What would the Realms be like in a fantasy setting? I mean a classical fantasy RPG setting, a la Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms.
Magic I think works as normal. I can see the Infernal being the bad-bad-wizard shtick, with Corrupt arts and magic offering a quick way to power and all that necromancy thing.
I would get rid of Faerie. Merge it with Magic.
And then there is the whole Divine issue, which sparked the arguments above. But in a standard RPG fantasy setting, where there is a pantheon of gods and clerics that draw their power from the different gods... One option is to give all the deities Divine power. Even the evil ones. This somewhat curtails the Infernal bit, however. Hmph.
I am not so worried about the pantheon at all. Ars Magica already supports pantheons in multiple variations. Several known pantheons are made canonical as faeries, who gain vitality from worship. Then there is also the false gods, who feed on worship. Finally, there are ancient gods of the magic realm, whom I find harder to understand.
It is the Divine Realm which is peculiar, with its power to overrule any of the others.
This is extremely important to the cosmology of Ars Magica. If Mythic Europe was a struggle to rule the world, the Divine would win. Thus are the rules of the game. But that is not the goal. The Infernal does not aim to rule the world, but to win individual souls. Although it cannot win a battle of the World, it can win battles within each human being.
All the mechanics of the Divine and the Infernal are built up around that internal human struggle.
I am not at all convinced of the approach to mend the realms to suit a generic fantasy world. There are too many ideas interwoven. If you want something different, I strongly believe that you have to build it up from scratch.
It would probably work to remove the Faerie, Divine, and Infernal, and play with only the Divine. A magic pantheon would probably work just fine, when there is no faerie to make you wonder what be the difference between the two. But then, priests and cults would be something entirely different, and they would have to be reinvented from scratch.
You could redefine Magic and Infernal as realms of Good and Evil, but since the Infernal depends on an understanding of sin, and hence of virtues associated with the Divine, those virtues would have to be reinvented in the new Realm of Good (Magic). Could be done, but non-trivial.
Only the Faerie Realm seems to be easy to handle, as a fairly modular unit which can be kept or scrapped according to personal preference.
From my notes when I was pondering similar:
I like the idea of aligned auras and power sources, something akin to what D&D 4E did but distilled towards an Ars Magica flavor. Wizards, witches, magicians, summoners, mystics, what-have-yous, they all derive their power from some kind of source. Rather than having a Mythic Europe table of precedence (Divine wins, infernal hates everyone, Faerie and Magic argue but get along), instead have a table for each realm: The Demonic Source table gets bonuses in pure magic auras because demons love magic, but penalties in faerie realms, because Faeries feed on the human vitae and leaves less soul to corrupt, and lose power in Angelic realms, because Angels and Demons are at war. Then you just re-build this table for each realm. Yeah, you get a lot of tables instead of just one, but it adds a more dynamic option than the one-true-god.
In the little world I was designing, the divine-equivalent realm wasn't about worshipping god, but getting power from angels - just dropped the idea of the creator god being a perfect being and instead a distant, grumpy world-maker who left things to his (fallable) caretaker angels when he was done. Demons were evil and corrupted, but I also got rid of the idea that dealing with them was an instant-soul-corruption. it's just like playing a game of craps with badly loaded dice. it's a bad idea, but you might consider it worth it.
This thread is weird and amusing. So many house rule discussions surprise me but it fits and is welcome. It might not be what I had in mind when I read the thread title, but it is still good.
I will say that I thought it would be a thread discussing what a fantasy setting might look like if it was built with the Ars Magica (5th edition) rules without the Mythic Europe setting assumptions and developed over time.
No Catholic Church, no Order of Hermes, no Christianity, no Roman Empire (Eastern or Holy).
But as we've gone a different way, I'll set that idea aside for now.
DISCLAIMER: In this post I say a lot of things that are my opinions, I have chosen not to put an "IMO" in everytime I state my opinion because it would be too bothersome. Just know that whenever I say something like "X would be a good thing" it is my opinion.
To answer that original question, and once again defy your intention, this time by getting back on the topic you intended, here is what I would do.
Generally I would aim to make as much of the published canon material compatible with the new fantasy setting as possible. This means that my new fantasy world must have all of those things you mention, and so I would keep the church, the order and the four realms, the roman empire, feudalism, all those things. I like the four realms except I am not super stoked about faerie, but at first I would certainly keep it.
I would modify all those things to suit the new world but I would keep them. In fact I would adopt as a principle that unless specifically stated otherwise then everything in the core rulebook is included my vision of a fantasy setting for Ars Magica. I would then start building a world and adapting my vision of what to include and what not to include to fit the world I am building (in this hypothetical example). If during worldbuilding something that I had decided to keep turns out not to work, I would just get rid of it there and then, but it is impossible to predict what things will turn out to be an obstacle before starting so I would not fret about it too much in the beginning.
The Order
I would keep the generalities of the order. Founded by a jesus-like wizard who developed a magical shield that allow the Gifted to peacefully interact with each other and also allow the to attack other magic users without fear of reprisal (since they are protected by their unique magic resistance). I would keep the order structured into houses, although I am agnostic about the current houses, so if during the proper worldbuilding phase certain themes for houses turn out to be necessary/desirable then they are easy to include. I would keep some version of the Oath and the Code. I am not a huge fan of the strict restrictions on mundane intereference so those would probably be reduced. Because I would keep the Bonisagus figure and the oath I would probably end up include a house that is Bonisagus in all but name and because of the Join-or-die policy in the oath I would also most likely have some form of House ex Miscallenea. I would also be likely to include the division between True lineages, Societates and Mystery cults.
I would keep the order to living in covenants that are members of geographically defined tribunals which in turn are ruled over by a grand tribunal.
The Church
I would make up a new religion that plays like the catholic church in many ways. I would probably mashup popular modern (mis)perceptions about medieval Catholicism with similar (mis)perceptions about Buddhism. I am not very attached to the idea of a paternal god with a resurrected son, and I would probably have the new religion centered around the teaching of a Buddha like figure with religious tenets centered around introspection as a path to enlightenment and salvation. It has to glorify poverty because that is a good source of conflict between the actual poor people being glorified and the powerful noblemen and church authorities who are far from poor but claim to be put in power through the will of god. I would keep monasticism and even have some of the monasteries be powerful landowners like historical christian monasteries are good antagonists and allies for covenants.
A religion that focuses on enlightenment also fits well into the scholarly culture of hermetic magic which means that magi are likely to have their views on religion and how magic fits into it. It allows for stories about religions conflicts between magi and mundanes and equally importantly between magi and magi. This opens the possibility for a hermetic house that uses religion to better understand magic, something of a mashup between house Criamon and holy magic. But I would probably not do so because I dont want to relegate religion among magi to a single house.
I would also make sure that the new religion resembles its sources of inspiration very little because religion is a very touchy subject and it is better to play it safe here.
The four realms
The four realms are just fine as they are. Magic obviously needs to be there since that is kind of what the game is all about. The divine serves as a nice check to the power of magi and creates a natural conflict where magi want mundanes at an arms length because mundanes bring divine auras which in turn destroys magical resources, while magi still need mundanes nearby to provide things like labor and laboratory equipment. The divine is also just about the only reliable source of defense mundanes have against magical attack and it serves to make magi more reliant on companions and grogs who can better operate in cities, which is also a good thing. The infernal, I dont like using demons myself because there is no way to compromise with a demon. However with a religion that is inspired by buddhism it is just too obvious to have demons that are made out of pure deception and the infernal seems to be popular, so I would keep it in the hope that during worldbuilding some way to include the infernal in the world. Faerie, I am not stoked about faerie either but I would keep it and hope for the best.
The roman empire
Since I want to keep the order more or less as-is I would need some form of a roman empire. I would give it a new name but there would have to be some form of ancient builder-empire that collapsed and left behind lots of ruins with cool magic auras and also there has to be a mercurian cult to lay the foundations that the order is built upon. I would also keep some version of the eastern roman empire that persists, in order to have a Constantinople. This last bit is down to pure personal preference. I would probably change the "Roman empire" a lot but that is very dependent on how the actual worldbuilding turns out so not a lot more to be said about it now.
Feudalism
The feudal system is good because it creates many of the stories that are central to ars magica. the conflict of covenants wanting to rule like feudal overlords but also wanting to be outside the feudal system. The conflict of covenants wanting to meddle with their feudal neighbors but also wanting to be subtle to remain within the code. lots of good stuff. Besides there has to be some form of governance and I dont have a better idea. It is however quite necessary to have rather weak states because covenants must be able to have a significant impact on their local environment and that does not work if there is a very strong state that can enforce its will on all the land. Also feudalism allows me to keep more of the published material which is good.
Other things
As for the rest. I would keep latin because it seems mystical. That is entirely down to modern perceptions but barring ancient time travellers all of the people who play are going to have modern perceptions. I would also create a world where travel-technology, e.g. shipbuilding, road building and maintenance, wagon building etc. is more advanced than they were historically because the ability to quickly travel to lots of places is usually nice in telling good stories. I would have some form magocracies, some in the "east" like steppe-towns ruled over by covenants maybe even a Venice where magi are significant powerbrokers. I would not have any of the standard fantasy races work as humans, i.e. no playing elves or dwarves or hobbits or orcs. Those could still exist as magical (not necessarily Magical) beings with might scores.
I would then try to understand what playstyles exist and create world that allows those playstyles. Very similarly to how the different 5e tribunals were created very differently to allow the game to appeal to different playstyles. I would be pretty shameless about creating countries and tribunals that fit these playstyles. Want a tribunal where magi live in isolation on allodial land, I would create a copy of central europe (germany+poland in modern terms) with huge primeval forests with covenats inside them that you can only reach by magic, a cursed river valley (I am looking at the Rhine gorge here), yeah it would be a shameless copy paste of the real world but tailored to allow for a better play experience, and besides the creator the real world can hardly sue for copyright infringement. For a political game about mage-mundane intrigue I would create the italian city-states and have some of them be ruled partly or entirely by magi, put those right on the border of free city-states, city-states run by the fantasy-church, etc. and then I would create geography that allows play in one to interact with many others. You could take this approach with any number of playstyles and if I was building a fantasy world I would. But since I am just posting to an internet forum I will stop here.
I would do the exact opposite. There is no point (IMO, duh) in re-doing Mythic Europe with the serial numbers filed off. The setting should be a standard fantasy setting, and ArM rules used as much as possible to fit it rather than the other way around.
But I think the core difference would be in magic-level. Magic is not as common in fantasy settings as to be everyday (usually), but it is far more common than in standard Ars Magica. One main point is the presence of "magic" races. I would have entire races with Strong Faerie Blood, representing high (sidhe) elves, mermen, dwarves, orcs.... with that will come supernatural abilities such as Second Sight, and perhaps also other faerie-touched powers/Virtues to define the race.
I would have entire orders with magical powers. Orders of divine knights with divine powers and divine mounts. Orders of holy men with holy powers. Churchs and monasteries would accordingly partake in this magic, offering things such as healing magic, blessings and wards against evil to the populace.
There would be no united Order, instead instituting only a new, local, limited one, to unite the PCs. Instead, there would be disunited magical traditions along themes: the necromancers of Thaas, the frost-giant-blooded weather witches of Garash, the fire-whisperers of Gorn... Possibly base these on the standard Houses, Mystery Cults, and lore, but possibly also ditch these in favor of just inventing new ones to better fit fantasy tropes and/or the rules.
And there be monsters. Lots of magical forests and supernatural auras of all sorts, with lots of monsters/creatures in them. Dragons, giants, under-dark monstrosities (and races!), strange roaming undead, demons of various infernal courts, and more.
We stray mainly because you have set an impossible task. Once you have removed all the Mythic Europe setting assumptions, there isn't an awful lot left to build on. Even the forms and techniques are based on European philosophy. When such a world could be absolutely anything, the question loses meaning.
It is still worth taking it seriously, but a generic and complete answer will be too vague to be useful. What about concrete examples?
Tolkien Hermetic Magic has not been taught in the the Third Age at all. Istarii, other Maiar, ancient Elves and Peredhil, and their likes, are the only beings to master the most generic magic, but Gifted hedge wizards exist also in the Third Age. The Gentle Gift is wide-spread. Virtue and Flaw comboes must be created to define the different races. Hobbits should have some resilience to warping, and possibly MR, in addition to Dwarf. Elves are probably slow learners, at least when they grow old (nephilim unlimited). Quite a lot of work to do there.
The Magic Realm can probably be kept. Gods and Creators are probably Magic Beings. A Realm of Evil should probably be developed, with an Evil Warping to represent corruption, but with mechanics entirely different from the Infernal Realm. The only sin (which leads to corruption) worth mentioning appears to be greed for power.
Moorcock The Magic Realm becomes the Realm of Chaos, but it can probably be maintained pretty much as it is. The opposing Realm of Order would have to be created, probably building on the Realm of Reason of 3ed, but taking on the role of the Divine, in suppressing Magic, without the omnipotent God on the top. There is no basis for the other Realms. Once you have redefined the realms, which is a big task, there might not be too much work to do. Just fix up virtues (church related) and abilities (C&C law and realm lores).
Historic Pre-Christian Age The Divine Realm has not yet been discovered, but the three other Realms could be maintained as they are. The sins, for the purpose of Infernal corruption could be kept as based on Universal Human Rights, either taking them as they are or reducing them to a subset in line with your own ethics. The pagan Gods may be faerie, magic, or infernal, with different implications depending on the realm. Hermetic Magic could well be there, invented by an ancient philosopher one millenium before Bonisagus. Magic texts are written in the dead language from before the Tower of Babel. Maybe all of Hermetic Magic is handed down from a pre-Babel Order. The Order has dissolved, but scattered practitioners remain. This works with or without the Hermetic Houses and Mystery Cults. Parma Magica is a mystery, known to only some mystic lines. A couple of virtues and abilities must be mended to write out the Divine Realm and the Church, but otherwise the system survives, it seems.
Obviously, none of these ideas are complete in any way, but they give some indication of the work involved and the magnitude of changes.
Fact is, Mythic Europe is one of the richest pre-gunpowder worlds there are, because we have human history, fairy tales, as well as a significant number of game supplements to build on. Entirely fictional worlds rarely manage to come up with the same volume of detailed lore. Not even Tolkien. Creating an alternative world will invariably take a lot of work to create a less mature world. Which is why you will never have the answer you want in a forum like this.
There is also the issue that just because many people want a fantasy setting, that does not mean that those people have much in common in terms of what they want out of that setting. As evidenced by the disagreements above.
It is by no means guaranteed that just because you can find a sufficiently large group of Ars magica players who want a fantasy setting (and I am not sure that you can) that this group would want to play in the same new fantasy setting.
One thing I was thinking of - with the Harry Potter connection but also Lewis Carrolâs Narnia - is how Ars Magica could be used for a âhidden worldâ fantasy. That is, there is a connection to the real world, but when you head into your wardrobe (or whatever) you get transported off to a magical world and find yourself as wizards in a covenant.
If you think of the world down the rabbit hole, or behind the wardrobe, or platform 3ž, Ars Magica already has the mechanics of regione.
If you think of taking half of the game inside the regio with the mundane level being a widely different world, like modern-day realistic and non-magical with the regio being high fantasy, you are in for a challenge, since you may need to develop characters with double skillsets. Potentially, we talk about a greater difference than CoC Dreamlands.
There is a frequent poster playing modern day urban fantasy in ArM4, but I don't think he would rate the conversion as trivial.
Throwing my own two-cents into this, I see a lot of talking about generic fantasy, as well as people not wanting the same setting. If everyone wants something different, then they do like I do with DnD 5e, they take the ideas presented (in a nice fantasy world package) and adapt them to their own world, continent, country, etc. Don't like the gods? Change them. Don't like the assumption that there are court wizards? Just don't involve yourself with it. The idea here for me is the creation of a baseline, a sample, a guideline for doing exactly the same thing for yourself.
Example, I and my friends are making a fantasy setting for our table's ArM 5e game. I think the realms are weird, but they provide delicious flavor: the Divine realm has a single creator deity who has kinda fucked things up recently (they panicked when their soup started boiling over and fucked up trying to fix it) as well as several children gods born of blooming flowers, the faerie and infernal realms are parasites invited in by this catastrophe, and the magic realm is the sorta underlying backrooms of reality. Faerie and infernal steal away vitality and souls and that sustains their powers.
The order of hermes exists under a different name (we haven't decided) essentially as a sort of survival tactic, a guild for the very rare Gifted people of the world who work together to not be overwhelmed by mass amounts of mundanes, magical beasts, faerie and demon invaders, etc. My own thinking is that it is something in the vein of Witch Hat Atelier's magic illuminati who regulate magic being seen by mundanes to prevent the development of strange and dangerous powers.
The arts exist because people, wizards included, like to categorize things. I'm handwaving the aristotlean ideologies as being something that kinda just, exists. Magic (as I've sorta understood and am working with it) is based on the connections people draw. These connections form the basis for the magical understanding of wizards and the like, allowing them to use their understandings to manipulate reality. Thus the hermetic arts exist.
Monsters and things are very common so lots of vis to be found and used, lots of magic items to go around, and all sorts of fun things for us to have. Example, our covenant we are designing is a bunch of young wizards attempting to search for ancient magical artifacts within the radioactive ruins of the city of Ramelov, destoyed 1500 years ago by magical/faerie/infernal/divine godzilla.
While I certainly don't like EVERYTHING my group and I have come up with, thats kinda just how doing the groundwork for this stuff goes. I'm making my own ttrpg, and making the setting is ALWAYS hard, regardless of whether you have a system to transfer over or not. No reason to balk, just throw what you think is cool together!
The hard part was never to create a world. The hard part is to share a world, and the interpretation of said world, with the players. We play characters born and bred in an alien world, and their entire perception and motivation is shaped by this lived experienceš.
You can sort of get away with it, if you play reactive players in a railroaded story, but the more open-ended, sandboxed, and long-term the game is, the more is left to player agency. And with player agency comes the need to have somewhat common expectations about what may happen when they try to change the world, which Hermetic magi are inclined to do.
Here's my opinion: the same reason some official TTRPG settings and many homemade ones fail is that people design the setting and then decide to play the system they like in it, as disconnected decisions. This produces arbitrary, disjointed, and handwavey settings because your game mechanics can't reasonably produce the setting, and thus feel alien to it. A setting that runs on magic trains should have a magic system where making trains is both possible and practical. If your magic system can't reasonably make a magic train, that's a problem, and if your magic system can much more easily and cheaply make better options than magic trains, that's a problem too.
Preventing the disconnect between setting and mechanics requires building one thing based on the other. You can achieve coherence either by deciding what you want your setting to look like and crafting the game mechanics to naturally facilitate that, or by taking game mechanics you like and designing a setting that naturally flows out of those.
D&D settings are certainly fantasy kitchen sinks, but I wouldn't describe the effective ones as "generic fantasy settings," because in order to be effective, they had to make deliberate and skilled use of the way D&D works in play, and D&D characters don't function like characters in most fantasy literature. They grow in competence and durability explosively through overcoming adventurous challenges, heal from injuries quickly and easily, gain new abilities in a set clustering and order based on class and very limited feats, and their abilities and magic are oriented almost entirely around adventuring and fighting stuff as a lifestyle. Any level-gated abilities your setting depends on intrinsically necessitate that some sufficiently powerful demigods are walking around in adequate abundance. GMs often want there to be magic item shops in major towns, but most magic item feats have very high level prereqs and an EXP cost, which can require bending over backwards to explain where all these semi-retired high-level spellcasters are coming from and why they aren't having a bigger impact doing something else.
Likewise, making effective use of Ars Magica's mechanics certainly doesn't have to produce Mythic Europe, but it won't produce anything remotely like a D&D setting, or whatever you would think of as a more "typical" fantasy setting.
The classic example of Meganâs thesis is the Gift. In the Ars system, all powerful wielders of magic are perceived as shifty, untrustworthy, creepy weirdos. (Gentle Gift is the exception of course, because another truism of Ars is that thereâs always an exception). This is in direct contrast to a fantasy setting like, say, the Forgotten Realms where many wizards are public figures and leaders of their community. In an Ars game, even other wizards naturally perceive each other this way, and Gifted characters without Parma wonât hang out with and befriend other Gifted characters.
The point that âgame mechanics inform the settingâ is absolutely true.
For what it's worth, as a more encouraging post, small tweaks can go a long way towards achieving the effects you want! When I wanted to use Ars Magica as the shell for a Yu-Gi-Oh! based game where we jumped back and forth between playing Ancient Egyptian sorcerer-aristocrats and their modern reincarnations, a few houserules went an enormous length of the way to achieving the desired effect.
For one, I changed the nature of the Gift to be more suited to social leadership, since the sorcerers are all priests/vessels of the gods and part of the aristocracy; you still get a -3 to most forms of social interaction with mundanes, but rather than a "look at that disreputable, shifty creep" response, it's more of the confused, fumbling anxiety of knowing on an instinctual level that you are an avatar of unknowable divine will, can invoke divine punishment on them, and will for capricious and unpredictable reasons.
I also got rid of Formulaic and Ritual Magic in exchange for integrating a TeFo-based spirit summoning ability and a few Mysteries, such as Verditius Curses, and the Ritual effect and Architecture enchantment ones from TMRE. I expanded some stuff from Realms of Power: The Infernal to give a way to functionally spend vis for enchantment purposes via blood sacrifice or mass labor, allowing for massive tombs (such as an iconic pyramid for the Pharaoh) to be enchanted throughout their building process and for the Millennium Items to be made through blood sacrifice, in an otherwise somewhat vis-poor setting. I replaced Magic Resistance with Magic Defenses, combined with letting most targeted spell effects offer some type of saving throw. Certamen was expanded upon somewhat and made possible in the modern setting for non-magi, because, y'know, card game dueling.
Some of these are bigger than others, but they leave a lot of the Hermetic magic system and the freedom it produces intact while switching things around to produce the desired differences in how the sorcerers operate in the setting, where they're more interested in summoning monsters and then using their spells to support them, or doing utility magic outside combat, and where the most powerful effects are stored in artifacts and locations rather than being thrown around at will by people.
IDK about having a world and then playing the system you like in it, I generally always craft the world for the system I've chosen to play. I personally dont set things in worlds that already exist or anything because then I have to tweak, and then it ends up not the same thing, and I also just don't like "crossover" territory stuff. System informing the setting is important, but the setting can then inform the system as well. Setting your Ars Magica campaign in the present? Do like I've seen suggested somewhere and have a Artificia Form for things that are highly fabricated. Its a new part of the system that the setting naturally would bring about.
On that point though, I think the most helpful way to go forwards would be to define the many systems you'd have to work around for Ars Magica to work in fantasy.
Virtues and Flaws: The different virtues and flaws would need to be taken into consideration, and then edited to fit the fantasy world that you share. Its a lot of work, but like, people already do this in small amounts when they decide to play a female priest or knight
The Gift: The negative to social situations can be adjusted and changed (as I've just read the great example by @Corteia just above having done), or even moved to a negative in something else. In the modern day Ars Magica discussions one suggestion was to shift it over to a negative when interacting with technology. It just doesn't work on wizards.
The Hermetic Arts: The arts and forms don't feel like science at all, so science can't really be how they work. They feel like they are built on the connections between things (IDK anything much bout Aristtotle) and so when shifting them to allow usually non-hermetic feats or to move hermetic things around between, its important to keep in mind you aren't performing chemistry or physics as we know it. Magic is magical, so let it stay so.
Humankind versus other races: Demons, giants, angels, dwarves, all of them are part of the non-mundane realms, and would need to be stat'd out for peoples use. Beastfolk are all magical humanoids born from animals? Maybe this is why they aren't so good at magic themselves, they have supernatural abilities like Animal Ken and rarely have the Gift, so they struggle to become wizards beyond the physical enhancement powers many of them enjoy.
The order of Hermes: The order's very existence provides interesting opportunities. Parma Magica could not exist or be rather widespread, both with interesting results that change eveyrthing for magic casters. The different rules that wizards follow about politics as has been discussed earlier can change. Maybe court wizards are a definite thing here and THEY are the ones who built the "OoH" replacement and spread Parma Magica. Where do the houses come from? Maybe house Verditius was started by a Dwarf who has since grown into a Hephaestus like figure do to the many enchanted items that have been sacrificed to them over the years, thus allowing many of that mystery cult's initiations to still happen with relatively little tweaking.
I know there's more, but like, Im still figuring it all out myself, so if anyone else has anything, much appreciated.
all this recalls me some thought I had the other day, probably coming from half-digested GURPS books:Mythic Europe is a medium mana setting:
Most people can't work magic, save a select few (the Gifted ones), and these must work through special rituals (spells) or suffer some other restriction (rune magic, solomonic arts)
Sometimes(When you fail by 10 or less), ambient magic ain't enough to power your spells, and you have to make do with your own energy (spend fatigue). Coincidentally, the margin is akin to the difference betwen "no aura" and being in the magic realm (aura 10)
Magical creatures can't survive outside of magical auras, and suffer acclimatization.
Now, this begs the question: What would a high mana Mythic Europe look like? Not for the mundanes: Of course, everyone would be able to learn and use magic, but for the Gifted?
You know years ago (1990âs) this is what started to push me away from D&D as a system, The magic is just simply limited. On discovering Ars Magica, I didnât want to embrace ME at all, but wanted to really extend the world building from my 15 year old campaign.
To transition to an AM based game, I just move the timeline about a 1000 years, placed a dark ages and a magic reset in the middle. This resulted in:
the rise of the âThe Orderâ
The domination of a Celtic style society with a strong sense of purity of form.
A subsequent crusader religious purge of any non human race, this remove the D&D race problem in the central regions.
establishments of cultural strongholds for formor and firbolgs
reworking some of the faerie aspects to be less opposed to Dominion.
pushed some of the ancient magic to D&D elven/dwarven.
Establishment of Nordic culture to oppose the order.
Establishment of a half orc /elven race, just appear as stockier humans, are at constant war with Celtic kingdoms⌠(this is mostly tC&tC) but in a colder climate, think steppes.
increase the number of hedge mages.
the big one was remove the chirstain monotheistic view of dominion. Also remove Satan.
the hard part as replacing SIN, it drives so much culturally
This worked well, as the players have contributed to the history of the world in many ways. 24 years, same campaign still going strong
All of that is quite interesting, and I think I'd throw my hat in with the anti-humans in a heartbeat!
On the subject of magic items and the limitations of their creation and sale, I do find it amusing that Ars Magica, pretty much the only game I've seen with the right long-term focus and option freedom that a character right or shortly out of generation could make a cool variety of items for a magic item shop, also has one of few settings I've seen that goes to such lengths to make the idea infeasible. All your products take a very long time to make, are so ridiculously expensive to be worth it that you can't sell to anyone poorer than landed gentry, the Gift means you can't (or at least shouldn't) run your own shop, and it's Hermetically illegal to sell stuff to anyone who can't do the same magic as you without a middleman. Alas...