Muggle Prime Minister: But for heaven's sake — you're wizards! You can do magic! Surely you can sort out — well — anything!
Cornelius Fudge: The trouble is, the other side can do magic too, Prime Minister.
Cornelius Fudge: The trouble is, the other side can do magic too, Prime Minister.
A full-scale conflict between wizards, where combatants wage war by unleashing the full force of their spells and magical creations against each other.
A distinguishing trait of these conflicts is that they often don't usually involve regular armies or really anyone besides the wizards, or at least not for very long. Instead, a Wizards' War most commonly consists of powerful wizards in their towers hurling tremendous magical destruction at each other, such as Meteor Summoning Attacks, bolts of Pure Energy, and far more bizarre and deadly things. When something like troops is needed, this will usually take the form of legions of golems, magically-controlled Attack Animals, bound monsters from other dimensions such as demons and elementals, hordes of the undead, and various other magically-sourced troops. Regular soldiers, if used at all, will be relegated to cannon fodder and often overshadowed by the terrifying monsters and arcane destruction that they will face.
The result is something not unlike a magical form of nuclear warfare, and indeed a lot of works make this comparison fairly explicit. Fantastic Nukes will see significant use, and may well be the primary weapon-spells employed. Fantastic Fallout is also common and may leave vast areas crawling with twisted monsters, burning with deadly energies, or simply uninhabitable wastes long after the war ends. Particularly destructive wars may be responsible for World Sundering events, or for magic being permanently diminished in the world.
These wars most commonly happen far in the setting's backstory, long before the story's time. Their primary impact is thus in their legacy and aftereffects, which continue to linger in the world. This is a common cause for the downfall of the Precursors' civilization, which will have destroyed itself in magical conflict at the height of its power and plunged the world into a long dark age. In the modern world, many areas may still bear the scars of the ancient wars, dotting the edges of the map with blasted wastelands, bizarre ruins, and areas still twisted and unsafe from ancient magical residue. Entire species of monsters may trace their origins to these wars when they were created as Bioweapon Beasts or arose from wildlife and people mutated by out-of-control magic.
Contrast Military Mage, where magic-workers are drafted to take part in more mundane conflicts, and Wizard Duel, when a more localized conflict occurs between two, or just a few, participants. For the next step up in supernatural warfare, see Divine Conflict.
Examples
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Anime & Manga
- Fairy Tail has been in a few Wizard Wars called “Guild War”.
- Fairy Tail and Phantom Lord War: Started with Gajeel destroying Fairy Tail Guildhall at night, that Master Makarov doesn’t feel it is worth getting into a War for. Until Gajeel attack Shadow Gear, that gives them a reason to goes to War for.
- Fairy Tail Civil War: Laxus and the Raijin Tribe stage a coup d'état by holding 7 girls hostage and force the Fairy Tail members into fighting each other. By using Fried Jutsu Shiki Magic all over Magnolia. In order to makes Laxus the next Guild Master.
- Allied Forces and Oración Seis War: Allied Forces of Fairy Tail, Blue Pegasus, Lamia Scale and Cait Shelter, was formed to take down Oración Seis. A Dark Guild that has 6 members, Really 7 members but they bring their Allies too. Naked Mummy, Black Unicorn, Red Hood, and Harpuia. But all got easily defeated.
- Fairy Tail and Grimoire Heart War: Grimoire Heart wage War against Fairy Tail on their Sacred Island, after finding out that their Dark Messiah Zeref the Black Wizard is there, but ended with not only getting their ass kick, but also ended with Zeref killing their Guild Master Hades.
- Fairy Tail and Tartaros War: More like Demon Wizard War, Tartaros attack not only the current the members of the Magic Council, but its old members as well, which Laxus and the Raijin Tribe got injured in the process, forcing Fairy Tail to have a all out War, against them.
- Lamia Scale and Orochi Fin War: Orochi Fin launches a massive Beast Army against Lamia Scale, but Natsu charges straight through the Army and defeats their hired arm Bluenote Stinger. Which forces them to surrender.
- Alvarez Empire and Kingdom of Fiore War: First started with The Empire waging war against Fairy Tail for Lumen Histoire, or it really name Fairy Heart. So Zeref can use it to reset his life and died with his family. But than change when Ichiya calls upon the Light Guilds of Fiore to aid Fairy Tail against the Alvarez Empire, turning from a Nation war against 1 Guild, into an Nation War.
- Kagurabachi: The Seitei War was the first large-scale conflict involving sorcerers of Japan, who had been living in secret for centuries, employed to fight the invading islanders, who were naturally supercharged with Spirit Energy due to being able to use Datenseki without ill effects. The end result was an incredibly bloody, world-rending conflict only brought to the end by six swordsman given the Enchanted Blades to channel their Spirit Energy into something more powerful.
Comic Books
- The Books of Magic: The last issue of the original mini briefly depicts a Bad Future where our hero Tim Hunter went evil and sparked off a war involving pretty much every magic-user in The DCU.
- Doctor Strange: The title character partook in a Great Offscreen War known as the War of the Seven Spheres between the Vishanti and the Trinity of Ashes, with Strange acting as the general for the Vishanti army. Not much is known besides that it lasted for thousands of years, but what is seen in Doctor Strange (2023) tells us that it was not pleasant. Not only did Strange commit war crimes, he likely created one when he made a spell to use the corpses of his enemies to fix their own.
Literature
- The Ascendant Kingdoms Saga: Meroven starts to use mages in its war with Donderath at the start of Ice Forged, which is viewed as a significant escalation, and Donderath is forced to reciprocate. This culminates in the use of a Fantastic Nuke called the Great Fire against the noble houses of Donderath, not knowing that several of those families were Cosmic Keystones that kept magic under human control. Their destruction causes Wild Magic to burst its bonds all over the world, collapsing human civilization.
- The Bartimaeus Trilogy: The series takes place in an alternate history in which magicians have controlled most of society throughout human history, with the rise and fall of world powers usually culminating in brutal wars of conquest as one rising empire violently replaces the old one. As the majority of magic in the setting revolves around summoning and controlling various spirits, this means in practice that warfare consists of the magicians on both sides conjuring hordes of powerful otherworldly beings (who for the most part would rather be left alone) and siccing them on each other, with unfortunate Muggles inevitably caught in the crossfire. We see the final battle of such a war in the prologue of book 2: Bartimaeus narrates the siege of Prague by the British Empire as one of the vastly outnumbered defenders, witnessing as the enemy army blasts apart the walls and swarms the city. Bartimaeus himself only manages to escape with his life because his summoner is killed first.
At their head, soaring on the updrafts of a sudden ferocious wind, came the djinn, armored in red and white, carrying slender pikes with silver tips. Their wings hummed; their screams made the tower shake. Below, on foot, a ghostly multitude: the horlas with their carved bone tridents, skipping into the huts and houses outside the walls in search of prey. Beside them, vague shadows flitted, ghuls and fetches, wraiths of cold and misery, insubstantial on every plane. And then, with a great chattering and champing of jaws, a thousand imps and foliots rose from the earth like a dust storm or a monstrous swarm of bees. All these and many others came a-hurrying toward the Strahov Gate.
- Briar Girls: The Final Battle is waged by mages on both sides.
- The Cosmere: In the backstory, the planet Ashyn was brought to near-total ruin by a global war of Surgebinding societies. A flashback in Wind and Truth shows refugees fleeing through portals while the very earth and sky burn behind them; the gods subsequently imposed limits on Surgebinding to ensure it could never be put to such ends again.
- Cradle Series: High-level sacred artists are fully capable of throwing mountains at each other. One Monarch complains after she fights off a Kaiju that she's going to have to redraw her maps for the region because of all the damage she did. In the next book, a random bully finds a piece of trash from that battle and manages to use it to become the unquestioned autocrat of his medium-sized village. In the last couple books, two nations finally go to war, and it involves careful segregation of troops so that the high-level experts don't just instantly slaughter all the weaker practitioners and depopulate both nations. This, it should be noted, is why open warfare is so rare; the difference between Power Levels is so great that it's generally not worth fighting if one side has significantly more high-level experts than the other. Best to just bow down, accept the loss with grace, and be glad the landscape didn't get rearranged.
- The Darkness Series by Harry Turtledove is a Fantasy Conflict Counterpart of World War II in a world where magic is commonplace. Muggle soldiers use magic-based Boom Sticks, Dragon Riders play the role of fighter airplanes, and both sides use Human Sacrifice for Blood Magic, but actual wizards are a minority of the population and military. The equivalent of the Manhattan Project, the Naantali Project, is a secret lab of a hundred or so mages who end up developing a devastating Fantastic Nuke.
- Discworld: In the ancient past, when magic was much wilder and more plentiful on the Disc, wizards warred against each other ceaselessly and apocalyptically. There are areas mentioned repeatedly throughout the series rendered permanently uninhabitable by the fallout from the ancient Mage Wars. Modern wizards see it as central to their job to learn how to do magic and then never to do it, or at least not any of the seriously reality-warping stuff, as they are well aware of the Mutually Assured Destruction that the Mage Wars had always ultimately caused. Pratchett generally tended to write magic as a stand-in for nuclear power and radioactivity, and the Mage Wars take the place of thermonuclear exchange in this metaphor. Sourcery deals with exactly this scenario: a super-powerful wizard called a sourceror (being a source of magic in himself) arises in Ankh-Morpork and his first action involves suborning or destroying all wizards on the Disc to his will. A full-scale magical war breaks out between Ankh-Morpork and the wizards of Klatch, who are quite prepared to go down fighting rather than surrender.
- Harry Potter: The Wizarding World went through several major conflicts within the 20th century.
- The conflict that is often referred to as the Global Wizard War began with Grindelwald's rise to power in the 1920s, and lasted until the mid-1940s, coinciding with the Second World War.
- The First Wizarding War of 1970-1981 started with Lord Voldemort's and the Death Eaters' rise to power and their attempt to take over the Wizarding World and subjugate the Muggle World. The conflict ended with Voldemort's defeat and his soul being split into the seven Horcruxes, the capture and disbandment of the Death Eaters, and the disappearance of Harry Potter, "the Boy Who Lived".
- The prelude to the Second Wizarding War began in the early 1990s, when Harry Potter began attending Hogwarts School of Wizarding and Magic, and there was an attempt to steal the Philosopher's Stone. The Second Wizarding War began, officially according to Ministry of Magic, in 1996 when Voldemort returned and the Death Eaters, secretly, made gains within the Ministry of Magic with the ultimate goal of accomplishing Voldemort's vision of wizard supremacy. The Second Wizarding War ended in 1998, at the culmination of the Battle of Hogwarts when the Death Eaters were ultimately defeated and Voldemort was killed in a duel with Harry Potter.
- Heralds of Valdemar: The Mage Wars ended with the Great Mages Urtho and Ma'ar causing the Cataclysm, an event that shook the world so hard that it left two giant craters in the landscape over a hundred miles wide, and strange magic mutations even farther out. It was so great in fact that, three thousand years later, the event rebounds like a rubber band, causing the whole mess to happen again in reverse.
- Into The Broken Lands: Mages being inevitably power-mad, reality-warping Persons of Mass Destruction, a disagreement between a handful of them created the Broken Lands — a Death World plagued by ever-shifting terrain, Fantastic Fallout, Bioweapon Beasts, carnivorous roads, region-wide magical booby traps, and worse.
- Magical Warfare naturally had one in its backstory, called the Great Magic War, between the peaceful Wizard Brace faction and the wizard-supremacist Ghost Trailers. In the wake of the war, a group of powerful mages put up a barrier which separated the wizarding world from the muggle world and punished anyone who used magic to attack a muggle. The Ghost Trailers eventually massacre the mages who sustain the barrier, lowering it and allowing them to begin the Second Great Magic War.
- Mogworld: A gag has the characters descend through geological strata that go from the modern day, to primitive sticks and rocks, to magical superweapons. There are at least two of these strata of superweapons, and right above them are stone age tools, implying this has happened at least twice.
- A Song of Ice and Fire: One of these occurred in the ancient past between the Valyrians (an advanced civilization of Dragon Riders who could use fire magic) and the Rhoynar (another advanced civilization who could use water magic). Although the Valyrians effortlessly conquered most of Essos, the Rhoynar were a Worthy Opponent that managed to put up a fight for centuries. The Rhoynar even managed to kill three dragons and defeat an entire Valyrian army after most of the kingdoms banded together and utilized water magic to drown their enemies. However, the Valyrians responded to this defeat by sending over three hundred dragons, resulting in a Curb-Stomp Battle that saw the Rhoynar civilization annihilated. Rhoynar culture/people were only able to survive through the brave efforts of Princess Nymeria, who knew that going against the Valyrian Freehold was destined to end in her people's destruction; she led thousands of her people out of Essos and, after many setbacks, eventually settled in Dorne.
- The Tough Guide to Fantasyland: In the distant past, the wizards fought a terrible war against one another. Modern wizards in a foul mood can do things like throw bits of the landscape about, wave storms into existence, move or destroy mountains and cities, summon and unleash demons, and pollute vast chunks of land with magic. The Wizards' War seems to have come about when too many wizards got into foul moods and started doing these things at one another all at the same time. Their battles' remains are still to be seen in the form of wasteland areas full of magical pollution, glassy slag, carnivorous monsters, carnivorous plants, carnivorous slime, and so on.
- War God (Series): The backstory contains two wizard wars:
- Not much is said about the First Wizard War, thousands of years ago, except that it was won by the forces of Good, under the command of the wild wizard Ottovar the Great. In the aftermath, Ottovar established "the Strictures of Ottovar" to make it illegal for any wizard to wield dark magic ever again. There was only one penalty for violating the Strictures: death.
- The second Wizard War was both conventional and magical, with the dark wizards of the Council of Carnadosa using both magical and mundane weapons to destroy the Empire of Ottovar. They threw huge destructive spells, an army of mind-controlled warriors, and thousands of undead and summoned monsters against the Imperial armies and the good wizards of the White Council. But it was the white wizards who ended the war, using a series of monstrously powerful spells to "strafe" the entire continent. What did those spells do? Well, think nuclear armageddon, just without the radiation afterwards.
- The Wheel of Time: The war that ended the Age of Legends had global Magical Societies throwing the full force of their powers against each other, culminating in the Breaking of the World. In particular, Balefire, an attack that retroactively burns away the victim's past actions, became a Dangerous Forbidden Technique because its indiscriminate use almost unraveled reality from the strain.
Tabletop Games
- Ars Magica: The Order of Hermes has formalised the rules of these conflicts, in order to prevent the disastrous consequences that usually come with this trope. Any magus in the Order may declare a Wizard War against another member. The attacker must give a month's notice to their victim, the war lasts precisely a month, and both sides are required to follow certain restrictions designed to minimise collateral damage. Disobeying these rules will get you Marched — essentially, the whole order will go after you until you're dead.
- Bitvy Fantasy: The backstory of the game describes a war between Wizards of the Isle of Mages, which involved hordes of monstrosities and destructive magic that Wizards hurled at each other. Curiously, them aiming solely to destroy their opponents minimized collateral damage, and the Isle quickly recovered. Three of the Wizards survived the war, and once again fight each other (which constitutes the game proper), but in order to avoid the dangers of the past war, they instead opted to draft small groups of warriors from across time and space to do their bidding.
- Dungeons & Dragons:
- Dark Sun: The Cleansing Wars that nearly wiped out all life on Athas was fought with Defiler Magic - a form of sorcery that uses living things as a fuel source. Even thousands of years later, the planet is a barely habitable wasteland.
- Greyhawk: Thousands of years ago, the Suel Imperium and the Baklunish Empire fought a magical war. The Baklunish Imperium destroyed the Suloise with the Rain of Colorless Fire, which turned the lands of the Suloise into ashes and dust.
- Mystara: Such conflict occurs in Wrath of the Immortals campaign for Second Edition, between the Principalities of Glantri and The Empire of Alphatia. It involves both A thousand of Alphatian Archmages storming Glantri City and Glantri firing a weapon that accidentally sinks the entire Alphatian continent.
- Mage: The Ascension: The Ascension War is a global conflict fought between the world's Mages for control of human culture and beliefs, which in turn shape the paradigms that nature and magic operate by — the ultimate prize is the ability to determine what rules the world will follow. The main combatants are the progressive but highly controlling Technocratic Union and the traditionalist Council of Nine Mystic Traditions. Other factions include the Disparate Alliance, the alien force of Threat: Null, and a number of independent actors such as nihilistic Nephandi and insane Marauders.
- Mage: The Awakening: An important event in the backstory is the Fall of Atlantis, which involved one of these (even if the Fall wasn't a result of the War itself): when the Awakened that would go on to become the Exarchs built the Ladder that led to the Supernal, their opponents assaulted the Ladder with magical military force. Come the modern day, however, this trope is mostly Averted, as Sleepers witnessing magic tends to make said magic get dispelled — at best — or causes Paradox and results in all sorts of nasty things (like spells going horribly wrong or summoning gribblies from the Abyss) at worst.
- Magic: The Gathering: The Brothers' War was an apocalyptic war between Urza and Mishra, brothers and artificers who did not realize that they were doing magic. They began as artificers for warlords that craved power, and due to the death of the two separate warlords they each became the de facto rulers of their sides, increasing the use of magical constructs against each other and, in Mishra's case, allying with otherworldly demons. Their battles would leave devastation across the plane of Dominaria and concluded when Urza detonated a Fantastic Nuke which killed Mishra, annihilated a continent, and plunged Dominaria into an ice age that lasted for more than two millennia.
- Pathfinder: The nations of Geb and Nex suffered a brutal Forever War under their namesake Archmages, including multiple Fantastic Nukes, huge waves of undead, and armies of mechanical and biological constructs. 4000 years later, most of Geb is undead, much of Nex is desolate, and the blasted no man's land between them is a no-magic zone due to being depleted of its ambient magical energy.
Video Games
- Age of Wonders: The story focuses on powerful Wizard Kings who serve as both prominent characters in the plot and leaders of their factions; as such, the series' conflicts take the form of magical wars between these kings and their armies of summons and monsters.
- Age of Wonders (1999) enables some spectacular (and cruel) acts of magical warfare as your wizardly leader grows in power, such as raising or levelling mountains and volcanoes, raising the sea level to slowly flood the map, and blighting the earth to poison armies and kill crops.
- Age of Wonders II: The Wizard's Throne: Newly-realized wizard Merlin wages war against conspirators within the Wizard's Circle, who betrayed and murdered the leader of the Circle because he had sought to curtail their tendency towards self-declared godhood and magical war-crimes.
- Age of Wonders 4: After being absent in the Low Fantasy-leaning third game, the Wizard Kings return, waging petty wars for control over the realms of a cosmic multiverse. This time, Mass Transformation magic is added to the mix, as the wizards physically alter their followers to gain an edge.
- Beyond Oasis: The backstory of the first game is that two sorcerers, Raharl, commanding the light, and Agito, with power over "chaos and destruction", waged a "devastating battle" against each other, which destroyed the realm of Oasis.
- Dominions: This is essentially the core premise of the series, featuring several godlike entities and their armies of fanatical followers warring for the Top God post after the former holder mysteriously vanished. With enough magical research, a Pretender God can literally rain fire down upon their enemies while blessing and protecting their own lands through various rituals.
- Final Fantasy XIV: The War of the Magi was a cataclysmic conflict between two ancient city-states, Mhach and Amdapor. Mhach was the birthplace of Black Magic and bound fiends from the void in an attempt to conquer all of Eorzea. Amdapor was the home of white magic and created golems to battle the voidsent sent against them. There was also a third faction caught in the middle, Nym, who deployed its magical scholars and unparalleled navy to repel attempts to conquer it. The battle between these magical factions drained the land of aether until the balance was tipped in the direction of water, resulting in a flood of biblical proportions that wiped out both Amdapor and Mhach. Following this, magic became seen as a heretical form of study for years until attitudes changed around the beginning of the Sixth Astral Era.
- Master of Magic: The entire premise is a war between factions all led by different wizards.
Webcomics
- Nixvir Chapter XVI features an battle between two armies of opposing wizards (one of whom uses a mandrake on the field of battle). The battle itself occurs in World Klosh and involves three-hundred participants (indeed, it is intended as a mocking parody of the historical Battle of Thermopylae). Zeta Toad aided the wizards in this battle and betrayed them, watching the battle itself using two emeralds as lenses (in reference to the emperor Nero).
Web Original
- The Wanderer's Library: In "The Last Magician of Moscow
", a network of secret magical societies once existed across Russia. When these first met, they exchanged knowledge and made alliances, but eventually jealousy and paranoia led to conflict. A petty, long-forgotten slight led to the Novosibirsk society being destroyed by the Muscovite ones. Within the following years, hidden wars rippled out that took out more and more groups. By the start of 1935, only the Muscovite and Leningrad societies still existed; by the end of the year, only the Muscovite one did. Afterwards, infighting saw the Moscow wizards pick each other off until, by the start of the story, only a single old man remains to brood over a lifetime of regret.
Western Animation
- Oggy and the Cockroaches: In "The Magic Pen", an unorthodox version occurs. A pencil from a witch's purse falls to Oggy's house. Everything that is drawn with this pencil becomes real. Oggy and the Roaches fight over the pencil and end up splitting it in half. Oggy conjures up medieval warriors, giant elephants, and unicorn-rhinoceros hybrids, while the cockroaches conjure up soldiers, military vehicles, mechas, and a dragon. The two armies duke it out.