{"id":694,"date":"2010-01-23T23:27:36","date_gmt":"2010-01-24T04:27:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/archives\/694"},"modified":"2016-11-03T14:20:44","modified_gmt":"2016-11-03T21:20:44","slug":"might-and-magic-whence-heroes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/archives\/694","title":{"rendered":"Might and Magic: Whence Heroes?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Might and Magic<\/em> series is of course the source of the Heroes of Might and Magic<\/em> series. So as I play the former, I’m keeping an eye peeled for connections to the latter. And, frankly, I’m not finding much. There are some spell names that the two have in common — in particular, the Town Portal<\/em> spell, which I anticipated so greatly in Heroes Chronicles: Conquest of the Underworld<\/em>, looks like it’ll just as useful here — but that’s pretty much it.<\/p>\n

To be fair, this is the first episode, and it’s likely that it just hasn’t developed its identity yet. Most of what I’ve seen so far is just undistinguished D&D<\/em>-style fantasy. But Final Fantasy<\/em> started off the same way, and look where that ended up. Ultima<\/em> was half sci-fi to start with, but toned that down considerably from episode 4 onward, when the Virtues of the Avatar became its defining characteristic. Might and Magic<\/em> seems to have gone in the other direction, becoming more of a science-fantasy over the course of the first five episodes at least, with horizon-dominating planetary bodies becoming prominent on the cover art. But that’s an aspect that’s completely absent in HoMM<\/em> as I know it. Considering that the first HoMM<\/em> came out when the most recent Might and Magic<\/em> game was set on the planet Xeen, I have to wonder what was going on there.<\/p>\n

The one major thing I can see as an influence on HoMM<\/em> so far is the outdoors sections. For one thing, the mere fact that they’re there. Might and Magic<\/em> had an explorable wilderness before other Wizardry<\/em>-style RPGs did — it predates the far simpler and less-varied outdoors in The Bard’s Tale II<\/em> by a year or two. As a result, it establishes from the very beginning an environment for outdoor monsters. Venture into the mountains, for example, and you can wind up fighting herds of centaurs or pegasi — the same cantaurs and pegasi that would become core troop types for “rampart”-type cities in HoMM3<\/em>. Obviously these aren’t unique to M&M<\/em> — they’re part of the Narnia-esque mishmash of myth that forms part of D&D<\/em>‘s core, and therefore the core of early RPGs in general. But that’s the part that’s generally neglected by other early RPGs in favor of the abominations-of-the-dungeon side, the troglodytes and oozes and spiders and so forth. It would be incongruous to find a pegasus wandering the corridors of an underground maze. (Not that Wizardry<\/em> shied away from the incongruous.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Might and Magic series is of course the source of the Heroes of Might and Magic series. So as I play the former, I’m keeping an eye peeled for connections to the latter. And, frankly, I’m not finding much. There are some spell names that the two have in common — in particular, the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[144,150,149,351,352],"class_list":["post-694","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rpg","tag-final-fantasy","tag-heroes-of-might-and-magic","tag-might-and-magic","tag-might-and-magic-book-1-secret-of-the-inner-sanctum","tag-ultima"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/694","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=694"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/694\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4352,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/694\/revisions\/4352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=694"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=694"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wurb.com\/stack\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=694"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}