Fair, but cutting down is easy-iah and you'll have your art assets.
Which is why I might do it. Pricing would be tricky, though. The starter set would be deliberately priced low, so the "expert version" would almost certainly not be cheaper. Just shorter…
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DAY 17: COVENANT IN A BOX
I have two ideas for this - one in-game, one out-of-game. The in-game idea is to assemble a bunch of tools to help magi found a new covenant or chapterhouse. This could be casting tablets to create covenant buildings, spell texts or items to help with setting up a source of income, spell texts or items to help gather vis, places to recruit potential grogs and maybe just a simple box of vis and cash to help out. Add to this some books to form the nucleus of a library, and away we go. If offered this at a Tribunal meeting, would your new magi accept and go find a site, or would they be dubious and want to cling to the familiar covenants they know?
The out-of-game “covenant in a box” would be slightly different. It would be a set of floor plans for possible buildings, a set of covenfolk character sheets and possible libraries and useful items for a covenant. This would be to help speed up creating new covenants, or when magi go visiting covenants and want to know what the buildings are like and speak to the covenfolk.
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I have thought about a saga where a Chinese maga turns up at the Grand Tribunal to warn about the Mongols and ask the order for aid, revealing Trianoma was from China. Note this was before the Thessalian origin was official. I’d note that Carolingian folklore has a Chinese princess and sorceress in it (Angelica of Cathay) and that she has travel magic that allows her to return home when she wishes, so there’s no great need to wrangle how the Chinese know there are wizards in the West. Also, China, as the centre of the world, is in harmony, and destructive forces come from the West, cosmologically speaking, so it’s not that hard to guess there should be something worse than the Mongols even further west than they are. Scrying into Spain and finding it full of fire wizards is just dead on for Chinese cosmological predictions.
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You could, and should, do such articles…
A “please make” thread would be great, actually. It wouldn’t only shake out what people want, but when some of us go “Oh, I have some ideas about that…” we can work together instead of, for example, writing two whole books on Venice independently. 8)
Basically I have a heap of stuff that’s been sitting on the backburner so long it has carbonised to the bottom of the pan, so if someone says “Regency Ars Magica?” I can go “May I suggest ‘What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew?’” (available for free, legally, here: What Jane Austen ate and Charles Dickens knew : from fox hunting to whist, the facts of daily life in nineteenth-century England : Pool, Daniel : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
So that even if I don’t help in the sense of being on a writing team I can supply drop references on people….which I discovered last week was an Australian invention. Odd chap that Monash.
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DAY 18: AN ONOMASTIKON OF SPIRITS, A GRIMOIRE OF TRUE NAMES
Many people ask on the forums for help with magical spirits, and for help with daimons that may appear. Some traditions (Hermetic Sahir from Houses of Hermes: Societates, the variant from Through The Aegis) and Sahir (from The Cradle and The Crescent) rely on summoning spirits and can explicitly learn from them. Some Elementalists also specialise in spirits. The greater the variety you have, the easier it is to play one of those traditions. The more magical forms they represent, the wider the range of wizards they can help. If you have a good mix of power levels from weak to mighty, you provide a path of progression for wizards. Also, they can provide extra things to encounter during regular Ars Magica adventures. Therefore, it makes a lot of sense to write up a big bunch of these and sort the list by might.
Also, real-world magical texts sometimes provide lists of names of summonable entities. This means you could create a framing narrative for your list of spirits of how they are listed in particular texts, or how this list was copied from an ancient Babylonian source.
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OK! I will probably start such a thread once this thread finishes then, just to make sure I don’t list something that’s about to get covered. 
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DAY 19: PODCAST EPISODES
As the mighty CJs co-host for the “Arcane Connection” podcast, I can actually generate more content in podcast form by sitting down, creating a script and then watching CJ diverge wildly away from it. The ensuing shenanigans seem to keep people entertained. We’ve covered a lot of ground, such as writing adventures, running games, folklore, favourite spells but I’m sure there’s a good deal more we could cover.
I know some people find actual play podcasts/videos useful to learn games, but I’m not sure how well Ars Magica as I play it would translate to that form. Still, there’s room for a group to step into that gap and be the pioneers.
I might try and get CJ to discuss Virgil in the middle ages, or I might just talk about regiones until he starts telling me about the design philosophy between the different realms. I’m sure we’ll come up with something, but if the fans suggest a topic I’m sure CJ will happily devote a segment of a show to it.
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DAY 20: ONE-SHOT ADVENTURES
We’ve already mentioned people needing an introductory adventure. I attend a couple of roleplaying conventions a year (including Grand Tribunal UK, the world’s finest Ars Magica focused convention) and try to run Ars Magica. Having good scenarios where I can hit the ground running and have a story done in 3-4 hours would really help. It’s not just me, there’s enough others who go to conventions who could use these, and people trying to get their regular gaming group to try Ars may find them helpful. Also, they can help someone who doesn’t normally storyguide try out running an adventure. They’re also potentially good for a regular saga when you just need something to run at short notice so people keep playing Ars while your regular storyguide tries to figure out where the story goes next.
I also think you can feature unusual settings or use unusual character types, as long as you can explain it well enough or limit the amount of new information that needs giving to a player to get into it.
I will revisit this, but knowing me I won’t take it seriously until the first week of August when I go “only 2 weeks till the convention and I’m being asked if I’m running a game! Aaargh!”
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We actually have some one-shot adventures that have been published for As Magica, but yes, the more the merrier
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DAY 21: A GUERNICUS CASEBOOK
House Guernicus can be a tricky one to have player characters representing. Also, how does Hermetic justice work within your Tribunal? I would like to create some scenarios involving the hunt for renegade magi and investigating their crimes to see what can be done. Also, as mentioned above CJ did Thirty Tribunal Cases and people seemed to really enjoy arguing through those, so there’s probably a market for interesting legal cases and arguments based on The Code of Hermes. If nothing else, they add flavour to Tribunal meetings and give something for player characters to practice arguing about.
Could enough scenarios be made that people could run a saga from it?
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DAY 22: A TRIBUNAL SCENARIO / PACK
Setting up a tribunal meeting can take a huge amount of preparation. You need the names of the other covenants handy, personalities for them to meet, and an agenda - what’s being debated, what legal cases are being judged. Also, is there any trading going on? Is there a hermetic fair at the same time? All of these take time. Would a prepared scenario help?
The challenge is in how specific to make it. A set of tribunal cases (see yesterday’s entry) could be easily adapted for most tribunals, and interesting wizards can be slotted in anywhere in Mythic Europe. Having covenants, their representatives, and what the timetable looks like would probably need considerable tailoring for the tribunal it is set in. Would an example for a tribunal you’re not playing in serve as valuable inspiration or be too much effort to change?
In the 5th edition books, Normandy has its own special tournament which slows down tribunal meetings but also serves to redistribute tribunal-held resources. That may call for guidance all of its own (I have only played through this once, as visiting Stonehenge magi - would repeating this every 7 years be fun or wearing?). Thebes is very civilised, but you would need to have apprentices for people to select and magi cancelling each other’s shards to help players see the ebb and flow of good reputation in the Theban way.
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Honestly I think it’d be useful just to have something to look at to say “is there precedent for this?” Because weird stuff seems to come up all the time.
I think this would be very helpful. With regards to Normandy in particular, I think someone recently did some simplified rules for their tournament to speed things up; was it Yosano Studios? But in any case, a genericized Tribunal plan with some flexible plot options for each “stage” of the meeting seems like it could give some guidance on how to run it and still provide a reusable jumping off point.
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DAY 23: MEET THE NEIGHBOURS/ TRIBUNAL POPULATING GUIDE
One thing that can chew up time preparing is creating a covenant for your troupe to visit. You need to decide what it looks like, who lives there, maybe have some covenfolk for them to meet. I propose a set of sample covenant maps (castles of differing styles, a manor house, a group of buildings, a set of caves, a townhouse) together with some sample magi and some sample covenfolk. This would make speed up creating a fleshed-out covenant, and could help with filling out the Tribunal you set your game in.
What would you want to see in such a kit, to help speed up making rival covenants?
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DAY 24: MOBILE COVENANTS
We have a spring covenant on a ship in Through The Aegis, and The Sundered Eagle briefly describes a covenant on a fleet of ships. I don’t think they go into enough depth about the challenges of being ship-based. I would like to see a detailed treatment of being a covenant on a ship. There’s also the possibility of being based on a wagon train heading along the silk road, or a camel train in North Africa. How do they find auras to study or create spells in? Do they mostly read from books? Do they set up small chapterhouses along the way?
Thinking about it, there’s probably room to create detailed suggestions for how to have a troupe of peregrinator magi who travel from covenant to covenant, finding ways to pay for their upkeep.
DAY 25: MILITARY SCENARIOS, or APPLIED USES OF THE BATTLE RULES
Typically if a mundane war starts in your area, magi are supposed to keep their heads down to avoid charges of interfering with the mundanes, although sometimes they become enthusiastic fighters and wipe out whole armies to remove any witnesses. Lords of Men has some good rules for running mass battles in Ars Magica. I would like to see a scenario that presents a good battle with options for magi to intervene as subtly as possible while also allowing room for companions to take leadership roles in a battle. I’d also like to see suggestions for battlefield encounters using the rules from Lords of Men to illustrate what it could look like in your saga.
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DAY 26: EXOTIC ADVENTURES
When reading Tales of Power, my favourite was the journey to the City of Brass. My group made a lengthy adventure of researching the location, preparing wards against desert heat so we could survive the Sahara, and then actually adventuring there. More recently in a game set in Novgorod, I dealt with one person’s lab accident by creating an opening into a Tempus in the Magic Realm, and for another adventure have the covenant’s mine get flooded with water from the underworld river Lethe. I do like a really exotic adventure where the players get to travel somewhere astounding. Yes, it does need balancing with more mundane adventures for most sagas, but a good sprinkling of really fantastic adventures really helps an Ars Magica saga.
Art and Academe suggests a few ideas, such as travelling past the Meridian or the Torrid Zone to see what’s in a radically different part of the world, or standing by a volcano waiting for a comet to be launched upwards and try and catch a ride. Perhaps flying up to the upper air and avoiding the demons to get to the sphere of fire could be the first step on a journey to the moon?
A journey to the bottom of the sea or deep under the earth could be fascinating, and an opportunity to use magical vehicles made by great enchanters. Perhaps you have a Verditius friend who wants someone to show it off, or perhaps your winter covenant has one hidden in a barn waiting to be used.
My favourite chapter of The Cradle and the Crescent deals with transoxiana, and travelling to the Eastern edges of Mythic Europe, and likewise I enjoy the most distant journeys of Between Sand and Sea and Lands of the Nile. What other fabulous adventures and great voyages can you think of?
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DAY 27: A BOARDGAME
I love playing boardgames. I love Ars Magica. I have played the boardgame “Grand Tribunal” and it was OK, but didn’t give much of a flavour of Ars Magica. What sorts of boardgames could we devise that would entertain?
CJ devised a boardgame about winning votes from different tribunals many years ago, I don’t know if the prototype board still exists. Would a worker placement/time management game based around covenant life be interesting? Would a strategy game of Wizard’s War allow you to satisfy your desire for magical violence without risking your favourite character? I think there’s room for a variety of games.
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