Magic is a tricky thing in Fall from Heaven. It's so big and different and subversive that the initial temptation might be to ignore it. Instead, you can just build powerful military units, or spread your culture, or race up that tech tree, all familiar and reassuring trappings of a usual game of Civilization IV. That can carry you for a while. You can even win games that way. But sooner or later, you're going to run into something you can't handle. Maybe the world starts burning down around you. Maybe your whole huge army bounces off a dragon. Maybe you're being beaten so bad you're ready to throw in the towel and just start a new game. Those are the times you probably should have been using magic.

Tricks revealed after the jump.

Magic in Fall from Heaven is that it's a way to subvert the usual gameplay. It lets you do end runs around tricky situations. It trumps rules. It breaks rules. It changes the way the game is played. With magic, you can be faster, stronger, tougher, sneakier, richer, healthier, and just plain better. But it takes patience and a little micromanagement. And powerful mages, of course.

I just summoned my unique religious hero. My religion is the Council of Esus, an underworld network of criminals, assassins, courtesans, and so forth (think of them as the fantasy world version of the Mafia). The Council's unique hero is a powerful mage named Gibbon Goetia. I bring him out early enough that he can sit around in Coombe Winery and accumulate experience points, becoming more powerful as time goes by. This is one of the great things about magic in Fall from Heaven II. You need powerful mages, but you don't need to risk your mages' lives for them to become more powerful. Over time, presumably studying in theirivory towers, mages automatically accumulate experience points. This also happens for heroes, but even faster. So before long, Goetia (below) has topped out at his 100xp limit. It's time to go shopping for spells.

Magic begins with mana. Any given map is sprinkled with raw mana nodes, which are useless until you research one of the mana technologies. These let you refine raw mana into something your spellcasters can use. For instance, once you learn Necromancy, you can construct a chaos, death, entropy, or shadow node on top of any raw mana node. Once you've added a type of mana into your resource network, your spellcasters can then learn the spells of that type. Every type of mana has three spells of increasing power. The higher a spellcaster's level, the more powerful spells he can learn.

For instance, the Balseraph palace in my capital gives me some starter mana: air, chaos, and mind. I began near the Standing Stones, a unique landmark that gives me earth mana. I've researched Necromancy, which has allowed me to build a shadow and entropy node on top of raw mana resources in my territory. And the Council of Esus shrine, Nox Noctis, gives me a second shadow mana. Unlike many duplicate resources, a second unit of mana isn't just trade fodder; if you keep it, it will allow your mages to learn spells of a higher level than their experience would normally allow. So my mana supply will let my new mages learn the first level air, chaos, mind, earth, and entropy spells, as well as shadow spells one level higher than normally allowed.

It might seem like six types of magic is a lot to keep track of. It kind of is. But consider that there are still twelve more types of magic I don't have.

From this generous magic buffet, I kit out Gibbon Goetia with a powerful arsenal of spells. The third level spell from each type of magic is the real prize, so Goetia decides to top out earth mana and chaos mana, learning all three spells of each type. The three earth spells are as follows: 1) he can cast a wall of stone around the town where he sits (the wall remains as long as he does), 2) he can protect himself with a stoneskin effect that makes him immune to damage from the next three attacks, and 3) he can summon mighty earth elemental (since my Balseraph leader has the summoning trait, earth elementals will stick around for three turns instead of vanishing after a single turn; and since Goetia can cast any spells once per turn, I can theoretically get three earth elementals going at a time).

Goetia's three chaos spells are as follows: 1) a "dancing blade" effect to all units in the stack that gives them a first strike ability in combat, 2) a mutation effect that assigns a whole mess of random traits to each unit in the stack, and 3) wonder.

This last spell is what I was really going for. Wonder is a classic example of the sort of wildly inventive craziness I love about Fall from Heaven. The Civilopedia entry for Wonder simply reads as follows:

Cause 3-5 random effects.

There's also a precious little story about a mage, a barrel, a cavalry charge, and some short flightless fowl, but it's not going to help you figure out the spell. For that, you need to refer to page 161 of the manual. Here you'll see a list of the 66 possible effects of wonder. Here you'll see the possibilities. Here you'll get a look at what things can happen if you let a little more randomness than usual into your game. Here you'll see a glimpse of how the wars against the Bannor will go in about 100 turns, when Gibbon Goetia and a mess of armies march against their cities.

But first, I should have a reason to go to war.

Up next: that reason arrives.
(Click here for the previous Fall from Heaven game diary.)