Call for ArM5 Errata

Games Discussion Ars Magica
33

Possible errata in Ancient Magic

  • Page 70. Insert. Line 3.

"Finding the locations of these relics and sites to help break the Limit of Vim"

I think "Limit of Vim" should be replaced with "Limit of Vis".

  • Page 70. Insert. Line 12.

“Existence of The Engima of the Sons of God: Order of Hermes”

I think “Engima” should be replaced with “Enigma”

Page 70. Insert. Line sixteen.

“Location of the second volume of The Engima of the Sons of God”

I think “Engima” should be replaced with “Enigma”

  • Page 110. Column Two. Line 22.

“(Base 4, +1 Touch, +1 Conc, +2 levels for Penetration)”

I think it's missing +3 levels uses/day

  • Page 111. Column One. Line 25 and following

“Demeter’s Blessing

R: Sight, D: Sun, T: Bound

Aquam, Pen +0, 1 use/day

Causes nourishing rain to fall upon a designated area up to 6 miles across.

(Base 1, +1 Touch, +4 Year, +4 Bound, +1 Size [for a total of +4 Size])

Ease Factor: 12

Level Cost: 35

Principle: Rain”

I think it must be

“Demeter’s Blessing

R: Sight, D: Sun, T: Bound

Aquam, Pen +0, 1 use/day

Causes nourishing rain to fall upon a designated area up to 6 miles across.

(Base 1, +3 Sight, +2 Sun, +4 Bound, +1 Size [for a total of +4 Size])

Ease Factor: 12

Level Cost: 35

Principle: Rain”

  • Page 111. Column Three. Line 20 and following

“(Base 5, +1 Conc, +5 Vision, +2 extra detail)

Ease Factor: 15

Level Cost: 45

Principle: Auras”

I think it must be

“(Base 5, +1 Conc, +4 Vision, +2 extra detail)

Ease Factor: 14

Level Cost: 40

Principle: Auras”

  • Page 111. Column Three. Line 24 and following

“Virtue: Ceremony

Minor, Supernatural

This Virtue grants your character the Supernatural Ability Ceremony, with a score of 1. Ceremony allows your character to lead or participate with a group of people in a supernatural activity, thus allowing great effects.

This Virtue first appeared in Realms of Power: The Divine, page 34.

is duplicated on the next page, page 115, in an insert

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34

TC&TC p80:
"These flaws are designed by Ferie jinn characters."

Unless Atlas Games employs some very unusal game designers I strongly suspect that should say:
"These flaws are designed for Faerie jinn characters"

6 Likes
35

HoH:MC p.95 (Vim): This was written pre-errata to match the old MuVi rules. You can see this with the note about durations matching the old MuVi note about durations. This paragraph should be adjusted to align it with the post-errata MuVi rules, probably using essentially the same new language like it uses essentially the old language.

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36

Cov p.96: The Scribe's Touch should be ReAn, not PeAn. Certainly Perdo could be included if you want the bits to be disintegrated. However, just as the core book explains about Rego v. Perdo for sharpening a sword, sharpening a quill should likewise fall under Rego. Processing an animal produce is base 3, so the base should rise from 2 to 3 and the level should rise from 3 to 4.

2 Likes
37

ToME p.55: The Carnivorous House is missing +1 Touch in the calculation, so it should be ReHe 40.

38

I would just like to see Wizard's Boost cleaned up/clarified. There was a thread. It got bad really fast.
As written, it's non-functioning legacy.

2 Likes
40

Just noticed this one tonight, and I am genuinely astonished it's made it this far without some munchkin trying to use it to overrule the very clear rules on gain limits in chapter 10.

ArM5 core, page 71, middle column, first paragraph under the "Library" heading:

Summae have a level, and once a character’s level in the subject of the book exceeds that level, the book is no longer of any use.

"exceeds" should be replaced with "equals"; the current phrasing implies that e.g. a Level 4 summa is useful until a character hits a score of 5 in the subject.

4 Likes
41

This one is more complex. There are two options. The far simpler one is to edit the core book's rule (and I think one magus who's been written up, but I'm having trouble finding that one). The other is to edit a great many magi who have been written up to align with the core rule. That rule is that Spell Mastery Abilities are supposed to have specialties, and there is an example where they do, but for the most part magi have not been given specialties in their Spell Mastery Abilities. (The options that are chosen are akin to choosing a new alphabet with each level of Artes Liberales, but Artes Liberales still gets a specialty.)

Choice 1:

Core book, p.62: Change "Each Ability you select for your character should be assigned a specialization" to "Each Ability other than Spell Mastery you select for your character should be assigned a specialization."

Choice 2:

Add specializations to every Spell Mastery Ability for every magus that has any in any supplement that includes them.

.

While on Spell Mastery, it hasn't been given a category, and that category can be vitally important, such as with Becoming. On the bottom-right of p.86 in the core book it should be given a category, probably Arcane or its own category.

2 Likes
42

Nowhere in A&A is it explicitly stated how many seasons a work of art (Thing With Aesthetic Quality) may be studied. I've always assumed once, like a tractatus that doesn't necessarily require literacy, but it could stand to be clarified.

Edit: This isn't strictly errata, but while we're at it, A&A could stand the addition of some works of art to Appendix A, or an extra Appendix with some historically-important works of art. As a prominent example, the Odyssey is among, if indeed not the, most enduringly influential work of vernacular literature of the entire Western canon (see this BBC poll); surely it deserves an Aesthetic Quality and accompanying Source Quality for Craft(Poetry)? Or the Acropolis of Athens for Craft(Stonemason)? Or...I could go on. But I think it would be a valuable addition.

Hell, bundle it with the existing Appendix A (and for fucks' sake make Euclid's Elementa a summa, the man deserves it) and release it as a web supplement, like the Book of Mundane Beasts. Throw in a couple craft manuals and maybe Royal Armouries Ms. I.33 for bonus points.

3 Likes
43

Oh, this is odd. I caught this one and submitted it a couple years ago, but the errata were never corrected so I'll send it again here:

The guideline as published is "Dispel a Hermetic enchantment with a level less than the guideline level used + a stress die (no botch). Spell must be a ritual” (HoH:TL p.75). Disenchant doesn’t take the 1 magnitude for Range Touch into account. So it should only work on effects 5 levels lower than listed. So...

Disenchant (core book p.160): Replace "the level of this spell + a stress die (no botch) equals or exceeds” with “(the level of this spell - 5 + a stress die (no botch)) equals or exceeds”.

1 Like
44

In city and guild a craftsman of expensive good or merchant makes 20 MP a year, while in Lords of men a landed noble also has an income of 20 MP per year, meaning a goldsmith or merchant makes as much money as a landed noble, and that a typical covenant makes 5x what a nobleman with the same estate would make.

2 Likes
45

Clarify T:Circle, ArM5 p112

The spell affects everything within a ring drawn by the magus at the time of casting,

Hmm. I was unclear with my parentheses. Let's try and make it a bit more explicit.

everything (within a ring [drawn by the magus])(at the time of casting)
vs
everything (within a ring [drawn by a magus {at the time of casting}])

"at the time of casting" can be validly interpreted to apply either to "when the ring must be drawn" or to "when the target must be inside it". Either reading is grammatically correct, but which one is semantically correct cannot be determined from the sentence along, and must be decided from context.

If "at the time of casting" applies solely to "when the target must be inside it", then it does not apply to "when the ring must be drawn"; you could draw your circle years in advance and then R:Voice T:Circle D:Ring to pop up a ward on that circle over there from way over here. This is blatantly not what is intended.

Equally, if "at the time of casting" applies solely to "when the ring must be drawn", then it does not apply to "when the targets must be inside it", and so targets which enter the ring during the spell's duration are affected by it, which is less blatantly but still fairly clearly not what the writers intended.

Consequently, it's my belief that "at the time of casting" was clearly intended to apply to both "when the ring must be drawn and "when the target must be inside it", but that reading is grammatically incorrect; "at the time of casting" must* apply to exactly one of the other two phrases.

The result is some nitpicky ambiguity.

*as I understand it, anyway; I will freely admit it has been over a decade since I was last had sentence diagramming inflicted upon me. Anyway it doesn't matter; if I'm wrong and "at the time of casting" can correctly modify both of the other phrases at once, it merely increases the number of valid interpretations of the sentence from two to three; it's still ambiguous and still needs rephrasing.

(edit: original post mostly rewritten for [hopefully] clarity)

1 Like
46

at the time of the casting could also modify everything, and thus apply to both of the other prepositional phrases. However technically a ring could be drawn a decade previous but would still need to be traced as part of the casting- if "at the time of the casting" were to modify "inside the circle" that would not eliminate the fact that a circle must be draw at the time of the casting as specified elsewhere.

47

Never mind. :slight_smile:

48

Places where a Pace is strangely defined as a "yard". This is obviously an error that crept in innocently in an older edition that needs to be corrected.

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49

Hi,

Either Winter's Icy Grip (and similar spells) need to have requisites, Curse of the Desert needs to lose its requisites, or this post needs to move to a thread about clarifying rules.

Anyway,

Ken

3 Likes
50

Losing your body heat can happen in seconds, in the right circumstances - think of jumping in ice cold water. Being dehydrated within a few seconds isn't possible without also burning to a crisp. Thus, perdo aquam just isn't enough on its own for curse of the desert to work without a corpus requisite because you need to literally target the water inside the body, whereas chilling the surface temperature of the skin is enough.

1 Like
51

Hi,

I don't think any of this is relevant to Hermetic Magic.

Winter's Icy Grip is targeting the heat in the victim's body, but that's Corpus as surely as the victim's blood is Corpus. Alternatively (or additionally), Hermetic Magic targets things the magus can see, and the thing being seen here, ie, the victim, is Corpus.

Real world physics about dehydration do not necessarily exist in Mythic Europe. Less importantly, your analysis cannot be correct because it cannot be based on any actual data about what happens when the water in a human body suddenly disappears, as if by magic, because this experiment cannot be run, for obvious reasons. I'm not at all sure that your assertion is correct, and I expect that Ars Magica game rules do not require players to have sufficient background in physics to figure this out, one way or the other.

Anyway,

Ken

1 Like
52

Data is irrelevant here. A basic understanding of body heat and dehydratation don't require knowledge of modern physics. This isn't about thermodynamics. If you think anyone in mythic europe believes instant dehydratation is an effect that can occur in nature, I don't know what to tell you.

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