Here are the style guide and template I used for Fifth Edition. They may be useful for people producing material under the Open License, and @Timothy_Ferguson asked for them. Some parts are no longer applicable, but people might well be interested in the peek behind the curtain.
These are licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, like the rest of ArM5, so that you can use information in them without worrying or needing to add an extra credit line. However, if you change them and distribute them, do not forget the license requirement to describe your changes, so that people know you are not distributing the guidelines used for ArM5.
These files are PDFs, because of limits on what I can upload here. Atlas should be putting editable versions on the license page soon.
I have a question about the content of page 5 of "ArM5 Style Guide for Reference", the section named "Mythic Companions and Hedge Magic Traditions".
Does it mean that opening the arts of an hermetic apprentice can be seen as generating 25 points of Virtues (3 for each Technique and 1 for each Form)?
I did not see in the sourcebook the implementation of "Hedge magic traditions should be built up of a set of Virtues". Is it because these guidelines were not practical enough?
This section might be one of those that you mentioned as "Some parts are no longer applicable".
Keep in mind that the document is not rules for players, but guidelines for writers of official books.
If Hermetic Magic could be learned by intiations (which it currently can't be), you would have each Technique represented by a Major virtue, and each Form represented by a Minor virtue.
Opening the Gift gives you access to all the Techniques and Forms without needing any virtues.
For many Hedge traditions you can either have your Gift opened to them and thereby get access to all their favored Arts and Abilities, or learn the magics piecemeal by needing a separate virtue for each Art of Ability - and this is how you must learn it if unGifted.
Some traditions, like Learned Magicians or Folk Witches, have a bunch of virtues defined for them. Other, like the Viktir or Hermetic Magi, are Gifted-only and so there is no need to define separate virtues for their powers.
In principal an unGifted person could initiate as a craftsmen with touched by (realm) or as an artist Hermetic inclination in (form), these work differently than normal hermetic casting but they do provide a form of access to forms.
Not really. As @ErikT said, these are not player-facing notes. They were to help writers understand how I was thinking about various issues, so that the suggestions they came up with were more likely to pass muster. The actual rules are the ones that got published in supplements.
I don't know if anyone else has this issue, but somehow the template doesn't seem to mesh to happily with my version of Open Office (4.1.15). Has anyone reported issues either generating a table of content or with the application of the template format in general?
They aren't set up to generate tables of contents, because that was done in separate software — and each chapter had its own file at submission. If you modify the styles and add an Outline Level on the Outline & List tab, that will, I think, make it possible.
The styles are set for ease of use during composition, and were changed for publication. The reason why authors had to use these styles was that it made it easy for whoever was doing layout to apply the layout templates, not because the final product was supposed to look like that.
Also, the template was made with LibreOffice, and last edited more than five years ago, so it might well not be entirely compatible with OpenOffice, or, indeed, more recent versions of LibreOffice. (I can open it in LibreOffice 24.8.3.2, but I haven't been working in it.)
I am curious: why were the Mights lowered? It seems we had a scale of 75 as the top terrestrial Might, in things like the core book's dragon and the Black Fir in the Rhine Tribunal. This was basically dropped to 50, in accordance with the posted Style Guide, with only a few "earth-shakingly important figures" breaching that. Frankly, I think the old scale worked better, and I'm curious why the change was made.
The dragon (Stellatus) in the core book has Magic Might 50.
The King Fir of the Black Mountain in the Rhine Tribunal has Faerie Might 90, making him a very powerful being indeed. But being the spirit of the largest forest remaining in Mythic Europe one would expect him to be powerful.
Faeries have a slightly different power scale than magical beings, probably because they have no real counterpart to daimons.
It's better to write something with a lower pool and more cleverly designed powers than to just give your monster a huge battery and devastating powers. Things tend, at the upper level, to blur into omnipotence.
Hmm, I think that authors (and GMs) shouldn't be kept to strict guidelines in regards to designing NPCs/monsters. In particular, it's quite fine to design a monster with high Might and give it not-quite-so-Mighty powers, if that works for that monster. Errg, I mean Creature.
The Might determines Magic Resistance more than anything else. Plus the size of the magazine for its magical powers, and Penetration, but that too can be tweaked as desired.
I personally find tying so much of the design into one stat a bit pointless, and that creature MR is too low at the high levels. But YMMV, and apparently the playtesters' mileage did.
