It’s a new year, and we’ve just had the definitive edition PDFs appear. The open game license means we can create fan products and sell them. Several scenarios have already appeared, David Chart is working on a starter set of scenarios, Mythic Europe Magazine is looking for articles for issue 2 - it is a great time to be a fan creator for the game!
In that spirit, I’m going to do a post a day suggesting ideas for fan products that could be fun, useful, or link up well with existing products. I haven’t done one of these since 2021 so I thought it was time to have another go. Given the speed I write at, if I were to try creating these myself it would take me 1-2 years per product, so 30-60 years to produce - I think I would perish of decrepitude long before I finished turning these into reality. Feel free to copy these and improve upon them.
DAY 1: ANOTHER VANILLA COVENANT
Timothy Ferguson produced a covenant set on the Isle of Lundy and boldly titled it “A Vanilla Covenant: An Introductory Covenant for New Troupes - Tome 1”. This clearly cries out for a Tome 2. We do now have the benefit of “Through The Aegis” giving us 5 decent example covenants, but ones that more explicitly tie in to the Definitive Edition or show a different part of Mythic Europe would be useful. Any covenant with good senior magi can help Storyguides populate their sagas and give places for their player characters to visit.
I’ve been trying to get people to tell me what they want me to do in the new year, and people seem to be happy to see what I cook before they decide what they want to eat. This could be liberating, but it’s not! I have perhaps 4 slots of big products this year, maybe less.
Mythic Europe Magazine has one.
Ars Magic Monsters 3 has one, but I’m not sure if I write it myself or pay coauthors to stat monsters which which have been in my backlog list forever.
So, with no signal…I’m just going to work on my Cheshire thing and hope for the best. Even within the Cheshire thing: it could be another vanilla covenant set in Longdendale, or it could be a bigger, harder book like Cornwall, but with a heap of mystery cults based on Lewis Carrol and The Wizard of Alderley Edge. Maybe do some Venice stuff once Serinissma Obscura is out?
For the love of your Divine of choice: please like the things in this thread that you think are good! We cannot be of service to you if you do not tell us what you want.
(Darkwing, you might cross-post to the Open License thread).
Through the Aegis has five fine covenants. We also have Semita Errabunda available on Atlas’ website, and Timothy’s vanilla covenant. Semita Errabunda and Collem Leonis (from TtA) use a regio that can lead to far-off lands, which lends a certain fantastic feel to them. Jardin has been designed to be aesthetically pleasing to its inhabitants. However, none of them are strikingly fantastic visions of what a covenant could be. When Covenants came out, I loved the new boons allowing for fantastic virtues, and the little descriptions of strange locations redcaps have visited.
I want to see a covenant on the seabed, somehow keeping the sea at bay and providing air and food for the covenfolk. Do they live near the ruins of a sunken city? Trade with mermaids for vis? Scour the seabed for fine pearls?
I want to see a covenant flying through the clouds - is it a cloud turned into something solid, or a flying tower made to study storms?
I want to see a covenant stretched over several regio layers, each one with distinguishing features. (Tablinum from Against the Dark is one of my favourite covenants, but each level is very much like the others except in the contents of the exhibits)
I want to see a covenant deep beneath the earth. Are they suspended over a vast pool of lava, or constructed inside a massive crystal geode, or placed by a branch of the legendary rivers of the underworld?
In addition to showing the magic needed to live and work in such extreme environments, seeing what sort of magi live there would add interesting characters who could add to your saga. Every detailed library helps inspire book titles to in a game, and every detailed vis source adds more ideas to borrow.
I didn’t realize you were looking that intensely for popular inspiration. Admittedly I need to watch these forums closer. I guess I want to ask, do you want to know broadly what people think would be good for the game, or what people think they could use specifically for their own individual purposes? Would it be worthwhile to start a “someone please make this for me” kind of thread? That seems kind of needy and I think that’s why I’ve been a more passive consumer; that may be true for others as well.
Anyways, I didn’t know about the Vanilla Covenant and found it from this thread, so this is nice! I’d be interested either in a covenant or a Cheshire place book, but my games are in Provence and the Levant, so I’d probably just be cannibalizing and converting things anyways, for whatever that’s worth.
It occurs to me that at least two of these fantastic covenant ideas have been danced around in published books. The flying one sounds like a pre-crash version of Thomae’s castle from Legends of Hermes and you could easily tie in the subterranean one with the volcano chapter in Hermetic Projects. Food for thought there. Of all these ideas, though, I’m most favorable to the regio one, mostly because I really need to understand regio topology better and it makes my head spin. If such a covenant could explain how all that stuff works, that could be a really useful tool.
I do also like the idea of more mundane covenant examples elsewhere in the setting. Obviously, there’s the conventional Tribunals that have gone untouched. Sub Rosa has a good Iberia one, that one where they’re working on like 17 year spells, so I’m not as worried about that, and between Timothy here and the Wisdom of the Desert folks I think the Levant and Stonehenge are pretty well handled. I think we’re getting something for Normandy from Kevin Hassall (spelling?) of Yosano Studios soon. Perhaps Novgorod, Transylvania, Loch Leglean, or Rome?
Or really, here’s an idea, fringe covenants in the areas beyond the Order, both the areas of the Muslim world that have books (maybe one in the Maghreb somewhere? the Richat Structure? something Carthage related?) or perhaps the Nordic world (could do something cool with the auroras? maybe Disko Bay in Greenland and its meteoric iron, that’s pretty mystical). Just throwing stuff out there.
That is on my list for later this month. I agree, some of them are harder to understand than others, and I didn’t understand medicinal elementalists until I saw the example in Sub Rosa magazine.
DAY 3: VIS SOURCES AND THEIR ASSOCIATED STORY
The example vis sources in Covenants and Through The Aegis are great, and provide inspiration for our own games. However, given how often covenants try to develop new vis sources early in a saga, it is annoying we have few examples of how covenants come across vis sources and discover how they harvest them. Do the magi observe the local villagers and ask them about local traditions? Do they detect the vis and then go back to the lab to develop Rego Vim effects to harvest it more efficiently?
The vis hunt is such a fundamental story to developing covenants that more scenarios demonstrating this, or even vis sources with story seeds attached, would really help.
The original research rules and examples in Houses of Hermes: True Lineages look interesting, but only give a very limited example of rolling for research. They don’t really explain what sort of spells you’d invent to research a given field. The examples of Parmulae and Parma Magica folds suggest experimenting with Parma Magica, but there’s very few spells you can create to affect the Parma, so what do you do to vary this about? How closely do your spells need to cling to the theme?
I suppose some of this is “Your Saga May Vary”, but some guidance would really help. I’ve finally understood original research better after my troupe had one person engage in original research while someone else researched integrating Fertility Magic (from Ancient Magic) and our troupe discussed some of the spells and their side effects. I think having worked examples showing the whole project would help others bypass the slow learning curve and get a grip of this system much quicker.
I must thank the Mark Lawford for the Aether magic section of Dies Irae (in his “End of time” scenario) - he lists some sample projects to help research the breakthroughs to understand this magic, and it’s handily there at the end of the chapter.
I know from experience that aging magi more than 30 or 45 years is hard work (hence most of the magi on Magi of Tom have only been aged 15 or 30 years, and the non-hermetic ones barely aged at all if they don’t have longevity-enhancing effects). I appreciate that we have a couple of very aged magi in the published books. However, I would like to see more examples of magi 120+ years out of gauntlet to act as population for winter covenants, ancient council members of old covenants, leaders of mystery cults, and archmagi to challenge. The fact they have so much study completed and so many projects they could have done, and so much warping and probably a lot of twilight scars, means that they’re not quick to work up. A few of these could enrich people’s sagas and make preparation easier for storyguides.
Covenant charters are probably something you should have in-game, but in practice creating one is a lot of work. It may create some argument at the table as people go round and round in circles as each person’s vision of what is a reasonable covenant duty and what tasks need specific oversight from a magus turn into repetitive discussions.
The Covenants book handily includes one solid example, approved by the Quaesitors as a good base for new covenants to use. However, more examples could give you inspiration for clauses to copy for your covenant, or illustrate different forms of governance - you often see a style with a council of magi giving instructions to an autocrat, but there are many options in Covenants which would probably need a very different charter. Would a militocracy style require a firm demarcation of everyone’s role and cover many operating procedures?
The problem with creating one is that you really need to playtest them, as flaws will be most easily exposed when someone else tries to exploit them.
I came up with this idea as I saw in Covenants the idea of having as an income source an astrologer. Could they function as a guild of astrologers, with mundane members selling their services to paying customers, and the magi forming an inner circle who are supported by the guild while maintaining the rules of the Order of Hermes, and only selling a few services in the same way that a Verditius might? Such an organisation would require a very different charter from a traditional covenant where the magi have some land or a mine they take money from and then spend. Likewise, a covenant that makes its money from crime would need to have its own rules that made sure everyone knew their responsibility to look out for each other and not inform.
DAY 7: EXPERIMENTAL PHILOSOPHERS, AND THEIR FORMULAE
Chapter 5 of Art and Academe includes the area of experimental philosophy. It gives rules for the three types of formulae - astrological inceptions (using Artes Liberales), alchemical reagents (using Philosophiae), and theriacs (using Medicine). This offers the chance to use characters with Academic skills but no supernatural ability the power to divine information, change matter and heal people. Outside of a covenant, how do such people exist? Is it all done by university academics during their non-teaching time, or as a hobby by nobles? Is it possible to make a living as an astrologer or as an apothecary mixing up near-magical theriacs?
I would like to see examples of an astrologer and the inceptions they use to earn a living. Are there plenty of good level 4 or 5 inceptions that a graduate from a local school or a simple student at a university could learn to start them on their career?
Characters who can make a living from this could make interesting NPCs who can help in an adventure, or who could give the covenant’s rivals a tiny edge. They could also provide inspiration for companions or grogs who don’t need arcane abilities to provide an extra edge.
As solomonic medicine, astrology and alchemy all use similar rules to A&A, there is plenty of room for these to inspire naranjs for sahir. Actually, the reverse would also be interesting - how do sahir make a living outside of a house of wisdom, and what naranjs can be copied by alchemists? Looking at the naranj “What Jabir found inside the rock” (The Cradle and the Crescent page 50) inspired me to look at how a mundane alchemist could improve item’s shape and material bonuses for enchantment.
I enjoy good scenarios that focus on companions or grogs. My copy of Grogs naturally falls open at pages 38-39, right on the “academic saga” and “monastic saga” portion of the section on all-grog sagas. I firmly believe that scenarios made for mundane characters can be exciting and explore interesting parts of historical/Mythic Europe. They can also tolerate a little meddling from a magus, if that person doesn’t draw attention to themselves and is discrete with their magic. They don’t have to be completely mundane - some dealing with faeries (where the roleplaying of bargains is part of the story) or dealing with low level curses can use the supernatural while not demanding a magus attends the story.
People keep discussing whether it’s better to introduce new players to Ars Magica through playing mundane characters (easier to understand character generation, don’t need to learn the hardest part of the game straight away) or whether to get people to grapple with magic straight away. I think we should give people the choice by having enough companion or grog focused stories to choose from if they don’t want to start with magi.
Seriously, the all-grog sagas section really does contain many great ideas for sagas I’d like to play.
I feel like the hard part with this is that once there’s no magus, there’s no Code restriction on interference, and PC actions are a lot harder to predict, which is an issue in a premade adventure.
That suggests player character magi treat the Code as actual laws and not a suggestion (maybe it’s just my troupe that is like that?), and mundane characters don’t worry about the legal consequences of their actions. By removing spontaneous spells (or ingenious re-use of existing formualaic spells), I would feel that narrowed some of the options and would force players into using social skills or inventing a solution.
I believe CJ started Thirty Tribunal Cases and made it as far as sixteen. Yes, that’s certainly a good idea and worth having another go fourteen years on.
Let me digress into Ars Magica history here - there was a point at which Atlas Games was considering making a spin-off of Ars Magica based on Gumshoe, which had the nickname “Magic Shoe” among developers. The premise was that you would be Quaesitors investigating magical cases, and you would use Gumshoe-derived mechanics to handle the investigation. As it was never published, I have no idea if it would have worked, but I’m sure Guernicus- based adventures (or a saga) could work well.
There is some advice out there already - Sub Rosa’s columns on advice for storyguides includes several by Gerard Wylie that can help, and CJ and I devoted an episode of the Arcane Connection podcast to how CJ turns folklore into an adventure.
Ask people what they think a story for Ars Magica should be, and you get a huge variety of answers - some favour very linear hunts for something mystical, some favour a very open situation which can turn many ways, others favour a villain’s scheme which the players can devise a way to foil, some like a mysterious location for people to investigate.
For me, I can try writing up my notes for an adventure (and have put one on my blog for an Amazon adventure), but if I had more ideas on how people like to see their adventures that could help. After all, the 2nd and 3rd editions adventures are presented a bit differently to 4th edition, and 5th edition presents a wide variety in Tales of Mythic Europe and Tales of Power. Thrice-told Tales deliberately structures things to come back twice. Realms of Power: Faerie does have a section on using Polti’s 36 plots to make for different stories, and Grogs analyses story types that work well with grogs.
Despite all this, I think there’s something more we can do to help new storyguides come up with adventures, more to help busy storyguides keep their sagas going, more to encourage players to step up to storyguiding, and things we can do to help wannabe scenario publishers make their work more useful.
One thing that might help is stuff for the researching stage, rather than the converting folklore into the adventure. Speaking as a North American, it’s not as easy for us to just think about things that are around us as it might be for someone in Europe. These are far off places that we don’t necessarily know a lot about. We don’t know the folklore, the geography, the climate. We have some idea about knights and castles and generally the one person in the group who plays Crusader Kings can help with the feudalism, but mostly thinking about Europe conjures up images of that time we went to Amsterdam and bicycled along a canal to a discotheque, and it’s just not all that helpful.