I like big bads !
In my theban saga, I used the material written about Veia in Rival Magic (though the PC never met her directly, but a cult of Daughters of Erichtho who worshipped her and used similar powers through the Goetic Art of Binding...)
Never read the Soqotran, though, they did not attract me that much. But I'll get to it.
My point being : I would have loved to see characters like Veia or Davnalleous in Antagonists, mixed in with lower level foes.
Also, there are some of those characters who look like everyone has already used them in a previous saga : the Divine abbot, the misguided Bishop (maybe that's just me, I like this kind of "morally ambiguous" antagonists.) Nevertheless, I'm confident the treatment of these "archetypical" characters will be great enough that I find them interesting anyway. I know it's almost always the case with the ArM5 line ! 
And it'll compensate for the mild disappointment that was Against the Dark (in which I didn't really find what I was looking for... 
)
I cannot speak about it, but I will be quite surprised if everyone has used this Divine Abbot.
-Ben.
Yeah, I'm certain you're right. And I'm sure there's more to it than what we can read in the spoiler-free introduction. What I meant was, when you look at the intro paragraph, you read "Dominion encroaching on Faerie & Magic auras", which I'm sure is a threat many have introduced in their saga already. That can explain the impression some of us had, when we thought those antagonists could be more "grandiose". But I trust this one has a nice twist to it ! 
I think it would be useful to scale Bads. That is, to present an antagonist in concept, with options scaling it from minor nuisance to end of days nasty.
As awesome as that would be, it would be very difficult, because of the great variation among sagas.
This is a problem. Especially when there is a demand for "story seeds from every realm" and the Dominion just doesn't have that many interesting stories. So the obvious ones are re-used over and over.
It's because the interesting ones break the setting.
Obvious ones are : "God is evil.", "There are two Gods and the shift in tone between the Testaments is a coup.", "God abandons his post., "God is just a big faerie.", "God literally dies and sends his body crashing to Earth." and "God decides that he doesn't like Man anymore and creates a replacement."
...i'll just be stealing this list if you don't mind...
The replacement already exists: it's called Women, and they are slowly taking over the world. 
Oh, sure. It's just the basic ones. Get a few Ars authors in a room, hand around the energy drinks and ask them to play with the concepts of God and things would gey far more interesting and detailed than this.
I personally like "God exists because Diedne won the war." although I've never played it fully in real life.
In ArM2, there was one covenant suggested in which your characters were all dead and didn't know it: you were all in urns in a necromancer's sanctum, and you thought you had a covenant beset by demons, and every so often the necromancer would turn up as a redcap and collect the wonderful new spells you'd made to fight the demons with. I occassionally like to think that the Dominion exists to force magi to find news ways to do the sort of small, tricky magic that the Diedne, lacking Forumalic magic, cannot do.
Oh yes, I remember that one.
February is nearly done so this must be getting close...
There is also the "god needs a task completed, but he himself cannot perform said task because it involves concepts that he cannot tarnish his great self with... so he enlists a scheme, a la Timebandits, to get us sinners (player characters) to do his great work for him"
Though of course as one of the few hard atheist out there who play Ars, the Dominion was at first a very tricky subject. I railed against its place as absolute good and ineffability. I refused to play as if the Dominion and the Infernal were what RAW said they were, however! Once I gave in to accepting the rules as just that, rules of a roleplaying game, and not a morality matrix being proselytize by the writers, then my oh my did the game open up and blossom for me.
Now I talk about the Divine as though it were real... just as I do the Tarrasque, Szass Tam, Cthulhu, and True Brujah.... hahahah pardon the references.
Hey, I think there are quite a lot of us. Well, relative to the Ars-fan community size... so yeah, probably "few" is about right
Hmm. I find the unity and certainty of the Divine Realm boring, as background for gaming. I much rather have the Divine be utterly incomprehensible even to the Divine Host, who squabble among themselves and schism roughly along the lines of earthly Divine religions (which explains why such exist!).
As I have in so many ways avoided a Divine story, I would like to think I am creative enough of a SG to have thought of this. I love the very wording of it. I did have a Rhine story ((which imploded due to gamer personality conflicts)) which was going to involved the Church versus the Divine... can the Divine be used against the Divine to serve what both believe to be the Divine will. Afterward I was told it may have been too esoteric for some players hahahah
"What God wants, God get, God help us all!"
There's nothing worse than forcing your beliefs into others, be it some deism or atheism. Trying to be agnostic in your interpretation of the Divine is a must. I'd even push for something that oppose my own just for diversity.
It is shipping to distributors.
I don't know the religious beliefs of most of the writers for Ars Magica, but I'm not a follower of a monotheistic religion, nor was I when I set the Dominion as all-powerful for ArM5.
Yay! 
(Yeah, quite a deep thought analysis of the situation, I know. I am sure Kant would be proud of me)
Hmmm... CJ? Fancy doing this at the next GTUK? If nothing else, it could be entertaining!