A fan-built wiki, not a definitive one
Spellmonger's Hall began as a personal scratchpad. I was deep into Terry Mancour's Spellmonger series and wanted somewhere I could check who was married to whom, which order of magi swore which oath, and why a particular witchstone keeps showing up book after book. It was internal-only at first — I had no plans to publish it.
A friend — the same one who'd referred me to the Spellmonger audiobooks in the first place — talked me into opening it up. So here we are.
This site is an entirely unofficial, unaffiliated fan project, with no connection to Mr. Mancour, Podium Entertainment, or any of the people who actually create the books. Every source citation here points back to Podium's official editions, which you can (and absolutely should) buy from them directly. The whole point of the site is to help more readers discover the series and stay with it.
What this series has done for me
This series has been good to me, in ways I didn't see coming.
When my friend first told me about it four years ago, I was at 298 pounds. The audiobooks turned out to be the perfect companion for a nightly walk — one mile at first. Then "just one more chapter" kept me out a little longer. One mile became two, two became three, and so on. Today I'm at 215 pounds and walking five miles every night, and Spellmonger is still in my ears. I've re-listened to the whole run multiple times and it stays engaging every single time. The site you're reading is partly a way to give back to something that's still walking me into better shape, one chapter at a time.
A solo, side-project pace
I'm in networking by trade, not web development. What coding I do day-to-day is mostly for visualizing APIs from the gear I work on, so the web skills on display here are honestly anemic — you'll spot the seams. I work on this site in the gaps between life and an already-demanding job, which usually means a few hours a month at best. Some weeks nothing changes. Some months, nothing changes. That's the cadence of an obsessive but unfunded fan project, so please excuse the delays.
I do lean on an LLM (locally hosted) to draft entries and surface details I've forgotten. Nothing the AI proposes goes live without me reviewing and approving it personally — I'd rather the site be slow and accurate than fast and full of hallucinations. If you spot something wrong, you're almost certainly right; I just haven't gotten to it yet.
For the character and scene images scattered through the site, my local LLM drafts a visual description and then hands it off to a public AI image generator to produce the actual picture. The images are not always perfect — I'm a network engineer, not an artist, but something is better than nothing. If a result comes back badly wrong I'll re-send it with adjustments; sometimes I just accept the closest version I can get. They're meant to be evocative, not canonical.
On spoilers (and the spoiler scale)
The site has been running for about three years now. The friend who originally got me reading is currently in the middle of Thaumaturge (book 11) — he has young kids (just like I once did), so family is rightly his priority, and he doesn't want anything spoiled along the way. I get that completely.
So every character page carries a spoiler scale at the top — slide it to the book you're currently on, and the page hides everything past it. If you've finished everything published, slide it all the way up for the full picture. The scale is the fiddliest thing on the site and the feature I'm most attached to. It exists because of him, and for everyone reading at their own pace.
Why there's no login or contact form (and a note about the comments)
Two reasons, both deliberate:
- Security. My day job is in network security. The fewer authenticated surfaces a site exposes, the smaller its attack surface — and on a few hours a month, the attack surface is exactly what I want to keep small. So: no accounts, no contact form, no public-facing input I have to maintain auth for.
- Sustainability and my own peace of mind. I'm not asking this site to become a second job. It's where I go to blow off steam and sharpen my web dev skills around a series I love — and if it became a feedback inbox, it would stop being that. Keeping a small wall between me and the contact firehose is what lets this stay a passion project instead of a chore.
Pages do carry a Disqus comment thread at the bottom — Disqus is a generic third-party widget, not something I authenticate against or moderate in real time. I'll see threads when I happen to look, but I'm not actively chasing the conversation there.
If you have a correction, a missing entry, or just want to say hi, the most reliable way to reach me is to post in the r/spellmonger subreddit. I lurk there regularly and catch most threads — much sooner than I'll catch a Disqus comment buried on a wiki page.
Maybe someday — once the site feels more "done" than "under construction" — I'll open it up to feedback. I'm just not in that headspace yet. If you have strong opinions about how a Spellmonger wiki should be done, please build your own and make it awesome. The more people engaged in this series, the better for all of us.
About the ads
I run modest Google ads on the site to offset hosting costs. They should be unobtrusive — if they're ever overbearing, that's a bug, not a strategy. Mention it on the subreddit and I'll notice.
In short
A networking guy fell in love with a series, and the series is still walking him back into shape one chapter at a time. The site is his way of organizing what he loves — made public because a friend nudged him to. Read carefully, mistakes are mine, support Mr. Mancour and Podium directly, and welcome.