Ars Magica: Preserving 30+ Years of Wizardry
Behind the scenes of the Definitive Edition with two Visionaries from Atlas Games, President John Nephew and content chief David Chart
Ars Magica Definitive Edition crowdfund:
https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/atlas-games/ars-magica-5th-edition-definitive
Intro
Can you introduce yourselves and tell us about your relationship with tabletop roleplaying games?
John: I’m John Nephew, President of Atlas Games. I started writing for RPGs in the mid-80s (my first publications were in Dragon #108 and Dungeon #1), and launched Atlas Games in 1990.
David: I’m David Chart. My first published RPG work was an Ars Magica article in White Wolf #35, back in 1993. I was the Line Editor for the Fifth Edition, and I am in charge of game content for the Definitive Edition.
Origins: First Through Fourth Editions
What were the initial inspirations and goals behind creating Ars Magica, and how did these evolve through the first four editions?
John: From what original authors Jonathan Tweet and Mark Rein-Hagen told me, the core idea of Ars Magica was “wizards done right” – a game where magic-users were objectively more powerful than other characters, in keeping with their stature in myth and legend. This led to the idea of each player having two main characters – a magus and a non-wizard companion – in addition to a common pool of “grogs,” who might be played by anyone. Everyone can take a turn in the spotlight as a powerful wizard, and also play the other roles.
Mythic Europe, the canonical setting of Ars Magica, is almost an afterthought in the first edition of the game, and is not named as such. The 10-page chapter “Wizards and Society” suggests that if your campaign world does not have ties to ancient Greece, you may want to rename the Order of Hermes something that better suits it.
What were some of the biggest challenges and triumphs faced in designing and developing the early editions of the game?
John: For the first two editions, the biggest challenge was probably just that it was a group of college-aged friends who decided to publish games and basically figure out how to do it from scratch. This was early in the desktop publishing era, when the original Apple Macintosh was only a few years old. I remember the Lion Rampant Mac Plus; you needed to put a 720K 3.5” floppy disk with the operating system in its drive. If you used a RAM Disk, you could put the system folder on it and then be able to remove the original system disk after you were booted up, and then be able to use software and read/write files on a different 720K disk.
David: The fourth edition was produced in something of a rush, because Wizards of the Coast had promised a fourth edition, and then decided to get out of the RPG business (they had a card game that was doing quite well, I believe). That was when Atlas took the line over, and decided to do a full revision of the game rather than just publishing the version that Wizards had prepared. In retrospect, it worked out well enough, but I would not recommend that approach to anyone facing the same decision.
What factors influenced the changes made from one edition to the next?
John: When I got involved with the game, as the 2nd Edition was in development, the connection to a fantastic vision of historical Europe was very appealing to me, and I was happy to see it developed further as the game went on.
In fact, my original vision for Atlas Games was to publish a licensed series of sourcebooks, called “Atlas Europa,” which would be alternate timelines and settings across Europe for the magi, from Merovingian Gaul to the late Renaissance. Those never were fully fleshed out, but White Wolf in particular began publishing books exploring the breadth of Mythic Europe, and Atlas Games has done a lot more for both the 4th and 5th editions of the game.
Were there any design decisions or elements that were initially considered for the early editions but ultimately decided against?
John: There was an ambitious passage in 1st Edition about “Future Projects,” to include an entire line of medieval games with the basic Ars Magica system but a focus on other characters. I recall that “Shining Armor” was the working title for the one based on knights. These did not ultimately come to pass, but I think you can see some of that aspiration in the World of Darkness RPGs that White Wolf later published.
Ars Magica Fifth Edition and Generally
What were the primary design objectives for the fifth edition, and how did you approach changing or refining the mechanics from previous editions?
John: 5th Edition is now 20 years old, so it’s been a long time since I thought about that! I think we were focused most on refinement and addressing some of the glaring issues, such as combat, from the 4th Edition. In general, there has been a lot of broad continuity across editions of the game.
David: There has been a lot of broad continuity, but there are also differences. Second edition was very slim, at 160 pages, and the background was lightly sketched — some people like that. Third edition was much darker in tone, to tie into White Wolf’s World of Darkness (because they were owned by the same company at the time, and quite a bit of the background for the World of Darkness was taken from Ars Magica). Fourth edition cut the links with the World of Darkness (different companies by that point) and also made the rules a lot more defined and explicit. Fifth edition fixed the problems with fourth, and refined a number of ideas. As a result, while second and third editions still have groups of fans, almost no-one is committed to fourth edition. For the people who like that approach, fifth edition does it better.
Ars Magica 5e emphasizes covenant-based gameplay, where players build and manage their wizards' homes. Where did this design choice originally come from?
John: Like troupe-style play (the idea that players have multiple character roles, and may even take turns as storyguide), I think it arises from the premise of “unbalanced” wizards. The main character of an Ars Magica saga winds up being the Covenant itself, a shared effort of all the players and their multiple characters.
The magic system in Ars Magica is renowned for its depth and flexibility. How did you aim to maintain or rebalance player creativity with a structured system in 5e?
John: The depth of mechanics for magic is profound, yet in some respects simple. The technique/form system of the Arts sets up a vocabulary for describing magic in the game, and has a wealth of specific examples, but it is ultimately a toolbox that allows players to express their creativity. An interesting sourcebook we published is “Transforming Mythic Europe;” it takes the principles of magic in the game to the extreme, modeling out what could happen with longevity potions, many years of research, etc., to yield results that would radically change the whole world of the game.
David: As John says, the structured system enables creativity. Hermetic magi can do almost anything within the existing system, and we have rules for how they can change that system to make the remaining few things possible. This means that, no matter what a player wants her maga to achieve, the rules say “Yes, and…”, with the “and” being what the character needs to do in the game to reach those goals. We actually published two books to support this sort of play: “Hermetic Projects” concerns ideas that will not upend the setting.
Character progression in Ars Magica 5e occurs over years of game time, and the game mechanics support long-running sagas. What design considerations went into balancing the progression of magical abilities with the development of characters' personal lives and stories?
John: This ties again into the central role of the Covenant. While the magi may slip back into their laboratories to study whatever mysteries obsess them, a lot of that is essentially out-of-game accounting (how many seasons doing one thing or another, progress in arts scores, creation of enchanted items or books, etc.). When you get together for a story session, it may hang on some magical Macguffin – perhaps a wizard needs to travel to a distant monastery, hoping to obtain permission to make a copy of a long-thought-lost treatise by Archimedes that contains secret wisdom about the form of Rego – but the game play is more than likely going to revolve around the soap operas of everyone who goes along with the wizard and the happenings along the way.
What types of players and playgroups do you think Ars Magica 5e appeals to most, and what are some of the reasons for its enduring popularity within those communities?
John: I believe that for a lot of enduringly successful hobby games, what you do when you are not “playing the game” is at least as important as what happens in the hours when you and your friends actually manage to get together around a table (or, so often these days, your computer screens and webcams). For the typical miniatures gamer, how much time is spent playing battles, versus how much building and painting models?
Ars Magica is a game where, by design, a guest at the table can be handed a grog character to play, and have a wonderful time essentially in a one-shot. At the same time, wizards and companions playing the same day may be engaged in something that complements hours of solo imagination spent on character creation, personal history, tracking the development of skills, magical laboratory activities, etc. The people for whom that is a driving attraction can sustain a long-running saga that may have many more intermittent participants.
Conversely, are there any types of players or playgroups for whom Ars Magica might not be the best fit?
John: At present, it’s a lot to absorb. Not everyone playing the game needs to immerse themselves in its lore, but you at least need a storyguide with the confidence to jump in and, when in doubt, improvise, whether in making rulings about magical mechanics or asserting things about the game setting that might not line up with what a historian would say. The very things that make it appealing to some people would dissuade others.
Ars Magica 6e (Definitive Edition)
When did the idea for a sixth edition, the Definitive Edition, first emerge, and what were the initial motivations behind undertaking this project?
John: I should clarify that Definitive is definitely not a Sixth Edition. It’s the very same rules as 5th Edition. After 20 years of play and 40 supplements, there’s a lot of information (and errata, and some conflicts) across a lot of locations. Definitive Edition is really a reference work, a recodification that pulls in and harmonizes the existing corpus of Ars Magica material. It remains compatible with the whole existing line; and in fact we will continue to sell the Fifth Edition softcover rulebook as the more affordable and accessible point of entry for players and storyguides.
What have been some of the most significant challenges encountered in developing Ars Magica Defintive Edition?
John: After we made the decision to go with Definitive Edition as an approach, and found that David Chart was willing to work on it, it’s been a challenge to get to this point while juggling the rest of the business over the past several years. Just in terms of investing money and staff time, without having revenue coming back in return, it’s been a challenge and a risk from a business management standpoint.
David: I didn’t have to worry so much about the business side of things, fortunately. Collecting and fixing all the errata that people had noticed over twenty years was certainly “challenging”, in that spending months working through people telling you what is wrong with what you have done is not the most encouraging of activities. It is very supportive of impostor syndrome. Fortunately, the response to the crowdfunding has helped a great deal with that.
A more straightforward challenge was drawing the line between what should go in the Definitive book, and what had to be left out. With over 5,000 pages published for the fifth edition line, it was obvious that we couldn’t include everything, but I had to decide which rule systems needed to be in the core, and which could be left for supplements. The rules for medieval surgery did not, alas, make the cut.
What aspects of Ars Magica Definitive Edition are you particularly proud of?
John: I think the new art and the graphic design of the book are stunning, and the crowdfunding success has allowed us to commission even more.
David: I think the collection of rules in the Definitive Edition book genuinely make it the definitive reference work for people playing a standard saga.
The crowdfunding campaign for Ars Magica Definitive Edition has received significant support from the game's fanbase, as well as those who might be discovering the game for the first time. Why do you think this project resonated with so many people?
John: Ars Magica has an incredibly loyal, invested fan base. As I see backer names across my screen, I recognize names from mail orders I sent 30+ years ago. I think it has been 8 years since we last published something for Ars Magica, but people haven’t stopped playing and talking about the game. In addition, I think some of the exciting things we’re doing, such as the Creative Commons licensing, are attracting more attention.
David: As well as the incredible fan base, Ars Magica is one of those games that has a lot of name recognition in the hobby. I suspect that the crowdfunding campaign caught the attention of a lot of people who had heard of it as a game you really should check out, and seemed like the perfect opportunity to do that.
I found it interesting that there were so many backers at the maximum reward tier that includes dozens of books but is priced at over $1200. And yet, all backers have received a ton of free PDF supplements immediately upon backing. How did you come up with the reward tiers and product release strategy for this crowdfund project?
John: I really did not expect we would have so many backers at the “Library of Durenmar” level. Our original plan was to have very simple tiers – add-ons access; new stuff in digital only; new stuff in print + digital; and a retailer tier. We had done a lot of work also to get the entire 5th Edition line set up for print-on-demand softcover versions that can be available in perpetuity, so that was going to mean loads of add-ons. We figured people would pick and choose to fill in holes in their collections; plus we would have bundle deals on lots of PDFs.
Kind of as an afterthought, I proposed an “all-in” tier, and figured out what its total value would be and how much we could discount it. Honestly, I thought we might have half a dozen people pick it up – I figured our audience would overwhelmingly consist of people who already have a lot of those books, and the people most likely to be willing to spend that much would also be most likely to already have bought all those books. I’m happy that I was wrong.
David: From comments I have seen online, I think one of the reasons we were wrong about that is that there were a lot of people who had played earlier editions and loved the game, but then stopped playing because they graduated and got real jobs. Now they have real money and the perfect opportunity to get back into Ars Magica.
How do you envision the Ars Magica community evolving in the years to come with regard to VTTs or other technologies that might aid play?
John: We’ve gotten a lot of questions about VTTs, and our answer to them is the Creative Commons license. We don’t have the expertise to make and support that stuff ourselves, and we realize that people who put significant work into making digital tools have a reasonable desire for compensation. The CC BY-SA license means that people can adapt all of the Ars Magica 5th Edition materials now into VTTs, as long as they comply with the license, even if they are selling the result.
There is already a head-spinning number of supplements published for Ars Magica generally. Has everything which could be written for it already been written? What are your personal hopes and aspirations for the future of Ars Magica beyond the release of the Definitive Edition?
John: Heavens, no! There is an almost infinite range of things that could yet be done with Ars Magica, especially if we think beyond the default year of 1220 assumed in the game. I’ve come to realize that the biggest barrier to Ars Magica’s potential is me. There is literally not enough time left in my life to fully realize the potential of this game, and both I and the rest of the Atlas team have other things we need to do in our lives as well! My hope is that the Creative Commons licensing will result not only in the Ars Magica books that I wish would be published, but even more books that I don’t even realize are possible but, when someone does them, make me pump my fist and yell “YES!”
David: I’m writing a Starter Set through my Patreon (blatant plug: https://patreon.com/DavidChart ), so I obviously think there is still an enormous amount that could be written. Not only are there other time periods, and alternate histories, to consider, but people have often mentioned the possibility of using the Ars Magica rules in a pure fantasy setting. The Creative Commons license means that all of that is now possible. I am really looking forward to seeing what people come up with.
John: We’re almost halfway through the campaign, and already there are 3rd party Ars Magica Open LIcense ebooks for sale, and a new category for third party Ars Magica material on DriveThruRPG. This is only the beginning of a new age.
Ars Magica Links:
Ars Magica Definitive Edition crowdfund
David Chart’s Patreon
