Getting rid of 4th Edition stuff

It might be the White Wolf novels from the Mage the Ascenssion storyline.

No, it was a spy thriller and the one character actually grew up there and remembered it as a tourist trap. The outside of it, the inside was sacred.
Never read any of those novels.

monkeyvrobot.livejournal.com/102870.html

Doi Suthep. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doi_Suthep

That's the one :smiley:

Three things I miss greatly:
1 Doissetep. Back in the day (been playing since 3rd) we had many adventures in Doissetep. It's a shame they had to get rid of it.
2 Fairy. Admit it, they neutered fairies in 5th edition. 3rd and 4th had way cooler fairies than 5th. Fairy in 5th has way too much mechanics and hardly any story or fluff behind it.
3 The World of Darkness. I liked the dark atmosphere of the World of Darkness, and miss it in 5th, which is a little too fluffy-bunny for me.
4 More emphasis on story and less emphasis on mechanics.

And since 4th edition still exists, you can still have those things. Change is good, it draws in new players and new ideas.
For example, I'd probably not have played 4th edition, having looked at it. It doesn't appeal to me the way 5th edition does.

Also, that's 4 things.

This is the thing I don't get when people complain about edition change. Yes, it's irritating that there won't be any more expansions you can use out of the box, but it's not like they made you burn all your old books and get rid of them. It's not like the balance changes to a video game.

Sorry, I did what now?

You're new, and you're entitled to your view, but if you really want to tell me that I neutered Faerie, you'll pardon me, I hope, if I ask for specifics. 8)

(Hi! The authors post here a lot more often than sites for other games. You're welcome to your view, but this isn't the Space Marine forum. If you say someone's work sucks, they are likely to read that within the next day or so.)

I myself do not fancy much faeries in 5th edition, but because the chosen approach to them does not fit my personal preferences (those would be along the lines of having 3 realms only, in fact). I think the line took a decision and did stick to it throughout the rest of the products. It is consistent and believable inside the gameworld, even if does not fit well the idea you have. it does not fit well with mine, after all :slight_smile:

Xavi

To be fair, he then wrote this:

Most avid Ars fans hated the tie in between Ars Magic and WoD. Ars Magica 3rd edition was with White Wolf, but 4th edition wasn't. Any appearance that it may have held to the WoD in 4th edition was purely accidental.

I view mechanics as a solid foundation for building interesting stories. Yeah, Ars is crunchy. As an SG, I like being forced to play by the same rules to create challenges for the players, instead of making stuff up without that solid foundation so I can create a challenge for the players. I will sometimes make stuff up if my main obstacle for a story is too easily overcome, but only if I think I can reverse engineer the obstacle into something that fits within the framework of the rules.

I think Ars is too mechanics-heavy as well. The introductions of dozens of subsistems detracts from the game for me and my troupe. in fact we play in Mythic Europe because we like the setting, but the rules would prevent us from entering the fan base if we were starting now: we would chose another game instead.

I'm divided on faerie. I find the mechanics very intriguing, and like them, I'm just not sure Faerie was a good choice of where to use them. I could see it as being described as neutered because it robs faeries of any sense of independent existence. They only exist to act out stories that people tell. To me part of the problem is that Ars Magica became dedicated to the idea of 4 realms and has tried to cram too much into a given realm while also maintaining the distinctions between them, while also trying too hard to maintain the 'everything has a theological explanation' aspect. Which is why you have the Muspeili following magical frost giants against the faerie Aesir. If you want to follow the idea of multiple generations of gods belonging to different realms, you frankly need more realms. After all you have dragons (Tiamat of Sumerian Myth) being slayed by Titans (Sumerian Gods overtaken by future generations of deities) being slayed by Gods (Roman era) which then fell to men (Follow the cycles of Irish lore, the Tuatha De Dannan fell to the Milesian) who embraced Christianity. And of course all of these had their infernal aspects, from the demon God Yam of the dark sweet waters in Sumerian myth (also called Enlil) to Loki of the Norse, to Lucifer in Christianity.

Although I have some sympathy with this, and yes, in one of my games there was a realm before Magic (the Primordial), and a realm after Faerie (the Emergent or "Strange" realm), in Ars the idea is that the you can get away with three.

The truly primordial spirits were magic. These were replaced in a cataclysm by the faeries. These were replaced by revealed monotheistic religion (which had always kind of been there in the background). So, the war in which the Tuatha de Danu defeat the Formorians is actually the same war in which the Greek gods defeat the Titans, just described in a different way.

I like the 5E take on Faerie even though I do find some aspects of it to be confusing or counter-intuitive. For me, Magic was always the odd-realm out since it's hard to really define what, if anything, it does. I get that we need it because the game is, ostensibly, about magicians, but I personally find it difficult to design a magic creature without wondering if it mightn't work better as faerie of some kind...

Many would argue that the Tuatha de Dannan are different from faeries. Some of those people still worship the Tuatha de Dannan. The idea of the Fomorians being the same as the Frost giants being the same as the titans is one I certainly agree with- historically speaking I would even throw the Nephelim/Grigori into that category (unless you want to consider the Grigori the same heneration as Tiamat and Apsu- a pair that doesn't find their way into mythologies after the Sumerian/Babylonian, and the idea of eating the children gets transferred to later generations (though Chronos does have a father listed the children eating does get pushed down a generation)
The other problem is that the platonic ideals associated with the magic realm were those of the Geni- Genies in the middle east, Genus in the west (as in Geni loci) which associated with the later generation of Gods instead of the titans/frost giants, etc, which were more primordial and associated with forces of nature, where the fringes of civilization and wilderness and faerie tend to be associated with each other, which means that from that perspective the fomor/frost giants etc should be faerie and the more modern deities magic, or as I suggested before, we really need more types of auras, and perhaps some rules as to how one aura might give rise to another, or possibly shift in signifigance (it seems to me that the aura of a nearly forgotten deity should be different from one who is actively worshiped...) but this would be getting into a major overhaul for 6th edition...

See? The division does not work very well unless you oversimplify it. I just threw them all in the same realm (Legend realm). Some legend creatures care about humans, some do not and everybody is happy with it. No big issues, really. A triad of realms works pretty well and avois a lot of headaches about these details. :slight_smile:

To expand upon my previous post, I think it would be prudent to note that one of the main reasons I voted for Varkos on CJ's Grimgroths nomination thread was that I appreciated the conceit that he is, in many ways, a magic dragon that is attempting to behave like a faerie dragon...

The best way to decide if a creature is magic or faerie is pretty simple in 5e.

"Does this being give an owl's hoot in a tin can about humans*? If yes, it's faerie. If no, it's magic."

  • this doesn't mean it has to like humans.

The 4 realms are as follows:

The faerie is curious about humanity. They interest it.
The infernal is jealous of humanity. They annoy it.
The divine is caring of humanity. They belong to it.
The magical is unconcerned with humanity. They aren't important to it.

A wild beast attacks humans across the forests of Wales. he can do that because he gets stuff from them (fear) and is a faerie junkie or he can simply be a magic beast that is hunti9ng down the damned beings that he has determined that are destroying his home and has decided to get rid of them. The librarian dragon from the rulebook could be made into a faerie, and he is magic. The division is not clear cut IMO and has caused more problems that dumping them all together and determining that the official ArM5 definition of faerie/magic is an intellectual debate inside house Merinita.

Xavi

It is all Faerie. Everything from all four realms and the mundane as well. The focus of everything, the cause and direction of observation, is to tell stories. Every bit and parcel is equally fictional, and each is but a part of a story telling mechanism.

Yes, in setting telling the 2 apart is difficult. For an SG, however, the distinction should be clear. If you don't know WHY the beastie is attacking people, DON'T BRING IT INTO THE STORY YET. If you don't know, how the heck do you expect players to solve the mystery?