Campaign Title: A matter of Prestige
System: Ars Magica
of Players: 4-10
Deadline: When you want all PC info to be in.
Starting Level: Levels will cover a rane, from grog to experience magi. No initiations.
Advancement Rules: Advancement will follow standard ARsMagica advancement rules except for he prestige system described later. Each season can only use 1 source of experience, but labs may be completed in the same season adventure experience is accumulated, subject to normal rules regarding loss of lab time. Adventures will range from 6-10 experience.
Combat Rules: Players should indicate their rolled totals when making an attack or defense.
Dice-Rolling Rules: Players will roll their own dice.
Special Rules: Presitige- each player will start the game with 7 prestige points, which may be ‘invested’ into characters: magi cost 4 prestige, Mythic companions 3, companions 2 and grogs 1. Characters which are removed from the game (through death or otherwise) will return points to the player based on their current level- ascending out (for example becoming a Daimon) is worth 5 prestige. Magical or faerie characters are ranked by their ‘equivelence’ in characters, with mage level being considered mythic companion.
Posting Rate: Minimum twice a week
Absences: Announced abscences will be handled as best agreed for the player, spontaneous absences will result in the characters being written out of the story, lethality will be used if no lethal means are not reasonable to the storyline.
Writing Expectations: More description than mechanics, in intelligible English.
Text Formatting: Any formatting questions will be determined later, likely to indicate language spoken, and will be decided after setting has been determined by the troup.
Plot- or Character-Driven: Character driven, true troop style
Focus: Long term growth and development of a covenant.
Character Types: No infernal characters without troop approval
Campaign Description: Primarily this is a test case for my prestige system, so almost anything else is subject to troop decisions. Discussion on what you would like to see, boons, hooks, location, etc may begin below.
regaring Grogs- while the prestige system I created lists Grogs as being 1 point, this is for "gold shirt" grogs, which are the property of that player. You can make as many "red shirt" grogs for general play by anyone as you like, understanding that these can be claimed by anyone spending a prestige point.
I might be interested. I've had the concept of a Verditius wand-maker (Craft: Woodcarving) rattling around my head for some time now.
Filius of a maga from the confraternity of Balento (from HoH:MC), so initially quite strong in CrIg. However, his natural abilities pull him towards the manipulation of wood so his development would quickly move towards Herbam rather than stay in Ignem. May be a blood descendant of strong practitioner of magus, but doesn't know it.
Any idea about where the saga would be located, the nature of the covenant, etc? Would the game be held on these boards?
It would be on this board, in terms of location, I have just purchased The Sundered Eagle, I have Guardians of the Forest, and Heirs to Merlin. I'm not averse to buying another pdf, but anything not yet on pdf I wouldn't be buying, though of course we can do an unofficial version of just about any tribunal- or areas in between tribunals.
I am a fan of Sundered Eagle. I have that, Guardians of the Forest, and Against the Dark. Faith & Flame is in the mail
Old tribunals, I have Iberia and Rome. I used to have Heirs to Merlin, but I lost that one due to flood damage last year.
I have Guardians of the Forest but not Heirs to Merlin or Sundered Eagle. I also have most of the old ones. As far as setting goes, I like a tribunal where there's some active politics going on within the Order. Not too sure about Iberia, since the Reconquista tends to be a very common theme and I've kind of seen that enough for a few years. Northern Crusades (Baltics) might be neat, of course, or maybe Thebae? I've never actually played in Thebae, and would love to.
I'm a big fan of Guardians of the Forest, but I'm not adverse to trying something else.
I have The Sundered Eagle, although I have not read it fully (more like browsed it). There are some things there I heard about that makes me go 'meh', but I can live with it if need be. I also have many of the older tribunal books (3rd and 4th edition), like Rome, Iberia, Novgorod and Stonehenge.
So I guess we would build the covenant from scratch? Or adapting something from the covenant book?
We would build from scratch is my thought. If we go with the Tribunal of Thebes one possibility to consider is a Frankish and/or Itallian "chapterhouse" that is attached in some way to the crusader takeover. However from where I stand right now Thebes looks more like an early favorite than a done deal.
I love Guardians of the Forest, too! And a chapterhouse out of the Rhine tribunal would work well - we have the politics of a cross-tribunal "colony", and we have two favourite tribunal backgrounds combined, by all accounts. There's also the matter of the Transylvanian incursions parallel with the Bulgar wars, although that depends a lot of the exact moment in time. The big choice, though, will be whether the setting is before or after 1204 CE, due to the political situation surrounding Byzantium and the Latin successor states.
I had assumed the standard 1220. While I'm on the topic of standards, I also plan to use, if there are not too many objectives, the common house rules that 1) when both form and realm are designated in a spell, the target has a weakened defense, such that the level of the spell is not subtracted from penetration. 2) Aegis do not need to penetrate.
The problem with a chapterhouse out of the rhine is that Fredrick II gt sick before the crusade and did not participate, which means the Rhine tribunal would not have been in on the sack of Constantinople.
My point is that a Rhine chapterhouse/colony in the Theban Tribunal is very unlikely, since the "colonization" followed the sack of Constantinople by French and Italian forces.
Well, it starts to sound like I may need to acquire "Sundered Eagle" one of these days! I was basing my commentary on RL history, of course, which tends to mirror and mostly coincide game history - but with sufficient changes to keep you on your toes.
Either way, I'm not dead-set on Thebae. I love the setting, sure, but that's the historian in me. I realize that we should probably pick an area where we make it all up, or where most (if not all) people have the sourcebooks. I think the count for Thebae is only 2 on that account.
