There's also an entire book of Covenants, Through the Aegis.
We do however need the mini-saga.
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I'm not sure that "buy more books to get the tools you need to figure out whether this game is for you" is all that welcoming. But I agree that a mini-saga (which would come with a fairly detailed player covenant and at least some notes on neighbouring ones, I imagine) is the more pressing issue.
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There was also Semita Errabunda on the website, which at least gave an idea of what a covenant looked like under the core rules.
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I have played ArM with players completely new to roleplaying, and was one of my more successful campaigns ever and it folded for out-of-game reasons.
Starting your very first roleplaying game as SG in Ars Magica is a different matter of course, but then few players start roleplaying as game master in any game, so I do not think this is a big problem.
Could it be mended? That would certainly require some kind of simplified introduction, without the covenant as a character, without troupe style, without long-term thinking.
I wouldn't count Semita Errabunda as published, since it is all of three printed pages and not very useful for information. To a lesser extent that applies to the Covenants found in Through the Aegis. Compare them to the whole books that previous editions provided for a single example Covenant.
Having some Covenants that new players could use both as examples and something they could just start playing with instantly would be helpful. The less work required by them the better. Even better if it has several spells and enchanted items made for it, since that would give them examples for their own creations.
Really just things that reduce the extremely high entry difficulty are what is needed. I just felt that prepped Covenants would be the easiest way to do that but anything helps.
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I never liked the long-prose covenant descriptions of 3ed. The signal-to-noise (information-to-words) ration is just too low.
It would be very useful, though, to have a mini-saga with a detailed covenant. We don't need many pages of prose. Most of it would be reference material, such as library and treasury which can be references when needed and ignored until the end of the first chapter. More importantly, I would like to see a map of the covenant, and NPCs (with personality and motivation). It could be quite thick a book, but two companion booklets would be easier to use.
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Huh??? What??? I have the pdf. It's 42 pages. That's not even vaguely in the ballpark of 3 pages. Several characters are 3 pages apiece.
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I first was Ars Magica when 2nd ed was the newest edition. I was mesmerized y it, but sadly never got round to actually finding a group to play with until 4th ed was well underway, skipping 3rd ed completely.
But a force in 2nd ed was the chapter "The Mistridge Saga" - 12 pages describing the covenant, the locale and a rival covenant. Quick and easy to set up a game.
There was also the "Create your own covenant" with quick and easy rules to generate a startup. It was geared towards a spring covenant though, byt that's a good start and also popular.,
Of course, the number and complexity of quantified stats back then was lower than now - especially the "one stat per Art/Ability" concept of libraries made things easier.
But a short chapter about setting up a saga might eb a good idea, as to not make it sound too complex.
To play Ars Magica in Mythic Europe you really only need two things:
*For the "Europe" part, choose a place, so you can use the names of towns and geographical features, in order for it to feel authentic. Plus a little about weather, terrain, names and whatever you know or believe to be true about medieval life.
*For the "Mythic" part, define places of supernatural power, decide on the mythic beasts, legends etc. which you know or believe to be relevant for that place and time.
If and when you want, you can go into more precise detial about actual locales, history, prominent figures, actual local legends etc.
If you feel you need a PhD in medieval history and folklore, most people back off. It's bad enough you have to do math!
Personally, I love it all. Now and for a long time. But at the age of 13, with a book in a foreign language, much more complex than D&D, ArM was more challenging. And the aforementioned quick help sections were helpful, so I didn't fint it too complex. But it was a hard sell to other players in order to find a group..
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That is probably harder in 2024 than it was in 1994. I would rely on what I found in regular encyclopedia and in school books, and never consider even looking at the material a doctoral student would have to read. Now the Internet has made all that information available at the fingertips, and one may easily be tempted into reading it or expecting other players to read it, forgetting that the main difference between a player and a PhD is not the available information but the skill to interpret it.
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The math is easier now that everyone has a calculator app in their pocket.
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And the research is easier now everyone has access to wikipedia.
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I know its probably too early in the open license discussion, but it would be nice to know what is Atlas Games' position on using covers for pdfs that are similar to official products.
Am probably just jumping ahead, but if people here want to put out products under the open licence, that's also something to consider.
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I agree with the posters talking about more "how to run the game" content. An example I remember that really informed my ideas of how to play / run a game, in a positive way, was this article in Dragon Magazine about Paranoia, written as a diegetic document about how to survive as a Troubleshooter (the games PCs, they find trouble and shoot it). This gave an idea of what sort of troubles / problems / scenarios you could find yourself in, as a GM you could picture it too.
Another positive example would be the Steve Jackson Games "How to be a GURPS GM" book, useful stuff that talks about running the notoriously complicated game without too much fuss, talks about stuff like full-character sheets vs. simple stat enemies, balancing encounters, etc.
My approach to running an Ars Magica game was to 1) read the majority of the line, digesting everything slowly 2) regularly return to reading them over years, making characters and tentative plans over and over and reading forum content and looking at online reactions and information, 3) Over a decade after first being introduced, actually run a game as the prime and only storyteller, lasting five real years or so. The long-term brain-soak approach worked great for me, but I'm not sure how well it scales to the larger community.
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Evil Hat published just such a book for their notoriously hard-to-grok game FATE, called the Book of Hanz. It’s a great model!
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The internet opens a bunch of options. A 5th ed revised edition can have one page devoted to pointing to a bunch of downloadable online content. Usable example covenants and characters, a few scenarios, etc. Some people will buy the PDF version, which makes this even better.
Page count in a rule book is important. You give a 500 page rule book to someone knew to TTRPGs, that will turn them away.
Having the core rule book with a few example magi, grogs, companions, covenants, etc, is important, but it is important it doesn't take up too much space.
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There's always the 2-tomes solution. That gets rid of the "boxed-set" overcost.
Also, if you cut it properly, you can have someone building a House/Virtue set while another one is leafing through sample characters to pick a direction. Then thay can swap, one complementing his magus with Virtues, while the other is finding a sample that matches her House.
Even with 4 Houses (Bonisagus, Tremere, Flambeau, Jerbiton) and a 6/6 limit with a core set of V/F you can create interesting stories. By blocking at 30 xp per year, you remove a few chapters whole cloth. Maybe you can even turn enchanted items into "a spell on a stick" and remove LR / familiar / apprentice for even more draconian cuts.
Later, you can enrich your picks from the full set. If your troupe buys the full Arm5D and the starter pack, you can have 3 players working at the same time.
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There absolutely needs to be a much better explanation on how to play the game. Anecdotally, the most common threads on RpG.net (at one point the largest TTrpg website forum) about ars magica were along the lines of "i just bought this game it looks amazing... but I have no idea how what an adventure should look lile let alone a full saga/campaign. "
A valid, in my opinion, criticism I've seen of the 5e core rulebook is that the target market of ars 5e was ars 4e players and no one else.
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I definitely think a well-thought-out starter set would be great, as would be some digital tools, but it might also be helpful to have some YouTube or podcast content discussing the game, how the rules work, and maybe an actual play. Personally, I find long-form actual plays to be of limited use but something more limited in scope, primarily designed to show the game in action, could be a good showcase.
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Ok, hear me out.
Isekai.
You play modern people learning to be medieval people
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And that is why I'll beat the drum again: Ars Magica already has books on adventures (Legends of Hermes, Tales of Mythic Europe), books on sagas and how to end them (Dies Irae, etc.), 'dungeoneering' books... but none of them do anything for new players and storytellers that want to play something of their own.
David mentioned in another thread that you cannot make a quick reference for experienced players and an introductory one for new ones alike, and while I agree with the general consensus that a 'Starter Set' would be quite welcome, that will not help the crowdfunding for ArM:DE, since they are different projects altogether.
What will help the crowdfunding is taking aproximately 20 to 50 pages of the book making sure anyone who has bought it can run an Ars Magica game without having to work out how to do it by themselves. If I'm either:
a) Someone who has a lot of experience running TTRPGs but I'm intimidated by the sheer amount of work ArM is to run, or
b) Someone who is relatively new to TTRPGs that gets enamoured by the system, the lore and the promise of the game as presented in the crowdfunding campaign, or
c) Someone who has run ArM in the past but doesn't want to jump in again without a clear way to jumpstart 'that saga I've been wanting to run'
Then putting that section into the book will only help drive up pledges and more people playing the game, creating a healthy cycle of new people coming, creating content, community, etcetera.
I will not claim to know more than people whose job is in the TTRPG industry, but to me this seems like something of a requirement if you want new people in on a very complex and overarching system as this is. 'How do I play this game? How do I narrate it?' are quite literally the first questions to answer.
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