ARS MAGICA VIDEO GAME

That's great news. Well done.

You have got to be kidding me.

HYPED by this great new, i'll try help. I lve the idea and the project.

I'm in, just signed up. I hope it gets up.
Ping'ed posts on both my blogs about it.

Wow, sounds really cool.
:open_mouth:
$290,000 in 28 days... man, I'm good for the cost of the game. But at that rate, you better hope there are 5800+ people interested just as much before it even exists.

(Heck I'll pay $50 just for someone to give me five pages of legit information on the Order in England in 1000AD!)

Yeah, it's a tough target -- but it's the right amount for the budget to produce the game (and the related cool rewards that KS backers get). And I'd much rather have the Kickstarter fail to reach its funding goal, than to have it reach a goal that is not actually high enough to get the job done.

Many thousands of copies of Ars Magica core rulebooks have sold over the years -- and the number of downloads of the free 4th Ed PDF is an order of magnitude or two greater than the hard copy sales. And then there are all the people who have played in games without buying their own rulebook, or who have looked at it with interest but never taken the plunge... We need to get a whole lot of those people to hear about the KS, and a bunch of them to decide it's interesting enough to put up a few books to help make it happen.

How exciting! The first alternative setting for canonical Ars Magica! I would really like to see this happen. :slight_smile:

You're right. Opening that door is just as exciting as seeing the game spread to a new media.

I'm in. I don't have much, but what I have I have put in. Anyone want to fund freezing Ars Magica writers too? :wink:

Is this really an alternative setting? Will the Diedne book and world book not be canonical? This is a kind of important question, for me and the other authors at least?

cj x

Whimper I am no longer able to play video games sad face

Anyway,

Ken

Nice :slight_smile:

This is very similar to an Ars Magica-inspired computer game concept I've been banging around for a while: generational, focus on key events rather than minutiae, turn based, centered on a covenant.

Shall have to drop Black Chicken a line and see if they need any extra hands on. This kind of procedural story construction is something I'm keenly interested in.

Any plans to do a tablet/iPhone version if the funding target goes beyond its initial numbers?

Let me refer you to David's post in this thread:

The Diedne supplement will be an official part of the game line, and the intent is, as much as possible, to make the video game itself canonical.

The folks at Black Chicken Studios are very enthusiastic fans of ArM, and they are passionate about making the video game true to the RPG. From the first time I talked on the phone with Larry (he's the guy doing most of the talking in the KS video), it was clear that he is extremely familiar with the game and has a clear vision of how to port it into an engrossing computer game experience. It won't replace the tabletop game by any stretch, but for those of us who enjoy the game and the setting it will give us a new and fun way to explore it.

They have several ideas for stretch goals if funding passes the original target, including porting the game to other platforms such as Mac and iOS. The way they envision the game, I think it would be a great fit for the iPad.

Ah cheers. The comments above about an alternative setting made me ask.I had not seen David's comment in the other thread. Will the Diedne book and World Guide (which I assume will be another Ars 5th book?) be available separately through Atlas? (and up to 99 subscribers now). If I had not already pledged i would have been the hundredth, so c'mon, some one else sign up now! :slight_smile:

cj x

101 now. I've increased my pledge cos I really want to see this succeed :slight_smile: Is it set in the history of the Heirs to Merlin setting, or can we not know that at this time?

cj x

In my experience, chances are if it works for tablet it can probably be engineered to work for the more modern generation of smartphones, too. Interface changes would be required, but if it's being developed for iOS or Android then tablet vs. phone is primarily an issue of screen resolution.

Being about to submit my first own-developed mobile game to Google, I'm now fairly familiar with the phone vs. tablet requirements. :slight_smile:

While this is probably buried under NDA, I'd be curious to know if they're developing the entire thing from the ground up or using a toolset such as Torque or Unity or similar. Some of those third-party toolsets can really make cross-platform development a breeze, and they're not that expensive when you compare them to the coder time it takes to implement the same features internally.

Anyway - this is for the Black Chicken guys to decide - they've already released a couple of games, they know what they're doing. I'm just being a sticky-beak. :smiley:

So how does this game expect to actually run? I mean is it a FPS? (joke)

How does a computer game while still using 5th edition rules?

Can you point in the direction of a computer game that might give us an idea of what it might be like?

Civ, X-com, anything like that?

http://www.BlackChickenGames.com/

Black Chicken Studios has produced a couple of games already. Years of Conquest will be the same basic format.

Right. I would like the world book to be a canonical "Stonehenge 1000" sourcebook for Ars Magica Fifth Edition if possible, but it might not be possible.

Computer games and table top games are different media, and there are different problems for each. Here's a concrete example that's already come up.

In the computer game, Longevity Rituals will not work for unGifted characters. If they did, then virtually every character who was alive at the beginning of the game would have to be taken into account in every storyline, right to the end of the century. There would be no guarantee that anyone would die. No problem for a tabletop game, but for the computer game it creates a huge amount of extra work, much of which will never be used, because most unGifted characters won't be given a Longevity Ritual.

So, it will become part of Ars Magica canon that Longevity Rituals for the unGifted were a 12th (or maybe late 11th, in Thebes) century Hermetic breakthrough. I'm pretty sure we can actually do this; I don't think we've said anything that contradicts it. However, similar things might come up that can't be accommodated that easily, and that might mean that the setting for the computer game can't be, quite, the canonical setting for the tabletop game. We'll be working to keep things as close together as possible, but at this point we can't make firm commitments that we will be able to keep the computer game entirely within tabletop canon. Fingers crossed...

Of course, even if it is, it's set 220 years earlier, so it's still an alternative setting of sorts.

The Diedne book is different. First, a fair bit of it will be for 1220, and thus will not affect the computer game. Second, the magical secrets of the Diedne will be properly integrated into Ars Magica canon, because failing to do so would be too much of a break from the tabletop game. (Yes, of course they will have magical secrets.) I don't plan to describe the plans of the Diedne leadership, or take sides in the Schism War, in the book. So, we can promise that this book will be canonical.

This sums up my impression when I talked to Larry as well. I'm really looking forward to seeing how this develops. (Although I may need to find a Windows laptop from somewhere.)