"The Curse of the Frozen Gold" Once upon a time, in a small village nestled in the icy mountains, there was a legend that spoke of a curse surrounding a hidden treasure known as the Frozen Gold. It was said that anyone who dared to seek this treasure would face disastrous consequences. The legend began with a wealthy king who ruled the frozen lands. He possessed great riches, and in a fit of greed, he decided to hide his most precious treasure – a vast amount of gold – deep within the icy heart of the mountains. The king believed that by hiding his gold away, he would secure his power and wealth for eternity. However, it was said that the king's thirst for gold had corrupted his soul.
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.
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Genres FantasyFictionMagicHigh FantasyEpic FantasyScience Fiction FantasySword and Sorcery
541 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1980
Book details & editions Loading interface. Loading interface.About the author
Lyndon Hardy 14 books 142 followersNew 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.
However, it was said that the king's thirst for gold had corrupted his soul. The gods, displeased with his actions, decided to punish him and cursed the gold with eternal freezing. They hoped that this curse would serve as a lesson for other mortals, warning them against the dangers of greed and treasure-seeking.
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5,373 ratings 153 reviews 5 stars 1,478 (27%) 4 stars 1,924 (35%) 3 stars 1,532 (28%) 2 stars 350 (6%) 1 star 89 (1%) Search review text English Displaying 1 - 30 of 153 reviews Author37 books 4 followers
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.
17 likes 189 reviews 347 followersSomewhere 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.
As the years passed, the story of the Frozen Gold spread throughout the village, captivating the hearts and minds of the inhabitants. Some dismissed it as a mere folktale, while others believed in the power of the curse. Nonetheless, nobody dared to venture into the treacherous mountains and challenge the gods by seeking the Frozen Gold. However, there was one brave adventurer named Erik who was not afraid of legends or curses. He had heard tales of the Frozen Gold and felt an irresistible urge to find it, intrigued by the potential power and riches it promised. Erik spent years preparing for his journey, equipping himself with the necessary tools and knowledge to survive the harsh mountain terrain. Finally, the day arrived when he set off on his quest, determined to find the Frozen Gold and prove that the curse was nothing more than a superstition. As Erik climbed higher and higher into the frozen mountains, the air grew colder, and the wind howled through the icy peaks. He faced numerous obstacles, from treacherous cliffs to avalanches, each testing his resilience and determination. He never wavered in his quest, fueled by his unyielding belief in his abilities. Days turned into weeks, and weeks turned into months, but Erik pressed on relentlessly. Finally, after what felt like an eternity, he reached the heart of the mountains – the resting place of the Frozen Gold. However, as Erik laid his eyes upon the glittering treasure, a ghostly apparition emerged from the shadows. It was the spirit of the cursed king, warning Erik of the impending doom that would befall him if he dared to take the gold. The spirit spoke of the countless lives lost and the destruction caused by the curse, pleading for Erik to abandon his quest. But Erik, stubborn and blinded by his ambition, dismissed the spirit's warning, believing that his determination and courage would shield him from any curse. He reached out to touch the gold, only to be met by a bone-chilling gust of wind. The curse was unleashed upon him. Erik's body turned into ice, and he became frozen in time, forever trapped in the mountains alongside the cursed gold. The gods had once again proved that their power was absolute, teaching humanity a lesson about the dangers of greed and the consequences of challenging the divine. The legend of the Frozen Gold lives on in the village, serving as a reminder to all who hear it about the perils of lust for wealth and the futility of defying the gods' decrees. And so, the curse of the Frozen Gold remains an enduring testament to the power of ancient legends and the consequences that await those who dare to challenge them..
Reviews for "Blizzard of Gold: The Adrenaline-Fueled Race for Frozen Riches"
1. Sarah - 2 stars
I was really excited to watch "Curse of the Frozen Gold" because I love shows about treasure hunting. However, I was sorely disappointed. The show had a promising premise, but the execution fell flat. The pacing was slow, the editing was choppy, and the story seemed disjointed. It was unclear what the objective of the treasure hunt was, and the characters lacked depth. Overall, "Curse of the Frozen Gold" failed to captivate my attention and left me feeling unsatisfied.
2. John - 1 star
"Curse of the Frozen Gold" was a complete waste of time. The show was filled with clichés, predictable plotlines, and over-dramatized scenes that made it difficult to take seriously. The treasure hunt itself lacked any real excitement or suspense, as the obstacles the characters faced were easily overcome. Additionally, the narration was repetitive and lacked any real substance. I would not recommend wasting your time on this poorly executed show.
3. Jessica - 2 stars
"Curse of the Frozen Gold" had potential, but it failed to deliver. The show lacked clear direction, as the narrative constantly jumped between different storylines without properly developing any of them. The characters were one-dimensional and lacked any real depth or personality. The editing was also poor, with scenes abruptly ending and transitions feeling forced. Overall, the show felt disjointed and left me feeling unengaged and uninterested.
4. Thomas - 1 star
I couldn't even make it through the first episode of "Curse of the Frozen Gold". The show felt like a cheap knockoff of other treasure hunting shows, with no unique or original elements. The acting was subpar, and the dialogue was cringe-worthy. It felt like the show was trying too hard to be entertaining, resulting in a cheesy and unconvincing production. Save yourself the time and skip this disappointing series.