I (and I think everyone) would be delighted if you linked the most-recent version.
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Hello!
I really liked the ‘Solo Adventures’ system and started making some improvements, including incorporating Adauli's suggestions.
I'm also creating a spreadsheet that calculates Lab Total automatically and also a way of recording events year by year.
As soon as I've finished I'll post the links here.
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Hi sodales! I finished my work!
I removed the "Final recommendations", "Multi-player rules" and "Complex Character Generation", in the future I will revise and improve this rules first.
After I finished revising the solo play rules, I created a spreadsheet to help automate solo play, I hope you like it.
Any bugs or suggestions for improvement let me know!
Solo Adventures v4.5 (PDF)
Solo Adventures v4.5 (DOCX)
Solo Adventures v4.5 - Tables
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The pdf looks great.
@shadowninja Looks like a great refinement of my own material I added. From an editing perspective, page 2 is blank, and there are numerous colum
ns
that shift over like the above with rol
l
or
98-9
9
in the column header. I think there's space to widen those columns and not have the info making a new unnecessary line.
In Step 12 for Time, it should read:
A reward from Step 10 can halve the amount of total time, per application, to a minimum of 1
day. Round up or down, depending on how kind you want to be to your PC.
I like how much you compacted the length with the formatting time you used. It does look like you removed some extra material for playing the game and comments on virtue selection, along with some of the random tables... They aren't strictly necessary.
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Thanks!!!
I want to improve more the Solo Adventures in the future, including more characters parameters. I want improve the table too, I start to make a test to use AI to generate ideas to the Solo Adventure: the table generate a text based in the adventure and challenges parameters and I input that, along with the Solo Adventures and Ars Magica Definitive Edition.
About the formatting, I used the Microsoft Word and generate the PDF to keep the formating, but I may have made a mistake, I will review everything again.
I removed a few comments about specific virtues, but I made this to revise that in the future.
And again, thank you very much! Let's improve what you created!!!
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In your pdf you linked to the multi-player rules; but you did not include them in the form itself. Would you please consider adding them in the next version? The link didn't work from my downloaded pdf. It looks like the expanded rules are already incorporated, is that right?
Thank you for putting this together!
Also:
Do you have any suggestions on how to handle an Apprentice? It seems odd to make them 'just a companion'.
Great work! But the examples in the earlier versions really helped. Could those be included?
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Sorry to revive the topic, but do you use the 300 points for spring covenants of single character magus, or less?
reading the vanilla covenant they used around 1,000, but divided by 7 magi (4 PCs).
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In the original I assumed it was a solo play for a single magus. But the intention is to have fun and generate story ideas. If running 7 magi (or 20) sounds fun, then have at it.
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No, thats not the point, Eu was just thynking why the order (parens covwnant, or someone enlse) would invest in a covenant of just one magus, and, if so, they would put the same amount of resources for a four ~five magi?
Right now I’m trying to “reduce” the covenant for two ideas:
- A wandering magus of Rhine, needs a wagon lab and some comoanions (I’m not intending to bring the monatary side of this).
- An independent magi in Rome (still thinking about it, but the few vis sources, waning aura and tribubal politics impedes a conventional covenant)
I was seeking adivice if anyone tried to create a covenant with fewer points, and if there is a minimum?
I’m not sure what the problem is. A wandering mage with a wagon sound like a great story. Use as many points as you wish but I suppose the minimum is Nil. But if you are looking for story ideas: perhaps his research is so risky his original Covent purchased him a wagon and told him may his travels take him far. Or perhaps he stole supplies from his covenant and is on the run. Or perhaps he did something so socially unacceptable a broken wagon and a half baked lab is the best he could do. Or you tie it into his House. Is he a tytalas looking to challenge himself, is he a Tremere spy, is he a hermit looking to mediate. Or perhaps he just hasn’t found a group of mages he like’s enough to want to form a permanent covenant.
If you’re doing solo play, Build Points equals Difficulty Level. 1 Mage with 300 BP is probably Easy Mode (that’s a LOT of specialists or magic items or books that you can tailor to exactly their needs). 150 might be Hard Mode, 50 Adamant, etc. So, do you want to experience a Fun Rambling Story about a magus getting into problems that he solves thanks to his resources (more BP), or an uphill struggle story (less BP).
Yes, 300 points is the base for a spring covenant of any size. You could rescale it however, to literally anything you want, the Role Playing Game police do not exist and cannot arrest you for Bad-Wrong-Fun.
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Conveniently, I've been working on a set of rules for exactly this. All the stuff that peregrinatores do, with an abstract adventure system (one which is more narrative, PbtA-style). It's currently getting a workout from a few playtesters, but it seems to work OK so far.
I didn't bother to do economics, but it does cover things like extending your tenure, covenant proposals (tricky in the Rhine), and getting that permanent position, as well as a FitD-style status system to build relationships with covenants and fellow peregrinatores and drive a few things and a basic event engine (which is the first step towards a full covenant-level implementation of the (CC-licensed) A-State Trouble Engine).
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Hi sodales! I finished my work!
Thanks for updating the rules. I really like them!
This is an excerpt of the full ruleset I am working on, and the backround reason why Officina (the name I choose for single magi covenant).*
Officina, ae (latin): a shop where goods are manufactured, especially an apothecary’s, a pharmacy.*
Mage’s Officine
It had become obvious that following the Schism’s war and the Sundering, the Order suffered great losses of knowledge. And to the embarrassment of Durenmar and House Bonisagus, more discoveries and breakthroughs were coming from single-focussed mage than from their own House. However, these research were often bringing mages into area unsuitable to sustain a fully-staffed covenant with decent size turbula, depriving them from the safety associated with it.
During the 13th Grand Tribunal of 1096, the concept of Mage’s Officine was submitted. It was heavily challenged – especially by House Bonisagus – but finally accepted. To alleviate part of the problem associate with those single-mage covenant, and encourage these researchers, the status of Mage’s Officine was created.
An Officine was defined as a single-mage covenant, dedicated to a research topic or a service to the Order, with a small turbula if any. An Officine’s creation must be notified and validated during a local Tribunal but can only be vetoed by a Quaesitor under strong suspicion of activities endangering the Order. The validation process requires the presentation of the research the mage intend to conduct or the service he will be providing to the Order. The mage is solely responsible for providing for his needs. A Mage’s Officine benefits from extended hermetic protection:
- it can only be targeted once between two Tribunals by a Wizard’s War, with a one-year notice (instead of a one-moon notice) – this codicil was added to give time for an Officine to negotiate or gather allies, thus reducing the risk of being plundered;
- any Officine’s demise must be investigated by House Guernicus and report must be issued for the next Tribunal;
- Redcap must visit the Officine at least once a year – besides providing news to the Officine, it also allows to check that a Officine is still existing or otherwise an Quaesitor investigation will be triggered;
- In exchange, the mage must submit once per Tribunal a summary of his research progress or a document contributing to the Order’s knowledge improvement. This last part is obviously a point of debate that can be leveraged to terminate the chart of an Officine that does not fulfil its duty.
- Revoking an Officine’s chart does not force the mage out (unless local Peripheral Code provision would do so), but it removes the protection from Wizard’s War and the mandatory Redcap visit.
Following the Grand Tribunal decision, each Tribunal added some local specificities to the Grand Tribunal ruling.
In game’s terms, it provides a reason and feasibility to have single-mage covenant, as well as story potential to play in Tribunal that would not allow such settlement.
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There's are already things which work perfectly for single-magus "covenants":
Chapter houses: there are three in GOTF which are explicitly single-magus affairs (Cherbourg, Lusatia House and Turris Acontiarum). Of course, a chapter house in theory has the backing of its main covenant, but practicalities mean they will still have to solve most of their problems themselves. You can always set up some sort of stat to track how well relations are going and the willingness of the main covenant to provide support, and managing that relationshiop can become an interesting part of the story.
Eremites: effectively "hermit" magi, living alone. They are effectively a one-magus covenant, but in some Tribunals do not have legal recognition. How much this means in practice depends on the Tribunal; In Normandy eremites can't "own" some sorts of vis sources, in the Rhine it means no "communal" rights (which means property is individual - less of an issue for a single magus than a group - and may mean a limited ability to prevent other magi from encroaching on their site).
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Total side thing, but a change that I’ve made to the solo rules in my own version of this is to allow a Method+Power roll in place of a spell or supernatural ability, once during an adventure, since Methods and Powers don’t function without each other. My solo play character is a Karaite, so I figured it made sense.
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