Atlas Games has announced that they expect to crowdfund Ars Magica 5th Edition Definitive in 2024. I think the approach they have chosen is wise and that this is good news.
Ars Magica is an important game to me. I have fond memories of playing Ars Magica and several of my own published games would not exist without it.
More about this below, but first let me bring you up to speed with what Ars Magica is if you are not familiar with it.
What is Ars Magica?
Ars Magica is traditional tabletop roleplaying game first published in 1987.
You play magical gifted people in a world similar to Medieval Europe, except dragons, faeries and magic are real.
The main attraction of the game is that you can delve into real history and real myths and play and meet historical characters. Go search for the Holy Grail, joust with King John in a tournament, and send and receive missives from the Pope in Rome. While leaving the option open to magic away everything and go all in on Vampires and Werewolves, Demon Princes and Faerie Queens.
Besides the rich setting, Ars Magica draws up a detailed model of studying and using magic. For your wizards to create powerful effects in the fiction, they must study rare books and boost them with magical ingredients. These are good incentives to travel out into the dangerous world for a little adventure.
Ars Magica also introduced the idea of Troupe Play, where the game master role rotates among the players. A pool of secondary characters is shared by all players. In games such as D&D and Call of Cthulhu, all secondary characters (NPCs) are controlled by a single player, the game master.
My experience with Ars Magica
I picked up Ars Magica when it was in its fourth edition. My friends and I had fun running a campaign set in the Pyrenees between today’s France and Spain.
This is how I got to know about the Albigensian Crusade and the siege of Montsegur. Without Ars Magica, no Montsegur 1244.
I created Montsegur 1244 to tell the story of the Cathars who were faced with the choice between life and faith when the castle surrendered. A compelling story that I did not feel that Ars Magica could deliver as its focus lays elsewhere.
What Ars Magica doesn’t do
While the setting suggests strong rivalry between wizards, the game itself does not support PvP play. What happens when the characters of players in your play group have ambitions that conflict with each other?
You can play out formalised magical duels to decide who is the stronger wizard without laying waste to the nearby countryside. This is cool.
However, the intended mode of play is that player characters work together to solve quests and collect resources for their common base. Any disagreements between characters in the fiction cannot be defining for the story. At most they can act as secondary stories, like comic relief in otherwise serious dramas.
This is perhaps the weakest part of the game.
Story games like Burning Wheels and In a Wicked Age have players create characters with strong agency. They expect players to pursue these goals without pulling their punches. The game rules guarantees that you are not ruining someone else’s fun by doing so. It’s a different mode of play. Sometimes it is fun to see the world go down in flames around strongly willed characters.
I designed Death of Rapacus to deliver this experience.
What Atlas Games plans to do
Atlas Games promises two things in their announcement:
- A deluxe print edition of the core book with an open license and backwards compatible.
- Print on demand editions of the entire back catalogue of supplements.
This is a super smart solution. Made out of love for the game and for the community. Not for profit.
Let me break down what this means:
A crowdfunding campaign for an updated core book will create hype for a new audience. The deluxe edition will please fans and collectors. And it will be a great eye piece for physical game stores. The open license is also great news. This means it will be super easy for people like me to create and publish games inspired by and derived by Ars Magica. Even commercially.
There are no details yet on what updates David Chart has in mind for the core rule book. I could wish for updated chapters on sagas and stories with stronger guidance on how to create the Ars Magica experience at the table. This may very well be what will come.
The print on demand editions will keep the supplements available for drip selling over many years without need to pay for storage. Many people still prefer physical books over screen reading.
The approach chosen will keep Ars Magica alive for years to come with low financial risk for Atlas Games and without pushing the existing community away. It may also grow and inspire a new audience of players and game designers.
Time will tell if I will get to play the definitive edition. According to the latest update on our campaign site (from 2006), my friend Robert may pick up the story of Silentiasaxa. I’m still waiting for an invite. It will be the definitive Ars Magica experience.
One long-running Ars Magica saga of mine (set in the Berner Oberland) ended when one player character magus was accidentally unmasked as a devil-worshipper — to the OTHER devil-worshipper player character magus. This set in motion the final three sessions of the game, in which experienced, powerful magi were doing their level best to kill the stuffing out of each other, setting the entire valley ablaze in the process. Absolutely epic and highly satisfying.
It’s such an obvious and satisfying direction to take the game: Why spend so much effort on formulating strict rules if we are not to explore what it means to break them? And how better to explore than by having player characters on different sides?
Let’s see where Ars Magica 5.5 lands on story guidance and tools for the players.