One thing that I would like to see in a tribunal book is a brief (SG only) guide to the future of the tribunal. What major or minor events will happen after 1220. Just a list of things that happen upto 1300 would be useful to help plan a campaign.
1225 The crusade starts in xxxxx and sweeps through this area. 1230 Count YYYY dies without an heir causing a lot of turmoil
1245 A very large fair in the town of ZZZZZZ
There could also be a list of possible developments:
Winter covenant (x) gains some new magi and becomes a Spring covenant again.
Vis source (y) is sold to Covenant (z)
Magus (a) goes into twilight causing his covenant to start to decline.
Just some suggestions of events and how they might change the tribunal. Then the SG can weave them into the story.
There are lot of decisions to make before describing Frederick II in 1220 for Ars Magica. He is not yet "the wonder of the world" by far. After all, he is crowned emperor only at the end of 1220, and he has made many solemn promises to get there. His position in Germany is as unstable as the situation in Sicily and southern Italy.
He will still be a major figure in most sagas set in the Roman Trbunal, of course. So how to describe him?
Go further into the future and tell what is going to happen when, and what it will mean for the Tribunal? Or just provide hooks about the popes, the crusade, the reorganization of the Empire and of southern Italy still to come?
Already deciding this requires a solid concept for the Rome book, a good grasp of the Holy Roman Empire in the 1220s and 1230s at least, and at the start of the book a sound description of Italy in 1220.
Leon’s idea is great. Occasionally ArM5 books have done this, and I’ve always found it useful. Also, although I’ve never run the Rhine Gorge Saga, I love that it’s in that book. The Flaming Shadow plot could get a similar treatment in an Iberia rewrite: skip the timeline up to 1220 and give the GM an outline for how to use this plot in his saga.
Timothy looks like he's weighing in on the whole Roman Tribunal trilogy that was spitballed once upon a time...
Stonehenge doesn't have a ArM5 book, but the ArM4 book has absolutely zero game stats in it, which means it works for any edition.
I tried doing some minor references to covenants out of Dragon & Bear in Dies Irae, but I don't remember if they made it in.
Definitely no Iberia, but I tried to get as close as I could to some of that situation in the Pyrenees/Hispanic Marches Chapter of Faith&Flame, and there's some reference to bits in Between Sand&Sea in the Maghreb section because of the political connections to Iberia. There's also a reference to a covenant there in Mysteries, IIRC.
Levant has some elements done in Cradle & Crescent, and in Lands of the Nile (by proximity), but not the indepth dive that was Blood&Sand.
Honestly, I think I'd agree with Timothy and love to see Rome get a solid reworking. I think Vardian's Tomb, Venice, Sicily, all of it could really benefit from a 5th Edition treatment. At the very least, I would have an extended use for all the Roman Catacomb and Venice books I've been picking up for the last year of my discord Ars campaign.
I'd love to see Iberia, I'm, from there, and the first time I played Ars the covenant was in an muslim keep over the Tajo valley at the border of our village. And to play in places you could just go and see, and that we knew quite well, was amazing.
On the other hand with Justin Alexander involved what I would really love to see in Ars Magica is a node based campaign across all Mythic Europe. Actually it might not need to be so hard to do; picking from there and here there are quite a lot of already made but disconnected resources published all over the line.
Once it has done loading, just search for the year you are interested in and (auto) translate the relevant section. I use this a lot, both to give myself plot ideas, and otherwise just to give the players "the rumours the grogs heard at Ems' inn ". My players really enjoy the feeling that's a real living world where things happen without their direct action, when they hear that nobles X and Y are summoned to the imperial Diet in Worms/Frankfurt for this and that, Konrad von Magdeburg is out there burning witches in this area etc
For a lightly earier period than most arsmagica I have the anglo-saxon chronicles and the Chronicles of the Age of Chivalry which are great for England and useful for Normandy
It's funny, myself and the group I play with are Irish but we actually avoid the Hibernian tribunal as a saga setting, even though we have a high opinion of the 5e tribunal book set there. Being so familiar with the places involved seems to take away some of the magic, so to speak.
On a related note I've used node/point-crawl style to run several travel-heavy adventures using the existing material and it works well with the 5e tribunal books. Most recently I ran the "Hypatia's Tomb" adventure from Ancient Magic in this format, with a very "zoomed out" point-crawl using the tribunal books for the journey to Egypt and a more "zoomed in" point-crawl around Alexandria as the characters searched for the location of the hidden tomb (with 1/3 of the points being things related to Hypatia's ghost that would let them work out the location of the entrance as suggested by AM, 1/3 being supernatural red herrings not related to Hypatia, and 1/3 being non-supernatural general encounters around Alexandria).
It's a format I find works well for Ars because magi have such a range of possible actions that planning anything beyond locations, characters, and a loose goal can very easily end up being completely pointless because someone thinks of a clever spell use you hadn't considered...
I decided to run the Rhine horge while paddling down the Rhine. Having been in most of the cities where the game takes place really helps me picture the locations and paint it for the players.
So I can totally get running a sagaset in a keep close to home.
Playing in known places can get annoying but also save a lot of times figuring out descriptions, I agree with both of you (which is kind of odd because you are saying opposite things). That one time of us was refreshing back them because we spent years and years playing Rolemaster on Middle Earth. I'm not sure how would that go now, but an Iberia tribunal book would probably make it happen.
That sounds amazing.
I absolutely agree that Ars works well with that format. I'd also had learnt the hard way that setting a plot and thinking "...and then..." don't use to work because more than one magi shows up because why not and they start looking into their grimoires and start solving things by raw magical power (which is what they should do anyway, because that's why they are playing Ars Magica after all).
We are going full hexcrawl mode over the Isle of Man and having a lot of fun looking for Diedne ruins, stumbling upon vis sources and sorcerers and dragons. I'm starting to consider doing the same on Iceland, or even over the north Atlantic; the Northern Seas covenant is an ally in our campaign, and giving them a tool to chart the oceans seems like a good idea.
As a new player, I love reading the plot hooks. Not to get spoilers, but more because some of them can give players ideas for characters, or about the kind of stories their character might get into with certain Flaws taken.
I ran a few sessions there long ago and far away, and the Hermes Portal issues on Man were useful, as was the book The Other British Isles (which appears to have dropped back down to reasonable prices on Amazon
It's not a Tribunal book, per se, but I would love a book that details the current events going on in each tribunal at a 10K-foot level, and shows where the social/political/trade connections are between the magi of different tribunals, so you get a better idea of who might be visiting, who might travel to see whom, where paters/maters live, where different plots might interact with neighbors, where they might cause friction, where they might have wider ranging results... basically taking all the Tribunal books, and mapping out the connections to give the big picture.
Just call it "The Order of Hermes". They could take things from the other lifestyle books (A&A, C&G, LoM) and present how they specifically work within the Order. Such as the trade from C&G, but focused specifically on the Order: Who are the best producers of lab equipment, the Hermetic Book trade, producers of/commonly traded enchanted items/lab text, etc.
They could also expand out the Mercere network. Maybe a starburst map of the major portal network. Some common Tribunal and inter-Tribunal correspondence. As you mentioned, there are all types of hooks and other ideas that could be provided. I would be really interested in relations and politics between Tribunals.
Finally it would give them the perfect book to expand on the Order as a whole. Things that are only lightly touched on in the Core and other books could be filled in.
Rome especially, Iberia second. These are intensely needed as the current books are sooooo radically different in tone and design from the current edition that they are pretty much useless. (Iberia less than Rome actually.)
The 4th edition tribunals work with 5e with little issue, as does Loch Leglean.
I kind of know this because when I was doing the whole adventurers of my mage Heru I used the tribunal books as sourcebooks. I found plots in the 4th edition and in Loch Leglean with no issue. Iberia gave me a bit of a plot while Rome had me laughing at all the demon stuff.
Also, on do I care. Yes. Yes I do. I would love more Ars Magica stuff. I would love it very much.
As a note one of the things I LOVE about 5e vs the previous additions are all the Story Seeds scattered in every chapter of the tribunal books. I love reading about a location and then my eyes turn to the sidebar where it lists two or so ideas on how to use said location as a plot point. Its marvelous. Its amazing. Its also very very helpful.
PS. I had to check on the date of this post, to make sure it wasn't an old thread brought back accidently. So when I see 5d by an Atlas staff member I was like "Woah, cool!"