Ars Magica To Get A New Edition

RareBreed said:

I'm trying to remember now, but didn't White Wolf make a tie-in with Vampire (and the World of Darkness in general) to this setting? I thought one of the clans could trace some kind of lineage back to one of the Houses in Ars Magica.

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Yes. The third edition of Ars Magica, published by White Wolf in 1992, was directly tied to the World of Darkness as the ‘history’ of the setting. House Tremere became a Vampire Clan while the Order of Hermes and Order of Reason were both linked together also. However, many fans felt that this darkened the tone, while the ‘Order of Reason’ actually undermined the premise of the game.

When White Wolf sold the game rights to Wizards of the Coast, and then in turn sold it to Atlas Games, the links between Ars Magica and the WoD were swiftly removed. House Tremere aren’t vampires...although you could choose that path for them in your own game...and the paradigm is fixed to Mythic Europe.

This will be an insta back from me. There’s nothing out there like Ars Magicka.

MNblockhead said:

I've been looking for a good system for a magic user focused campaign. Medieval fantasy or modern. I tried Mage the Ascension since I like the flavor of the magic system, but I just got frustrated with the rules and also by the lack of good pre-written adventures. I would love to play in a MtA game, but hated trying to run the game.

Can someone who has played Ars Magica explain some of the core mechanics, especially regarding casting, or link any good summaries or reviews?

Also, how tied into the setting and lore is Ars Magica? Could I run a game in a home brew world, or would that be taking away a lot from the game?

Lastly, is there enough published adventures for the system to run a campaign of at least a few months? How well designed are the adventures?

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Ars Magica uses a D10 roll for everything. It can be rolled as a simple die, reading the numbers 1-10 (0 counts as 10), or a ‘stress' die which is read 0-9. When rolling a Stress die, a 1 allows for a double die roll to be added to the score, but rolling a 0 counts as ‘0’ with a potential ‘botch’ die then rolled to see if it was a catastrophic failure (if you roll another 0). Depending on the stress level of the task you can increase the number of botch dice you roll.

The core mechanic is Stat + Skill + die roll vs Target number which goes up with difficulty.

Magic also operates like this, except you add Stat + Verb + Noun vs the casting level of the spell. Spells can be designed where you have scores in 5 different techniques (verb) and 10 different forms (noun) which you can combine to create effects. So, for example, you could have a score in Creo (“I create”) of 8 and a score of Ignem (“Fire”) of 7 and combine them to cast a level 25 fireball spell where you roll 8 + 7 + stress die vs a 25 target. The higher the level of the spell the more powerful it gets. However, casters can also create spontaneous magic rather than use a formulaic spell by casting at a fractional level below their magic score totals.

The first edition didn’t have any setting, so the Mythic Europe Setting is one that has been developed over several decades and is based on very well researched historical Europe but with a mythical fantasy overlay. It is basically a magical version of history where the superstitious beliefs are real. It is, however, entirely optional - you can set the Order of Hermes in any fantasy setting with little trouble.

There are something like 40 published supplements that are now available in POD. These include lots and lots of adventure and campaign material. Atlas Games maintain a forum on their site which is still active and some gamers play Ars Magica exclusively for years. Its entire set up is for long term, extended play and the main ’splats’ are geographically based Tribunal books. There are some books with a good range of adventure anthologies though.

You’ll also note there are three tiers of play - Mages (which are powerful), Companions (which are advanced, independently thinking non-magical characters) and Grogs which are basically servants and guards, but you can still make them individually interesting to play in low key games. All live together collectively in a Covenant that the players collaboratively design together.

I own a hardcover of the 5th edition. I haven't had time to read it yet. I bought it because someone said Ars Magica represents the gold standard of magic systems.

TrippyHippy said:

Ars Magica uses a D10 roll for everything <snip>

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Thanks for the summation. It sounds interesting. I'm definitely going to read up on it some more. Good chance I'll back this as a TTRPG I hope to play in the future. I'll look for some one shots on the Roll20 find a game page or on StartPlaying to see how it plays.

Ah, just realized it isn't a kickstarter. I signed up for reminders and updates on the Atlas sight.

TrippyHippy said:

The first edition didn’t have any setting, so the Mythic Europe Setting is one that has been developed over several decades and is based on very well researched historical Europe but with a mythical fantasy overlay. It is basically a magical version of history where the superstitious beliefs are real. It is, however, entirely optional - you can set the Order of Hermes in any fantasy setting with little trouble.

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I'd add that while it's not setting-locked the way something like Shadowrun is, there are some fair bits of setting woven throughout the game. This is similar to how you can take D&D out of Greyhawk, but it's hard to take the Greyhawk out of D&D. So while you don't have to play in Mythic Europe per se, your game will probably look quite a lot like it even if the geography and stuff won't match.

Another factor that's not directly setting-related: the game is very much set up for long-term campaigns. Magical activity (study, research, crafting magic items, formulating new spells, etc.) is done on the time-scale of seasons. Adventuring, from the magi's point of view, is an unwelcome interruption in their important research, and magi have means of extending their lives (though not forever).

Von Ether said:

What's wrong with the SA part?

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It might get tricky if you're trying to combine it with other stuff that uses other licenses. Otherwise, I'm a big fan of CC BY, and plan to use it for my own rules stuff.

Staffan said:

I'd add that while it's not setting-locked the way something like Shadowrun is, there are some fair bits of setting woven throughout the game. This is similar to how you can take D&D out of Greyhawk, but it's hard to take the Greyhawk out of D&D. So while you don't have to play in Mythic Europe per se, your game will probably look quite a lot like it even if the geography and stuff won't match.

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Actually, I disagree. The original game (1987) only had an implied setting and didn’t include any setting detail about Mythic Europe. It only became the default setting from 2nd edition onwards and it was constructed over years through supplements. It was only by the time of the third edition (1992) where the setting became more strictly tied to the WoD version of our own history where the time and place of the setting started to get more elaborately described. And the WoD link became abandoned in later editions, while developing the Mythic Europe setting with more historical vigour.

However, the Order of Hermes are an anachronistic organisation - they have lots of modern day attitudes, like gender equality, tolerance and democracy that sets them apart from the rest of medieval society. And they literally live apart from them through their Covenants. The Mages’ Companions are there in the same way Doctor Who has companions - to try to stay connected to the world around them while they engross themselves in their studies. Magi can also potentially live a long time which means that, in theory at least, you can progress them through over a century of play at least, while the OoH has at least one outlined possible future outlined in Mage: the Ascension that takes you up to the modern day..

The game has medieval-focussed equipment lists and some of the skills listed may need consideration, but the core chassis of the game can quite easily shift to different settings while the magic system itself doesn’t have any real world analogues so it can literally be translocated into any fantasy setting.

Don’t get me wrong, I think the Mythic Europe setting is a feature of the game, and many fans love the meticulously detailed research that has gone into it, but I’d like to see the new edition underline that you can run Ars Magica with alternative (simpler) settings if you want.

David Chart, the Ars Magica developer, has just stated that he thinks a Starter Set is needed for the game, where a lot of the simplification spoken about above could happen. He regards it as a separate item to the Definitive edition though.

Hopefully, then, we will see both.

TrippyHippy said:

The game has medieval-focussed equipment lists and some of the skills listed may need consideration, but the core chassis of the game can quite easily shift to different settings while the magic system itself doesn’t have any real world analogues so it can literally be translocated into any fantasy setting.

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I think we may be having different definitions of a game being integrated into its setting and/or genre. Could you take the core mechanic of d10+stat+skill vs difficulty, along with mechanics for damage and such and build another game around it? Sure. You could bring along the magic system, though it does have a bunch of medievalisms in it as well (such as not being able to affect anything beyond the Earth). But skills, advantages/flaws, creatures, and all that other stuff that makes it a game rather than a game engine, all form around a medieval core.

To use a D&D analogue: D&D is built around a setting that vaguely corresponds to Greyhawk. You have studious wizards, you have clerics wielding both martial implements and divine magic, and there's a huge gaggle of various monsters with different roles in the world. You might be playing in Greyhawk, or the Forgotten Realms, or Eberron, or a homebrew setting, but they're all essentially Greyhawk with different geography. If you want to change a lot of the built-in Greyhawkisms, you could get something like Arcana Evolved, with mostly the same rules engine but different races, different classes, different spell lists (both in the actual spells and in how they're organized), and so on. Or if you want to go to another genre, you'd get something like d20 Modern or one of the d20 Star Warses. They're all built on the same core chassis, but they're also very clearly different games.

That's basically how I see using Ars Magica outside of Mythic Europe. You can certainly transplant the game to a different geography, where things like Provence or England doesn't exist, without other consequences than you having to make up more material yourself. But that would be the equivalent of setting your D&D game in Greyhawk instead of the Forgotten Realms.