It's truly amazing that a game like this can remain relevant even in this modern day and age. It's even more astounding that I can't find anyone who's posted that much about it here on Bay 12. So, I've taken it upon myself to show you guys what MoM is, and what it's all about. I will be playing a full Death wizard for this run, so I hope you like seeing necromancer shenanigans.
I will be using a lot of pictures & illustrations in this, but I'll be putting most of them under spoiler tags that you can open with a left-click.
Master of Magic is a vintage high fantasy-themed strategy game, in the same swords-and-sorcery vein that launched other successful titles like the
Age of Wonders series. In many ways, MoM can be considered one of the OG fathers of them all. You play as a Wizard, a rare breed of spellcaster with the kind of power and level of ambition that lends itself to world-conquering and empire-building. You begin with just a single small town in a randomly generated map, a shelf full of spellbooks to research, and a burning desire to rule over everything you see. You are not alone in this world, either; the game supports up to 5 players, although unfortunately, multiplayer was never an official function -- you have to get a hotseat-enabling mod to go that far. Your goal is simple:
Conquer the world. Eliminate all opposing wizards. And establish yourself as the one, the true,
Master of Magic.Let's start a new game. Here, you can see the startup screen. You've just gotta love the original textures and those cute little gargoyles! Anyway, here is where we set the parameters for generating a new world from scratch. Difficulty
(Which I set to Hard), Opponents
(Four, the max), Land Size
(Large; more land to conquer), and Magic. The last of these is very important, because it allows you to set how valuable magical Nodes are ingame; Nodes are fonts of pure mana you can draw power from in order to cast spells. Each Node has its own area of influence around itself, which benefits units that are of a similar elemental alignment to the Node. Every tile covered by a Node represents mana it can generate; by default, this is 1, but I'm setting it to Powerful, which puts that at 1.5.
Next, we select our Wizard. There are 14 pre-generated Wizards to choose from, or you can create your own Wizard from scratch, using one of their portraits as your face. This is significant because using a portrait belonging to a Wizard essentially removes them from the pool of randomly selected opponents you will face. Here, we see
Rjak, a purely Death-aligned character with the
Infernal Power retort. I will get to Retorts in a second, but first we have to select our Wizard. I am going to make one from the ground-up, just to give you guys a look into the creation process.
Here, we can choose exactly how to make our Wizard. These choices will stick throughout the entire game, and there is no way to change them; you can't 'lose' books, or Retorts, etc. However, you
can find more spell books, and even more retorts, but only if you are very lucky in finding treasure in lairs and dungeon raids. Each Wizard is given a pool of
11 "picks" they can use to customize themselves.
Every spell book costs 1 pick. Spell books are vital because they give you access to magic belonging to any of the relevant five "Realms" of magic; Life, Death, Chaos, Nature, and Sorcery. Without any spell books, you can only cast Arcane spells, which are almost completely utility-oriented and very limited; i.e., dispels, and summoning Magic Spirits, which every Wizard can do from the start.
Retorts, the words in either beige or grayed-out text, are more dynamic. Retorts are the game's word for "Perks". They give your Wizard certain special abilities, talents, and tricks that are always passively active. A few of these can be accessed immediately, but the grayed-out ones require certain spell book picks be taken first, like
Node Mastery, which needs you to have at least 1 spell book from the Chaos, Nature, and Sorcery realms. Since I am running a purely Death-aligned wizard, though, I am limited to whatever Retorts I can pick with a single-suited hand. Remember that
Infernal Power retort from before, that the pregenerated Wizard Rjak had? Exclusive to Death wizards, that gives its holder double the mana and double the unrest-pacifying effects of religious structures & institutions built in cities. I don't take this perk because it costs 2 picks, and it takes far too much time to build up to really be useful. Instead, I take the
Conjurer perk, plus
Archmage, and a set of 9 Death spell books. Here is what I just bought.
9 Death books. Every Realm has 40 spells, divided by 10 into different tiers; Common, Uncommon, Rare, and Very Rare. 9 books in any Realm gives access to all 10 commons and 10 uncommons, plus 9 of the rares, and 7 of the very rares. In addition, just having at least 8 books indicates a higher degree of understanding than most, and reduces the casting and research cost of all spells in that realm by 10% plus another ten for every book after; thus, 9 books is a nice 20% reduction. If I had taken the maximum, 11 books, not only would I have
every single spell in that realm available for research, but I'd gain a whopping 40% discount on casting and research. But there is a very good reason why I'm only taking 9, and it has to do with the Retorts system.
Conjurer is the really fun one, the kind of thing necromancers salivate at. It gives me a -25% discount on casting and research costs of summoning-related spells; and since the Death realm has a LOT of summons at its fingertips -- gotta keep that skeleton army going, after all! -- this thing's gonna pay for itself in the long run. Even moreso because it does something that just having the books does not -- it shaves a quarter off the upkeep cost for all of my summons! The casting and research discount stacks with my Death books' discount for a -45% reduction, too, but only when I'm using summoning spells from the Death realm.
Archmage is what will make me more than just a bone-rattler, though. Let me explain what "skill" is, in gameplay terms. That means "casting skill". In this game, when you cast a spell, your casting skill is the maximum amount of mana you can pump into that spell every turn. Thus, if you're casting something that takes 50 mana, and your casting skill is 25, you'll take 2 turns to cast it. If you have significantly more skill than the spell takes, you can cast it
immediately, in the same turn, without having to wait at all; although casting spells instantly does take away from how much else you can channel into other spells that turn. So, the Archmage perk does two things to help me there. First, it gives me a fat +10 to my base skill, which starts at 18, so now it's 28. That means I can pump 28 mana into spells per turn, as long as I have that much to spend. Second, it gives me a 1.5x bonus to increasing my casting skill. The last is much more complicated; in short terms, it's something that, when you allocate mana to it instead of to your mana reserves or to spell research, permanently increases your base casting skill so you can cast spells faster. So with that bonus in play, I'll be able to build up my spellcasting ability at a much, much more rapid rate, and that'll let me get my armies and enchantments out commensurately faster.
It also helps me by making my spells stronger and more resistant to dispels. In this game, with how dispels work, a spellcaster has to cast Dispel Magic on a unit with a spell on it, and if the mana they spent on that dispel is higher than the cost of the spell, it is removed. With Archmage, though, they have to spend TWICE as much as my spells cost in order to affect them at all! That means I get to throw curses around mid-battle and on the overland map with near-impunity from petty meddling Wizards! It is this combination of books and perks that will make me a superior necromancer.
With my Wizard finished, I now move on to picking my starting Race. This will affect the makeup of my starting city, and thus what kind of units and structures I'll be able to access.
As you can see above, there's quite a few different races to choose from. I could go with the bloodthirsty barbarian tribes, the peaceful (yet scary with a sling) halflings, or the cultural trader mastermind nomads. Five of the races, the Myrran Races, are grayed out because I didn't take the
Myrran perk during character creation. Ah, I should probably explain...
Master of Magic is a game where you don't have just one World Map. You have
two. There are two interconnected worlds, which can be accessed for travel in-between via special means. Arcanus, the primary plane, is an Earth-like world with a good, balanced ecosystem and fairly powerful magical nodes. Myrror, however... Myrror is a land of eternal dusk and night, with black seas and sweeping gray deserts,
absolutely TEEMING with magic. Many of the races there can literally produce mana on their own just by living, and pass this energy on to the Wizard who controls their cities. The Nodes on Myrror are twice as powerful as those on Arcanus, and there are a number of special resources there that are completely unavailable to the first world. Thus, you can think of Myrror as the place to go if you need to absorb a powerful client race to build up your forces, or if you are just out adventuring and looking for powerful monsters to kill and treasure to loot. We will get to that place in due time, though. For now, we need to work through Arcanus. And I know just the race to help me do it.
High Elves. Yes, I can hear you guys groaning through your screens. But bear with me, here. These aren't the pithy, tree-hugging yayhoos we're used to. Among their many racial bonuses -- including moving fast through forests, a +1 to-hit in combat, and very strong archers -- is the ability to create their own mana, to the tune of 1/2 per population. This is going to start stacking up FAST once I get expanding. And I need all the mana I can get to build my undead army.
With that, we get to the final step in character creation: Picking our banner. I decide to go with a nice, deep
purple, to match my all-Death realm of play.
And... we are done! Join me next time for
Turn 1 of this game! I look forward to showing you guys the gameplay!
