Ars Magica has always been a game that said "this is about playing fantasy roleplaying in a European setting where what the people in the middle ages believed to be true, is true. Thus, no attempt was made to create "balance". Wizards were terrifying, powerful and enigmatic figures who could craft epic talismans, turn back the tide, fly in the sky, Similarly, dragons and faeries weren't placed in arbitrary categories for "balance, but to accord with the premise - this is what medieval people believed. Over the years, this "mission statement" for Ars was more or less achieved. Hermetic magic is complete fantasy (thus the fantasy roleplaying element), while supplements like The Mysteries added a more realistic, historical kind of magic for magi.
As Realms of Power The Divine states, the Divine isn't meant to be forced onto your sagas. Its a tool kit. The Divine could make almost no appearance in your saga and you would still be playing Ars Magica correctly. But if you do want to include angels and demons, then they accord as accurately as possible to the "source material" (medieval beliefs and legends).
Adding Nephilim or Holy Magi doesn't "unbalance" the game. It simply means your players want to play a game with a Divine focus. The powers of the Divine come with some pretty large "restrictions". You cannot sin, or you lose your powers. You must be humble, pious, truthful, charitable, honest, etc. You have to re-learn all your spells and Magic Theory. You risk a Hubris tragedy if you fail any roll using your powers. You could lose your True Faith or holy powers without warning as a Test of Faith.
Vanilla magi get to level mountains, change the course of rivers, build flying castles and move the hearts of nations - with no restrictions on their behaviour. They can do what they want. They don' need to go on pilgrimages. They can be arrogant, self-aggrandising, lying and selfish. Their powers are unlikely to vanish if they do something "unHermetic".
That's hardly "unbalanced". And if it is, it's because it accords well with the source material.
Roman pagans did, sure --- and that sort of thing was inherited by Christianity. But I don't think the same was true of odin/wodin type pagans, or at least not to the same extent.
While odin/wodin pagans believed in their gods, it doesn't seem to be quite the same thing that Christianity means by belief. It's difficult to explain how pagans could convert from paganism to Christianity if they already had a religion in the same sense that Christianity was offering.
Why does people convert from christanity to islam, or the other way? And any other combination...
Do you mean to say that today is so radically different?
Thats just silly. Not identical doesnt mean less strongly.
Richard, I'm afraid you're just projecting modern attitudes onto a completely different culture. There is plenty of evidence that many pagans (Norse, etc, invaders of England and France) held deep beliefs and faith in their gods. The conversions that took place were done in similar ways that Mediterranean pagans were converted and occurred over a few generations, as well as the conversion of key leaders. The "pagans" of today (Wiccans and so on) bear no relation to those of the middle ages.
No, the thing that I want to be very careful to not do is to project Christian ideas of "what a religion is" onto a different culture. Which seems to be what you are doing.
No argument there.
Individuals convert from Christianity to Islam, and vice versa, but it doesn't seem like you get the entire religion converting.
Certainly, there are exceptional individuals and even communities that have converted...but there has been hundreds of centuries of contact between Islam and Christianity --- why have the Christians not all converted to Islam, or vice versa?
When Islam invaded the Levant, many Christians converted because it didn't make a difference to them. Based on what I read, the dhimma was easy on the people of the Book.
I don't think christianity was stronger than paganism, it is more likely that pagan were persecuted in a very "join or die" way.
You (and others) seem to be implying that Christian faith was different somehow to the faith of pagans in the middle ages and earlier. This is just not the case. In any case, in Western Europe (Britain, France, Iberia, Germany, Italy, Greece, etc) there are no pagans left in the 13th century. In Mythic Europe at this time, the only pagans are a few Hermetic wizards and supernatural beings.
In early Christianity, very few people were persecuted. Most pagans converted of their own free will. In fact, for many centuries, it was the Christians that were persecuted (up until the 6th or 7th century in Paris for example). This is not to say that heretics, Jews and Muslims weren't persecuted in later times (or in the Baltic areas), but by that stage there were no pagans left in Western Europe.
Uh? So what, you didnt get everyone converting to christianity either, where ever did you get that delusion from?
As i said earlier, just talking about Sweden, priests were still trying to convert "pagans", mostly up north but not just, by at least the 18th century, and the Sami were never truly converted. And the first converts happened almost a millenia earlier.
And, as was the norm, the large conversions happened because leaders converted, like hundreds of years later between catholics and protestants.
Except you ARE doing it.
Later on, yes.
Change "no" to "very few" and you´re likely far more correct. Just as isolation of the north here made conversion far slower, it slowed it down in other parts as well.