Session recaps: The Sundered Eagle - Ars Magica game

The Initiation of Eric
Autumn of 1229 - Adventure 29

Eric d'Ancelin faces an assault on the alliance by the serpents, only to discover that he is actually inside his own mind, undergoing his Initiation into the Criamon Path of Seeming. During this ordeal, he discovers some painful truths about how he views his sodales and his own prejudices.

Participants:

  • Eric d'Ancelin

Notes: This was a very short, one session "adventure". Eric had previously contacted a Criamon Mystagogue to guide him in his initiation into the Path of Seeming. As Story Guide, I decided that he'd have a psychodrama (HoH:MC page 59) as his initiation, as suggested on HoH:MC page 64. I thought it might be fun to have the player not be aware Eric was living a psychodrama, so I secretly enrolled the help of the other players. In the previous adventure I asked each player to list me what prejudices their character had about the other characters. Of course, I was only interested in Eric's prejudices, but I disguised the question by asking everyone, and pretending that I needed to know because of the presence of demons in that adventure. Before we gathered for this session, I talked with the other players, and explained to them how the adventure would run. They all knew it wasn't real, but just a psychodrama, except for Eric's player. I asked the rest to act out their characters as charicatures of how they actually were, exaggerating to the max the prejudices Eric had. The initiation was over and considered successful once Eric realized the other magi were acting too much like his worst prejudices about them, thus realizing they were actually prejudices. When the player mentioned that the way they were acting felt out of character, we considered Eric had realized that extreme behaviour was not really how his sodales were, and the psychodrama was over. We all had a lot of fun with this.

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