Advice for a New Game?

Related to the castle - there are multiple instances of magi building ship - based covenants. Fun stuff.

Also, the flying castle is, in many ways, Ars Magica in a nutshell. He wasn't being investigated by the Order for "breaking the veil", or showing that magic exists or anything. He was being sued because he built a flying military fortification, and its presence was causing political upheaval. The resolution was "I promise to keep my flying castle away from large urban areas", which he may (or may not) have actually kept his word on.

Is there a book about the Provencal Tribunal? I thought it was mostly undocumented so that we could make it up as we liked.

My group might just be more allergic to guidance and authority than others (which is odd since they work well with L5R.)

That sounds ideal. Is there precedent for covenants being territorially discontinuous? As in, having a "campus" in Toulouse itself and then another "campus" up in the Pyrenees? It would make the Aegis twice as expensive but would create an interesting living situation.

I like that! Is the execution of vampires canon? I'm aware that I can make stuff canon in my saga, but I'm also aware that Timothy Ferguson is posting in this thread, who literally wrote the book on them, so I would feel hesitant about changing canon significantly.

That's really useful, thanks! I think that might be a great way to engage the player, giving him destruction at first and then delving into the deeper aspects of fire magic and the politics of its use.

When you say "fire worshipper", does that refer to a specific thing within Ars Magica? I only know the term as a reference to Zoroastrianism.

I love this. It's not "can I do it?" but "what are the consequences of me doing it?"

Castles are very cool (one of the reasons why the Provencal Tribunal looks good is that the old Cathar fortresses are so inspiring) but we may have to tone it down, at least in front of other people.

Constant-effect Perdo Imaginem might also be a good way to handle it. Invisibility makes everything better.

There is. It is called /Faith and Flame/, but obviously, you may make it up. There is also a lot of stuff from ArM3 for the Mistridge saga set in Provence. The published supplements are not always consistent, not even within one edition, so one should rather a world one believes in, rather than trusting the supplements. My remark was based on history rather than ArM, though. Raiders on a regular basis does not happen in the most civilised areas of Europe. You may be run over by the Albigensian crusade of course, but probably not more than once :slight_smile:

They don't want guidance, but they also do not trust themselves to be let loose in a player-driven story. Someone needs to make a tough choice :slight_smile:

Not unheard of. There is chapter house hook in Covenants. In Normandy, vassal covenants are common. A possible spin on this, is to let one of the sites by a mother covenant, SG created, while the second site is a chapter house/vassal created by the players in play.

There is Faith & Flame (F&F) as a full blown Tribunal book from 2014.

Yes. Many large covenants have 'chapter houses' - e.g. at the Rhine Tribunal - or even vassal covenants - like at the Normandy Tribunal, which can be very far away from the main covenant site. As it is that easy to set up a covenant at the Provençal Tribunal, there are fewer examples there - but the Coenobium (F&F p.24 and p.128ff) has many 'chapter houses'.

Cheers

The real university of Toulouse in 1229 was founded to support the Catholic Church in Occitania and to produce priests: so in 1229 there's only Latin, Artes Liberales, Theology and a little Canon Law (which every priest needed to know) taught there.

Cheers

Ahem....

"Canon is for authors, not players."

((Older members of the board shield their ears, throw fruit, and head for the bar.))

I have mellowed somewhat in my position, but I still think that the point of the books is to support your -at the table- game. Change everything you need to. I mean, I could hardly complain: look at Tremere before and after I got to it. You need to change the stuff that you need to change, or want to change.

I ran a Convention game once where the Order was started by Newton and was the Royal Society, and you got a bonus for doing things in a stereotypically English way. Easier to conjure tea than water, easier to throw a cricket ball than a stone. I've had Stargates, and aliens, and the PCs turning up on the beaches of Normandy during the D Day landings. I got a flying castle in! I've had people steal the world egg from the core of the earth and use it as lab equipment to forge a new Eve. I resdesigned the cosmology based on the spring you find at the top of a backyard tennis trainer.

Seriously: break stuff. Change stuff. Tell you players I said it was OK. (I believe I said it in writing in "Covenants".) The Paradigm Police retired back in the 1990s and won't kick down your door. The possibility that David Chart is off running a temple of ninja assassins is not zero, but he's always been a mellow dude.

...and then tell us about the cool stuff you are doing.

The execution of the vampires was canon before I got to it, by the way. The cause of the infection and the House's response are briefly described in "Triamore : The Covenant at Lucien's Folly". I like Triamore, but it's very Buffy in the way that there are about 15 things which will literally end the Order within walking distance.

Hi,

I was thinking first about Zoroastrianism, but not only. Fire plays a role in Christianity, Judaism, Mithraism... The druids are said to have burned people to death in wicker cages. There's Agni, there's Moloch, there's.... Heck, you can roll your own. Eternal flames are a thing, symbolizing enduring purity and power in the face of darkness. Or eternal damnation. Etc.

But all this can wait. The first things I'd want the player to tell me about is "Whom do you especially want to incinerate?" "What did they do? Whom did they hurt?" And now you have a nasty enemy to set against the players, who will do more of the same (and worse, once you develop them) unless the players stop them, possibly with fire. I might also ask "What do you like to do when you don't have an enemy to incinerate?"

I would encourage the player to take massive scores in Creo and Ignem, if he wants the very best fireball. A big Creo is useful for more than just fireballs. So is Ignem. I'd gently hint that he might want to take a few Cr and Ig spells that are not CrIg, and that he will be quite good at these, and then sit back and let him notice the possibilities.

I also might find out if he wants fire because fire is the archetypal destructive spell in D&D, or if he just wants to be great at this in AM. If the latter, I'd ask him how he'd prefer to slay his enemies with magic, because there's a good chance the game supports what he'd rather have.

Anyway,

Ken

Hi,

(((Ken does no such thing, and agrees +5:)))

Spindle. Fold. Mutilate.

I think it is especially useful to consider everything outside of the core rulebook as House Rules that just happen to have been published. Some of these are great, some of these fall far short of greatness, and many of these don't play well with each other for all that the authors tried hard to keep things consistent. Above all, not all of these will suit any given game.

Anyway,

Ken

Hi,

That's most groups!

It might work for L5R because the entire setting is about strict hierarchy, from emperor to eta.

Anyway,

Ken

Whether they are allergic to guidance and authority, I still suggest you provide it. Don't give them an elder magus who tells them what to do, but instead give them an elder magus who, as dictacted by the covenant charter he was signed when he was 28, is now obligated by duty or Oath as the eldest magus on the Council of Magi, to spend the first day each season in the council chamber to provide guidance and answer questions to the younger magi who come to him for aid, [sub]but really he just wants to get back to his lab to try and finish his studies and experiments into resurrecting his long-dead paramour who died sixty years ago, because that's obviously more important to him than some dumb new child magi in the tower.[/sub] Basically, you can arrange it so they don't have someone telling them what to do, but have access to someone who, at specified times, can answer questions they may have about mythic europe - in character. And then you can throw a wrench at them by having him just accidentally jaunt into twilight one year.
But yea, if you think the group will have more fun with literally nobody in charge, definitely do that.
As far as fire magi go, there are a lot of good suggestions around already, so I just have a few witty sayings. I had a Tytalus character in a game told he couldn't solve everything with Pilum of Fire, so he started designing variants of Pilum of Fire that did other tasks. He had a teleport spell that turned him into a javelin of fire and launched himself to the new location. When trying to disable people, he designed a spell to set their nerve endings on fire. When he had to seek answers to tricky questions, he tried to design the spell Pilum of Truth (which failed). To quote the renowned Jaya Ballard, "Of course you should fight fire with fire. You should fight everything with fire."

This topic had become quite inspiring. But the Pilum of Fire Tytalus story will stay with me forever. But Tytali are my soft spot (well, one of my two soft spots in Ars).

I must mostly nod to all of the above and add just two quick more things: foreshadow, and always have a big and small trouble cards in your sleeve.

Foreshadowing is good because with time you read a lot of adventures that require a lot of work that you can do in advance if you already have an adventure going. Get sure to make the players meet an interact some merchants who provide them goods, one from the nearest village and one from afar, get sure they have contact with some monastery, and that a couple of barons around them had shown from time to time to meet their new odd neighbors, probably one asking for taxes and loyalty and the other inviting them to social interactions. Make them like their local Redcap, and familiar with a handful of them. Use the correspondence rules and make them contact with magi of other parts of Europe, which could act as hooks for stories. Let them know that in some near village there is a crazy dude which sometimes speaks in tongues and a maid of legendary beauty... plaint seeds. They pay off quite well later, and help you avoid awkward conversations like "oh, by the way, there is this guy who sells you candles and parchment from decades and that you know pretty well and like, though I never mentioned him before..."

And the hidden cards, use them when you want to animate things or magi are getting comfortable. Nothing breaks boredom more than either the end of the world or a domestic issue (I have a break-time adventure prepared for that: a war between the king of rats and the King of crows, where the battlefield is the covenant, with players playing, well, rats and crows, while their own magi and grogs appear as guest NPCs. Probably a familiar or two will emerge from that war) or avoiding the end of the world.

Seriously, the number of times I have dropped a bunch of foreshadowing and just had no idea where I was going with it is honestly too often to count. Well worth while.

Yeah, foreshadowing tempts players to speculate. Steal their good ideas.

Yeah, foreshadowing tempts players to speculate. Steal their good ideas.

Foreshadowing is good. I tend to do it in the way that John Wick suggested: throw dozens of simple but memorable things in, and see which ones the players react to and remember. It also makes the world feel very baroque, which I like.

I've been thinking about it and I think that the best way to describe my group's dynamic, is that the players want to dick around aimlessly, but they want that dicking around to result in the characters saving the world.

It's weird, when I see it written out like that.

I think they'll take well to Ars Magica because dicking around will hopefully lead to characters getting embroiled in stories of their own making.

We had our character generation session! The players talked a lot about the setting, introduced ideas, and kicked around the concepts of what the covenant would be like.

The covenant will be in the French Pyrenees (thanks KenOB) which will open a chapter house (thanks loke and One Shot) in Toulouse when the university is founded. They were taken with the idea that magic auras are found in unusual places, and so we agreed that the covenant will be built on the ruins of an old Motte-and-Bailey castle on a perfectly circular outcrop in the middle of a glacial valley, with numerous caves nearby. There is a weaker magic aura across the rest of the valley, punctuated by Dominion auras in the few shepherds' hamlets.

We decided not to write it up using Hooks and Boons, but talked through and thought that a nice feature that would lead to stories is to have an awkward mix of ethnicities within the covenfolk: Occitans drawn from local villages, Italians who came with two of the magi, and Christian Mozarabs who came up from Spain.

We agreed to time-shift the era so that the whole Albigensian Crusade begins much later. This means that we get to play through it rather than have it be recent history.

We have five wizards:

Lucretia of Criamon and Flavius of Flambeau were both taught simultaneously by a Bonisagus magus. Their parens wanted them to join his house but each of them rejected him and he feels desolate about it. They had been romantically and then sexually intimate during their late apprenticeship but broke up, and now it's sort of awkward but neither of them wants to be the one to make a scene about it.

Lucretia is very abstract, a good lab mage but one who looks beyond the applications of magic theory and towards its underlying structures. She joined the Criamon because they might have answers. She has Elemental Magic and has affinities for Vim and Aquam, a respectable Muto score, and the Blatant Gift. She has her parens as a Mentor.

Flavius is very active, his head full of chivalric tales and his heart full of heroic intentions. He joined House Flambeau because it openly encourages its members to go out and fight for what's right. He turned his back on House Bonisagus very impolitely, resulting in a Tormenting Master. He's got affinities for Creo and Ignem, and plans to learn some Corpus so he can be a healer as well.

Galena of Tremere is the youngest daughter of Count Raymond de Toulouse the Elder. She's Gently Gifted. She has affinities for Corpus and Mentem, and puissancies in Rego and Perdo. She's got close ties to her family but understands that she can't directly take part in their power struggles because of the Hermetic Oath. She likes being among the Tremere: they don't regard her as just a marriageable bargaining chip, and let her put the intelligence and ruthlessness that she inherited from her father to good use.

Julian of Guernicus does Muto and Terram. Despite his House, he has no interest in being a Quaesitor, and may well break away to found his own Ex Miscellanea group. He's an incredibly inspiring figure: he's got a Presence of +4, a Communication of +3, Good Teacher and Inspiring. Despite this, he has Difficult Underlings; and even worse, has a Restriction which prevents him from being able to cast magic if he can't see the sky. His hobbies include building towers and ranting about how they'll be sorry, he'll show them, he'll show them all. (Played by my husband, who is a huge Girl Genius fan.)

Finally, Quirina of Jerbiton is a heroic adventurer, dressing up as a man to go around doing chivalric deeds. We're aware that this is probably a little anachronistic, but it sounds fun and melodramatic. She does Imaginem (affinity, puissance and Deft Form) but mostly relies on her Gentle Gift and her impressive martial abilities to get her through tough spots. She has the Curse of Venus and is already Famous locally for her acts of chivalry (although everyone thinks she's actually Jacques, Chevalier de Seingalt.)

I was unsure about having two characters with Gentle Gift, but they really wanted it, so fine.

The Story Flaws are as follows:
Mentor
Close Family Ties
Curse of Venus
Tormenting Master
Difficult Underlings

Because two players have chosen to play chivalric adventurers, we might have some light-hearted romps in between the more serious stuff. I especially like the fact that we can contrast the very storybook view of knights that Flavius and Quirina have with the very brutal, pragmatic view that Galena has.

I'm unsure of whether letting two players have Story Flaws relating to the same NPC was a good idea, but they got excited about it.

We didn't make any companions or grogs. People don't seem that excited about the idea of playing troupe-style, so I'm going to hold off on it and then maybe introduce it later.

Hi,

Snipped stuff that you already know is good and why. This last bit, though, interestingly enough, hearkens back to AM2, whose archetypal covenant was deliberately set in Provence just before the Albigensian Crusade took off so they could play through it...

If the player finds Elemental Magic to not be so good, which it's not, you might want to allow the virtue to be swapped out for something else good. It's a major virtue, so just saying.

Hopefully Puissant Cr&Ig too. :slight_smile:/10 Your (I assume) "kill things with fire" guy made some good choices. He can probably start with a good CrCo spell or two right off the bat.

Deft Form: Mentem might suit her better than one of these Affinities and Puissances. Puissancies? Pui... ah, whatever. Good Parens might also. (And also Flavius; amusing to have the same guy be both a Good Parens and a Tormenting Master!) DF:M plus Gentle Gift for a social character. I suspect the character will get a lot more out of it, and it's more interesting than a gentle bump.

lol Just a reminder that building towers is either CrTe or ReTe.

Good optimization on Im.

And they are very different. Sansa and Arya!

Yes. Of course, you can sometimes flip it around too, making the storybook chivalry stuff become the very serious stuff, with the brutal pragmatism become (dark?) comedy.

For the win. Great idea because they got excited about it, but not just because. They have essentially asked you to pretty please have a powerful NPC play one PC off against the other. With two players invested in the fellow, he is an easy choice for major NPC/antogonist/something for the entire saga.

That might be a good thing. Between 2 GG characters and 1 martial character, you have a lot of bases covered already. They'll need grogs, but you can play those, at least until the players decide that it's their turn to play the grunts with cheesy soccer (ok, football; sheesh) hooligan British accents....

Anyway,

Ken