So, this will be a speculative thread looking to put together some inspiration for a future AM campaign (...or chronicle? I forget the correct term!) [CORRECTED: Saga!]
It isn’t a new idea as previous supplements for the game have included Four Seasons Tetrology:
The Tempest, Midsummer’s Night Dream, A Winter’s Tale and Twelfth Night.
I personally only ever glanced at one of these, but the idea is plain enough - to take some inspiration from a Shakespeare play and turn it into a scenario or story to tell in the game. I’m not sure if the inspiration was only superficial or whether it connected greatly with the actual plot, but it is a neat idea nevertheless. I’d note that although Shakespeare actually lived a couple of centuries after the high medieval period of Ars Magica, his plays weren’t necessarily contemporary anyway (some might argue they were timeless) and Ars Magica covenants are somewhat anachronistic due to their inhabitants.
My question is what other of the 37 or so plays that Shakespeare wrote, which others could be adapted and how would you go about it?
Hamlet as a tame noble, ideally the mages prevent the tragic ending.
Othello (a mage vs Iago ex Tremere) and Romeo and Juliet both seem eminently minable, though i would tone down some of the less palatable elements for a modern audience.
The party Tytallus could have helped steer MacBeth's hand. Though I would switch it to a lower ranking position than King.
There is a blatant homage to The Tempest in Legends of Hermes, down to some names on the level of "run through Google Translate and back again". The island of the spirit-summoning maga.
Well, as a fella who taught Shakespeare for a living, I think this is a great question!
The Tempest is certainly the juiciest of Shakespeare’s plays for Ars players. It is one of only two of the plays for which we find no historical source; that is, Shakespeare appears to have entirely made it up. You’ve got an Italian wizard, the witch Sycorax, her monstrous son, and Ariel, who is some kind of spirit. In addition to the old adventure, the characters of Tempest have also been adapted into ArM5; the island gets a brief mention in… Between Sand and Sea? I forget. (Legends of Hermes!)
Any saga set in Loch Leglean begs for the three witches of Macbeth to be included as a covenant of Ex Miscellanea seers and Folk Witches.
The plot of King Lear—elderly head of the house retires, but not before dividing his property between his siblings, who proceed to fight with each other while dad declines into madness—has been adapted hundreds of times into other genres and it makes an excellent Autumn covenant situation, with the PCs as Lear’s daughters.
Midsummer is the other play Shakespeare seems to have written from scratch and the Oberon/Titania plot has been inspiration for many GMs over the years. This may be the most well known faerie forest in Western literature.
Don’t ignore the histories! Depending on when your Saga is set, many of the characters in the history plays may be alive in your Saga. The events of King John are set not long before the traditional starting date of 1220.
Owen Glendower, a Welsh sorcerer who claims to be able to speak with the dead and control the weather, appears in Henry IV Part I. Since he’s Welsh, he must be either a Tremere (and a resident of Blackthorne) or Ex Misc (and a resident of Cad Gadu), but you might make him a Diedne survivor.
I’m sure there’s more but I’ve already gone on too long. This is just off the top of my head.
In one saga I played with, there was an Ex Miscellanea tradition who had Death Prophecy as their major virtue. These "Doomed Ones" claimed to have intervened in both Macbeth and in ancient Rome in the case of Julius Caesar - they have a script to initiate mundane people into having a Death Prophecy, but at the curse of becoming so insanely Ambitious (major personality flaw) that it drives them into their doom. Shakespeare is a great lens for trying to use prophecy in a game.
Many of the comedies, tragedies, and romances make excellent Faerie Regios in which the player characters are conscripted to fulfill various roles. For example, they might find Faerie Capulets calling them Montagues and picking a fight in the street. Maybe the faerie that’s been playing Romeo is missing, and one of the PCs is expected to fill that role. Or maybe there’s a Romeo but he’s incompetent, and needs the PCs to help him fulfill his role.
Wasn’t Hamlet the basic plot line for The Northman (the recent Eggers action-horror Viking movie)? Was watching that last night.
What I’m thinking is having a mysterious character join the covenant who is secretly the son of somebody killed by a covenant character aiming to assassinate him. In fact, you could just put together a number of Shakespear characters into the covenant somehow, using the play scripts as back stories.
In principle yes. In practice, this is something that the players should do rather than have done to them. A lot of people would be mad if they just had their companion or mage killed in the night and the SG just shrugs "you should have used mind reading on all your grogs"...
I once ran an EVERWAY game in which the characters were acting as bodyguards accompanying a Prince back home to attend his father's funeral.
The look on the players' faces when it dawned on them that they were accompanying the equivalent of Hamlet to Elsinore! I can't recall now if there were equivalents of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in the company.
Imagine that 'Hamlet' had been friends of a couple of students of magic who were attending Wittenberg U. And the Gentle Gifted pals were asked to accompany him back to the funeral. They chose to take their bodyguards with them.
Do they dare interfere in the whole mess? Ghosts? Treachery?