The concept of the "Five Magics" refers to a system of magic or sorcery that is often found in various mythologies, fantasy stories, and role-playing games. These magical abilities are typically divided into five distinct categories or elements, each representing a different aspect of existence or power. The origins of the Five Magics can be traced back to ancient civilizations and their belief systems. In many cultures, magic is thought to be derived from the elements of nature, such as earth, air, fire, water, and spirit. These elements are believed to have their own unique properties and can be harnessed by individuals with the appropriate knowledge and skill. Earth magic represents the power of the land and the physical world.

Master of the Five Magics

Alodar was a mere journeyman thaumaturge, learning the least of the five arts of magic. As such, he had no right to aspire to the hand of the fair lady, Queen Vendora, not even when he saved her during the siege of her frontier castle. But aspire he did.

Contains additional chapters, glossary, and author's afterword.

Genres FantasyFictionMagicHigh FantasyEpic FantasyScience Fiction FantasySword and Sorcery

541 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

New York Times best-selling author of the Magic by the Numbers fantasy series.

One Last Heist, the seventh book in the series, is now available.

I meld my knowledg in physics with the fantasy of alchemy, sorcery, and wizardry to produce tales in which there are constraints and limitations. Magic is not omnipotent. When the protagonists are in a jam, they are not saved with a simple bibbity, bobbiity, boo.

With the exception that book 5, Magic Times Three, involves the same protagonists as book 4, The Archimage's Fourth Daughter, all the books in the series have different leading characters. They can be read in any order.

I have some experience with adventures in our universe as well -- orchestrating the classic Rose Bowl Card Stunt in 1962. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_R.

I have yet to come up with a plot in which a stamp collector saves the universe.

Earth magic represents the power of the land and the physical world. It is often associated with strength, stability, and the ability to manipulate rocks, soil, and other materials. Earth magicians may be able to create or control earthquakes, form protective barriers, or even heal wounds using the energy of the earth.

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The Master of Five Magics (1980) by Lyndon Hardy sits at that annoying place between being a good and a bad book. The book itself tells the story of Alodar, who desperate wants to be a suitor to the Queen, so that he can restore the fortunes of his once noble heritage. In doing so, he tries each magic.

The structure of the story is rather fun, with the early parts of the book acting as independent stories, and the later part acting as a single story. The episodic breakdown worked out rather well, giving the reader a coherent tale for each segment. This broke down towards the end, making the episodes slide one into the other, presumably because the story just worked better as a singular narrative as opposed to a sequential narrative.

Lyndon's exploration of magic proved rather fun, as each magic had its own twists, turns, and downfalls. These differences lent themselves well to each distinctive type of of story.

The world itself is a slapdash sword and sorcery style world, where there's no need for a map, history and politics are shallow, and all those fussy world building details don't matter much.

At the same time, the characters are stiffer than wallboard and more difficult to swallow. Their dialog is so stiff that you could starch your drawers. There isn't a naturalistic line in the entire narrative. Meanwhile, the women can be divided into impossible love interest and achievable love interest. The Queen, of course, is busty and beautiful. Meanwhile, the achievable love interest is a redhead, rough and tumble, and not like all those other stuffy girls.

By the end, our hero has become mighty studly, defeated the enemy, gotten the girl, and restored himself. This isn't a spoiler as these books only have that sort of ending.

While the plot sometimes rolls along well, at other times, it becomes an annoying inconvenience between you and the end of the book. The later chapters increasingly ground on me (not that the early chapters didn't), while the end, the part that should have been most engaging because it was the accumulation of everything that came before, could be mostly waved off as filler and ignored.

If you made me choose good or bad, I would describe this books as a good bad book. The book is objectively bad enough to throw against the wall, but it's not without it merits and avoids most of the excesses of bad book. Unfortunately, it doesn't have enough good qualities to qualify as a good book.

Somewhere in the latter part of the '80s I was working summers in the maintenance department at the residence halls at the University of Houston, where I was an anthropology major. One day I wandered over to the carpentry shop to grab something, and found Rick the carpenter dude finishing up this book. He and I liked to talk books, and he ended up giving me that battered little paperback copy of “Master of the Five Magics.” I read it over the next few days, enjoyed it, and then pretty much forgot about it for the next 30 years or so.

As I have gotten older, though, I have found some value in rereading books that I had read when I was younger. It’s interesting to discover what 30 years of perspective can do to a literary experience. And thus it was that I wandered across Lyndon Hardy’s durable fantasy one day in the racks at Half-Price Books. The first thing I noticed was that the original book had spawned two sequels, “Secret of the Sixth Magic,” and “Riddle of the Seven Realms.” I plucked all three off of the shelf and checked out with a satisfied smile.

Hardy’s novel had created a bit of a stir when it was first published back in 1980. It was a popular enough book that it influenced a song by Megadeth called “Five Magics.” Author Pat Rothfuss gave it some love as an influence on his own “Kingkiller Chronicles” series. The five color magic code in the “Magic: The Gathering” card games was also inspired by “Master of the Five Magics.” That’s a pretty fair amount of pop cultural credibility for a book that isn’t going to replace “Lord of the Rings” on anyone's bookshelf at any point in time.

The other big calling card for this book was its very detailed system of magical laws that defined and directed the storyline. It was logical and solid and served as the backbone of the universe that Hardy had created for his characters. Thaumaturgy was the simplest of the magics, the engineering hub of the world, practical and simple. Alchemy was also reasonably useful on a day-to-day basis, creating everything from potions to salves in a sort of assembly-line style. Sorcery was a darker art, concerned with glamours and mind-control. Magic was an art of perfection that could take years to yield results. And the darkest art of all was Wizardry, which meant controlling demons, or conversely being controlled BY demons.

The main hero, Alodar, must master all five of the arts in order to restore his family’s honor and standing. He strives to become a suitor to the Queen of Procolon, the busty and vivacious Vendora. But Vendora has a comely court adviser, Aerial, who truly makes an impression on our hero and makes his decisions a bit more difficult as the pace proceeds. Alodar must eventually do battle with the Demon Prince as the fate of his world hangs in the balance. It’s a straightforward plotline with a couple of neat surprises that manages to stay away from a few of the more common sword and sorcery tropes.

My impression reading this 30 years ago was that it was fun but mostly forgettable. I was playing a lot of Dungeons and Dragons at the time, and it kind of seemed like it was tailor-made for the D&D crowd, which was really not a bad thing at all. It didn’t have much depth of character, but that was okay as the main calling-card for this book was its detailed system of magic. From a D&D perspective, that was awesome in and of itself.

My thinking now is that “Master of the Five Magics” is a better read than I remembered it to be. Part of that 30-year perspective is that a lot of truly AWFUL and derivative fantasy has been released in the interim. Yes, there has been something of a renaissance the last few years, but for a while there, things looked bleak, and I mostly abandoned fantasy as a genre because of the dearth of good material.

Overall, though, the book was an enjoyable reread. I was able to get a more cinematic view in my head this time, and the plot worked better for me because of it. The characters are still kind of wooden and stock, but they function perfectly well in the context of the story. The big star is still the intricately designed magical system, and you can tell that this is where Hardy really wanted to expend his effort. It does pay off, though, as I really wanted to know how this universe worked and reacted for each different class of the arts. At its heart, this is a fun novel that manages to deliver the basic sword and sorcery goods. The action really picks up in the final stages of the story as Alodar takes on the role of Archimage to do battle with the dreaded Demon Prince whose machinations have been revealed as the driver for all that has come before. In the end, its essentially genre-pulp fiction, but it’s pretty damn GOOD genre-pulp fiction. I will ultimately judge and rate a book like this by whether or not I enjoyed it and had fun reading it, and I definitely had fun with “Master of the Five Magics.”

I’m currently reading the follow-up, “Secret of the Sixth Magic.” So far it’s a worthy successor to the original. Stay tuned for my review when I finish that volume.

Five Magics

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Five magics

Evan Symon Category: Articles Read Time: 5 mins Published: 14 April 2020 Artwork from the Magic: The Gathering card Richard Garfield, PhD. (WOTC)

A look at how Magic: The Gathering came to be.

Fans know the story of how Magic: The Gathering was started more than 25 years ago. Even casual fans know the basics: In the early 1990s, Richard Garfield got some people together to bring his new game, Magic: the Gathering, out through Wizards of the Coast. It became such a huge sensation that by 1995 it was a worldwide phenomenon, and it still continues to this day enjoying a dedicated player base, numerous tournaments, and a steady flow of income and new players.

But Magic itself wasn’t made simply overnight. It actually took more than a decade for it to come together including a huge hiatus on any development whatsoever in the latter half of the 1980s. In fact, for a long time, the name "Magic: the Gathering" wasn’t even a thought. Instead, Garfield was working on a project called "Five Magics."

In the late 1970s and early 80s, Richard Garfield’s love of card games started joining in with his other interests. In specific, that was his love of the board game Cosmic Encounter for it’s variety and player battles.

(FANTASY FLIGHT GAMES)

. as well as the Lyndon Hardy novel Master of the Five Magics for its fantasy and magic class aspects.

(DEL REY PUBLISHING)

Other games added aspects of duels and creatures, proto-versions of fantasy baseball, and Even marbles. Add to that the card games of his childhood and you get a combined new type of card game. In high school, he finally began cobbling together a game based on five magic classes with duels and turns and unique characters: Five Magics.

For such an influential could-be game, it’s hard to tell exactly what the specifics of what Five Magics actually was as the rules were never really written down. From what we can tell, it was created in or about the year 1982 and that Garfield and friends tried to make a huge game like Cosmic Encounter, but boiled down into a card game. Like MTG, Five Magics had each player play with a deck with that deck having the ability to be changed as the game went on. While that doesn’t exactly sound revolutionary now, it was huge in the early 1980s.

And just like Magic: The Gathering, there were five colors based on geography. Unlike Magic, however, where there is a set formula, Five Magics was all over the place. No game ever had the same formula twice. Some versions had points to win, for example, while others wanted to have the other player dying. Other versions were completely card based while some went more the board game route (minus the board). And so for three years this Magic predecessor was one that was never really set with stone, not knowing exactly what it was going to be.

By the mid 80s, though, it sort of petered out. And, quite frankly, that’s really all we know about it.

By the early 1990s, Five Magics was virtually forgotten. Garfield, now a graduate student and game creator, had worked with Mike Davis on a new board game and decided to visit Wizards of the Coast in the hopes of distribution. WotC, however, didn’t want to invest in another board game at the time and preferred something cheaper to produce and with fewer pieces and parts.

Richard Garfield (WOTC)

To clear his head, Garfield paid a visit to Multnomah Falls just outside the city to think up a game when he remembered about Five Magics. He then thought about how each deck could be like a character in itself, pretty much solving the main issue he had with the original version. Climbing back, down he drove up to Seattle and told Wizards executives his new idea. In short, they enthusiastically were taken by it.

Back at grad school in Pennsylvania, a newly-inspired Garfield went back at it and started revamping Five Magics through new cards and test plays for WotC. The only thing that wasn’t working was the name, but that's a story for another day.

Five Magics was over, but Magic: the Gathering was only just beginning.

Evan Symon

Evan Symon is a graduate of The University of Akron and has been a working journalist ever since with works published by Cracked, GeekNifty, the Pasadena Independent, California Globe, and, of course, Magic Untapped.

Air magic, on the other hand, is linked to the realm of the wind and atmosphere. It often grants individuals the ability to manipulate air currents, create gusts or hurricanes, and even control the weather. Air magicians may also possess heightened senses, allowing them to perceive things that others cannot. Fire magic is closely tied to the element of fire, representing passion, transformation, and destruction. Fire magicians excel at manipulating flames, generating heat, and wielding fire as a weapon. They may also possess the ability to cleanse and purify, or to summon beings associated with the fire element. Water magic encompasses the power of oceans, rivers, and other bodies of water. It is believed to be flexible and adaptable, flowing like water itself. Water magicians are often skilled at manipulating water, creating or controlling rain, and even healing with the power of water. They may also possess the ability to communicate with aquatic creatures or influence emotions. Lastly, spirit magic is often considered the most mysterious and ethereal of the Five Magics. It deals with the spiritual realm, connecting with otherworldly beings and tapping into unseen forces. Those who wield spirit magic can communicate with spirits and ghosts, divine the future, or even manipulate the souls of others. In various mythologies and fantasy worlds, characters who possess these magical abilities often specialize in one or more of the Five Magics. They may belong to specific magical orders or schools, where they learn to harness and control the powers associated with their chosen elements. Additionally, these magics may interact with one another, creating a complex tapestry of power and possibilities. Overall, the concept of the Five Magics offers a rich and diverse worldbuilding tool for storytelling and role-playing. It allows for exploration of different aspects of magic and the human experience, while also providing a framework for understanding and categorizing the vast array of mystical abilities found in myth and fantasy..

Reviews for "The Five Magics: An Introduction to Wicca and Witchcraft"

1. John - 2/5

"Five magics" is a song that I just couldn't get into. The instrumental parts were impressive, but I found the vocals to be lacking. The melody was repetitive and it felt like there was no real progression throughout the song. I also couldn't really connect with the lyrics, as they seemed to be quite convoluted and difficult to understand. Overall, it just didn't leave a lasting impression on me like some of Megadeth's other songs.

2. Sarah - 3/5

Although I appreciate the technical skill displayed in "Five magics," I found the overall composition to be a bit overwhelming. The multiple tempo changes and fast-paced guitar solos were impressive, but it felt like too much was going on at once. I also found the lyrics to be a bit cheesy and cliché at times. While I can see why some fans may enjoy this song, it just wasn't my cup of tea.

3. Mike - 2/5

I was really disappointed with "Five magics." The song lacks a catchy melody and gets lost in its own complexity. It feels like a jumbled mess of different musical ideas that don't come together cohesively. Additionally, the vocals were grating and I found it hard to listen to the entire song without getting annoyed. This is definitely one of the weaker tracks in Megadeth's discography, in my opinion.

The Five Magics: Transforming Your Life with the Power of Magic