I think that starting with the Order's "IPO," so to speak, would alleviate some of the pressure on us having to account for, say, a hundred years of how that's affected mundane society.
[quote="silveroak"2) Is going public something done continent wide or in only one tribunal? [/quote]
I suppose that depends a lot on how it goes public; if it is by accident or one rogue covenant (even a single magus) doing something to irrevocably change the consensus of Mythic Europe, then it starts one place and spreads. But if it was decided at a Grand Tribunal then it could happen all at once.
[quote="silveroak"3) Which tribunal do we want to play in?[/quote]
I've been playing in the Theban Tribunal, but I was kind of hoping for a change of venue to one of the "less exotic" tribunals. For what it's worth, though, I do think that the Theban Tribunal gets a lot easier to run after 1260. It's really from 1204 on when the Frankokratia begins when things start changing hands all the time that it gets hectic and difficult to keep track of all the moving parts.
The way I see it Thebes would be the easiest place for going public to occur without intent- Theban covenants and mages start helping the "resistance" and shut foreign mages in chapter houses out of tribunal votes so magi fighting Latins get slaps on the wrist while those supporting the Latins get marched, marched magi leave the tribunal to be replaced with ew Latin magi, each side starts coordinating more with their mundane counterparts, word gets out and eventually the whole mess gets brought to a grand tribunal since effectively the entire tribunal leadership is interfering in mundane affairs and denying members of the order their right to vote.
Of course even if we go with that background Provencal, Normandy, Rome and Levant are all going to have the secret blown collaterally... and without a "clean" decision the game can be started at any point in the process.
The Thebean Tribunal have a whole other enemy they more or less open fight the Arabian invasion who have the Shair open fighting by there side. But don't forget that to have a covenant in Thebean we need a Patron what in most cases is a strong Faerie!
So despite this Tribunal is good for a starting covenant I actual think it bring quite some thing that is difficult to handle for new player.
Thebes also has the advantage of being a covenant that already stands a bit apart. Despite the fact that everyone else speaks Latin, they speak Greek. That has to isolate them from the rest of the Order to some extent. IT would make sense that they feel more independent of the Order and able to act unilaterally.
1) do we want to play from when the order first goes public (massive chaos and plot possibilities) ir when it is established after having done so?
The initial setting was 100 after the order did so but with an ongoing war where a other mage order is already public taking part in it (like Tebes or Ibernia who fighting the Order of Suleiman) could force a whole tribunal to get public and join the war without much time to reconsider.
An other interesting setting is that the Hanse was founded and the changes it brings come from a powerful Mage Covenant that is forced more and more into the public thanks to its involvement with the Hanse. In this setting its interesting to play a Chapterhouse of this Covenant after the Covenant managed to change some rules in the Rhine Tribunal already.
2) Is going public something done continent wide or in only one tribunal?
For joining the war against the order of Suleiman I think a general pardon continent wide should be the thing. For the idea with the Hanse I'm more on the point that it should be start with a single Tribunal before spreading out or be suppressed. 3) Which tribunal do we want to play in?
I prefer Tebes over Ibernia when we do the war way and even then I would prefer to be in the west of Tebes where the war is not direct present but the magus would be asked for joining in from time to time. Especial if it is a city covenant this would get some interesting follow up when people suddenly recognize them after they joined the war at last once.
Sill I absolut want to be in a city covenant / chapterhouse preferable even harbor city with a setting where the order of hermes get into the public otherwise it would a waste of potential of this setting.
I'm up to join another game. I have no trouble with the ideal of the Theban Tribunal. Perhaps we decided that in the wake of the destruction of Constantinople, that we can't be isolated anymore, and risk losing our knowledge, like we've lost much of the Mercurian rituals.
If we do the Theban Tribunal, how about setting the covenant in or around Thessaloniki? It's urban, and a port town. It was the second biggest city in Byzantium, so it has plenty of opportunity for trouble and adventure without being overwhelmingly crowded, like Constantinople itself.
Constantinople was sacked twice, never destroyed. The first of those in the 4th crusade in 1204 marks the beginning of the Latin occupation, which I already referenced as a slow turning towards acting openly as a result of the partisanship of the tribunal's structure.
The OoS is much more in the Levant than in Thebes, wwhere they are still trying to overthrow crusader states that will last another century or two.
That being said I think we have agreed on the Theban tribunal and the early part of the 13th century, and with both the Latin invaders and the OoS as potential drivers of the change the details can be left to whomever becomes the alpha storyguide.
Here's a question that is probably worth discussing now, as well: will we treat Medieval Greek and Ancient Greek as separate languages for the purposes of xp/advancement? I'm assuming that the Order uses Ancient Greek in the Theban Tribunal, rather than Medieval Greek, but perhaps I'm overstepping here (Sundered Eagle might have something to say on the matter, but I don't have it at hand right now and we haven't been using it in the saga I'm running).
Its a 2 point penalty between this 2 languages so at a value of 6 you can read Hermetic books in Classic Greek with Romantic Greek but the book also say that you actual need Classic Greek if you want to write Hermetic text.
As for how many characters we should create, of which types and who will control them, what do we think?
In the game I'm playing, everyone made their own magus and then the companion for someone else, so that when their magus goes out and about, the companion can come with them and they don't have to play two characters at once. It works reasonably well, but we are also pretty free about handing control of our companion characters over to others, if circumstances arise where it makes sense. But perhaps for our purposes, and with the concerns about attrition, it would make more sense for everyone to have a magus and a general companion character who is not strictly tied to a particular magus, but to the covenant in general.
One of my pet peeves is that when an adventure comes along in most games most of the magi leave the covenant. Drop their research and hope to make the adventure short enough not to cut into their lab time. I prefer to have a magus, a companion, and lots of grogs. Most people seem to disagree with me on the grogs however... some on the companion...
I'm right there with you on this one. If you want to advance your magus in a meaningful way, on any sort of reasonable timescale, you can't go running after rumors every season - you gotta stay in the lab or the library, working on your projects and studying! Taking 5 to 10 xp every season for whatever you happen to get to use on an adventure (which might not be more than Folk Ken or Guile or something) is such a waste.
I agree that most games give short shrift to companions, and that most adventures seem geared toward having magi participate. I'm all for a saga where companions and grogs can participate in stories, and in which every magus doesn't feel the need to join every story.
Honestly, its a case of power and time, I think. Stories take so long and come along infrequently enough that people want to play their most powerful (and likely most developed) character when a good story does come up. I get that. We didn't put all that effort into making a magus to have him or her sit on a shelf. But surely there must be a solution. I'd love a saga where companions and grogs participated more.
Although we now have decided for Tebes as tribunal we current have no alpha SG and also not set how old our Magus and Companion should / could be, decided if we use any special rules or if we use all books or exclude some and so on.
That is why for now I don't start with any character creation.
I.e. its a big difference if the rule book Apprentices play any role in our character creation or not (for some character you fast can end in teaching scores of 20+ you need for their paren to have just because of some virtue what means that even with the max +3 from the lab and the +9 for individual teaching you still need them have at last 8 in Teaching + Com ... guess why I personal think it should be near impossible to find or become a paren for some of the ex Misc factions.)
Is there any book that should be discarded? I don't think a PC should be built from Realms of Power: the Infernal, but the others seem OK.
Advancement: I'd say we follow the rules on page 32 of the main book. What sort of characters do we want to play? I'm open to discussion, but I find advancing more than about 30 years to be quite a chore.
2a. We need to have a discussion about Mystery Cults, and how far a player can advance. Off the top of my head, I'd allow one stage of a Mystery Cult every ten years.
In the interest of keeping work down for the StoryGuides, I'd say that a player can have a magus, and either a Companion or an Apprentice.
Do we use one of the covenants from The Sundered Eagle, or make our own?
I'm willing to do at least part of the StoryGuiding, but I've never run an Ars Magica campaign before.
My current idea for a Companion is a Appolo priest who is linked to one of the remaining Hyperborean Spirits via Spiritual Pact (RoP:M 88), have 1 or 2 of the Hym and is a Hyperborean Descent (AM 104).
Interesting could also a via Spirtual pact linked priest for our patron but then the patron must be a Magic Might creature i.e. a Daimon (this means it also could be an ascended Magus).
Yes its "just" the major Virtue Spirtual Pact not the whole Spirtual Votaris package.
Edit:
2a) I think for MC they need general presented and talked about how the initiations are done as they are not full worked out in the books. But I have no problem if a player take 1 or 2 Mystery Virtues as part of the normal character creation virtues and flaws.
3) I think every player must have a magus and a companion and if want can play also an apprentice but not from their own magus. Grog is open to every player to create & play but once we create our covenant we might need to limit the number of grog we have.
4) We should make our own covenant but I don't mind if we are just a chapterhouse of an existing one.
General question is also who or what do we want as our Patron?
Any Veto, comment or suggestion to my Companion idea at the top?
I think all the books are generally good for characters (except, as you say, RoP:Infernal). Though there is the problem of power creep that comes in as you bring more books in (particularly RoP:Magic, Hedge Magic, and Ancient Magic). See my comments below about power creep in companions.
By-the-book advancement is okay by me. But are we talking strictly by-the-book, or with any variations? I've seen some slight variations from the core book's rules. For example, do you have to group your lab seasons in blocks of four just to avoid inefficiency? Some sagas I've seen have said that you get 10 xp per season and let you take lab seasons wherever you want. There's also the question of learning new spells. Going strictly by the rules, you have to spend xp on learning spells, which places a very strong disincentive on learning them. (Given the opportunity costs of doing so.) I have seen variations on the character generation rules that allow lab seasons to be spent learning spells instead of having to spend xp on them.
I'll go along with whatever people want. But we should set clear ground rules from the start.
2a. I'm willing to go along with what everyone else wants for Mystery Cults. The real question, as I see it, is figuring out the costs of advancement. Many of the cults don't have specific Initiation Scripts written up. This leaves us guessing as to what the costs of initiation are. Obviously we'd all prefer if it an initiation involved quests and such so that we don't have to take any new flaws. Is it fair to assume such? And if flaws are to be imposed, what should they be?
From my experience, companions get a whole lot more play than apprentices. The average apprentice doesn't see much action in a saga, from what I've seen. LImiting players to only a companion or apprentice seems a strong disincentive for having an apprentice. And what if someone with a companion decides to have their magus get an apprentice after play begins?
None of the existing covenants are written up in detail (showing BPs, libraries, etc.) as it is. So, we might as well make up our own.
I have no immediate ideas for patrons.
See my comment below about power creep.
One issue I'll observe is a kind of power creep among companions I've seen lately. It used to be that companions were normal people: the turb captain, a merchant, a local priest, etc. Maybe they had a magical ability, but that was about it. Now it seems far more common for companions to be hedge wizards, people with ancient or rival magic, magical beings, or other magus-lite characters. Heck, I've even seen people ask to play a Redcap (sometimes a heroic Redcap) as a companion, despite the fact that Redcaps are supposed to me magus-level characters. In short, many companions I've seen in recent sagas have been basically half-magi (or full magi in the case of Redcaps). It seems rare to see just a normal person as a companion.
Often the least powerful companion suggested is a failed apprentice, which brings up thorny issues of its own. Most particularly is the question of who gets the (very significant) benefit of the failed apprentice's time. (Spread out among the magi? To the first player who calls 'dibs' on that companion concept? Something else?) It hardly seems fair for only one person to get that benefit. But it strains credulity to have more than one failed apprentice in a covenant.
Now, I'm as guilty as anyone in this. When the power creep has hit, I've been sucked in as well. And sure, there are a lot of cool rules out there that we don't often get to explore. And yes, it's more fun to play a character who has powers and abilities far beyond those of mortal men. But is that what we want for this saga? If people say yes, then I'll go along and give consideration to all of the non-magus magical options out there. Still, it might be worth trying to rein back on the power creep and limit ourselves to 'normal' companions.