Ars Magica, Revised Edition (Ars Magica RPG Core Rules, #2) by Jonathan Tweet

Ars Magica, Revised Edition (Ars Magica RPG Core Rules, #2) Reviews

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  Jason

  As with most of my posts about RPG games, this one assumes that you are familiar with the text. In a traditional text, what I say would count as spoilers, but in an RPG text, they are just assumptions.
  
  I picked up Ars Magica second edition primarily because of my interest in the inspirations that led to the construction of Apocalypse World. I knew that the Bakers had played some version of the game for many years and that their experiences there informed a lot of their game design that followed. And of course, the ludography in Apocalypse World notes that the system for hardhold construction was inspired by the covenant creations in Ars Magica. In addition, I came to Ars Magica because I’m interested in the history of RPGs and like to look at the games that shaped the very landscape of the art and hobby.
  
  When I look at Ars Magica, I see a lot of little clever details. There’s the neat feature that when you roll your stats, another player rolls against you. There’s the yoking of stats so that you split one bonus as equally possible between two related stats, ensuring that they are both low, high, or mediocre together. There’s the use of the old notation on a d10, in which the 10 was noted as a zero, to make two different kinds of rolls, a simple roll and a stress roll. There’s the use of personality traits to give mechanical grip to acting against character. But it is not because of these details that the game draws its power. Nor is it the main mechanics of conflict resolution—which is a variation of roll+stat+bonuses against a target number (called an “ease factor”) or an opposed roll--that inspire fondness for the game.
  
  The game draws its lasting power and influence from a few things, most of which are commonly discussed when talking about the game. The first is the idea of troupe play and the characters that are created. When a player sits down to play, they create their Magus, a Companion, and a Grog. The grogs all become communal characters, not owned by any specific player. The magus and companion are specifically yours. Then when a game or series is about to begin, one player plays their magus, one player plays their companion, and everyone else plays grogs. In fact, the players playing the magus and companion can play grogs as well. Which characters are involved is the result of deciding who is most appropriate for a given adventure and who most wants to play their character at this moment.
  
  This fluidity of character play is tied directly to the second feature that makes this game special: that the long-term story created by all the sessions of play is the story primarily of the covenant itself. While the individual characters are important and hopefully meaningful to the players, the game is designed at cover decades of play. There are specific rules for aging, overcoming aging, and dying of natural causes. Magi can spend whole seasons if not whole years studying their art, and while they study, others adventure to advance the cause of the covenant. Many games since this one have tried to make a community the focus of play, but this one really nails it because it does so indirectly. While players concentrate on their characters and their long-term goals, the cumulative affect of play is that the covenant develops its resources, grog live and die, companions contribute and develop different relationships with the different characters. A table of 3 players has nine playable characters in the covenant from the first session and most likely a host of NPCs who have the potential to each become playable characters in their own right.
  
  And the third thing, which is intimately related to the first two of course, is that the covenant exists in a specific and interesting world. Tweet and Rein-Hagan place the game in a fantasy version of Europe during the middle ages. It’s the world as we know it, but it includes magic; it is, in short, the world as it was conceived by those who lived in the middle ages (or at least that was how the authors saw it). Magic beasts, we are told, should resemble those of medieval tales and literature, not those of the modern imagination. The big addition is of course the Hermetic Order of magi and their shareable system of spells to understand magic. We know that this approach was popular because there are supplements to explain the order, its rules, and its magic. But within the core book, there is only a sketch of how things stand. But that sketch is both evocative and full of everything you need to know to get up and running. It’s enough to inspire and it gives you permission to fill in all the gaps and create all the local rules you want for your specific game. Magic as the Hermetic Order understands it has rules and is predictable to a certain extent. And those rules are reflected in the rules of spell casting and spell creation within the game. The authors wisely noted that there is a lot of magic in the world the Order doesn’t understand, so magic as used by the beasts and demons of the world do not have to follow the logic of Hermetic magic. The game does an impressive job of walking the fine line between being inspiring and overbearing. I can see exactly how it grabbed players imaginations and let players create their own world with zeal. Even when players like the Bakers put down the rules themselves, they played within the world, because the world is wonderfully realized with a ton of potential for stories and drama, ready to be lived in and explored without strangling creativity with preconstructed elements.
  
  I found the presence and treatment of religion to be amusing from my perspective in 2020. It feels like either the authors were wary of judgment from the religious right here in America or that they were genuinely concerned with giving proper respect to the Christian church. While the magi are not aligned with the church, and while there is friction between the magi and the church, there is not direct opposition. In fact, the game treats demons and the devil as real antagonists and the Hermetic Order, to which the main characters must belong, rejects Diabolists, magi who use devils in their magic. In this way, magi and the church are united in their common enemies of demons and diabolists. Beyond that, the church is given real power through the use of dominion, land under the church’s protection that negatively affects the power of magic and diabolists’ power. God has real power in this world, and there is no way to play within the world and reject Christianity as mere philosophy.
  
  The power structure is rounded out by the inclusion of faerie magic, which is a neat way to introduce the fantastic beyond the church and demons. I like how the bestiary in the main text structures brownies, elves, dwarves, and other fantastic creatures as variations of faeries. It allows you to bring your D&D knowledge into the medieval world, allowing you to eat your cake and have it at the same time.
  
  This is not a game text that I finished reading and wanted to play. The main mechanics are relatively dull. There is a ton of math for every action from basic combat to complex magic, and I don’t need that in any gaming conversation I want to be a part of, though I understand that others do. But I did end want to play within the world of the game. I liked the way it viewed magic. I liked the way it created covenants. I liked the way it told stories over such a long arc of time. In the end, I think, I would rather hear people tell the story of their campaign and their covenant that play out the experience itself.