Unofficial reference
Lords of Magic: Special Edition
A 1997 fantasy strategy game that never quite got the reference material it deserved, and an ongoing attempt to work out how its files actually fit together. Everything here is labelled with how firmly it is known.
What this site is
Two things. A plain guide to the game — eight faiths, what each one plays like, and what the rest of it is about. And a public write-up of a reverse-engineering project that has been taking the game's data files apart: maps, sprites, scripts, savegames, and the multiplayer code that the community has spent twenty-five years calling “touchy”.
The second half is the reason the site exists. Much of what was “known” about these formats turned out to be folklore, some of it repeated for a decade, and some of the mistakes were this project's own. Both kinds are written down here rather than quietly fixed.
Start here
The game
What Lords of Magic is, how a game of it actually goes, the eight faiths you can play, and every unit they field.
Modding research
5 file formats decoded, the multiplayer findings, and an honest list of what is still unknown.
Three things worth knowing
- The game ships with a desync post-mortem, switched off. When multiplayer peers disagree, the engine is built to dump its entire state so you can see what diverged. The flag that enables it is zero when the game loads, and the only code that writes it writes zero. Why nobody ever diffed a desync.
- An asterisk in the multiplayer game list means something. It marks a host whose build does not match yours — the number one cause of a session falling apart. The engine has always told you; nobody knew what it was saying.
- Your savegames contain fragments of your computer's memory. Player names are copied into a fixed field that is never cleared first, so whatever was in that buffer goes to disk behind the name. What that means if you share saves.