strategy games, first-person shooters, even a golf game. But if there was one constant in the Black Arts games, it was the Four Heroes. They were—I think—based on the ones in Gauntlet, but you couldn’t say for sure because they were the same four heroes you found in almost any video game that featured four heroes, anywhere:
(1) A muscular guy with a sword
(2) A bearded guy in a robe
(3) A skinny guy with a knife
(4) A sexy lady
Whether you thought of them as Jungian archetypes or a set of complementary game mechanics, they’d been around almost since the beginning. Black Arts mixed and matched them depending on the plot of a given game, but they kept the names the same. It was part of the brand, and people cared a surprising amount about them.
The history of Endoria was divided into three ages, which had in common the fact that the world of Endoria was completely fucked.
Of the First Age comparatively little is known, other than it was an age of near-divine beings, heroes, Dreadwargs, and tragedy. Games were never set directly in the First Age; it was just used to explain strange objects like the Hyperborean Crown and the Brass Head, which emanated from the gods and wizard kings of this era. A creeping darkness overwhelmed the Great Powers, and the world descended into warring kingdoms.
The Second Age: That was when the four central heroes made their first appearance: Brennan the warrior, Lorac the wizard, Prendar the thief, and Leira the princess. I had no idea what happened other than that it ended with a gigantic war involving practically everybody.
The Third Age, where Realms games are mostly set, was the era of rebuilding, the long struggle for the restoration of the world.
Third Age Endoria was a dangerous place; it wasn’t noble, it wasn’t mystical, and it wasn’t especially dignified. Dwarves lied; elves slit throats. The land was a chaotic mess of factions and cultures and species. Different languages split the world, Coronishes and Zeldunics at each other’s throats. Rival deities and pantheons played games with the world, spawning curious groups like the Antic Brotherhood, which served the chaos daemon, Quareen, and the Nephros Concordance, with its vast and mysterious wealth. Different schools of wizardry competed for supremacy: Horn Adepts were masters of illusion; Summoners and Divinomancers were like cosmic hustlers, making deals with unseen entities, playing powerful forces against each other, always trying to come out ahead. Pyrists and Infomantics clung to their disciplines like addicts; Necromancers, like engineers of a rotting eldritch calculus. The world was dirty, as if in that tournament all the shiny, high-fantasy idealism had been hacked to pieces and ground into the mud of the Second Age.
The Four Heroes’ lives continued, through sequel after sequel. There was no fictional justification for their extended life spans—did they have identical descendants, or did they just live a long time, as people in the Old Testament did? No one explained. Prendar was half elf and half human, and Lorac was a wizard, so they might plausibly have extended life spans, but even this was pushing it. (This was to say nothing of their twentieth-century and far-future analogues, for which no rational explanation suggested itself. Realms had a ludic dream logic of its own.) The Four Heroes were more like actors in a repertory company than stable characters. Nearly every story needed to fill one or more of their roles, “fighter” or “wizard” or “thief” or, well, “generic female person,” and they always showed up and did their bit. Sometimes they were a little older or younger than they were in previous games.
Were the characters supposed to remember everything that happened to them? If I asked one of them, would it know? It didn’t seem like it—most of the time they seemed paper-thin, just empty things you steered around the world to get what you wanted. No way to ask them, and no point to doing so. They weren’t even people; they were half people, you and not you, or the half of you that was in the world.
The Heroes met, adventured together, betrayed one another, reconciled, and even married (choice of Leira and Brennan or Leira and Prendar; I went with the latter). Lorac recovered the Staff of Wizardry and became the evil Dark Lorac for a while. Leira and Prendar ended up leading an army against the other two, and even had a son.
The Lich King rose, the last Elven Firstcomer died, and her knowledge was lost