OSSR: Ars Magica 5th edition

[Username17]

OSSR: Ars Magica
Chapter 12: Realms


There are other realms of existence, and weird shit is breaking in all over.

The chapter on the Realms is 9 pages, which isn't actually very much considering that they are basically putting up four alternate dimensions full of supernatural creatures. As I mentioned earlier, the book introduces the terms of “Divine” and “Dominion” by page 15, but it doesn't tell you that these terms mean the same thing until page 188 – so if this edition was your first exposure to Ars Magica you probably went about 173 pages believing that there were five kinds of auras and that the fifth one was generated by mundanes living in civilization.

Basically, there are four alternate dimensions that leak into the mundane world to varying degrees in varying places and the amount of leakage explicitly varies over time. There are ten levels of leakage and only one of the dimensions can be leaking in at a specific time and place. There is no coherent model of why one dimension or another holds sway in any particular time and place, nor is there a good set of guidelines for how big each aura should be. Exactly how big an aura is makes a huge difference because auras penalize other magic sources by their rating times a number. Remember still that the RNG is really small, so the fact that increasing or decreasing the rating of a Divine Aura (also called a Dominion Aura) by 1 changes the target number to cast a magic spell by three or an infernal spell by five is a fucking big deal.

There are multiple pieces of explicitly contradictory fluff to explain the difference between the realm flavors. These not only contradict each other, none of them actually explain the game mechanical effects. If the “magic realm” is the closest to the “divine realm” and always moving towards it, why does the divine realm apply big penalties to using magic and the infernal realm apply only small penalties? Why is this all so bullshit?

There are Divine, Faerie, Infernal, and Magic realms, and there are talking dogs from all four of those places. Remember that when we get to the Bestiary. I don't understand why the Magic realm even exists, because everything in it is supposed to be “just like a mundane thing, but better.” When it comes time to actually describe a magic creature other than a dog in the Bestiary, they decide to go with “Dragon” which seems like they are shitting on even that concept. I mean, Dragons are one of the very few namechecked creatures in this entire fucking book that don't look like a mundane animal or person, so what the actual fuck? The other realms are similarly described in useless and contradictory terms, and I hate this chapter.


It's like a man in a suit. But you know... better.

I've ranted about this a bit before, but this book has its head planted firmly in its ass where it comes to Christian / Muslim relations. According to this chapter, despite the fact that God is a real thing who demonstrably backs the Christians and the Muslims, and the fact that there are real Angels who know and understand this and give marching orders to the leaders of both faiths, that the Church does not believe that Muslims worship the same god as they do. You know, despite the fact that all of the ones who have divine powers can simply verify that they have completely fungible faith power and also their own god and all of his angels simply confirm it for them whenever asked. I think the author was chickening out on making actual 13th century Christian crusader morality “right” for fear that would be offensive, but the result is that it makes all the Christians and Muslims be faithless douches who refuse to listen to the divine pronouncements of their own God – and that's way more offensive.

Chapter 13: Bestiary


Steve Jobs explained the Ars Magica Bestiary in 2004.

There are only 8 pages in the Bestiary section and not a lot of ground is covered. We've already mentioned some of the ways this chapter is strange and unhelpful in the previous chapters. There are four magical realms, and each realm gets its own micro-bestiary. Since there are only 8 pages to divide, that isn't a lot of space for each one. Each realm gets a sample magic dog, a thing you can talk to, and a thing that is bad ass. For the Divine Realm, you only get two creatures because the Angel counts as both the thing you can talk to and the bad ass. The bad ass Fairie and badass Infernal are actually leader types and don't fight.

There are only 11 creatures total, and four of them are various flavors of magic wolf. None of them are mundane creatures and none of them is a standard challenge for a soldier grog or anything that might be useful as a baseline for much of anything. The ghost and the demon don't even have combat stats and I don't think you're supposed to take on the dragon or the angel. Basically, this bestiary is even less useful than the one at the end of Scion, which is a fucking achievement. Even extremely basic questions like “are my soldier grogs better than guard dogs” remain unanswered.

What numbers there are are all over the place. As mentioned in the combat chapter, the high defenses are +18 and the low defenses are -1, and you're still rolling those d10s with no 1s or 10s on them for an RNG. So even with this tiny and almost useless sample, the one thing I can get from it is that you couldn't make balanced combat challenges if you tried. Which they don't try, because there are no challenge ratings or anything like it in this book. That sort of oversight made sense back in 1989 when “ah, fuck it” was the order of the day in all games – but in 2004 that kind of half assedry had gone out of style.

Next up: Mythic Europe! Or perhaps MYTHIC europe.

[Username17]

OSSR: Ars Magica
Chapter 14: Mythic Europe

This is from an earlier edition of Ars Magica where the Muslims were just treated as filthy pagans. In 5th edition, North Africa is labeled “Moorish Lands.”

This section is twelve pages and talks to you about the default setting, which is supposed to be “13th century Europe, with magic.” Of course, if that's all there was, you wouldn't need twelve pages or even twelve sentences. I just got that idea over in one sentence, and the book does too. It's a pretty self explanatory concept. Indeed, it's generally assumed that Ars Magica was originally set in “actual Europe, but with magic” because that was easy. They didn't have to do any real world building, and they didn't. But there's another reason to use the actual world, which is that it has a shit tonne of source material for it. Like, all the source material. Ever. There's a reason that the two most lastingly influential games of 1989 were both set in “Earth, but with magic” (Shadowrun being set in the 21st century, and Ars Magica being set in the 13th). All the places are places people care about, all the cities are places people have heard of, any part of the map you want to visit has as much source material on it as you care to read. You can get people invested into the setting quickly, and the burden on the authors of the game to produce all the world material people need is considerably lessened.

So what the author's job here should have been is to get across to the reader how the world of Ars Magica is different from real history. After all, our Earth didn't have covenants supporting members of the Order of Hermes in their arcane research nor did it have gateways to fairielands opening up in the woods. So you might think you were in for a condensed secret history of how the King of Hungary is a vampire and the Albigensian Crusade was called because Pope Innocent III really hated Occitanian witches. And this is really the book's opportunity to connect the magic rules they've been talking about and historical reality that you can look up on wikipedia.


This opportunity is missed.

What this book presents instead is mostly the author's opinion stated over and over again that you should research historical details for your campaign as long as it is fun, and then make up details when it wouldn't be fun to look this shit up. Which is great advice for playing the game, but really honestly seems like the way the author went about writing the game, which is less cool. When the author says “If historical accuracy is spoiling your fun, you need less of it.” it feels like he's justifying his own slacking off when it comes to getting things accurate in their own work. When he tells you to follow your bliss and focus on medieval historical details that interest you and ignore shit you don't like, that's great advice for a game and terrible advice for the game. This is pretty good DM advice, and atrocious shared world author advice, and I think it got used for both things.

Five pages of this thing are dedicated to ranting about the Church. The fact that the Church has in fact schismed during this period and there are two fucking Churches does not get mentioned. The fact that at this moment in time there are entire cities given to the heresy of the Cathars and Christians are killing Christians over doctrinal differences by the tens of thousands. And yet, rather than discuss these issues at all, we get 332 words squandered on telling us “Christian” doctrine:

There is one God, eternal and unchanging, who created the world from nothing and sustains it from moment to moment. This God is three persons, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The Son became a human being as Jesus Christ, an event called the “Incarnation,” which is considered the most important event in history. Jesus Christ died on the cross, the Crucifixion, and by his death paid the penalty for all the sins committed by human beings. On the third day, he rose from the dead, in the Resurrection, and forty days later he ascended to heaven.

In the beginning, God created two humans, Adam and Eve, and placed them in the Garden of Eden. There, they were tempted by Satan and sinned, and this Original Sin tainted all of their descendants. Where once all of nature had served humankind, now it turned against them. Human beings in Original Sin can do nothing truly good, because their motives are always tainted. Baptism washes away that stain, and fits a person to receive God’s grace, which grants the ability to do good.

Good acts are those which accord with God’s will, and tend to His glory, while evil acts are those which do not. The seven deadly sins are the basic roots of almost all sins committed by human beings, and the Church warns against them in particular. They are Avarice, Envy, Greed, Lust, Pride, Sloth, and Wrath. On the other side, there are the three theological virtues: Faith, Hope, and Love, and the greatest of these is Love.

All humans have an immortal soul, created at some point before birth. (In 1220, theologians still disagree about when.) After death, the soul is judged by God. Those who die perfect, having done penance for all their sins, pass directly into heaven. Those who die penitent, but not yet perfect, pass to purgatory, where they do penance after death for all those sins remaining. Those who die impenitent are condemned to hell for eternity.

I'm not making that up. It's in there. There is no context for it. That is a complete subsection all to itself, precisely as it appears in the book. It doesn't make sense, and it's very nearly actual dogma for some flavors of Christians. That isn't even the end of this shit, in that the next subsection is a rant about the sacraments. I feel like I'm reading something by Dave Sim. We don't get any discussion of how the secret history is different from real history, but we do get a description of the beliefs of Christians. Because obviously there's no way we could just look that shit up. There's some rants about using Christian trappings as things to care about in games, but honestly what the fuck is going on?


The author really seems to think that the trinity is obscure information. Either that or he's proselytizing.

The other estates get less ink. The Nobility get two pages, and the Cities and Towns get a page and a half. These sections get subsections on “mythic options” but they are almost unbelievably bullshit. Just a notice that a lord or town could have links to faeries or other supernaturals. Not which ones do in the default setting or what the actual fuck – just a note to the Storyguide that the magic can be played up or down, you know, whatever. So much ink is spilled on reminding the Storyguide that the setting can be changed, that they never quite get around to saying what the setting actually is.

The last little bit is a rant about peasants. This is the only part where they really commit to anything setting-wise, and it's completely batshit insane. Apparently, all the peasants have supernatural shit in their lives, and it is completely normal for regular farms to have magic trees and people talk to the wolves in the forest and villages make formal treaties with the forest beasts like they were living in fucking Equestria. This is MYTHIC europe, not Mythic Europe. Things in the author's description are gonzo on a level that most D&D campaigns don't reach. Galt in Golarion is more recognizable as historical France than the 5th edition presentation of Ars Magica France is. It's quite an accomplishment.

At least there's a map. But since the map is just a map of Europe in 1220, you can just google that shit.


Or start a game of Crusader Kings 2 in 1220.

Chapter 15: Stories


We can't bust heads like we used to, but we have our ways.

This chapter is only 5 pages long. It starts on page 211, and by 215 it's over. It doesn't even fill that last page, there's just two ectopic pieces of box text and some white space.

While the chapter is incredibly spare, it covers a fair amount of ground. We don't see it wander off on half page tangents about Christian dogma like the last chapter! This chapter actually raises a bunch of good points. Political conflicts are good problems for powerful characters because they can't usually be solved with a simple spell or a well placed dagger. How “soap opera” inherently scales to character power or lack thereof. And so on. But these issues aren't so much addressed as merely raised. This looks like the collected notes to write a chapter about telling stories in Ars Magica rather than an actual chapter that had been completed.

• Other Covenants. Magi are expected to give hospitality to visiting magi, even if they turn up uninvited. Getting to know your neighbors is a good idea, provided you can avoid upsetting them.

Seriously, that's the whole idea: just those two sentences in a bullet point. The implied expansion into a paragraph or subsection never happened.



There's not a lot to condemn or make fun of here because there just isn't a lot here. The truth is that Ars Magica does have a lot of stories to tell. It has a large ensemble cast who span a large collection of different power levels and the most detailed setting it is possible for a fantasy game to have. Europe at the time is a land filled with wars internal and external. There are wars against the Egyptians and Estonians without and wars against the Cathars and between the nobles of Champagne within. The main characters are witches and the friends and allies of witches who live in countries that officially have a zero tolerance policy on witches. There's setting, characters, conflict, and goals – stories can happen.

The chapter's missions should have been to provide challenge guidelines or something that a person couldn't replicate by sitting in the bathtub and thinking about possible story hooks for Ars Magica until you got out. Instead, it gives some fortune cookie wisdom and some bullet point ideas. It's not bad, but it doesn't really go into much detail. If this chapter was as-is in a 70 page rules-lite game, I wouldn't have a problem with it. As is, it looks like this a chapter outline rather than an actual chapter.

Chapter 16: Sagas


Let's hope we have a slightly better saga.

This chapter is the one we were directed to for more information about “Troupe Play,” which I remind you is the central innovation of this game and pretty much the only reason we still talk about it rather than forgetting about it like it was Powers & Perils or something. This entire chapter is only 7 pages, so... not likely.

Perhaps the most obvious question concerns how much history you want to use, and how close to historical events you want to stay. Some troupes like to keep mundane history the same as real history, and have the Order of Hermes acting entirely behind the scenes. Others prefer to have the magi change things, so that political events look very different from our history. Still others prefer to change things around entirely.

Basically, the author spends so much time in these last few chapters reminding you that you can change the setting that he forgets to write a setting. This book is a hard bound Page 42 Fallacy. These “maybe you want to do it differently?” suggestions take up five and a half pages of this chapter, leaving only a page and a half to describe the central game structure. Because the author has no idea what is important and what is not. Telling people that they could make up some rules to do The Magic Goes Away if they wanted to do that instead of playing Ars Magica is not important, while telling people how to play the actual fucking game is. Fuck.

The actual advice on running a troupe game is actually placed into the narrative of giving you options. You know, like the entire rest of the chapter is wasted on doing. However, this time they are actually suggesting a solid baseline from which to deviate, which makes such discussion modestly helpful. Hell, I'll just go ahead and quote a bit from their discussion of pooled characters:

This has a number of advantages. First, the number of magi in a group tends to be small, which makes them easier to challenge. Second, the covenant staff get to appear on stage, without condemning anyone to playing bit parts all the time. Third, when playing a grog you can cut loose and enjoy yourself. If you overact and ham up your main character, you are likely to end up annoying the other players. On the other hand, a grog who is hammed up can be restricted to small doses, making him entertaining rather than annoying.

That's true. And it's insightful. We don't really get to the downsides of this setup, because the author thinks he has to sell you on troupe play as a thing to switch to while playing Ars Magica rather than just laying down the fucking law and saying this is how it's done. And since there is only a page and a half on this subject, there really isn't room to get in to issues of characters who have less screen time being inherently less fleshed out or player/character alienation or any of that stuff.

And that's the end of the book's chapters. There are two appendices, one of which is given to ranting at 4th edition players about what to expect. This doesn't even bother to call out major changes like “armor based burden doesn't penalize your defense anymore so wearing armor is good rather than bad” but instead calls out incoherent gibberish like how they reworded the trait definitions of Muto so that it makes no sense in a different way. The second appendix is a collection of all the math formulas that were put into bold font earlier in the book. These are totally without context and obviously collected by a computer. It's just so fucking useless that I have no idea why that's even here.

Then there's the index, which is also automatically generated by a computer and essentially useless. Then the book is over. I'll post my final thoughts tomorrow some time.

[Lago PARANOIA]

FrankTrollman, in your final thoughts tomorrow could you give us the ins and outs of troupe play? Both theoretical ones and maybe those you've experienced at a table?

[Red_Rob]

FrankTrollman

Jeez Lago, d'ya have to be so formal? It's not like this RPG.net with a thousand members and a weekly turnover, we know who Frank is.

Besides, if you want to get specific about it, wouldn't it be Dr. Trollman?

Regarding Ars Magica, it is one of those games that has a reputation as being a real "Roleplayers RPG". Back in the 80's innovations like playing a cast of characters and tracking your progress off screen were so out there that they left a real impression on people who played this, much more than the actual nitty gritty of the rules. That plus the whole freeform spell system meant it really felt like it was doing something different, and ultimately I think that was more important than what it actually did.

We once tried troupe play in a Shadowrun campaign, but our experience was so bad with wildly varying tone and a few shitty GM's we ended up referring to it as "Arse Shadowrun". Then again, we were in high school, which might have had something to do with it.

[mean_liar]

I didn't want to wait for Frank to post before contributing my own take.

Troupe play is a good way to divvy up GMing responsibility, forestalling burnout, as well as allow less-skilled GMs a small arena in which to try some shit out and get some experience. Typically we divvied up responsibilities to the players, and in general you wanted to really give the GM-of-magic and GM-of-the-mundane to players who know the system and are willing to research real world shit, respectively, with other scopes and/or themes assigned to the other players according to some discussion about what the game should be about as well as what the GMs are comfortable running. Those two pretty much show up in every ArM game, and everything else tends to be geographically and group-specific (someone needs to play the Muslims/we want faerie stories/etc).

Basically, the idea is that a player takes on a portfolio of NPCs that are reasonably silo'd from the other possible categories, and manages those NPCs. That also means that their magi should not be the type to get involved in those stories, since they'll be running them: a player that wants to play a scheming Magi within the context of the Order of Hermes, then that player shouldn't get the responsibility of GMing the Order of Hermes; give that dude the local lord and what-not.

As a general rule, I really like the exercise provided by The Microscope of helping to lay out thematic elements of the game and providing bounds and expectations. That goes double for ArM, since multiple GMs makes collaborative setting and game scoping vital. You really want everyone on the same general page on that stuff.

Having someone assigned as a Miscellaneous GM allows stuff like wild stories divorced from context; basically when it's that GM's turn he gets to poke into the setting, turn over a few rocks, pick out something from some supplement or story or what-have-you and plop it into the game divorced from metanarrative. It allows some more fun episodic play, and maybe that's the season that all the magi stay home and the players all pick up Companions and/or Grogs just to see what they can do.

[Koumei]

We once tried troupe play in a Shadowrun campaign, but our experience was so bad with wildly varying tone and a few shitty GM's we ended up referring to it as "Arse Shadowrun".

Our group called it Arse Magic. But let's be honest, we all know from where the justifications for Muto Aquam rather than Creo Aurum are pulled.

[mean_liar]

I really, really like ArM, and 5th edition especially. That said, I think Frank did a very fair job here with his assessment of the game and the core book.

The game needs more on Troupe play. It needs more on mundane/hermetic interactions, but they purposefully shy away from that because, I believe, of the different editions and their various relationships between magi and mundanes and they weren't willing to state THIS IS THE SETTING, instead going for "this could be the setting or this or this or this, your call really" which is a little too blue-sky for coming up with a game unless you're already comfortable with it.

God as a powerful divine force is a lot more abstract than I think Frank gives it credit for. Actually getting regular divine guidance is pretty rare, and having access to divine insight sufficient to realize that everyone's source of power is abstract Divinity is difficult; it isn't like a high fantasy setting (relative to Divine characters anyway) where you can just run an eldritch Google for big answers. Saints and powerful ascetics are in on it, but convincing temporal powers of that is pretty much asking to be killed martyred. That is, of course, something that the base book really needs to cover and explain.

[Longes]

I'm not making that up. It's in there. There is no context for it. That is a complete subsection all to itself, precisely as it appears in the book. It doesn't make sense, and it's very nearly actual dogma for some flavors of Christians. That isn't even the end of this shit, in that the next subsection is a rant about the sacraments. I feel like I'm reading something by Dave Sim. We don't get any discussion of how the secret history is different from real history, but we do get a description of the beliefs of Christians. Because obviously there's no way we could just look that shit up. There's some rants about using Christian trappings as things to care about in games, but honestly what the fuck is going on?

There are actually rules for going into the Garden of Eden, talking to animals who lived there since the beginning of time and steal eat the Apple. Eating the apple is actually a stupid thing to do, because it makes your current form into your natural form, and you can only enter the Garden as an animal. What you actually do in the garden is learning the Adamic language.

And no, I have no idea how existence of Garden of Eden as it is written in the Bible, works with both Christianity and Islam being true.

[Username17]

OSSR: Ars Magica
Final Thoughts

Ars Magica was created by a couple of fresh faced college kids from the Midwest and got more notice than it otherwise would have because as early adopters of computers it had higher production values than most indie games of the period. The game itself was a product of its time and every major innovation of the game was driven by intense laziness. Writing a spell list is a lot of work, so they just wrote up a couple of spells of each type and told you to make up your own spells. Writing a setting is a lot of work, so they just told you to use real world history books and put magic into it sideways or anyhow it would fit. Balancing character classes is really hard, so they told the players to take turns playing weak and powerful characters and just let things be unbalanced on a per session basis. That's a lot of lazy to go around.

But the fact is that modern RPGs have gotten too long. For fuck's sake, D&D 5e is like a thousand pages and is still basically a ruleslite with no set difficulties for performing basic actions. These systems that made Ars Magica easy to write also made the game more accessible. And that's a good thing. People who want to design a game need to read Ars Magica. They need to ask themselves “Do I need to actually put this into the game, or can I just pass the buck and walk away from it like Tweet and the Dotmeister did back in 1989?” Because a design is perfect not when there's nothing left to add, but when there's nothing left to take away.

The fifth edition carries with it that spirit of laziness. It abdicates on its responsibilities to add much of anything to Ars Magica. Secret histories? Challenge guidelines? Skill use guidelines? A usable set of antagonists? A reassignment of magic categories to make any fucking sense at all? We'll just write down a big old giant “Nope” for all of those. Instead we get reminders that we can change the rules and setting as much as we want because it's our game like this was a fucking 2nd edition AD&D book. The real additions are mostly confined to the author name dropping some medieval philosophy that the author does not understand, because the scholarship is quite terrible in this book – or various tirades about how stuff from 3rd edition isn't canon anymore but some of the stuff from 4th edition is. Yeah, the book can't be fucked to formalize the in-canon relationship between Wizard towers and the feudal system, but it can be fucked to tell us that there is no longer a canon connection between the magus House Tremere and the vampire Clan Tremere. That's some seriously weird priorities.

Ars Magica is an important game, but it's a product of its time. And that time is 1989. I honestly think everyone who wants to design games should look at Ars Magica, but I can't really point to a single reason to look at the 5th edition instead of the 2nd. There's a lot more god-bothering in 5th edition, but I don't think it improves anything. Ars Magica had a lot of promise back in the late 80s and early 90s, but 5th edition is clearly just a keeper of the old ways ranting about epicycles.

Troupe Play

By far the most out-there idea of Ars Magica is that of Troupe Play. If you wrote an edition of Ars Magica and spent less than 20% of the book talking about its ramifications, you were probably doing it wrong. At its core, in troupe play there are more characters than there are players, and players take turns playing powerful and weak characters. You can also take turns with MC duty, but that is neither necessary nor sufficient for troupe play (some people take turns as the DM in otherwise traditional D&D games and this is not troupe play, and some Ars Magica groups keep the same Storyguide while having the other players take turns playing different types of characters and this is troupe play). Troupe play completely stands a lot of RPGing on its head, causing and eliminating a lot of problems. It's deeply weird to me that this hasn't been adopted by more games. About the only attempt to copy this that I can recall was a weird and half-assed attempt to do it in Dark Sun. But like everything in early 90s 2nd edition AD&D, it was extremely poorly put together, so I'm not really surprised that never went anywhere. But I can't think of another major attempt to do anything with this concept, and that's very strange to me.

Troupe play creates a larger cast of characters. By definition, that means that characters get less time in the spotlight. This is good for one-joke characters, and bad for self-insert characters. A character who only ever says “Hodor” or “I Am Groot” would be fucking intolerable in a standard RPG that ran for multiple sessions, but in one-shots or as an occasional guest appearance can be funny, endearing, and memorable. A lot of fictional characters that are not OK for normal RPG campaigns are great when they only have dialog every couple of episodes. But while you get a good deal of entertainment value out of mute characters or characters that never leave sight of water that either would be terrible if they were in every adventure or just literally can't go on all the adventures, all these guest appearances do demonstrably cut into the screen time of “main characters.”

To give media examples of this: consider Justice League Unlimited and The Wheel of Time. In JLU, we get episodes about The Huntress and The Question and those are great, and we get adventures about The Flash switching bodies with Luthor and those are great too. There's a balance between little adventures for the little heroes and big adventures for the big heroes and it's just generally really good from beginning to end. You need to watch that show. On the flip side, through most of The Wheel of Time the plot only really moved forward at all with the adventures of Rand and Matt. And yet, we'd go sometimes a hundred fucking pages of various annoying female caricatures tugging their braids and threatening to box the ears of uppity dudes. It was painful, and I never finished the series. Of course, neither did Robert Jordan, zing.

Troupe play can handle wild character power differences, one note characters, and characters who have absolute restrictions on what kind of adventures they can go on without even batting an eye. It's not that those sorts of problems have workarounds, those aren't problems in the first place. Instead it has problems with characters struggling to have enough screen time for character growth, and balance problems with excessive specialization.

The Legacy

Ars Magica's legacy is felt hugely in gaming, but for kind of weird things. Ars Magica gave rise to Vampire the Masquerade, which for several years was the biggest game in the world. Masquerade was of course basically a new edition of Ars Magica and written by one of the original authors. The same lazy flippant disregard for mechanics was there from the beginning, and most of the story dials. Masquerade didn't use troupe play because it was heavily focused on the melodrama of an individual character, but we still see the sort of lazy world building and short magic lists that made Ars Magica easy to write – and to read.

The Dominions series is basically Ars Magica, but it takes only the concepts rather than the mechanics. And while we have gods spreading dominion auras that go up to 10 (the way it worked in the early Ars Magica editions, rather than having all dominion auras belonging to the one true God who supported Christians, Muslims, and Jews equally because fuck the Romuva), and you find special magic sites that give yearly vis as well as one-time events where you find vis stores – it's not even really an RPG.

The weirdest one for me is the modern day Ars Magica fans. They claim things that aren't true about it, like all the time. Last time we talked about Ars Magica, a bunch of people posted rants about how clear the magic system is. And that's just fucking insane. Ars Magica's magic system is lazy and incoherent, that's what it is. That is what it has always been. And yet, you see people who claim that it's “obvious” what Muto can and cannot do, even though the extant of Muto is based on a double negative of a reference to a medieval understanding of an ancient Greek philosopher that the author of the book does not himself understand and has only a couple of a examples which flagrantly violate the examples on several levels. It's difficult for me to imagine how you could make a magic system that was less clear than that. Even on this thread, consider how Mean Liar attempted to defend the Ars Magica assertion that people living in and around the Holy See would aquire warping scores and eventually turn into supernatural creatures by pointing out that this did not happen to people who already had True Faith – and then later in the same thread attempted to defend the Ars Magica assertion that The Church somehow didn't believe that God also backed Islam by claiming that only people with the True Faith got to be in on the God plan. That's some pretty serious denial-in-depth right there.

[mean_liar]

I never asserted that True Faith was common, only that it would prevent Warping. The main thrust of that post was that you didn't grow an extra tit from living near the Divine, with or without True Faith.

Living in Divine Auras does weird things to you, but those things are context-dependent. Like, living in a Divine Aura makes you Pious, but it doesn't define that piety. So you pick up the nearest monotheistic book and decide it has all the answers. Now, in ArM that's explicitly not "correct" from the perspective of the Divine - the Realms of Power: Divine book calls out that no religion has it all "correct", and that the only real way to have access to the Divine is to somehow worship the a monotheistic one God, and the rest is largely details (Zoroastrians, for example, are Divine).

True Faith is rare, roughly as rare as wizards. Divine powers don't really lend themselves to the kinds of consistent power displays that magi enjoy, but are more prone to explosive miracles. There isn't this idea of "go to the church, the local priest has True Faith/Divine powers and can just heal you up"; the Church itself is a powerful secular organization in ArM and True Faith tends to actively marginalize you within it. There isn't a chain of higher- and higher-level miracle workers up the chain with the Pope being the head miracle worker; it isn't DnD. Wearing a cross doesn't make you Divine.

...

I think you're right that they should've chosen sides - there's a version of the Mongols in 4e in which they're actually Infernal and represent a Satanic destructive threat to Europe, there's another where they're Magical pagans, and left unexplored is the idea that Mongols worshipping Tengri are Divine monotheists whoops - but the idea that God is mysterious and removed from immediacy, that you can't actually speak with God, and that all divine interactions with mortals are inherently subject to mortal interpretation lends itself to a just-so rationale as to continued separation between mortals, and schisms, and what-not. I think ultimately you're complaining about shit that atheists have been complaining about since monotheism was invented (and before), in that the inaction of God to clear up the problems of the living is clearly some kind of fuckup. It is, that's why atheism is compelling, but ArM splitting the baby on the issue by appealing to a mysterious God beyond understanding isn't as much an affront to me.

Within the context of ArM, the only group with a strong theoretical understanding of the Realms - Divine, Infernal, Magic, and Faerie - is the Order of Hermes. It's a fact that there's mechanical support for Infernal magic that mimics Hermetic magic (and any other form of magic), and that necessarily leads to a conflating of the Infernal and Magical realms in the eyes of most. Divine power is less common and arises out of a powerful personal connection to the Divine and can be enjoyed by any monotheist, including heretics. To most people it looks just like any other magic; there isn't a DnD-style "detect magic" that reveals the nature of the supernatural you're observing, and almost all Divine powers replicate in some way or another extant powers from other Realms and traditions.

The point of all that isn't that the ArM presentation of the Realms, and in this case specifically intra-Divine relationships, is the One True Way. Rather, the point is that there is a decent case to be made that allows the setting to exist with the presented relationship to the Divine. An ArM game where only the Roman Catholics (and maybe the Eastern churches) can gain True Faith isn't that disruptive, and probably would feel more evocative. But making the case that there's no support for any conclusion but what you posit isn't as strong as you think it is, largely because you're ignorant of the game's mechanics and presentation.

You can't just Google God or Angels to ask if there's only one God and all the dogma is fucking things up (well, you can but it's a lvl 35+ Understanding miracle based on Abilites rather than Arts and therefore the RNG problem looms massive over it: getting that level of response is pretty much a result of a random roll rather than a predictable trick). You can't even do that meaningfully when the Muslims you're dealing with include non-Divine Magical sahir, Divine casters, Infernal infiltrators, and unaligned opportunists and powerful mundanes protecting status quo civilizations and societies. It's a mess and history is full of holy men professing that we should all get along who get killed for their trouble, and ArM provides sufficient support for that.

[Username17]

Mean Liar: I don't buy it. First and foremost, because you're cherry picking ideas out of other books to try to claim consistency in presentation in the core book. The core book, which is the book I'm reading, is a contradictory mess. Obviously if you pick and choose statements out of other books, you'll find statements that can back up some sort of hodge podge view, but this book says in black and fucking pink that the Divine backs both the Christians and the Muslims and it says that The Church doesn't believe that.

It isn't saying that various princes and dukes who don't know any better believe the Muslims are pagans, it says that the Church believes that God wants them to fight Islam, and they are wrong about that despite the fact that there are angels that they talk to. The book does choose a side, it's just that that side happens to be that the Pope is calling for the murder of tens of thousands of people that he believes incorrectly that God wants dead because there is a God that people talk to and know the opinions of, and neither he nor anyone he knows is one of them. It's supposed to be less offensive because it's relativist and fuzzy towards Muslims, but it's actually a giant middle finger at Catholics. The Church is specifically absolutely in the wrong about the biggest issue of the day.

-Username17

[mean_liar]

I think as a critique of the core book, that's accurate. As you pointed out, they don't spend anywhere near enough time talking about the differences between ArM and the real histories, and certainly the idea that the Church is a largely secular organization as far as ArM is concerned needs some serious explanation. Players coming from more standard fantasy games wherein church = clerics are not helped by the core book.

And to your point, going on a crusade grants (one-use) Faith Points, which can be burnt for small bonuses to tasks. The designers had the option of that granting Confidence, which largely does the same thing, but no they went with Faith Points which are Confidence+ and grant rare Divine miracles... for anyone that decides they have to kill a bunch of Muslims/Estonians/Cathars. Presumably that goes the other way too. I'm not aware of any book that directly addresses how that happens, other than to say that it is a mystery. So is God. We deal and move on, we have magi to play.

A new player who picks up the 5th edition core book and expects to grok the game is going to be lost and suffer a disservice; at the least they'll have to research the game itself on the Atlas forum and ask questions and tap the collective knowledge of five editions and say a thousand pages of canonical info and a few thousand more of non-canonical stuff from earlier editions. That's shitty.

The 5th edition book - I think you mentioned this as well - was written more for players of earlier editions than for new players, and so I think that a lot of stuff they simply don't go into because they didn't really have their hands wrapped around this. That said, I also think that the subsequent additions to the canon have done a good job of putting forward a consistent worldview with mechanical support. It's a mark against the system that to really play it with everything laid out in front of probably requires:

Core book
Art and Academe
City and Guild
Covenants
Houses of Hermes - Mystery Cults
Houses of Hermes - Societates
Houses of Hermes - True Lineages
Realms of Power - Divine
Realms of Power - Faerie
Realms of Power - Infernal
Realms of Power - Magic
The Mysteries
(at least one Tribunal book of your choice)
(at least one of Hedge Magic/Rival Magic)

...but at the same time, that mark exists for the negative reason that no book encapsulates the setting, and the positive reason that each of these adds to the setting in an interesting and reasonably mechanically sound way (largely due to silo'd abilities lacking complementarity).

[Mask_De_H]

With D&D or Shadowrun, you only need the core book(s) to get a sense of the world. You're telling me that for ArM I need at least fourteen goddamned books? Do you not see how insane that is?

I mean, there are ways to get all of those books, but parsing that's a nigh-insurmountable task for a new MC or player. And that still probably doesn't solve things like Muto, Perdo and Creo being ill-defined, which are core issues with the most important part of the game.

[name_here]

Fourteen fucking books is a pretty steep entry price. Granted, it sounds like the first four on the list should leave you acceptably set. At least, they have titles that seem like they should go with a set of four books that would leave you acceptably set. Still a bit much, though.

As for the ill-defined verbs, I think that's going to come with the territory. It's meant to cover anything you might want to do with magic and have a vaguely managable number of skills. I think the best option is to just accept that there's going to be overlap. If an effect could plausibly be achieved by two categories, it exists in both categories. If the descriptions of those categories gives them different difficulties, they just do and mages pick whichever category gives them personally a higher chance of success. Ideally, you arrange your difficulties so that it's harder to Muto something from intact to destroyed than to Perdo something from intact to destroyed.

[mean_liar]

Those books provide a total canonical exposure, which is kind of tautological. Imagine a DnD game where True Namers and weird supplements actually provide useful, non-game-fucking info and you get the point: I suppose it's like every supplement in ArM5 is The Book of Nine Swords. It addresses holes in the game you may not even be aware of... but then give the Bo9S a raft of interesting setting fluff and that's really where ArM5 is at with its supplements.

So no, you don't need them. The core book and Covenants, and maybe the House books would be plenty for most. But there isn't too much uninteresting setting and/or mechanics in the supplements, so I have a long list of stuff I think is neat.

[Username17]

Now, I've never read the Divine Realm book and outside of a contrived desert island scenario I'm never going to. But I'm pretty sure there actually isn't a coherent and satisfactory answer at the end of that book. Every time Ars Magica fans have insisted to me that there's a right and complete answer to something in Ars Magica, and I do mean every single time, when I've followed them down the rabbit hole it has turned out that they were full of shit. Like the whole melancholic humor thing on this thread. But with like, everything that any Ars Magica fan has ever said to me over the last ten years.

Here's the way it actually works: If you want to find out how the people from The Church in town are supposed to interact with your Covenant, you're supposed to read the Core Book (227 pages), Art and Academe (140 pages), City and Guild (144 pages), Covenants (128 pages), one of the Houses of Hermes books (136 pages), and Realms of Power - Divine (144 pages). And then, by the time you've gone through those over nine hundred pages you'll have an opinion. It won't be the same as the opinion of anyone else who has gone through those same pages because there's a bunch of contradictory and incoherent bits. But it's literally impossible to go through that much text without forming some ideas and sticking them together with mind caulk.

The thing that's weird to me is that almost never do I hear some Ars Magica fan admit that the way they do things is the way they do things rather than the "way things are" in Ars Magica. All the resolutions of big issues are made out of table consensus and mind caulk, not unambiguous and usable rules from the printed books. But Ars Magica fans keep telling me that if I only read more Ars Magica books that I would miraculously come to the same conclusions as their table consensus. It's fucking weird is what it is. Obviously their table had a discussion and some back and forth and made a compromise as to what they think Rego is capable of, why they think that I or anyone else in the world would independently come to exactly the same compromise position as their home group is beyond understanding to me.

-Username17

[Longes]

The thing that's weird to me is that almost never do I hear some Ars Magica fan admit that the way they do things is the way they do things rather than the "way things are" in Ars Magica. All the resolutions of big issues are made out of table consensus and mind caulk, not unambiguous and usable rules from the printed books. But Ars Magica fans keep telling me that if I only read more Ars Magica books that I would miraculously come to the same conclusions as their table consensus. It's fucking weird is what it is.

This is not limited to Ars Magica fans at all. I've experienced that with every single game I've discussed ever. Mostly White Wolf stuff though.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Here's the way it actually works: If you want to find out how the people from The Church in town are supposed to interact with your Covenant, you're supposed to read the Core Book (227 pages), Art and Academe (140 pages), City and Guild (144 pages), Covenants (128 pages), one of the Houses of Hermes books (136 pages), and Realms of Power - Divine (144 pages).

You left out The Church (144 pages) itself.

[mean_liar]

Here's the way it actually works: If you want to find out how the people from The Church in town are supposed to interact with your Covenant, you're supposed to read the Core Book (227 pages), Art and Academe (140 pages), City and Guild (144 pages), Covenants (128 pages), one of the Houses of Hermes books (136 pages), and Realms of Power - Divine (144 pages). And then, by the time you've gone through those over nine hundred pages you'll have an opinion. It won't be the same as the opinion of anyone else who has gone through those same pages because there's a bunch of contradictory and incoherent bits. But it's literally impossible to go through that much text without forming some ideas and sticking them together with mind caulk.

The thing that's weird to me is that almost never do I hear some Ars Magica fan admit that the way they do things is the way they do things rather than the "way things are" in Ars Magica.

Woah now, cowboy. I never said that. In fact I've said repeatedly - insofar as it was in the context of the discussion on what Hermetic magic can do - that it inevitably has to be some kind of table consensus, and so have others. Not only that, but within the context of Troupe play the entire setting has maintain a common consensus, which is why I explicitly called out The Microscope on how to help build that consensus.

It's weird you'd reach your conclusion in such stark terms, but whatever.

I do think there are some broad strokes in the setting that ArM grognards would agree on, but I also think that's as much the same mindcaulking process on a larger, forum-assisted scale.

ArM is rare (possibly unique?) in that table consensus is required for some very common mechanics, but settings are almost always plastic things that groups alter.

...

You don't really need The Church to interact with the Church, only if you're going to involve the story in internal Church politics. You don't need Art and Academe either, but that's really useful for playing characters that are alchemists or scientists. City and Guild is more about how medieval cities are run and constructed; you don't need that for Church interactions either. Realms of Power is necessary for creating truly holy men, but again, interacting with the Church in the abstract would need that. You wouldn't need the Houses or Covenants either.

The biggest resource for the Church is Wikipedia.

The books are there to expand the mechanical reaches of the setting (how does one advance in the Church in mechanical terms, what's a Church trial look like and involve and what Abilities are utilized), but unless you're involved in that particular subsetting, you don't need that subsetting's minigames.

From my perspective, the most interesting minigames are what I listed, and it's long. But a lot of their content is silo'd such that you generally don't need to bounce between multiple books to address a single topic.

On reconsideration, City and Guild shouldn't be on the list of core+ books for an ArM game.

[Username17]

The biggest resource for the Church is Wikipedia.

That's just scrapping the setting as presented in 5th edition altogether and going back to its "13th century Europe, with magic" roots from 2nd edition. The 5th edition "The Church" book tells us that canon law is undecided as to whether witchcraft is a crime.

Now, in 1220, church courts didn't try people for crimes of witchcraft in most jurisdictions. But there wasn't any fucking ambivalence about whether sorcery was a crime. Sorcery was a fucking crime, there was just jurisdictional disagreement about who was supposed to find the evidence and get the stake properly burny. The only periods when the Church historically forbade people from burning witches was the periods when they insisted that witches did not exist. But once the Albigensian Crusade is on, that honeymoon was over. And in any case, if the Church knows about the Order of Hermes, which in 5th edition they apparently do, that doesn't make any sense either.

Wikipedia is fucking useless, because the Church described in Ars Magica 5th edition is so incredibly unlike the Church from our history in every single way that matters to the player characters that it might as well be a group from Forgotten Realms.

-Username17

[mean_liar]

Okie dokie.

I guess that's my mind caulk then. Makes for a pretty good game.

EDIT - Wait a second. Are you on that deserted island? They have Wi-Fi? Do you realize that The Church discusses canonical crimes? Should I actually attempt to find this passage that brings the entire edifice crumbling down before or after we dispatch the rescue helicopters?

[Username17]

Okie dokie.

I guess that's my mind caulk then. Makes for a pretty good game.

EDIT - Wait a second. Are you on that deserted island? They have Wi-Fi? Do you realize that The Church discusses canonical crimes? Should I actually attempt to find this passage that brings the entire edifice crumbling down before or after we dispatch the rescue helicopters?

The Church is of course not the same book as the Divine Realms book. Here, I'll save you the trouble:

Sorcery and Witchcraft
Rarely, minor cases of sorcery are brought to the canon court. A typical penance involves wearing a white sheet before the congregation, although canon courts are ambivalent about whether minor sorcery (except as evidence of infernalism or paganism) is a crime. Serious cases of sorcery are prosecuted by secular courts, which can impose death as a punishment.

This is just brain breaking when it comes to the actual Church of the period. And most importantly: it's a complete abdication of world building responsibilities. The game, and I mean the entire game, is about playing sorcerers and the women who love them in Christian lands. It is completely unacceptable to discuss the legal status of sorcerers in Christian lands in a single paragraph of vague generalities. It is probably the single most important facet of the player characters' interaction with the campaign world and the society around them.


Seriously, you had one job.

Now in the actual period there was debate within the Church about whether accusations of witchcraft should be investigated or whether the accuser should simply be burned as a heretic. The bible is not ambiguous on the point that sorcerers should be put to death and are going straight to Hell after they die - but there was considerable debate as to whether sorcerers actually existed.

If, as the core book suggests, the Church is fully aware that there are real sorcerers and that many of them are good Christians, historicity of Church doctrine on this subject is out the window and it's up to the game books to write a new one. If the entire Church book doesn't discuss Leviticus (which it does not), it has fucking failed and the official setting doesn't fucking exist.

It's fucking 1220, except people "get along" or something because otherwise it might be offensive to religious people or something. But you know what? If people get along, it's not a god damn thing like 1220 because that was a time of open war on four fronts! Fuck.

-Username17

[Lokathor]

Or start a game of Crusader Kings 2 in 1220.

This would not be the worst way to generate a map for each Ars Magica campaign.

Start in 1066 (or earlier) and then just play normally until 1200. Maybe don't blob out and conquer too much of the world or anything. You can also set observer mode and have the AI control 100% of the stuff so that you don't have to. Then use that as your map for that campaign. Maybe keeps the world "fresh" from campaign to campaign.

[mean_liar]

Turns out this guy is an idiot:

In the world of late antiquity or the early Middle Ages, it is impossible to define someone as a witch (as opposed, for example, to an amateur herbalist, a heretic or a scold), and none of the legislation of the time attempted to do so. Offenders were designated offenders by virtue of their performing various actions or wearing certain objects declared by the legislation to be condemned or forbidden. For all practical purposes, the 'witch' had not yet been invented. There were only practitioners of various kinds of magic, both male and female, who might belong to any rank of ecclesiastical or lay society, and whose actions might, or might not, bring them within the compass of canon or secular law, depending on external factors that were usually local but could, from time to time, be more general.
— P.G. Maxwell-Stewart, The Emergence of the Christian Witch

...which is what The Church is trying to address: minor sorcery is/is not a crime, depending on regional circumstances.

LOL messy history, get the fuck out of here we have a game to run.

[Koumei]

Well, he's probably just missing an important point: any time The Church (even after the schism of your choice) believed in witchcraft being a real thing, they forbade it.

However, any given place gave more or fewer fucks about that depending on all sorts of circumstances. So you'd get places where they said "We don't really know what you mean by witches, and we're more interested in this other thing, so I guess we'll just ignore it". Even though they were Christian kingdoms (or counties or whatever). You'd also get ones where people ran about decapitating and/or burning people just on an accusation. Then there were places like England, where the vast majority were acquitted. The remainder were hanged, so it's not like they were an enlightened folk who didn't believe in that superstitious nonsense, they just apparently had a really sturdy legal system at the time.