New to the game, baffled by some things

Games Discussion Ars Magica
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Picked up the 5e rulebook before realizing that it's effectively free now. This post is too big because, well, there’s all sorts of things that I’m confused and / or frustrated about and I probably shouldn’t flood the category. I know this won't all get answered, it's more of a rant about how sketchy it all feels.

General Thoughts

The broadest question I have is this: What is it about Ars Magica as a ruleset that makes it useful for this sort of game? The setting, magic system and structures provided are all compelling, but I'm trying to resist the urge to plug it all into some other ruleset (probably Mythras, it's sorcery system is a good starting point) to make it less intensely 90s. Outside of the concept of botches and exploding "criticals" is there something special going on with the math?

Then there's the Aristotle thing. Really just the extent of "Medieval natural philosophy" in the game in general. I'm only aware of this conceit because I saw it pointed out outside of the rulebook. With that in mind, it's clearly something that the rulebook takes into account to some extent, what with the Theory of Forms impacting magic in a very real way (and those "forms" not always making sense with a modern understanding of science) and God presumably being the source of those forms. I'm surprised that the rulebook doesn't explicitly spell out this gimmick and lay some ground rules- because otherwise, god knows what the ground rules actually are. I'm no expert or even layperson on this sort of thing but I'm pretty sure that what Aristotle believed about the world was not identical to what Thomas Aquinas believed about the world, let alone other Western European scholars or better yet scholars in Asia or in the Islamic world. Do sourcebooks that tread beyond Mythic Europe, or even to particular regions in Mythic Europe, account for this sort of thing?

The Arts

An aside titled "The Elemental Forms" says the following:

However, affecting the aspects and properties of a thing might use the other Arts. Thus, making ice warm would require Creo Ignem. A Creo Aquam spell with an Ignem requisite could create warm ice — still solid, but warm.

Sorry, Creo Ignam to make ice warm? Wouldn't that rather be ReAq (if you don't care about the ice melting) or MuAq (if you don't want it to melt)? Saying "I'm creating heat to warm up the ice" rather than treating temperature as a property of the ice seems convoluted. Is this an example of the world running on old-school natural philosophy rules that I'm unaware of?

Also, Creo can only create substantial things, but Perdo is capable of destroying properties, am I understanding that right? The example of "destroying weight" is mentioned, I'm guessing this is literally making a person lighter rather than making them less fat or muscular, even to the point where they just float helplessly?

Parma Magica

On p.83 the concept of a "fast-cast defense against magic" is described. It sounds like this is meant to be a sort of counterspell. OK, but... why? Isn't this what the Parma Magica is for? Oh, wait, the Parma Magica isn't as revolutionary as it's first presented, because you can Rules Lawyer the hell out of it.

Want to kill a hermetic mage via magic? Just drop a boulder on their head, nothing magical about gravity (or the natural inclination of objects to settle at the same level as other substances of their "absolute weight")!

So, the book never really puts this together in one place, but if I had to guess, the revolutionary aspect of Parma Magica is less that it makes mages immune to one another, more that it prevents them from hating each other due to The Gift as a rule?

Dominion Auras

I can sort of put together what a "dominion aura" is, but after checking the Index it seems like this term isn't explicitly defined anywhere. It's just brought up like you should know. It sounds like pretty much any sufficiently civilized area emanates an aura that cancels out magic auras, if not magic itself?

Errata

Just moaning, really, but the last 5e pdf is from 2011. I can't complain about this too much considering that it's free, but I hope the Definitive Edition takes the huge pile of errata the game has accumulated into account? Are PDFs for Definitive Edition ever releasing? I'm a bit spoiled by games that have done a new printing every few years just to revise the text.

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The way they account for it is that Aristotle is (approximately) right everywhere, regardless of where you are. The book Art & Academe goes into a decent amount of detail about how things work.

First, of course, it depends on what you mean by "substantial"; Creo Imaginem or Creo Mentem work just fine even if the stuff they make is insubstatial. Creo Ignem is how you create heat or light.

Second Creo also can improve properties -- if you want to make a person stronger or more agile, for example, that's Creo Corpus.

There is often more than one way to achieve the same effect with different combinations of Arts.

"Dominion" and "Divine" are synonyms (well, outside one specialized use in the Realms of Power: the Divine book that isn't consistently followed elsewhere). For example, the (Realm) Lore ability for the Divine is Dominion Lore.

All four Realms (Magic, Faerie, Infernal, and Divine) and the associated Auras are discussed in Chapter Twelve: Realms.

Yes, it's in there. In fact, a lot of the errata was generated specifically as part of the Definitive Edition production process. Definitive Edition PDFs should come out around the same time as the printed book, which has just recently been sent to the printer.

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IIRC, the “Dominion” is more the earthly expression of the Divine Realm;

The Dominion Aura specifically comes from a Priest consecrating a new church, thereby “inviting the Divine” in. Thereafter the aura spreads as far as the sound of Church bells can carry it. The strenght of the aura is then determined by a variety of factors (presence of relics, divine creatures, historical signifigance to so or so faith, number of believers) but most important of which is the faith of the community. If the community is pious, the aura is maintained. If it is not, or actively turns their back on their old faith, the aura falters and another one can more easily subsume it.

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Hi, and welcome to the game :slight_smile:

Alternative Rule System

Well, I like to think of Ars Magica as a simulation-game. It is a simulation of the life of a wizard in a mythical version of medieval Europe.

A key part of that is the seasonal advancement aspect of the rules. You fret over which book to read, what to study next to invent that spell you want, whether to invest the season to improve your laboratory, how to get that great book, and so on.

Of course, the magic system itself, including the laboratory rules, are also really important here.

Another key aspect of the rules for me are the Virtues, and in particular those gained through being intiated into Mysteries. An odd corner of the rules/setting, but it's an imporatnt one for me. I love mysteries.

I'm sure you could port all of this to another system. But it's ... a lot. A lot to port over, and a lot of work. Are you sure you want to bother ?

I'm always thinking of porting Ars Magica over to a rules-light system, and actually simplifying it. But it's a LOT of work.

Aristotle

The book Art & Academe deals with the philosophy bits. Like all of Ars Magica, it is essentially free now - but I'm not aware of it having been uploaded already. Keep your eyes on project redcap's upload project:

Eventually it may get up there. If you want, I can upload a quick-and-dirty badly-formatted version quickly.

Warm Ice

Creating sometihng that has both the properties of ice and of warmth would be Creo Aquam (Ignem), yes. This would also be an unnatural thing, so it will only last while the duration does.

You should be thinking of Aristotelian properties here. Being cold is part of ice's essential nature, so you can just use CrAq to create the ice. Being warm is not, so you need to add the requisite.

Just like you can create a human body with Creo Corpus, but creating one with wings would also require Animal.

Note that Creo can also perfect things, not just create things. You can heal someone with Creo Cropus. You can also create heat, I guess bringing the thing closer to the perfect fire, with Creo Ignem, or reduce heat with Perdo Ignem. So Creo Ignem can heat-up already-existing ice. But it won't create an ice that is solid water yet warm. You can use Muto Aquam with an Ignem requisite, perhaps a Creo requisite too, to change already-existing ice to also have the property of being warm.

Parma Magica

Yeah, Parma is arguably more important for its social effects than for the magic resistance.

But don't sell the magic resistance thing short. It can be circumvented, but it's still often very effective.

Dominion auras

The Dominion aura is a Divine aura that stems from devotion. It is defined in the Realms chapter of the rulebook:

"The most obvious agent of the Divine in western Europe is the Church, and Divine auras, also called the “Dominion,” or “Dominion auras,” surround its buildings. The Church does not have a monopoly on Divine auras, as Jews and Muslims also live within a Dominion aura, which appears indistinguishable from that of the Church."

The book Realms of Power: The Divine expands on the core rulebook. It, again, has not yet been uploaded to project redcap's SRD.

Errata

Yes, the Definitive Edition includes all of the errata. You can find it (well, its draft version) online here:

I do like that you bought the game; if you like and use any supplements, please consider purchasing some more of the actual products, maybe as PDFs, to get a nice copy and to reward the publisher.

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  1. People dropping boulders on their heads is why wizards use fast-cast spells for defense.
  2. Parma Magica is for when you don’t know that there’s a boulder headed for your head. And if you can’t Resist the tossed boulder because your enemy was clever enough to use an Aimed spell, you’ll still get a Soak bonus from your Terram score.
  3. Yes, the Parma Magica negating the social penalty from the Gift is an important conceit of the game to explain why the Order of Hermes exists as a widespread organization where other Gifted traditions haven’t managed it.
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So then I guess I'm guetting this bit of the core rulebook's entry on Creo wrong:

"Things that exist independently are called “substances,” and include people, trees, and rocks, but do not include colors, weights, and sizes."

So Art & Academe includes a bit of Aristotlian natural philosophy for dummies? It seems like a big can of worms, given how alien the world becomes. Big enough that the core book's nonchalant treatment of it is kind of wild to me.

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You’re having a reading problem here. An illusion is created from the substance that your visual sense perceives (“visual species”). It’s just a substance that is insubstantial; “substance” ≠ “substantial.” A color is a property of a substance – of people, trees, rocks, and illusions. When a wizard is creating an illusion of a person he is not creating a color, he is creating an image that has colors as part of its properties. A color does not exist independently.

If you want to change the color or other property (e.g., weight) of a person, tree, rock, or illusion that falls under the Art of Muto. If you want to destroy the property that’s the Art of Perdo. If you want to intensity a property, that is also Creo.

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Ars Magica is NOT ‘adventuring wizards in medieval Europe”. If that’s what you want, there are games that do that quite well.

Ars Magica is about a chapter house of different wizards trying to live the life of an actual wizard. Study, research, making magic items, avoiding distractions, politicking with other wizards, going out in the world to get rare things for the work you are doing in the lab, dealing with the distractions you fail to avoid, etc.

There is no other game that does that. There are a few other games where you can have 4-6 PC wizards who are all very different, but there isn’t any other one where a reasonable campaign is spanning decades and the rules let you invent unique spells, enchant items, customize a familiar, train and apprentice, care about how educated you are, and all the rest that is the trope of a scholarly wizard. The stuff that other games say NPC wizards are doing all the time, but PC wizards don’t really do.

Yes, obviously, you go on adventures because you can’t actually do everything from your lab.. But you aren’t “an adventurer” first and a wizard second.

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This reads like a copy-pasted thing to throw at new players who don't understand what Ars Magica inherently is. Which I do.

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You asked why you couldn’t use some other rules system. There aren’t any other rules systems that do what I described.

The Mythras system is fairly flexible, but significantly less comprehensive than Ars Magica. If you like the Invocation & Shaping stuff better than Form & Technique with Spont/Formulaic/Ritual spells, you could spend the time to mix & match the two systems. Whether that would work out or be worth the effort is really going to depend on what you actually want to accomplish.

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You are correct here - but Aquinas used Aristotle as a base for a new Theology - and hence Cosmology - that became quite the canon at medieval universities in the 2nd half of the 13th century.

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Plato is also in the mix of Hermetic theory, I think.

I’m also new to the game, so I could be completely wrong, but for this bit:

Sorry, Creo Ignam to make ice warm? Wouldn't that rather be ReAq (if you don't care about the ice melting) or MuAq (if you don't want it to melt)? Saying "I'm creating heat to warm up the ice" rather than treating temperature as a property of the ice seems convoluted. Is this an example of the world running on old-school natural philosophy rules that I'm unaware of?

Yes, the world kind of runs on old-school natural philosophy. Well, temperature is still a property of the ice in one sense, but Ignem is the Hermetic Art that affects heat and temperature, so the typical Hermetic way to make something warmer would be with a Creo Ignem effect (and to make something colder you’d use Perdo Ignem).

But, as SEE posted, there are often different ways of doing a given thing with Hermetic magic. So, Creo Ignem, warm the ice so it melts. (Or Creo Ignem, start a fire on top of the ice, etc.) But alternatively, as you suggested, you could use Rego Aquam to change the ice straight into water without fuss, or Muto Aquam to make an unnatural form of water, e.g. room-temperature ice.

I think you could use Creo Auram to blast hot air at the ice, or at least room-temperature air. (Hot air might need an Ignem requisite, maybe depending on how hot it is? I’m fuzzy on requisites, but it seems like the book is too.) This would probably be less efficient than using Ignem or Aquam, but maybe you’re an Auram expert. If so, Creo Auram also lets you shoot lightning at the ice.

Other options (again, I could be misunderstanding things):

  • Creo Animal: Cover the ice in mice so they melt it with their body heat. (Use Rego Animal to make them stay in place, or just keep using Creo.)
  • Muto Animal (Ignem requisite): Fire-breathing mice!
  • Rego Corpus: Force a grog to sit on the ice so they melt it with their body heat.
  • Muto Corpus (Ignem requisite): Give a grog fiery breath and tell them to melt the ice.
  • Creo Herbam: Drop a stack of branches on the ice, then ask a grog to set fire to them. (Maybe you have Deficient Ignem.)
  • Creo or Muto Imaginem: Make the ice look like it’s melted. I haven’t actually melted it, but I’m an Imaginem specialist, what did you expect?
  • Rego Terram: Move the ice (because it’s a solid) – lift it up and drop it to break it into smaller bits so it melts faster. Or drop a rock on it.
  • Perdo Terram: Destroy the solidity of the ice. I’m not sure if this actually works, but let’s see what happens!
  • Rego Mentem: Force a grog to sit on the ice so they melt it with their body heat. (If you happen to know a ghost with fire/heat powers – maybe the ghost of an arsonist or of someone who died in a fire – you could use Rego Mentem to make the ghost melt the ice.)
  • Rego Vim: Summon and command a magical spirit to melt the ice. If you have a fiery or watery spirit or elemental handy, I think Rego Ignem/Aquam can command them to do it too. (Rego Vim might also be used to summon a demon to do it, but that is probably a Bad Idea.)

EDIT: Sorry, I got a bit carried away there.

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The social aspect is a great aspect, yes. Don’t sell Parma Magica short, however, it can be incredibly useful if you raise it even just a little bit. Being immune to everything non-physical that doesn’t penetrate is very powerful. But, yes, Parma isn’t perfect. Like you point out, Finesse attacks ignore it. Parma Magica necessitates a very high score to protect someone else effectively - sometimes fast-casting is not about saving you, it’s about saving your companion. Sometimes, it’s about stopping an effect because you don’t know if it will penetrate. Your enemy might be more skilled in his art than you are in Parma Magica, or he might have an arcane connection. If you wait to know if it bounces, it might be too late. Just fast-cast and put that wall of water in the pilum of fire’s path - it works well enough. But because you’re rolling against an initiative check, you can fast-cast your way out of a sword strike without going through the defense total step and by substituting Rego Terram to deflect, Rego Corpus to teleport or Creo Terram to put a wall in the way. Bonus points if you’re doing this with a mastered formulaic with fast-casting and quick specs to simplify your rolls.

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Technically you have four forms of possible spell defense: A "Fast-Cast Defense" (ArM5, p.83), fast-casting a dispel (Spont or mastered Formulaic, must match PeVi guidelines), fast-casting a Spont spell defensively, or fast-casting a mastered Formulaic spell defensively.

If you are wondering about the differences, the first two are directly targeting the cast spell (to ether deflect it or dispel it) while the later two are making you not a valid target. If you are taken out of range and/or perception before their spell is cast, then you are not a valid target and thus their spell fails. Conjuring barriers to block LoS, teleporting out of LoS, and turning invisible are just a few options. You have to actually design the spell if it is a Spont and this sort of defense is worthless against things that have arcane range.

Example: My Magi has a mastered spell, ‘Conjuring the Instant Bulwark’ (CrTe Base 3, T/M/I, Size +1), that creates a curved half-circle stone wall 2.5 paces high, 4 paces long, and 1 pace thick for ~1 round. Mastery 2, Fast Casting and Quick. Created it the better part of a century ago in game (he had a little extra lab total when creating a CrTe ritual), never saw a need to improve it.

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A funny other form of protection is casting a ward against humans on yourself as a form of protection from a tradition that can only inflict spells via touch-range spells.

Not sure if such a tradition exists, but conceptually its very funny.

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Yeah there are some weird philosophical things in Ars Magica that can technically break your head. I started playing the game at age 12 so just kind of ignored all that as a teenager and you can have plenty of fun anyways! :smiley:

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Yeah there are some weird philosophical things in Ars Magica that can technically break your head. I started playing the game at age 12 so just kind of ignored all that as a teenager and you can plenty of fun anyways! :smiley:

Oh, if only. I'm hyperfixating so hard that I'm reading some of the Summa Theologica

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There is a great line in one of the books about levels of commitment to the world setting and history, and the extreme level was learning Latin. :slight_smile:

All any world setting needs is to be consistent and make sense to the players. The peasants don’t know about Aristotle, yet when they physically interact with the world, everything still works fine. If you have someone trying to invent gunpowder, wanting to improve medicine, then one has to look up medieval science and medicine, alchemy, the humors, bile, etc. I would not care if the level of effort my SG went to was looking up a Wiki. If a players wants to do wacky stuff where the cosmology matters, they can read Aristotle.

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Ars Magica is about a chapter house of different wizards trying to live the life of an actual wizard. Study, research, making magic items, avoiding distractions, politicking with other wizards, going out in the world to get rare things for the work you are doing in the lab, dealing with the distractions you fail to avoid, etc.

There is no other game that does that. There are a few other games where you can have 4-6 PC wizards who are all very different, but there isn’t any other one where a reasonable campaign is spanning decades and the rules let you invent unique spells, enchant items, customize a familiar, train and apprentice, care about how educated you are, and all the rest that is the trope of a scholarly wizard. The stuff that other games say NPC wizards are doing all the time, but PC wizards don’t really do.

Well… that's not really correct.

Both Adventurer, Conqueror, King System (ACKS) and GURPS have full rules support for exactly this sort of campaign. It’s not the main focus for either of those systems in the way it is for Ars Magica, but both rulesets are extensive enough that they encompass everything you mentioned, and campaigns sans adventuring are very much a thing with them.

My preference is still Ars for this sort of campaign because that IS its focus as a system and it absolutely nails the execution. But the claim that no other system does it, or even that no other system does it well, just isn’t true.

Saying that Ars does it BEST, on the other hand…

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That is an awesome quote. That said, my brother got Arts and Academe, and was taking a couple philosophy courses… He nearly changed his business major to a philosophy major after that. Ars Magica can be intense like that.

In terms of what Ars Magica is good at, it’s play over long periods of time interspersed with a bit of adventure here and there. I don’t know that Ars Magica is the BEST at seasonal long term play, just that it’s Good at it. Downton Abby, in my opinion is one of the best styles of game that Ars Magica does really well at. Just replace the Nobility with Wizards and you have a slow moving drama/soap opera that lasts generations.

There are a couple actual plays up in the forum, I recently added a map to mine. This is a war game campaign, which Ars magica may not be the best actual game to support this style of play, but it’s what I got. Actual Play Write Up: 1st Crusade Campaign of 1096 - Games Discussion / Ars Magica - Atlas Games RPG Forum. Can give you a sense of just seeing a game in play were no one really cares (at all) about the philosophical aspects of the system. That said, this game is the result of dozens if not hundreds of hours historical research into the background of the 1st Crusade and what happened with the Crusade of 1101 and other “early” crusader year history up to 1187.