There were tables strewn with archaic instruments of doubtful use, with astrological charts, with skulls and alembics and crystals, with censers such as are used in the Catholic Church, and volumes bound in worm-eaten leather with verdigris-mottled clasps. In one corner stood the skeleton of a large ape; in another, a human skeleton; and overhead a stuffed crocodile was suspended.
— "The Return of the Sorcerer", by Clark Ashton Smith
The traditional workspace of the Wizard Classic and the Witch Classic. These places are usually located up on the very topmost room of a Mage Tower (unlike the Mad Scientist counterpart, which is usually down in the castle basement instead), often with a peaked roof directly forming the ceiling. Otherwise, they will be found inside an isolated cottage deep in the wilderness. These are usually very messy and cluttered places, crammed with assorted tools of the arcane trade in teetering piles and messy clusters.
Common elements of such workshops include:
- A small library's worth of literature, usually in the form of enormous leather-bound tomes (usually Spell Books, Tomes of Eldritch Lore, Tomes of Prophecy and Fate, and assorted esoterica) and reams of parchment scrolls, either stacked in teetering heaps or overloaded on groaning bookshelves.
- Clusters of dribbly candles as the main form of illumination, rarely seeming to form a fire hazard with all those books and scrolls.
- A human skull, often serving as a mount for the aforementioned candles.
- Alembics, flasks, mixing bowls, mortars and pestles, retorts, and assorted alchemical apparati, usually filled with ominously bubbling or smoking liquids, due to the association of magic with alchemy. A Science Wizard's workshop might include ordinary laboratory equipment or extraordinary equipment for ordinary sciences.
- A cast iron cauldron, filled to the brim with unnamable green brew.
- Rows of dead things floating in jars of preservatives, usually either as curiosities or alchemical reagents. Bundles of dried herbs hanging from the ceiling are also common.
- Lots and lots of cobwebs.
- Telescopes, astrolabes, orreries, and other complicated astronomical accoutrements, usually made out of shiny brass, bronze, or copper.
- A Crystal Ball, as well as assorted regular crystals.
- A Familiar, usually an owl, toad, raven, or cat, and its nest or perch.
- The occasional bit of anachronism, such as maps showing lands centuries away from discovery or a few pieces of modern technology.
- And a stuffed alligator hanging from the ceiling.
Wizard's workshops often have powerful defenses. Sometimes these are a magical animal like a dragon, sometimes magic or mundane traps, sometimes both.
If the wizard practices Fantastic Science, their workspace might resemble an academic office or research facility, showing off their own research projects and the reference materials they've amassed. Hermetic Magic can require supplies of spell ingredients, ceremonial tools, or even specially prepared rooms. If owned by a witch specifically, the workshop will most likely have a Flying Broomstick stashed away somewhere.
The general concept at work here is to cram a magic-user's workplace with stuff as a way to show that they must have clearly accumulated a great deal of knowledge of and practice with exotic materials, strange instruments, and varied lore by putting all this stuff on clear visual display to the audience. This imagery also takes its cues from the popular image of the laboratories and offices of historic alchemists, which often did tailor their public-facing rooms to look like this in order to impress clientele.
Compare the Mad Scientist Laboratory, the Gadgeteer's House, and the less-formal Hacker Cave, this trope's pulp and science fiction counterparts. Might be down the hall from a Magical Library. Contrast Wandering Wizard.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Magic Kaito: Akako Koizumi has this in her creepy-looking mansion, which almost resembles the Evil Queen's from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.
- Smile PreCure!: Majorina has one in the Bad End Kingdom, including a cauldron, some potions, and a Crystal Ball.
Fan Works
- In chapter 2 part 3👁 Image
of SlifofinaDragon👁 Image
's Sengoku Basara fanfic Let's Endless Party!, we read that Kyogoku Maria, a very powerful sorceress, has her own study-laboratory at her residence, which in misakiyu👁 Image
's illustrations, is almost replicant to The Evil Queen's in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. She even has one in a floor above her penthouse in the modern day fanfics.
Films — Animation
- Brave: The witch's hut contains a variety of magical implements, potions in bottles, her crow familiar, and a huge cauldron for mixing new potions. Her front door can also be used to switch to a room where she whittles wooden figurines because as she put it "Never conjure where you carve".
- The Little Mermaid (1989): Ursula the sea witch has a glowing cauldron inside her home, which is inside the ribcage of some huge dead creature. Its entrance is guarded by serpentine creatures that try to snare intruders (which are actually her previous victims, with the implication that they're trying to stop others from suffering their fate). She also has shelves of "ingredients", many of which have terrified eyes that look out through their clear vessels. Ursula's cauldron works its wicked magic twice: once to transform naive mermaid Ariel into a human girl, and another time to transform Ursula into The Vamp Vanessa.
- The Princess and the Frog: Dr. Facilier has a voodoo emporium where he does tarot readings, possess mystical objects he states he hasn't even tried, and contacts his "Friends" on the Other Side.
- Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: The Evil Queen bombastically descends a staircase down to her secret laboratory in her dungeon. Once inside, we see that she has tomes labelled "Black Arts, Black Magic, Alchemy, Sorcery, Poisons" on a shelf covered in cobwebs, glassware, and test tubes filled with bubbling liquids, and a raven familiar perched on a human skull.
- The Sword in the Stone: Merlin's cottage is filled with teetering stacks of books, alchemical devices of unclear purpose, an antiquated globe, a pair of mechanical wings on the wall, and a perch for his owl familiar. Upon declaring his intent to educate Arthur, he magically packs his entire collection of wizardly trappings into a single bag to relocate to Sir Hector's castle, setting up in the top of the tallest tower.
- Wizards: Avatar the wizard dwells in a tower atop a promontory. It has a balcony with a segmented telescope, while inside are several odd creatures in cages (they are transformed into a 1950s jukebox when one gets loose and tries to bite Avatar). Also inside are an upholstered easy chair, an ornate full-size bed, and a peculiar table with restraints and a tilting mechanism. The captured assassin Nekron 99 is lashed to this table to allow Avatar to conduct a "brain reading".
Films — Live-Action
- The 7th Voyage of Sinbad: The wizard Sokura's lair, located in his castle in a cave on the island of Colossa and guarded by a fire-breathing dragon, contains alchemical equipment, manacles, a hanging skeleton (which he animates to fight Sinbad in the "Skeleton Duel" sequence), some weapons, a Crystal Ball, and the inevitable Apothecary Alligator.
- Nosferatu (2024): Professor von Franz's house is a gloomy, cluttered space filled with shelves and stacks of books, astronomical items, and rows of glassware, all shrouded in shadows lit only by the odd candle and his fireplace, where he conducts his studies in alchemy and occultism with no company besides his cats.
Gamebooks
- Fighting Fantasy: The series often features Yaztromo, an old, eccentric wizard, whose tower doubles as a lab filled with his nifty inventions. It first appears in The Forest of Doom where you can purchase a number of magical items for your quest.
Literature
- The Bartimaeus Trilogy: Deconstructed. The djinni Bartimaeus notes that the presence of stereotypical "wizardly" paraphernalia is a good indication that a mage is a second-rate poser trying to hide his incompetence behind spooky knickknacks that impress hoi polloi but don't have any practical use, whereas the truly powerful magicians favor a sleek, modern look.
- Bedknob and Broomstick: The workroom of Miss Price the witch includes a zodiacal chart, a sheep's skull, a chocolate box full of dried mice, herbs both in dried bunches and growing in pots, and a small stuffed alligator hanging by wires from the ceiling. She admits that the latter doesn't serve any particular purpose and the habit's out of date, but she likes the way it looks.
- The Belgariad: Belgarath the Sorcerer's tower is cluttered with seven thousand years' worth of scrolls, specimens, experimental equipment, and cobwebs. His greatest scholarly project is researching The Prophecy; he designed the other gear for projects to improve his understanding of the world, as sorcery is purely a Thought-Controlled Power.
- The Castle of the Silver Wheel: Deconstructed by Gwenlliant's reaction to Lord Cado's wizard's laboratory. When Gwenlliant — who grew up at court and was taught by the resident alchemist/wizard — first sees Cado's laboratory, she is immediately uneasy, knowing that he must be a bad wizard — "either not very principled, or not very wise". No proper wizard would bother to keep so many showy magical experiments running at once; they would be set up one at a time for research purposes, and would not be shown off to visitors.
- The Discworld novels can't have a scene in a magic-user's residence without poking fun at this trope. Most common are jokes about how they all order identical décor out of a kit: pre-dribbled candles, dusty skulls (with optional raven on top), mysterious alchemical glass apparati (usually filled with green-dyed water and soap), and the sorcerer's equivalent of the Jacob's ladder, i.e. a stuffed alligator hanging from the ceiling.
- In The Light Fantastic, a wizard's workshop is described as looking like the chaotic meeting of a taxidermy warehouse, a foundry, and a glassblower's shop.
Like all wizards' workshops, the place looked as though a taxidermist had dropped his stock in a foundry and then had a fight with a maddened glassblower, braining a passing crocodile in the process (it hung from the rafters and smelt strongly of camphor).
- The workshop of second-rate wizard Cutwell in Mort includes a variety of the usual decorations with the caveat that most of them are decidedly shabby, in disrepair, and otherwise indicative of his unimpressive status.
There was a large crystal ball with a crack in it, an astrolabe with several bits missing, a rather scuffed octogram on the floor, and a stuffed alligator hanging from the ceiling. A stuffed alligator is absolutely standard equipment in any properly-run magical establishment. This one looked as though it hadn't enjoyed it much.
- In Soul Music, Quoth the Raven says that dribbly candles, "bubbling green stuff in bottles" and "the old stuffed alligator hanging from the ceiling" are key parts of wizardry. He scornfully adds that the wizards "get it all out of a catalogue. Believe me, it all comes in a big box."
- Wyrd Sisters: Discussed in the context of the three witches' very divergent aesthetics. Magrat is a sucker for this stuff, so her cottage is filled with bundles of herbs, ornate occult tools, books of astrology and esoterica, and so on. The elder and more experienced witches Nanny Ogg and Granny Weatherwax think that it's all a waste of time — at most it may be good for "headology" — i.e., for a combination of public image projection and deliberately instilled placebo effects that make up a good portion of a competent witch's repertory — but ultimately neither puts a lot of attention into this particular angle, with Granny living in a very spare rural cottage and Nanny in a townhouse filled to the brim with kitsch.
- A dealer in such accoutrements is encountered in the Tiffany Aching series, as well as a catalog marketing the witch's version: packaged cobwebs (with optional rubber spiders), icky bubbly goo for cauldrons, big ominous mirrors with a selection of frames, enough dopey Wicca-wannabee amulets to strangle a giraffe, etc. Boffo!
- In The Light Fantastic, a wizard's workshop is described as looking like the chaotic meeting of a taxidermy warehouse, a foundry, and a glassblower's shop.
- Doc Sidhe: Doc's lab in the Monarch Building is a combination of a Wizard Workshop and a Mad Scientist Laboratory, fitting the elves-in-the-1930s setting and the fact that Doc is a Deviser. ("Magic" is considered a primitive term in the setting and so isn't much used. Devisement is the science of mysticism while magic is the superstition.)
- The Dresden Files: The Blue-Collar Warlock Harry Dresden invests most of his funds into a low-budget version of this in the lab in his sub-basement, accumulating features like a high-security summoning circle, a Sympathetic Magic model of the city, and a stock of potion-making ingredients stored in rows of Tupperware boxes and assorted jars.
- The Face in the Frost: Prospero's living room holds the usual paraphernalia of a practicing wizard, including a talking Magic Mirror and the inevitable skull that Prospero put there to remind himself of death (although it usually reminded him that he needed to go to the dentist).
- Harry Potter: Some rooms in Hogwarts fit this trope, especially Dumbledore's office, which is full of mysterious magical instruments, relics such as the sword of Gryffindor, a vast number of books, and Fawkes the phoenix on his perch. Snape's dungeon is also full of cauldrons and animals in jars.
- Inheritance Trilogy:
- The Court Mage's lab in The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms is packed with esoteric experimental apparatus, Runic Magic supplies, and plenty of specimen cages, foreshadowing his overall disregard for life.
- In contrast, Deka's personal lab in The Kingdom of Gods is stuffed with nothing but literature and writing supplies, as he's such a phenomenal scrivener that he's reinventing the divine Language of Magic.
- The Magician's Nephew: Downplayed with Uncle Andrew's study, which is on the top floor of Digory's house, and is described as containing many books, a microscope, and of course, the magic rings. Uncle Andrew describes himself as a great scholar and magician.
- Neverwhere: Lord Portico's study contains various leather-bound books, an astrolabe, mirrors, assorted scientific instruments, and a stuffed crocodile hanging from the ceiling.
- The Spirit Ring: The workshop of Abbot Monreale, a magician as well as an abbot and a bishop, includes a "dried and mummified crocodile" stuffed in a barrel, assorted books, papers, jars, bottles, and "mysterious little boxes with labels in Latin".
- Sword of the Rightful King: Merlinnus and Morgause both have their magical workshops, bursting with magical writings and potion ingredients and, in Morgause’s tower, a Magic Cauldron and jars of preserved dead things.
- Played With in Technomagia i smoki, where Halamus (the wizard with most pagetime) has a lab with the obligatory stuffed monster hanging from the ceiling (it's a local monster and the protagonist will encounter a living specimen later on), but it's about as tidy as a dungeon can be and contains a magical (dragon and hamster-powered) computer.
- Tress of the Emerald Sea: Tress inherits a workshop after agreeing to become the sprouter for the Crow's Song. The room includes a bed, a small bath, and a worktable, as well as a series of drawers built into the wall that contain the spores that she uses for sprouting. What it doesn't include is any Anti-Magic silver in the floorboards like the rest of the ship, meaning that she has to be careful with the spores because if any of them fall to the floor, and if she happens to spill any water on them, she has no way of immediately killing whatever sprouts from them.
Live-Action TV
- The Crystal Maze: The second series has a wizard's lab for the murder mystery game in the Medieval Zone, with books, scrolls, a bubbling cauldron, glass bottles of coloured liquid, small locking boxes containing ingredients such as coal and gold, a stuffed raven, cobwebs.
Multiple Media
- Nasuverse: In works like Fate/stay night and The Garden of Sinners, magi are prone to building workshops to facilitate their magical research. The exact specifications vary based on the magus' field of study and resources but often include countermeasures and traps to punish trespassers who try to steal the work inside. Especially powerful magi, such as Caster-class Servants from the Age of Gods, can construct "Temples" that also offer them a Home Field Advantage.
Tabletop Games
- Ars Magica: Every mage needs a laboratory for long-term projects. They can be extensively customized to the mage's specializations and personal circumstances — the classic Mage Tower gives a boost to air magic, but other magi might include operating rooms, astrological apparatus, teaching theatres, Item Crafting showrooms, Pocket Dimensions, or just really good glassware, to say nothing of the concessions a mage might make to a sub-optimal location.
- HeroQuest: Some of the furniture props portray this. The "sorcerer's table" has two candles and is covered with runes, and the "alchemists bench" has scales and bottles. Two large bookcases are often found in the room of a powerful mage. Skulls and rats can be fitted into these pieces of furniture.
- Mage: The Awakening: Given the setting's Post-Modern Magik, a Sanctum can be anything from a penthouse to a motor home. Mages can outfit them with useful features like a reference library, premade summoning circles, Haunted Fetters, and a personal Place of Power.
- Starfinder: The party's starship can be upgraded with an Arcane Laboratory that allows a Mystic or Technomancer character to craft magic items in half the normal time, or an Arcane Mortuary that strengthens any undead created in it.
- The Strange: The Magician's Sanctum is a pocket recursion consisting of a single, if large, house created by a long-vanished wizard. It contains everything a magic-user could desire, including a library stocked with tomes of magic from various fantasy and horror recursions, a laboratory filled with exotic reagents, walls lined with strange items, and a sealed chamber holding dangerous artifacts. It's guarded by a living iron statue named Xû who still protects it from interlopers, although explorers can usually convince her to let them stay for a while by offering a new book, artifact, or rare reagent for the sanctum.
- Tarot Cards: "The Magician", I of the Major Arcana, shows the Magician standing over a table with objects (a cup, a wand, a sword, and a pentacle) representing the Minor Arcana.
- Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay: Some Disciplines of Magic are better suited than others to laboratories for the study of mundane and fantastical sciences.
- To pursue their study of Alchemy, Gold Wizards often keep laboratories that are spacious, well-lit, and well-ventilated, yet stuffed with reagents and cluttered with assorted chemistry, alchemical, and metallurgical equipment.
- Celestial Wizards tend to accumulate telescopes, optical lenses, orreries, and astronomical paraphernalia to aid their astrological studies, such that the Celestial College had to ban any new Mage Towers within the grounds due to clutter.
Video Games
- AMC Squad: Oveus the wizard lives in Easthaven's library, where he's found at work behind a table stacked high with bottles of colored fluids and complex alchemical glasswork.
- BlazBlue: There have been a number of mentions of the mage characters having a workshop of their own and even having meetings there. Nine, Trinity, Relius Clover, and presumably even Clavis Alucard had his own workshop.note He needed to have built System No. XX and researched creating a spell for Time Travel somewhere. We see a glimpse of two workshops in the game and locating Nine's is a plot point in BlazBlue: Central Fiction.
- Nine the Phantom's workshop is located inside Purgatorium. It's both where she researched the development and creation of Ars Magus and the Nox Nyctores.
- We only ever see a glimpse of Relius Clover's workshop, and it's when he activates his Astral Finish the Puppeteer's Altar, where he has each character restrained in a unique character-specific animation and then experiments on them offscreen, painfully. It's also where he decides to retreat to when he sees that he isn't going be the one to reshape the world into his own image.
- Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night:
- There are three Sorcery Labs in the castle:
- The Oriental lab is Japanese-themed, with ninjas and torii.
- The Secret lab has traps, like spikes and swinging axes, and is darkness-themed.
- The Underground lab is poison-themed, and home to poison toads and poison-inflicting Sidhe.
- Johannes establishes a field alchemy lab in the secured section of Arvantville.
- There are three Sorcery Labs in the castle:
- Castlevania occasionally features these as stages, whether it be in Dracula's Castle or the castles of someone Dracula-adjacent. The Alchemy Lab from Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is probably the most well known example.
- The Elder Scrolls:
- In Morrowind, the majority of the Great House Telvanni councilors have one in their magically grown mushroom Mage Towers. Included are alchemical equipment, soul gems, and, since the Telvanni care little for Imperial laws against the subject, human remains for Necromancy. Master Aryon's includes his notes translating the famous necromancy in-game book "N'Gasta! Kvata! Kvakis!", as well. Should you choose to join House Telvanni, you get to build (or "grow", as the case may be) your own stronghold in their style include an area clearly designed as a mage's study with tables, alchemical equipment and ingredients, and soul gems.
- The Oblivion DLC "Wizard's Tower" naturally inserts one of these into the game for the player's use, known as Frostcrag Spire. It includes a garden full of alchemical ingredients, teleportation to any Mages Guild hall, Enchanting and Spellmaking altars, and an altar to summon an Atronach follower. Everything an aspiring wizard could need.
- Skyrim:
- In the major cities such as Whiterun, Solitude, Markarth, Riften and Windhelm, the local Court Mage will have a private room or area for them to conduct research, make alchemical potions and enchant items.
- The Arch-Mage's Quarters in College of Winterhold is easily the most visually impressive Wizard Workshop in the game. An entire garden full of alchemical ingredients with an alchemy table ready for use. An enchanting table with multiple soul gems around the entire room to enchant or refuel enchanted items. It really is a workshop worthy of The Archmage. As an added bonus, the Arcanaeum (Wizard Library) is just one room away.
- You can purchase an alchemy lab and enchanting station for almost every purchasable house, with associated furnishings like shelves and containers of ingredients, bookshelves, display racks, and a soul gem holder. Breezehome in Whiterun is the exception: you can only fit in an alchemy lab, and only if you don't use the space for a child's bedroom.
- The DLC Hearthfire includes two options as tower additions to your house. The Alchemy Laboratory has fancy lab equipment and plenty of Eye of Newt stockpiles for potion-making, while the Enchanter's Tower has an Item Crafting altar and display cases for your creations. Academically-inclined characters can pair them with a library tower.
- Final Fantasy:
- Final Fantasy I: You encounter the crotchety old wizard Matoya in the cave named after her, Matoya's Cave. It's littered with skulls on platforms, bookshelves filled with tomes, and magical brooms that keep the place as clean as a dank, old cave can be. It's here that Matoya brews potions and elixirs of great power, but she's been rendered blind by the dark elf Astos, who took her Crystal Eye. Once the Warriors of Light retrieve it, she'll use her facilities to create a potion capable of breaking the sleeping curse on the Prince of Elfheim.
- Final Fantasy XIV: Matoya is still a grumpy old woman living in a cave swept by magical brooms, but she's also attended to by a small legion of poroggos, frogs enchanted with sapience and significant magical power. Her cave also acts as the only point of access to the Antitower, a strange, upside-down castle that Sharlayan designed to delve into the aetherial sea and uncover its mysteries. Shadowbringers reveals that she has an additional workshop known as "Matoya's Relict", where she once created many familiars and wonders. You help her clear out the monsters infesting it to get it working again for the sake of mass-producing a cure for tempering.
- Hollow Knight: The Soul Sanctum, a secluded area high in the spires of the City of Tears where scholarly bugs performed arcane experiments in the nature of the soul, is a complex of opulent rooms at the top of one of the City of Tears' many spires filled with bookshelves and vessels full of soul energy.
- Kingdom Hearts: Beginning in Kingdom Hearts II, the sorcerer Yen Sid becomes a recurring character, and his study, named "the Sorcerer's Loft", a recurring location. It's a circular room at the top of his Mysterious Tower, with shelves filled with books and a table with a skull with a candle on it.
- Kings Quest III Redux: Manannan's study hides a secret door to the basement, where his work room is. A spell book lies open on a large table, a pile of tomes is on the other side of it, and, on the other side of the room are shelves with bottles of ingredients.
- Märchen Forest: Mylne and the Forest Gift: Flamel's Journal 01 mentions a laboratory, and Alchemy Is Magic, so it's a magical laboratory, along with relics in the area being things like alembic distillers:
"I decided to build a research laboratory in this cavern to perfect the ultimate alchemy. This ultimate alchemy is none other than the Sage's Stone."
- Super Mario Land 2 - 6 Golden Coins: The fourth stage of the Pumpkin Zone, which is the home of a Wicked Witch, is filled with bubbling cauldrons hanging from chains and a room filled with shelves of bottled potions, some containing indistinct floating shapes, and is lit by wall-set candles.
- Vermintide II: The Mage Tower in "Tower of Treachery" contains an alchemy lab where you can improvise magic potions, an observatory for astrological work, and a storage area for animal specimens, along with a huge Magical Library and even stranger features.
Visual Novels
- What a Legend!: There's one hidden in the Cursed Mansion, and it's haunted by the wizard — Sev, the legendary Benevolent Mage Ruler who founded the current royal dynasty, was led by a prophetic foretelling to die in it so that he would one day be able to meet you as a ghost and serve as a Spirit Advisor.
Webcomics
- Nixvir: Vaizros, before his painful transformation into a horrifying monster, had one. From what we see, it contains alchemical equipment and a sentient portrait of his own mother on the wall.
- Surviving the Game as a Barbarian: Arua Raven is ranked highly enough to have a personal laboratory within the Mages' Tower, where she obsessively researches magical creatures and essences. It's untidy but spacious, with loads of books, specimens in bell jars, anatomical diagrams, and a very intimidating examination chair. Though she trades out her wizard uniform for a lab coat there, she's loose enough with lab safety to drink out of the alchemical apparatus.
- Unsounded: The Black Tongues are based in Juste, a secure Pocket Dimension where they've hacked the Background Magic Field. Full members have personal workshops within: Maur's is stocked with Item Crafting supplies and references, whereas Delicieu has loads of specimen cages for his obsession with pain and the Anatomy of the Soul.
Web Original
- Minecraft Misadventures SMP: Maeve's Cottage is an isolated house located "deep in the Dark Forest" where Maeve lives and studies infernal magic. The house has various bookshelves with magical tomes and her own personal notes, pots of ingredients for her Infernal Elixir, a crafting table and cartography table and the Emberhearth fireplace on the surface. Gaining enough reputation with Maeve by doing her quests grants access to her basement, which contains a cauldron, more ingredients and more notes. Players must search her house to find clues for the recipe for the Infernal Elixir to be able to safely enter the Emberhearth and by extension, the Infernal Descent dungeon.