I think the authors are adding these restrictions because they make for great stories and entertaining books.
My complaint is that I want the stories to be from the Virtues/Flaws that the player character have that the players build and the covenant features that the players chose. I am starting a game with 5 players, which will have 5 magi and 5 companion characters for a total of 11 story flaws. (Stupid Diedre Magic) That is before we even consider the covenant hooks and stories caused by house affiliation or personality flaw related motivation. A Tribunal. where we could concentrate on them rather than the (admittedly cool) variations that happen in the Tribunal would be nice.
Now I have five 5th edition tribunal books and 5 non 5th edition tribunal books. Other than Iberia, none of the other Tribuanal books seem similarly prescriptive to me, and I really don't see how Iberia can help it. Likewise, I don't see how Transylvania can help it either, you really can't make a "controlled by the Tremere" Tribunal something where you can play any story you want. Nor do I want every Tribunal to fit that average mold. I do want one, and I want to be as convincing as I can that it would be good for the game, even if it would not top peoples list as the most interesting twist on the Order of Hermes.
You don't have to tell a story about the Tribunal politics around covenant foundation. The troupe/storyguide chooses what you want to tell stories about. The storyguide just needs to say "OK, this is recognised in the Tribunal as a covenant."
Sounds reasonable to me. Were I to get the chance to write for another Tribunal, I would still consider what kind of social pressures and restrictions contribute to their recognition of new covenants and hopefully come up with something that reflects the society around which the Tribunal is based. Respectfully, I wouldn't drop it from the book on the basis that a couple of troupes might not want to use those aspects. The troupes themselves can do that.
I think there needs to be a tribunal book ready to play "out of the box". As in you don't need to comb through it to see which features you like or need to ignore or any landmines if you didn't read well enough. There needs to be a "standard" tribunal. One in which Hermetic Culture is as described in the core rulebook. A tribunal that differs from all the other tribunals in that it isn't different. Or rather, it is different because it isn't unique or strange. Everything is regular and normal. And there is too much smack talk along the lines of "we thought it was a good idea" or "it seems more realistic that way" or "it makes for good stories and you need someone to spoon feed you all your story ideas". And while yes it is true that I can always disregard or modify whatever, my point is that I shouldn't always have to. Sometimes is cool. But not every-single-freaking-tribunal. So far, the best one really is Sundered Eagle, if measuring by how compatible it is with a standard common vision of the game. Some cultural quirks that add flavor, but nothing that dramatically alters the outline of Hermetic Culture as described in the main book. Against the Dark is what it is supposed to be, can't fault it there. Guardians of the Forest is a bit loopy. Bet to start play as an already established covenant and skip the spring thing. Normandy is bizzare and has no excuse to be so. Ironically, it is the one I do not own and yet the one I have played the most in. The end result really has been that I ignore the tribunal around me and instead focus solely on my covenant. It has quite the opposite effect if the intention was to foster play between covenants. I have not read the Hibernian book, but before I do I want to state that this is one I expected to be strange. I do see the point that every tribunal should have some quirks for flavor. But here and now I am proposing the idea that we need at least one regular vanilla flavored tribunal.
They are playable out of the box. Be careful not to frame it as though the authors have slipped mousetraps between the pages. We're not hiding round the corner waiting for the sound of springs snapping and fingers breaking. The things in the books are there for all the reasons already discussed. But if you really don't like what's there then don't use it - just use what you are happy with. It would be a thankless task trying to write a book like this that instead of a Hermetic Culture chapter just had a reference back to the core book.
I would much rather that each Tribunal delivered a unique play style, something that I think is hard to achieve actually, rather than just rehashed the core book.
But frankly, I think we're all getting hung up on what is effectively a very useful shorthand but ultimately something that individual troupes can easily take a view on.
I think the various gimmicks of the published 5th ed Tribunals are there to safeguard against isolation. Back in my early Ars Magic playing years it was 4th ed with no Tribunal books used. It's easy to just found a covenant and start to play, and we did that. However we did make a list of all the other covenants, and in time individual magi were also names, as they became relevant and we met them.
If you don't do that, and simply start playing stories with local faeries, the dragon in the forest, the local nobleman etc. you end up staying isolated and neve really being part of an Order of wizards to interact with.
Since playing 5th ed I've used a lot more of the Tribunal books, and have had no problems with it. Although I do recognize that players new to Ars Magica can experience a problem with the sheer volume of material.
But when forming a new covenant in a Tribunal it really is a good question to ask: "How, what do the others say? Do we encroach on someone else's resources? If this place has untapped resources, why is that"
And the challenges I've had is not integrating the Order of Hermes, but integrating with mundane society. Some mundanes or even nobles know the covenant is there, unless totally hidden. Either way the magi need resources and workforce. Going to town for things leads to interaction, and people notice strangers especially Gifted ones. But several times we've failed int his, glossed it over too much. It's been too much "Myhtic" and too little "Europe". If you deal with magi and faeries etc. it could be any fantasy, need not be Ars Magica.
And I think the Tribunal books do a good job of covering both integration with OoH and with the mundanes. If you are tired of Rhine's stale politics or the liberal economy and democracy of Thebes and want to go fight dammit! Then go to Normandy or Hibernia.
Nothing stops players using the geography, covenant and magi names, myths and story ideas etc. any Tribunal book but defining that Hermetic Culture is as core book and politics either non-existent or tailor made to the saga.
And why all published Tribunals differ a lot from what the core rules say? Well, this could have been how it originally was, how it was meant to be. But several centuries of self-governance has cause widely different societies developing from these original concepts, while still adhering to the Code, with a little adaptation.
There is a vanilla book, but it is 4th edition. HTM. Iberia could be cast in that light as well easily, since the 3rd edition one is 100% vanilla in that point. I prefer that style, really. it has plenty of hermetic story potential (even without the shadow flambeau) and a defined mood, but it is still vanilla hermetic when it comes to the rules.
Normandy is my biggest let down as well. I expected traditional monolithic nonsense to be part of Rhine, and I actually like the 1-2-3 votes per magus system since it fits how I see the OoH, even if I prefer normal covenants and not the chapter house thing. My problem is not the existance of rules governing the creation of covenants, but the PC having to fight against a tsunami to get a covenant recognized. Disregarding it goes against everything written in the book, so it is not done so easily without flouting a lot of other things.
Normandy caused quite a rucus in my gaming table between "we will never play this as written" and "let's play monty python style there!" Since it is in the freaking middle of the OoH I expected it to be the paradigm of regularity with a stress on non intervention because the mundanes are so violence-crazy around them. It came out as the opposite. IMO it is the weakest of the current tribunals. Given its geography I would have expected that to be more regular, as I said.
The oproblems about creating the covenant can easily overwhelm a new troupe before their saga starts, so I find the isolation in the early stages to be a good thing. THEN you introduce hermetic stories. This is how my troupe has played Ars for years, and it works well IMO.
I hear you. But I like to ensure that isolation does not continue. Years can go by before anyone realizes this, and the it may be hard to recover.
But I'm caught up in the situation where I know and realize new players should not be overwhelmed, but my many years playing ArM prevents me from gauging correctly how much.
Out current Loch Leglean sags tries to do this, keep things simple. I may be going ok.
At the risk of sounding like a smartass, there really is: any Tribunal you play in, if you don't buy a Tribunal book.
Now, before you jump down my throat, please let me expand on that so as to make my point. What I've most read here is that Tribunal books, while blissfully choke-full of story potential, make it harder on new players, since they have to learn how the Order of Hermes works from the core book, then un-learn parts of it as the book for their choice of Tribunal changes those parts. But I'd say that new players, coming to the game for the first time, would do better with just the core rulebook.
A new troupe that has never played Ars Magica is better off, IMHO, by just reading the core book and playing with just that.
The rest of the books can come into play as the troupe develops more experience and start to thrist for diversity, more options, and additional material. But a starting troupe will already have their hands full with just the basic rules and setting, honestly. And you don't need any Tribunal books to play in their Tribunals. You (or at least me) use them because they provide additional detail and complexity, that I want in my games since we're all already very familiar with the game. But if you're new to it, you can decide your Covenant is anywhere you fancy, and just use the core rulebook for that, even if it doesn't agree with the Tribunal book for the place you chose.
That's what we did when we started playing, years ago. And as we got more comfortable with the game, we started using Tribunal books for the places we visited. And as time went by, and we started whole new sagas with new characters, we used the Tribunal books to add additional flavour to the setting. But when we started, the game as it is "out of the box" was enough flavour for us, and we didn't need a Tribunal book.
That would be great, but in my (limited) experience people do not play like that. At least for what I have seen.
They buy the core book, and think it is cool, and that they want to play a game. Then they feel overwhelmed by having to design a country, specially since one of the few areas where the core book does not say anything is how the tribunals of the order are in mood. In older editions there was a chapter about precisely this, but in ArM5 there is no reference at all about this. So they have no benchmark and the new troupes tend to go out and buy a setting book (a tribunal book) to start playing right away. And here is where I think a more lenient tribunal book would be nice as a core setting.
At least this is how it plays out in the 3 gaming groups I have had regular contact with.
But then, and keeping in mind we're talking strictly about new players to the game, they wouldn't know which of the Tribunal books was the "vanilla" one. What my point amounts to is, that having a "vanilla" Tribunal book would actually only help experienced players with a knowledge of the product line who wanted a "vanilla" book, but not new players coming to the game for the first time.
Then again, that's only my personal, and probably biased, opinion.
When I am new to a game, I ask, either online or my local store owner. In the case of the store (Gigamesh) they do not know much about most RPGs they sell, but then the internet is wide The back cover text of the book is also important here. Those would be the info sources I would go for. let's wait what they have done to Provençal, but the crusade environment of the saga might be a little extreme.
Personally, I've always thought that Rhine is meant to be "as vanilla as it gets".
Its only real quirk seems the "seniority stuff". Technically, it's not that elders get two or three votes, it's that they are voting proxies for a (limited number of) absentee magi. I don't really think this is against the corebook. Instead, it clarifies what happens in a case that I saw happen in more than one saga: old magus A entrusts his sigil to magus B with orders to vote in a certain way until he comes back (from whatever), and then magus A "disappears". The fact that seniors automatically win certamen against juniors may be a little more controversial, but again, it's not that big an issue, and it reminds players that Certamen resolves disputes only when the rest of the Tribunal is ok with disputes being resolved by Certamen (which is a standard assumption of Ars Magica).
I would not consider the gilds something against the corebook in letter or spirit. I expect most Tribunals have their own factions, and Rhine gilds are just a formalization of that.
Need permission of the Tribunal to establish a new covenant? That also seems pretty standard. Incidentally, this is a source of stories only if you want it to be.
I do agree that Tribunal books other than Rhine are a bit quirky (I've not read Hibernia). AtD is frankly no more quirky than you'd expect a Tribunal dominated by the Tremere to be. Normandy looks quirky only until you realize it's a Tytalus tribunal though I do find the tournament material somewhat goofy.
Socialist Thebes is, I think, the Tribunal running most against the basic tenets of the game. I particularly dislike the stuff about "vis is so abundant it's essentially free" because it's hard to justify why the vis then does not percolate out to the rest of the Order in exchange for services, magical items etc., with the result that either a) vis becomes scarce in Thebes too or b) vis becomes abundant throughout the Order. Also, it's never been clarified how one should handle, mechanically, the fact that apprenticeships are only 14 years long in Thebes. And the whole thing about Greek instead of Latin is also aesthetically unappealing to me.
Unless Atlas games actually publishes: "Ordo Vanilla - the Starter's Tribunal Book". But as it still needs a geographical location it will almost certain step on the toes on either a tribunal already published for 5th ed, or hit a place from 3rd or 4th - which sparks controversy from the "old" players who know and/or use this. And what if those new players dont' actually want to play in France, Greece or whatever? Then you need vanilla versions of them all?
Maybe this is a project for fan-based work for Project Redcap? Would there be any copyright violation if one were to take all published tribunal books, list all covenants along with magi in them, plot locations onto a map, write briefly about what the different covenants are/do/want but within vanilla bounds and forgetting all about Cathachs, Gilds, Vassals, Oppida, Patron spirits etc.
I'll bite:
I know players who look like deer caught in headlights when hearing about the 12 houses, and end up picking Ex Misc. because they think they are bland and unconnected enough to not need to actually remember or read any published material. And forget that Ex Misc has lots of different traditions in itself...
Or, if forced upon a house, still play like hermits with no connections. Which IMHO is a shame because House bind magi together and spin off stories (ideally) with your sub-organization within the Order.
If you want that much vanilla then why not drop the Houses as well? Just create basic magi, with no rhyme and reason but just like you want them, and play in a vanilla setting? I'm just afraid this would lead to either weird character builds, or magi with huge gaps regarding goals, personality, history etc. Houses help with this.
Going even further, is it off-putting to have four Realms? I hear of people having difficulties keeping track of differences between Magic and Faerie.
The question is where to stop when changing to 'light, vanilla' versions. Ars Magica dies IMHO if over simplified.
I like to rant. Don't take it personally. I am a bit disappointed in Rhine and Normandy for not being "Normal" because those are the two I would have hoped to be the most normal. That is a legitimate gripe. My "out-of-box" rant is not a legitimate complaint. I withdraw that as such and would instead resubmit it as a counter defense. The defense voiced that we can just change this or that, I counter it by pointing out that this is not always an easy or obvious option.
Once again...
I like to rant. Don't take it personally.
Do me a favor. Go read City of Brass from Tales of Power. Start a new thread ripping it to shreds. I have really been looking forward to that and have been sitting here waiting and waiting and waiting...
To be fair, Hibernia actually makes a point of stating that outsiders have a problem with their peripheral code. Working to change it is one kind of saga that I would expect to see there.
I'd argue that the Rhine is fairly normal and vanilla, with the possible exception (in any case very minor, and effortlessly removable) of the seniority system What are the abnormalities?
IMO it is the weakest of the current tribunals. Given its geography I would have expected that to be more regular, as I said.
