Alex Yarde invites you to step into Sean Andrew Murray’s world of ‘Gateway’ in his review.
“Chances are if you are reading this tome you are breaking the law of our land, and we hereby welcome you to the fold. Within these pages, we have done our best to represent the lives and achievements of some of Gateway’s most influential wizards and magicians in the days leading up to the Great Inquisition – lest they be forgotten in these times of blindness to truth. Our city’s history is inseparable from magic and those who have practiced it, which is why it is all the more ironic that we should now find ourselves living in an age where those at the helm of this city have outlawed that which it was built upon.”- Excerpt from “The Death Of Magic?”
Gateway: The Book of Wizards opens appropriately with a warning: “Published secretly in defiance of the SALMUN Act of 1866.” Then the letter quoted above penned by an anonymous “Concerned Gateway Citizen” entitled “The Death of Magic?” from there I was hooked. Extraordinarily talented illustrator and author Sean Andrew Murray has woven together a world as rich and as deep as Herbert’s Dune or Tolkien’s Middle Earth. This incredible mythological volume documenting a history that never was (but the ten year old inside me desperately wished that was) is a “Potter heads” dream. Gateway: The Book of Wizards is an imaginative tome of spells, alternate histories and antidotes beautifully illustrated and through every minute detail documents the art, architecture, cultures and languages of the sprawling city state of Gateway, given life through tales of it’s wizards and their exploits.
You are made a co-conspirator in a fight for the freedom of the magical city state of Gateway. I hope and pray this world is realized some day in an Action or Role Playing Game along the lines of the Bioshock games. Like Bioshock, Gateway:The Book of Wizards serves as an allegory about a society organized around a central tenant, in this case Magic, and the political fallout behind the machinations between the authority and subversive elements that oppose the status quo. It’s a familiar story. The “Chancellor” an oligarchic despot through an Inquisition, has purged the city of unlicensed magic users and consolidated a power base using Rune stones. The population through fear and intimidation are conscripted to serve and fight this “holy war” in his name. While the embers of a rebellion “Free Agent Wizards” and their supporters are driven literally and figuratively underground where the Chancellors minions do not hold sway.
The richly illustrated book gives readers a thorough history of the land of Gateway and a rouges gallery of it’s most famous and infamous Wizards pre Inquisition. You will read the tales of powerful mages from the myriad races of Gateway. Names like Commorus Rex the Grand Levitator, Grendam Black the Poisonsmith and Vincent Crane -Toymaker (my personal favorite, pictured with one of his creations below) who’s deceptively innocuous title, though making children’s toys was his main output, was the greatest tinkerer, armorer and weapon smith in the City State of Gateway. The maps and history of Gateway with it’s wizardly Orders, Oracles, Scholars and Mages are far to numerous to mention here but if you are a fan of Sean Murray’s Art this breathtaking masterpiece outlining his visionary world is a no brainier. If you are new to his world, then prepare yourself to be conscripted in the “Free Agent Wizard” underground and celebrate a Free Gateway.
For more information about the artist, please visit: www.seanandrewmurray.com or get yourself a signed copy at sketchsam.blogspot.com
all art~ Sean Andrew Murray