I'm reading the 5th edition of #ArsMagica and to be perfectly honest it rules hard. Like years before Harry Potter someone was like "What if there was a silly society of wizards that had their own weird rules and political intrigues?"
Also, core rulebook not only includes the phrase "I will not molest the fairies" (which would be a banger name for an #ArsMagica podcast) but then a paragraph breaking down that nobody even really knows what this means.
This game was a big reason I actually got back into roleplaying. I joined a 4e group, another friend wanted to play an Ars Magica game, so we had both going for a while. There was some cross-pollination and I got to live in one of those gaming golden ages you don't know you're in until it's over.
I'm understanding that a lot of what drew me in then is what keeps me around. This game is like if you wanted to play Vampire but without all the mucking about with superpowers and bloodsucking.
Ahhh, the memories just come flooding back. Of course I would love this game, I love everything monks and monks-adjacent. This game is basically "magic monks and their friends solve their weird problems and then have long conversations about magic" and I cannot stress how hard I fucks with that.
I'm reading this because I've been revisiting my Ironsworn campaign and trying to breathe some life into the world. I say it often and in many places, but I'm not huge on most fantasy.
(I say that because maybe you've seen me say it here and I don't wanna be *that guy*)
So there's the #Arcanum rules for #Ironsworn, but I wanted to also pull in some of the lore, just maybe at a more dialed-back state. And man, does this hold promise.
So now this might become my "kinda-a-Witcher becomes a weird gopher for a covenant of weird wizards" game. And then I can hop from character to character, which is how an Ars Magica game is supposed to go.
Continuing on with the rulebook: scrying is illegal if you do it to other wizards, and turning yourself invisible is specifically called out as scrying, which means it's a weird edge case that someone tested once, or perhaps several times, and lost.
I love that the Hermetic order has such specific rules for wizard fights. You have to send a formal declaration of Wizard War that MUST be received on the next night of the full moon. The war begins with the full moon following that (presumably giving your opponent a month to prepare) but, unlike our dumb normie wars, it stops one month hence regardless of outcome.
It's noted it's in bad taste to carry on a lot of Wizard Wars.
One of the reasons this games brings back memories is how I envisioned the campaign to go - basically a bunch of muckity-muck wizards smoking pipes in towers while their underlings had adventures to get them reagents or something.
The campaign never took off - I think we ended up playing Eclipse Phase instead - but my ex would forever refer to game night as "Wizard Club"
What I love about this book is that someone took time to think about how their perfect society would function if said perfect society was also a bunch of beardy-weirdies sitting around smoking pipes and discussing paradoxes or something. But then like a few thousand other weirdos also jumped up and did the sickos.jpg at it. Like clearly, we have had 5 editions of this and this one looks lovely, this seems like one of those games with a fanbase of lifelong players.
Anyways, all this thought into how this society would function and I'm on like...page 9. Boy, this is not a book that holds your hand.
"Behold! I have invented a shield through which the mundane world is protected by magic and vice versa! This discovery is free for my fellow magi to use!
"But if you don't join our club before you use it, we'll hunt you down and kill you!"
Like a friend of mine once said: if you stop trying to apply modern sensibilities to medieval life, you'll understand it was just a lot like Warhammer 40k.
I am definitely pulling this stuff into my #Ironsworn campaign, because it seems like a fun way to gameify the stuff going on in my immediate surroundings. Like, I don't have to directly play a wizard, I can just play out what the wizard does and have the world react. Or have the characters go out to help meet the wizard's needs.
Like, you can get a fairly interesting solo game out of "a wizard is my boss" all by itself.
Reading about Covenants now, and it seems like this is where a lot of meat in the game is, at least looking at it from a solo perspective.
Right off the bat, I love classifying them in terms of seasons. It's a much more evocative way of thinking about them then "newer, established, successful, and declining covenants" which is all they really are.But calling them spring/summer/autumn/winter covenants just gives a bit more, y'know? #ArsMagica
Bringing a winter covenant around to a spring covenant sounds like such a fun campaign idea. "A wizard is my boss" but also "he's an incredibly powerful wizard" and "he'd be terrifying if he wasn't obsessed with a specific type of fae lullaby that he's been documenting for years".
There's some doddering old fool in the lunch line complaining about how the rolls don't taste right anymore, but you can't speak up because he can transubstantiate you into a warm film covering the wall.
Honestly, having an #ArsMagica campaign that revolves around being, essentially, caretakers for a bunch of incredibly powerful wizards who are rapidly losing mental faculties would be fun. Like the Tribunal sends you because this covenant is extremely powerful and well-known during its summer and autumn times, but is now and decline. You gotta go give it fresh blood and make sure none of the nuclear-powered dementia patients wreak any havoc.
So right now the idea is that my current #Ironsworn campaign is going to be involved, somewhat, with the establishment of a magical covenant in the Ironlands, which is more of a spring covenant. But there are such cool ideas with winter covenants too. Autumn and Summer are fine, I guess, but man there are some fascinating stories in Spring and Winter that focus around the covenant itself.
One small complaint with this book, and a half-hearted one because maybe I've been skimming too much: this book keeps throwing terms at me I'm supposed to understand but haven't run across yet, namely vis, and how vis needs a source, and sometimes covenants will fight each other over vis sources.
Dunno what vis is at this point but I guess we press onward.
> be me
> be named bonisagus
> invent magical theory and the parma magica that allows covenants to exist
> they name my theory of magic after some roman god
80 pages in and we''re finally describing magic, what it is, and how it's used. I'm not saying the mechanics of it needed to be printed in the first 10 pages, but if it's the big draw, maybe a rundown in the first chapter?
(Easy to forget I'm reading a book that doesn't have the benefit of the last 20 years of intense design intelligence that developed within TTRPGs)
I hate that my brain reads a sentence that starts "the Parma Magica blocks" and then immediately autocompletes that sentence with "of cheese"
OK, but for real, the magic system in this game? It rules.