ridiculously Fast Construction: Unit recruitment/recall. Unless, of course, one prefers to think that all these people already were following the leader offscreen all along and just waiting to be bribed to actually enter the map...
  • Rise to the Challenge: Under the Burning Suns has a scenario where you're in a cave that's flooding, forcing you to stay ahead of the rising tide while battling various threats along the way.
  • Royal Rapier: The Fencer line and Princess Li'sar uses rapier as their sword and primary attack.
  • Runic Magic: The dwarves have no casters like the other races but their Runesmiths are talented artisans who can infuse magical power into weapons using runes.
  • RPG Elements: All recruited troops can gain levels, and pretty much all have names. Only the Bats and Undead don't have names by default.
  • Sand Blaster: Quenoth Mystics have a spell that sprays the enemy with sand.
  • Sand Bridge at Low Tide: Though technically a safe ford across a raging river, the effect is much the same. Scenario 6 in Heir to the Throne features the Thieves' Guild of the besieged city letting your army know of a hidden ford that will allow them to sneak into the city and flank the Orc invaders. In mechanical terms, meeting with the guild turns several water tiles into traversable land tiles.
  • Save Scumming: Older versions actually had no in-battle save to prevent this. Now the game does it for you. Which is good, because your treasured high level units are always at the mercy of the Random Number God.
  • Schizophrenic Difficulty: Most campaigns have a fairly linear difficulty curve, but not all:
    • Most notably Northern Rebirth: The first four or so chapters are absurdly hard even on the easiest difficulty level, while the latter half of the campaign is pretty easy, just extremely annoying, because every single chapter throws a seemingly endless wave of orcs and trolls at you that take virtually forever to kill off. The very generic plot and characters make it just even more trying to play through.
    • Delfador's Memoirs is similarly bad, if for slightly different reasons: Unlike virtually every other campaign, it is completely impossible to plan ahead in this campaign, because you have no way of knowing what units you play with on the next map, since the chaotic plot of the game arbitrarily gives and takes units that you have to assume you only get to play with for a single chapter before they might be removed from your unit list again, only to show up in your recall list a couple dozen chapters later.
  • Script Breaking: It's possible (although difficult) to win the first scenario of The South Guard without meeting Sir Gerrick. Since you're supposed to have him with you for the rest of the campaign, the dialogue gets messed up and later scenarios become Unwinnable.
  • Scripted Event: Campaign maps frequently use scripted events to expand the map, spawn in new enemies, inflict or remove status effects, change victory conditions, and generally shake thing up when certain units are killed, certain tiles are reached or crossed, or a certain number of turns have passed either in total or since some previous event.
  • Sea Monster: Cuttle Fish/Kraken, Water Serpents, and Sea Serpents, who prefer the deep seas and are somewhat hindered even in shallow water, and are very vulnerable on land.
  • Seashell Bra: Averted by the Mermaids who wears upper-body clothes made out of vines.
  • Shout-Out: Plentiful in Under the Burning Suns, but no less than two Easter Egg characters have been gifted with Gollum's personality
  • Sinister Scimitar: They're not always evil, but orcs and nagas tends to be the bad guys in campaign and most of them wield scimitar.
  • Sinister Scythe: Spectres look like Grim Reaper and fittingly wield a scythe. Orcish Slayer and the Dark Assassin in Under The Burning Suns also wield scythe and are deadly killers like their unit name said.
  • Sliding Scale of Turn Realism: Of the Round by Round variety. Each turn represents four hours of the day.
  • Sliding Scale of Undead Regeneration: In gameplay, the Undead have no healer units by default but a few of them are capable of draining enemies with their attacks. They can still heal from level-ups, standing on villages, or if there's an allied healer standing next to them. While not really healing, the Ghoul line does gain the ability to increase his max health by killing enemies once he upgrades to a Necrophage. In the lore it's Zig-Zagged a bit as sometimes undead are found randomly wandering around without seeming to ever rot away, while sometimes they instantly crumble the moment the Necromancer is killed.
  • Smash Mook: Trolls, Ogres, and the rarely encountered Yeti.
  • Smite Evil: The White Mage's Lightbeam spell, the Mage of Light's mace and the Paladin's arcane Sword attack, both of which are extremely strong against Undead.
  • Smoke Out: The mysterious cloaked figure who keeps showing up to try to kill Kaleh in Under the Burning Suns vanishes in a puff of smoke each time he's defeated.
  • Sociopathic Hero: Kapou'e in Son of the Black Eye. He'd count as a Villain Protagonist if he didn't have an entirely justified reason to be slaughtering humans ... and elves ... and dwarves...
  • Space Compression: As a result of the vague size of hexes, you may spend days exploring a single castle, or the same amount of time fighting across a large portion of a kingdom. A scenario may take place in a vast cave under a mountain range that was only a few hexes large in the previous map.
  • Spikes of Villainy: Inverted. The Undead almost never use spikes. Instead, the higher-level forms of the Loyalist Heavy Infantryman unit have black spiked armor and spiked flails/maces, which are used to intimidate the opponent and have no evil connotations whatsoever. In fact, Heavy Infantrymen are often used for bashing skeletal opponents into submission with their impact attacks.
  • Squishy Wizard: The Mage, Dark Adept, and Elvish Shaman all fit this trope. Even their leveled forms are somewhat more fragile than main-line troops of the same level. The Dark Adept is a pretty extreme example in that they have no melee attack at all.
  • Standard Fantasy Setting: Battle for Wesnoth draws heavily from The Lord of the Rings, with noble elves that are nearly universally skilled archers and live in forests, mostly good humans that mostly live in a standard medieval European-style kingdom, mostly neutral dwarves, hordes of orcs and undead, mages all around, and a fair number of dragons and other classical monsters.
  • Status Effects: Poison, slow, plague (which turns your unit into a zombie on death) and petrification, though the last one is rare.
  • Stealth-Based Mission: The scenario "Hide and Seek" from Liberty has you sneaking your heroes through a heavily-guarded city, staying out of your enemies' line of sight since you have neither the time nor the troops to fight them all. If you're careful, you can complete it without ever engaging in combat.
  • Stone Wall: The Dwarvish Guardsman/Stalwart/Sentinel line are an example of this, with their high resistances, relatively low attack damage and Steadfast ability. The Merman Hoplite is the aquatic version of a stone wall unit, sacrificing the speed and attack power of its alternative, the Triton, in favor of sheer toughness.
  • Story Branching: Many campaigns feature choices that can change the ending.
  • Strategy Guide: Most of the mainline campaigns have detailed walkthroughs on the game wiki.
  • Suicidal Overconfidence: The AI is like this, although, it isn't completely spiteful. It'll try to attack wherever it gets the highest chance to kill, or if that's not possible, try to hit targets that can't retaliate well. Still, it doesn't do very well in terms of unit choice, tactical maneuvering, or defense.
  • Suspiciously Similar Substitute: In Under the Burning Suns, if you fail to rescue Grog (if you allied with the trolls) or Rogrimir (if you allied with the dwarves), they will be replaced by their brothers Nog and Jarl respectively. The replacements have slightly different traits, but are otherwise identical for both gameplay and story purposes.
  • Sword of Plot Advancement: After the first third of Heir to the Throne, the Scepter of Fire is established as a weapon needed by Konrad to establish his legitimacy as a king. He or Li'sar then gets it around the end of the second third, and the scepter proves to be a powerful weapon even in-game.
  • Taken for Granite:
    • In a former scenario that was removed from Heir to the Throne due to being filler, there was a type of monster called a cockatrice that had a special attack that could inflict this.
    • Happens to Zhul during the "UTBS" campaign when she defies Eloh/Yechnagoth, but gets better.
  • Taking You with Me: During The Hammer of Thursagan you can equip one of your wizard unit with a staff that will one-shot all the hostile units around him. In the Dead Waters campaign the Silver Wizard escorting you to the Flaming Sword will destroy you with a similar staff if he's killed. In Tale of a Mage this is how Dillon takes out his lich-brother while destroying the Icestone.
  • Talking Is a Free Action: Characters in campaigns can talk with and even interrupt each other from opposite sides of the battlefield, no less. Justified in that turns are four in-game hours long.
  • Teleport Spam: Silver Magi (and any other units with the teleport ability) may freely teleport between owned villages. As such, they can quickly be nearly anywhere so long as there's a village nearby.
  • Timed Mission: Most missions in the campaigns must be completed in a limited amount of in-game time (those that don't require you to hold out for a given number of turns, that is).
  • Title Drop Chapter:
    • The final battle of Heir to the Throne is titled "Battle for Wesnoth".
    • Descent Into Darkness has its second-to-last scenario "Descent Into Darkness", where Malin completes his Protagonist Journey to Villain and becomes a lich.
    • The last scenario of The Rise of Wesnoth is titled "The Rise of Wesnoth".
  • Treants: Woses, large humanoid trees allied with the elves and thought to be wardens of nature. Their ambush skill also makes them effectively invisible in woodlands.
  • The Undead:
    • Undead are fairly ubiquitous enemies and are characterized by only having the "undead" trait, which makes them immune to poison, draining attacks, and the "plague" effect of their own walking corpses, as well as high resistances to pierce, blade, and cold damage and weaknesses to impact, fire, and arcane damage.
    • One of the most common enemies in campaigns are the undead. There's seemingly always a necromancer up to no good and they frequently serve to either pad a campaign's length or create an excuse for a Mêlée à Trois if they're not the main threat. On some occasions, the campaign will actually be played from their perspective. Enemy undead and necromancers may be simply in it For the Evulz or some manner of Well-Intentioned Extremist, while playable undead factions are usually Well Intentioned Extremists, possibly on a Protagonist Journey to Villain.
    • In multiplayer, the undead are one of the core factions, consisting of skeletons, zombies, ghouls, ghosts, vampire bats, and their necromancer overlords.
  • Unintentionally Unwinnable: In the first scenario of The South Guard, the game drops clear hints that you're supposed to meet Sir Gerrick before defeating the enemy leader. If you do manage to win the battle without finding him, later scenarios that depend on him become impossible.
  • Units Not to Scale: The scales of the game are very abstract, with hexes varying depending on situation from miles to metres across, and units on the map similarly varying from possibly representing squads or more, to single units. The unit graphics are the same size as the ship graphics and the mountain graphics, all of which fit into 72* 72 squares. A common adage is HAPMA (Hexes Are Possibly Miles Across.)
  • Universal Poison: Poison from giant spiders, ghoul claws and poisoned daggers all affect everyone in exactly the same way (except for undead and mechanical units, both of which are not affected).
  • Un-person: The dwarvish witnesses can do this to other dwarves, casting them out of the race and stripping them of the name:
    Angarthing: "The Law speaks: you are cast out. You are un-dwarf. I AM A WITNESS!
  • Unreliable Narrator: In Heir to the Throne, it's ultimately revealed that the opening narration isn't entirely true; notably, the fact that Konrad isn't the actual prince is kept hidden from the player.
  • Unstable Equilibrium: Bad performance early in campaigns can render them Unwinnable at later stages thanks to limited funds and low-level units from over-recruiting, bad XP management, and not finishing quickly enough. Similarly, early good performances can render later levels very easy, even on harder difficulty levels.
    • In skirmish battles, controlling more villages yields more income, which allows a larger army which makes it easier to take and hold territory. Of course, it's possible to overextend and concentration of force is important.
  • The Usual Adversaries: Almost every campaign has you fighting orcs or undead at some point. They're freaking everywhere, it seems. Even the undead and orc campaigns have other orcs and undead as enemies in a few missions.
  • Video Game Caring Potential: This generally happens a lot with high-level units, because they are difficult to replace, and take effort to train into their powerful max-level forms. Even more so with Loyal units, which cannot be replaced.
  • Warrior Monk: The Paladins, which are described as such in-game.
  • Weakened by the Light: Chaotic units. It doesn't have to be sunlight; strong illumination from lava or a powerful light-magic aura will achieve the same effect.
  • Weapon of X-Slaying: The Paladin and Mage of Light lines have weapons specifically tailored to dispatching the undead.
  • We Cannot Go On Without You: In addition to your general being critical to the survival of your faction as discussed above, certain other units may also be marked as essential to the storyline. If one of those dies, game over. This is lampshaded near the end of Heir to the Throne.
    Konrad: (hushed) Our soldiers will defend us as we rush across the field. Sorry to be blunt, princess, but you and I are the only ones who need to make it across alive.
    Delfador: …
    Konrad: ...and Delfador, of course. And Kalenz... and..
    Li’sar: Ach! I understand, Konrad. I am no stranger to the burden of command. Onward!
  • What the Hell, Player?:
  • When Trees Attack: Woses are basically intelligent trees which doesn't always attack other people. But they could and they would attack their enemies with strong but slow crushing attacks.
  • White Hair, Black Heart: Ardonna of Secrets of the Ancients makes a note that other magi in the school make fun of her for her hair color, part of what causes her to leave the school and pursue dark magic.
  • White Mage: White Mages, and their advancements, the Mages of Light have healing capabilities unlike the other advancement of Mages. They also have arcane lightbeam attacks unlike the fireballs used by regular mages.
  • Wizarding School: Alduin is the school for Wesnoth mages such as Delfador.
  • Wolverine Claws: While most Drakes fight in melee with regular claws, the Clasher -> Thrasher -> Enforcer line use metal talons instead.
  • Xanatos Speed Chess: Multiplayer gameplay is essentially this; the RNG makes sure that no plan survives contact with the enemy. You basically have to keep updating your plans move-by-move.
  • You Killed My Father: Motivates peasants to become playable combatants in one of the campaigns.
  • You Shall Not Pass!:
    • In "The Elves Besieged", the first battle of Heir to the Throne, the elves of Aethenwood decide to hold the orcish armies surrounding the forest while Konrad and Delfador escapes.
    • In "Pebbles in the Flood", while Deoran's troops manage to reach the border guards in the beginning of the scenarion, Mal M'brin's undead army are right behind them, so Sir Gerrick and Urza Afalas stay behind with the border guards to hold the undead while Deoran goes to Westin to prepare an actual defense.
  • Zombie Apocalypse: What happens whenever a huge number of Walking Corpses are deployed at once and overwhelm their opponent in a Zerg Rush. Quite impossible in multiplayer given the frailty and weakness of zombies by themselves, but doable in certain campaign missions and a few custom scenarios.

Alternative Title(s): The Battle For Wesnoth

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