Ars Magica 5th Edition

Description

Imagine an age where myth is real and where the superstitions of the common folk hold true: faeries dance in forest glades, angels protect the Church, demons corrupt the weak, and wizards wield magic beyond the ken of other mortals. You play these magi, gathered in covenants with your allies and servants, unlocking secret powers and creating wonders. You and your friends will also portray the loyal companions and grogs who stand with the magi, as a buffer between them and the mundane world that often misunderstands their power and motives.

When adventures draw you out into the medieval world of Mythic Europe, your stories are the stuff of legend. The award-winning First Edition of Ars Magica by Jonathan Tweet and Mark Rein?Hagen set the benchmark for magic systems with what’s widely regarded as the best rules for magic in all of gaming, and pioneered both troupe-style play and storytelling in roleplaying. It won the Gamer’s Choice Award for Best Fantasy Roleplaying Game. The Fifth Edition won the Origins Award for Best Role Playing Game, the Gold ENnie for Best Rules, and the Out of the Box Award for Best Retread. Numerous supplements support the Fifth Edition, and dozens of still-useful supplements for previous editions cover every facet of Mythic Europe.

Ars Magica players participate in a thriving fan community, as well. Changes to the Game Veteran Ars Magica players are clamouring to know what’s new and different about the Fifth Edition. Here are some of the rules change highlights: Magic resistance has been changed so that the Parma Magica is actually the defence it’s always been said to be. The Laboratory rules have been streamlined and unified around a single core mechanic — the spell invention mechanic from earlier editions. The spell guidelines have been cleaned up, clarified, and made as consistent as possible. The combat rules have been completely rewritten so that armour and shield grogs are more useful. The introduction to Mythic Europe has been rewritten to provide information that’s immediately useful in play.

Character creation has been revised to create characters, including magi, at any age, and to create characters of similar power to those advanced through play. Supplements & Support There’s already an enormous library of Ars Magica supplements in our catalogue, and we will continue to sell them. As a rule, we expect older source-books to be usable with the new edition, and we expect them to continue to sell (just as many 3rd edition books remained strong sellers throughout the life of 4th Edition). It will be some years before there are Fifth Edition replacements for many of these books. Roughly speaking, we plan to release three to four major supplements per year for Ars Magica, and to fill in the gaps in the current line as follows … Houses of Hermes: The book Houses of Hermes, published by Wizards of the Coast, has been one of the game’s top selling supplements as long as we’ve owned it, but is now out of print.

Since the Order of Hermes is at the heart of the game, we need to replace it, but we want to offer players something meatier. We are thus planning a series of Hermetic source-books for players, each one focusing on several houses with a common theme. Realms of Power: The Realms are the heart of magic in Mythic Europe. Our intention is to publish one Realm book every year for the first four years of the new edition’s life, each covering one of the major powers of Mythic Europe — the Divine, the Infernal, Magic, and Faerie. Tribunal Books: Tribunal books deal with a particular region of Mythic Europe in detail. We will be considering covering areas that haven’t already been done in a previous edition of the game, as that older material is generally still usable. Miscellaneous: Certain aspects of Mythic Europe and the lives of the people who live there have been overlooked in the past, and are things we’ll be focusing on. Books like City & Guild and Art & Academe are examples of these.