Background

Era of High Sorcery was created by Eli Dupree, a.k.a. Elvish Pillager. The impetus came from him seeing a wizard-battle era that features spell-casting mechanics by krotop, which is itself based on "Path of Summoner", a wizard-battle themed era by Fmunoz, the spell-like effects of which are comprised entirely of standard Wesnoth mechanics (recruiting, attacks and passive abilities).

EP furthered his desire for fantasy settings to be less "racist" by making the wizards black. When a game starts, wizards are assigned black skin, depending on the observer, 25 to 50 % of the time out of the 75 % total when they are dark-skinned. Non-South Europeans, who constitute the majority of Wesnoth's players, have been able to play as a wizard who looks like them just 25 % of the time. Although EP implemented an astounding amount of in-game customization options for wizards' appearance, he deliberately left out the ability to customize their skin color.


 * Eli Dupree about himself
 * Path of Elemantalists units

Players Race
An estimate based on download statistics of the latest version of Wesnoth suggests ~70 % of users of Wesnoth are of European-non-Southern ancestry.