seeing Ars Magic in non-related media

I had a weird epiphany last night while attendng local anime club and watching the "You Name" movie.

There was a scene that perfectly emulated a Diameter duration mystical event, during twilight (of the day, ie between when the Sun touched the horizen and when it finished going below the horizen).
That took place on the natural Boundary of a Magical Aura/Regio that contained a Genius Locus (the movie described it as housing the body of the local god, but the god was not decribed as anthropomorphic nor making any direct appearance, and its scope could be described as some fundmental forces of nature).

Once I realised there was a Diameter duration, I began seeing that a noticeable amount of the movie could be expressed in Ars Magica terms/mechanics, even though the movie is otherwise almost totally unlike Ars Magica.

Has anyone else had a similar experience, suddenly seeing Ars Magica mechanics in some unrelated media?

I've certainly observed the Wizard's Sigil in some movie and comics wizards.

I have a tendency of seeing everything in Ars Magica terms. It's not only fun, but helps a lot to learn the mechanics of the game.

Yesterday I spoke a coworker about his range: voice, as he was pretty far from me and I wasn't hearing him.

A few weeks back I was watching Alien: Covenant with a friend from my groupe and we spent half the movie debating if the Aliens were faeries, demons or magical beings.

And a recurrent idea I have is to addapt the soul-eaters slakemoths from China Mieville's Perdido Street Station as monsters in our Ars Magica campaign (these are definetively fae, of the darker kind).

Speaking of Casting Sigils, I do enjoy Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London novels, which is supposed to be based on the idea of a modern day Ars Magica police procedural, and his idea that that all magical beings doing magical things leave behind a unique vestigium that can be detected by another wizard.

These vestigia appear to be more complicated sensory/emotional constructs than the typical Ars Magica casting sigil.
However, if I were to run my own Ars Magica saga I would insist that every player magi would have to have a defined vestigium that is detectable by InVi (or even with Magical Sensitivity), and that a Casting Sigil is only a single portion of the vestigium that typically shows up to the mundane during spell-casting.
Except for Jerbiton Magi, whose House familiarity with Im and Me allow them to select whatever part of their vestigium is displayed (I think the HoH:S book calls it "flourishes").

Flourishes aren't just a Jerbiton thing. Every magi can do it by increasing the difficulty of the int+ finesse roll of the spell by three. What if (like 93 or so percent of the time) there is no roll? Then the ease factor is only three, almost any magus or maga can pull that off.

Sorry for the thread interruption. I just like flourishes.

On topic, I think the power that magi have to do low level spontaneous magic is reflected in media all over the place.

Would it depend on what realm the Android was tied to? My suss is Fae; as far they progress the story of the colonists. The android and alien have very different agendas, however both are pointless without the poor humans to interact with. :slight_smile:

I'm always with the Fae option. I just love the extremely alien nature of faeries in this edition, the many ways they can feed on vitality, from being defeated to eating brains, and the human parasites they end being. I tend to see faeries everywhere. My main concern is exactly their need of humans to interact. I don't like to think in faerie courts in far forests kept in power saving mode until a lost guy comes around and let them start their show.

Demons also are pointless without humans, they need souls to gather and sent all the way down, but I don't see how aliens or the android would be making people sin.

Back to topic: enchantments! I have a handful of charged items. One of them does a small Creo Ignem: I call it 'lighter'. It's useful to start small fires or give some light. The other one opens the gate of my garage with a Rego Terram effect. And I have a big black rectangular window with several Creo and Rego Imaginem effects (where we saw Alien: Covenant, of course). And so on.

On the original point. I think that spontaneous magic could be described as a way to bring non-related media into Ars. A few years before Ars Magica came out I read a book where an Wizard's apprentice was bothered by smoke in the room and his master cast a spell to draw all of the smoke into a ball and throw this ball out of a nearby window. this scene struck me as something that I couldn't do in any of the games that I had seen. In Dragonslayer (once again pre- ars magca), the wizard character casually uses magic to pull a dragon's tooth to his hand from across a large table, while there were spells to do this in RPG's of the time none of them would have allowed it to be done with the sort of no-big deal casualness that the scene conveyed in the movie.

I think this just might be the definitive example of that....... youtube.com/watch?v=L0MK7qz13bU

Speaking of Ben Aaronovitch, he wrote the seventh Doctor Who story Battlefield, which includes a scene where Ace and another girl draw a chalk circle to protect themselves from a demon, and it is exactly how I would imagine ring/circle wards working.

I went to see an exhibit of artifacts from ancient Greece at the museum a couple of years ago. The first thought that crossed my mind when I saw the fertility statuettes was actually "I wonder if they still have Creo vis in them?". :blush: There were also some defixiones later on, which led to more Ars musing.

Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable

Can you remember anything else about the book? I'd like to read it.

I liked the magic scenes in Dragonslayer and think that in film media it's probably as close as would get for many years to seeing something remotely resembling Ars Magica themed magic.

Sounds like Magician's Apprentice(book 1 of the Riftwar cycle) by Raymond E. Feist. There is an expanded Author's preferred edition.

If you’re trying to find it I think the book is just called “Magician”, with Pug as the apprentice. The authors extended revision is far better if you might continue the series,

I think that's more a Jerbiton's nightmare of what happens when you give wealth to those with poor taste, or a set of stories told to disguise the origin of infernally-obtained loot.