Wishlist: Ars Magica 6

[Berengar]

@Heaven's Thunder Hammer

6.) I really don't know enough actual church history on magic, sorcery and witchcraft to really make an informed criticism of this point:

Daniel wrote:
The Church being aware of the Order, but basically pretending it does not exist? Perfect status quo for most Ars Magica campaigns.

I can't accept that. I can accept that that might have been a perfectly decent set of assumptions to write a fantasy heartbreaker's fantasy world to, but you still actually have to write that fucking world. Ars Magica 5th edition did not fucking do that.

As Mean Liar said, the best resource for the 13th century is wikipedia. As long as Ars Magica was set in “exactly our world but there's secretly magicians,” that was fine. Elegant even. But in 5th edition they dump that apple cart over, and don't replace it with anything.

If you want to tell me that the 13th century Catholic Fucking Church knows about a group named “the Order of Hermes” that has hundreds of people who have actual magic powers that very explicitly are not miracles from God, and that there isn't already a full scale shooting and stabbing war on, I'm going to have to know why. Spending a single paragraph of shrugging text about how sorcery is kinda illegal but not consistently enforced or interpreted doesn't fucking cut it. We are talking about 1220 when the Catholic Church has declared open war on Muslims, Heretics, and the Romuva for being religiously wrong, and the Order of Fucking Hermes has the name of a fucking PAGAN GOD IN ITS FUCKING NAME. If the Catholic Church knows about that and is not “at war already” you need to do some pretty damn big world building to explain that. Because anything that looked even a little bit like the Catholic Church in history books and wikipedia would flip its shit if there were confirmed non-saintly spellcasters who self identified as the “Order of PAGAN GOD”.

Ars Magica 5th edition tossed away the entire point of lazy world building. Ars Magica classically had only the slightest amount of world building text in their rules because you were allowed and expected to use real world source material. In 5th edition they write just enough world text to completely toss all the real world source material into the circular file, and what they replace it with is so sketchy that it might as well not exist. It's just Generic Fantasy World #516 and it's written about so minimalistically as to be wholly unusable.

We had that topic last in November: Evading Crusades . I don't think we need to take it up again here for "13th century Catholic Fucking Church" Daniel.

Cheers