Game: Media Trope Deconstruction, Ars Magica Style

Games Discussion Ars Magica
1

For the uninitiated, allow me to explain.

When referring to media, a trope is similar in meaning to the word "cliche," though it has a neutral tone, compared to the nearly always negative tone of the term "cliche." (So you wouldn't insult a scene or concept by calling it a trope, but you usually would by calling it cliched.) Basically, they're things that you'll see and recognize as repeating across media.

A trope deconstruction, meanwhile, is a piece of media that criticizes the unrealistic and usually far-too-ideal portrayal of certain tropes by showing it in a more realistic and usually much darker light. For example, if the popular works of the day mostly show the hero who never gave up winning and getting everything he wants without losing anything (think early Disney films), a movie attempting to deconstruct that trope would have an equally determined character's never-give-up attitude work against him, as he fights for what he believes in without backing down even when it would be smart, and he and everyone he cares about are much worse off than before (or even dead) for the fact. This is often done just to criticize the overshooting idealism of the initial works, though it's often also done because the writer genuinely believes the counter-message (for the above example, "just being determined to succeed doesn't always mean you will succeed").

So, let's play a game. Think of all the unrealistically handled tropes that happen in medieval-styled high-fantasy stories, and then think of how you can deconstruct them in an Ars Magica game. The more unrealistic the trope and the more realistic (not just dark, because more darkness does not translate to more realism, though darkness is juicy too) your re-interpretation of how that trope would play out, the better you do!

I'll start. There are a whole bunch of stories involving people who grew up as commoners finding out that they're actually royalty, and after doing some magical thing that can only be done by a true heir to the throne, they become king, and thanks to the compassion they learned from growing up as commoners, they become everybody's favorite king. If this were to happen in a realistic Ars Magica game, nearly any commoner who found themselves in that position would have no idea how to rule or manage the political climate, and would immediately want to take advantage of all the luxuries they didn't have before for personal pleasure, rather than using their funds and luxuries to help improve the standard of living for the poor. This would cause difficulties throughout the kingdom for about a month before one of the dissatisfied noble shmucks got their favored royal replacement set up, and then said king would be summarily assassinated, and the legend would be handed down for generations as an example of why it's better for everybody if the nobility and royalty are kept above and away from the taint of common people.

Okay, you guys' turn! Give it your best! If you need help thinking of tropes to deconstruct, there's a website with a whole catalogue of tropes as well as in-depth explanations of each an every one of them called tvtropes dot com. Let the games begin!

2

Most high fantasy tropes based on medieval myth are sort of baked into the Ars Magica setting such that instances of the tropes, including the examples you cite, move from "unrealistic" to at the minimum "unlikely in most cases but totally happen sometimes."

As I read the books, Ars Magica does not take the position that the Arthurian Legend (which, by the way, is your "commoner to king" example) or Beowulf are pastiches of several major regional European kings with mythical stuff added as time went by; the acceptance of medieval myth means that, for the setting, those stories occurred more or less as written.

Arthur was a commoner, magically gained kingship, and ruled in a way that all British kings should emulate. Happened at least once.

One man can defeat a dragon. Beowulf more or less did it (had a little help, died shortly afterwards); St. George totally did it.

Furthermore, the existence of the Dominion and the miracle and True Faith rules of RoP:D essentially say that tropes based in medieval Christian, Jewish, or Muslim belief are going to be true when God wants them to be, and while not "always" it will be a bunch more times than "never."

Where I find I get the most mileage out of "Ars Magica vs. generic fantasy" is in the medieval-ness of the setting, not trying to blow apart the foundational tropes.

3

... and that's why I don't do Let's Play a Game on forums much.

For my part, my interest in tropology tends to be in where real world concerns and conflicts meet mythic matters, and I have a leaning toward Boring But Practical.

So, yes, one man can defeat a dragon. It might take fifty dead men before that's done, and the dragon may still be lairing when the magi wander by. The magi may well want the dragon defeated, protected, killed and carefully dissected for parts and ingredients, or may want to talk to it. They might want Knight A to kill the dragon, or Saint B, or for a thief to steal a particular item from the treasure, for esoteric or more practical reasons. The dragon could be their enemy, patron, vis source, or ward. It could be malevolent or benevolent. Meanwhile, the local villages lose a cow a month and sometimes the thing burns a village/r in a fit of whimsy, and about once in a while some fool knight prods the beast into lashing out, which it does by eating the knight and then a few villagers. There's a reason Ars Magica has been called the Dragonslayer RPG.

Let's say the great hero does wander along and slay the dragon. There are consequences: the dragon's hoard is plundered by whom? Was the dragon lairing here for a reason? What happens to the hero? Does he become famous for this, or is the credit given to the local lord or king, once the highly bribeable media (minstrels) sing of King Rex, Dragonslayer? Is the treasure cursed, as they sometimes are? Was the dragon performing a guard function, as they often do? Of what? A gate to Hell? A regio? How will the local covenants react? Will they rush to secure valuable magic items from the hoard plunderer?

4

Unless God is having an off day, the usual fantasy levels of idealism simply won't happen, because while all the myths are "true" (more on that in a moment), also true is the fact that even mythicized medieval life is highly political and never rainbows and sunshine. And those are legendary for a reason; expecting things to go the same a second time is not very paragon.

Aside from that, well, for your example legends... I see it as more ambiguous. Sure, the legends probably happened as written... Or at least, as observers would have written, since things can happen differently behind the scenes than they appear. All the attention due to his ascension would make being Arthur a rather vitality-heavy role, and plenty of Magic beings can look human, while dragon-fighting stats wouldn't be outside of such a being's range to get...

Anyway, I might be misremembering, but wasn't Arthur himself a squire? It's not exactly prestigious, but I don't think he was a commoner.

@TimOB: See, that's actually some great discussion. In a game like Ars Magica, a knight who gets lucky and slays a dragon will be met by so much fallout regarding the dragon's other functions (and, y'know, carrying any of the dragon hoard) that he probably doesn't just go home rich. He might be awarded land, but even after a feat like that there'd be too much political risk in marrying a low knight into the royal family. Heck, given how stuff works back there, most important peoples' praise would be directed at the knight's liege rather than him, and for all he knows he might have made some other supernatural entities either mad at him or way more interested in him than a man wants said entities to be.

Ripe for more stories, which is a positive, but certainly not what most fantasy would have you believe happens.

5

It's pretty weird to discuss the father of a legend: but Monmouth's Arthur (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historia_Regum_Britanniae) is the son of King Uther Pendragon.

Given that Hermetic magi are a version of a 20th century fantasy trope, I myself find it fun to have them handle older tropes (mostly medieval ones). The ArM5 construct most likely to recreate legends encountered among medieval people and/or written up by medieval authors is the faeries - but sometimes it is more fun to have magi be the perpetrators.

Cheers

6

Ars Magica shares a lot with the motifs of Game of Thrones: we all know the story, what Ars Magica (and GoT) delves into is 'what happens next?'

And by and large, it encourages a degree of 'realism' in the processing of that outcome, even when that 'realism' is being prodded by a very annoying faerie. In fact, it probably is given that we're talking tropes.

The ones I have the most fun with are tropes involving evil wizards setting up dominion over some lands and the knight/squire of the neighbouring lands riding out to deal with this. Mainly because in almost all circumstances the 'evil wizards' are the PCs, and the knights/squires are some saps being manipulated by mundane political enemies of the magi.

Which leads to the fun story of : how do you make a party of adventurers leave in a way that doesn't result in more people coming looking?

7

You can try scaring other potential lookers by brutalizing the "visitors" and hanging their bodies just outside wherever they came from. Other than that kind of approach, there's really no other way if your plans involve taking obvious action, which they probably do if you're now the "evil overlord wizard." Or, I suppose, just see if you can't hire them. If they made it any of the way past your defenses, they're clearly pretty competent.

8

One thing I'v always found interesting about Ars Magica is that the "Medieval Paradigm" is very different from your bog standard DnD setting. So many of Tropes standard to a Pseudo Medieval world like Oerth or Faerun would be completely foreign to a native of Mythic Europe. Things like..

A well accepted and even catered to social class of of "Wandering Adventurers" running around acting as what amounts to freelance trouble shooters, exterminators/assassins and treasure hunters.

Non human races living side by side with humans and each other.

Remarkably egalitarian society almost devoid of sexism or racism unless your talking how elves don't like dwarves and vice versa or nobody like orcs.

Numerous underground treasure troves teaming with ridiculous amounts of golds and jewels. Guarded by an often improbable ecology of magical creatures.

"Religions" mostly devoid of any real spirituality or faith operating more like social clubs and walk in clinics than places of holy worship.

The fact that what an average midlevel Dnd Wizard considers walking around money would support a whole Hermetic covenant for Decades in Mythic Europe. (and probably crash the local economy)

So a good way to deconstruct some of those more standard "Fantasy" Tropes would be to expose Ars Magica character's to them and just let them react to it.

One of those Sagas "I've always wanted to do" is transport a group of Magi to a world that follows a more standard Psuedo Medival Paradigm and let them go wild.

Just imagine a group of Magi and companions walking into a village the local constable (an armored halfling woman) aproaches them. "Well met Adventurers. So good to see your sort around here. Perhapes you could help us. A tribe of lizard men have taken up residence in the local elf ruins and have been preying on our outlying farms. Could you maybe, you know, (draws go get rid of them. We are a poor village so I can't offer more then a few healing potions each and this sack of 200 g.p. but tis rumard the ruins hold a vast treasure"

9

Or, of course, a party of adventurers dumped into 1220 France.

"Ho there, Priest of Jesus, I require healing."

"Ah, your wounds are very serious. I shall send for Brother Matthias, our barber-surgeon."

(A little later) "WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH THAT RUSTY NEEDLE?"

"We shall pray for you."

10

To be fair, as bad as medicine and chirurgy were back in the day, in Ars Magica medical science works exactly as they think, so the rust on the needle probably wouldn't cause any actual problems besides increased pain.

But yeah, for some reason most priests in Ars Magica don't actually have any Divine Abilities... I suppose that'd be another difference. I mean, Clerics are downright mighty in most high fantasy settings, but in Ars Magica their greatest form of power is usually politics.

Though part of the reason this game is difficult is that Ars Magica can easily vary between low and high fantasy without breaking canon. You'd only be met with maybe a raised eyebrow or two if you decided to run your game with every single church official being well-trained in supernatural talents... Though I guess you'd get rather a lot more contention if you were to also have the clergy in your game be the types to drop their ecclesiastical obligations to actually adventure with a group of wandering warriors.

Actually, yeah, this was brought up already with the adventuring thing, but taking it the next step, people would be shocked at how light adventurers travel and how far they go despite lacking obligation to do so. Aside from pilgrims, most people in ME don't really travel unless they absolutely have to (vassals with feudal obligations, people for whom travel is a part of their job such as merchants and messengers, etc.), and usually they travel in large groups, both for safety and to transport more supplies during their travel. Most people would find adventurers crazy, because while "traveling around helping people" sounds noble today, it would sound stupid and pointless and financially unsustainable to the majority of people in Mythic Europe.

(Plus, EVERYBODY would wonder at their social class. Are they escaped peasants? Or maybe they're freedmen who are using weapons beyond their status. If they are of status, then they're not living to an acceptably noble standard! Agh!)

11

Sure, the rusty needle is of limited actual concern, but an average D&D setting has 20th/21st Century assumptions about hygiene.

And, there actually are holy people who can heal with a touch and a prayer in Mythic Europe, but the social institution of organized healing clinic clerics is absent.

There are, actually, bands of roving adventurers who kill for money in Mythic Europe, too: mercenaries. Given the fantasy component, there really being dragons and giants and so on, that's where Adventuring Heroes would be filed - socially marginal cutthroats.

Actually, that would be fun for a mage and his companions to run across - a band consisting of an armed killer with the best armor legally allowable; his friend, a skilled and compulsive thief; an outlaw and former huntsman; a minor hedge wizard with some nasty tricks up his sleeve; and a debauched friar who seems to be able to work miracles through prayer. They've been hired to rid the local area of a powerful wizard who has terrorized the region ... you.

12

Hi,

Isn't Mythic Europe, and AM by extension, simply "Europe in which medieval tropes are true?"

(Or even, the way I see it, Europe in which a selection of 20th (now 21st) century tropes about medieval Europe are true.)

For all that I find AM5 to be incredibly well-researched, I see a lot more historiography than history at work here.

As for gaming (rather than medieval) tropes, my favorites go the other way: What if various gaming tropes really worked in the real world? Like, most of us have pretty close to 0xp, what with not having adventured and killed stuff. And then there's the guy who gets all the xp for Hiroshima, and after the war starts noticing all these cool new abilities from leveling... Since we're firmly in old school gaming, where each gp of value plundered equals 1xp, the struggles among Putin and various oligarchs must truly have been epic...

Anyway,

Ken

13

There are one point between, for example: there were black people, the learned people knowed than the Earth was spherical, the people drank water and they took baths, the prima nocte thing wasn't real and so on... with the exception than if your story needs other thing.

14

A thousand years from now, the people of Mythic 21st Century won't be drinking water either, due to pollution. Everyone drinks cola and energy drinks. (The most notable feature of the Enlightenment was the slow reduction of alcohol content in beers and ales, until the beginning of the M21C leaves only trace amounts in Budweiser energy drinks.)

15

It's more amusing if the hedge wizard has somehow stumbled on some magic item with daily charges. Ball of Abyssmal Flame? Sure, but only twice a day...

16

Apologies for the threadomancy, but it occurs to me reading Lands of the Nile that adventuring tropes do have their place in Ars - robbing tombs in Egypt, as there are books detailing how to defeat traps and deal with tomb curses.

Sadly for those north of the Mediterranean, those who would pillage and engage in violence for a living are best off being mercenary soldiers. There are livings to be made in many areas though.