Ars Magica: the Definitive Edition

A Great Game Discussed at Great Length

Ars Magica is a medieval historical fantasy RPG that spotlights wizards and magic. In the traditional game, every player has a wizard character. The characters live in the 13th century, in “Mythic Europe,” a version of our own world in which myths, legends, and folklore are true. This week, Atlas Games, the publishers of Ars Magica’s recent editions, began a crowdfunding campaign for a 600-page definitive, updated version of the core rules to the game. I have a deep love of this game, so I’m taking this opportunity to talk about what makes it so great, why it’s important, and how it sits in the historiography of tabletop roleplaying games.

Influenced By and an Influence Upon

Ars was created almost 40 years ago by Jonathan Tweet and Mark Rein-Hagen. Tweet would later go on to lead the design team for the 3rd edition of Dungeons & Dragons, the first edition published by Wizards of the Coast, in addition to Over the Edge, Everway, and many other games. Mark Rein-Hagen went on to create Vampire: the Masquerade, White Wolf, and the World of Darkness. So, you know, that’s quite a pedigree.

Tweet and Rein-Hagen were tired of playing D&D, in which sure, you can play a wizard, but you have maybe 4 Hit Points and you can cast only a single spell each day. That’s not a very recognizable version of a wizard, a word that conjures up characters like Merlin and Gandalf. They wanted to play a game in which wizards were the stars, wielding incredible magic powers.

Roles and Runequest

Jonathan Tweet was kind enough to sit down for an interview with me in the pre-COVID era (you can watch it here, he is super interesting), and he told me about the influence of Runequest on Ars Magica. Now, we could go on for days about Runequest, a wonderful game with a rich history and enthusiastic fans, but what’s important here is that Runequest did not have classes. In D&D, the single most important choice you make for your character is your class. Are you a Fighter or a Wizard? A Thief or a Paladin? And this choice locks you in to a certain set of abilities you will enjoy for the life of your character. Other games do this, but maybe they don’t use the word “class.” Cypher, which we talked about just a few days ago, calls this your character “type,” but it’s the same idea.

Runequest does not do that. In Runequest, every character can learn how to do anything. You do not, as a player, pick an archetype for your character. Instead, your Runequest character, who lives in the fantasy Bronze Age world of Glorantha, selects their personal patron god, and they join that god’s cult. Each cult teaches a selection of skills and magic to members of the cult, but nothing prevents you from learning things outside your cult. So sure, if you’re a worshipper of Orlanth the Storm King, maybe you learn how to throw a thunderbolt. But hey, maybe you want to learn a healing spell too. That’s okay!

Tweet and Rein-Hagen took this idea to Ars Magica, where every wizard joins one of twelve Houses. (Remember, this is the 1980s, long before Harry Potter.) Each House has a distinctive flavor: wizards from House Merenita hang out with fairies, Bonisagus wizards spend all their time in the lab doing magical research, and House Bjornaer teaches its wizards how to turn into animals, and so on.

You can see this same principle at work in the World of Darkness and many, many other RPGs. Instead of you, as a player, choosing an archetypal class for your character, your character chooses a faction in the setting to align with.

Verb + Noun = Magic

So Ars was influenced by games that came before it, both in a positive (let’s do what that game did) way and in a negative (let’s not do it how other games have done it) way. But one of the places the game really did innovate was in the way it presented magic.

In Ars Magica, magic is broken down into five verbs (“Techniques”) and ten nouns (“Forms”). Your wizard has a score in all of these verbs and nouns. When you want to cast a spell—let’s say Fireball—you figure out what verb and noun you need (Create + Fire), add up your score, and roll a die. If you roll high enough, you cast the spell and BOOM.

Your wizard knows some spells very well, and can cast them without thinking too hard about it. But if you want to improvise something magical, you can, you just need to have the verbs and nouns required. This opened the game up, so players could invent new, unique spells using the verb + noun combos.

If this sounds familiar, it should, because other games have borrowed from this system to varying degrees. White Wolf’s Mage kept the nouns, so you have a score in Life magic, or magic relating to Matter, and the higher your score the more you can do. The West End Star Wars game didn’t need a noun (because that noun was “the Force”) so they just kept the verbs (Sense, Control, and Alter). Other more comprehensive and setting-neutral games, like GURPS, came up with their own rules for verb + noun magic.

A Historical Setting

Ars Magica is not the only game with a historical setting—13th century Europe—but this design choice is not easy one. Human beings have not always been very good people, and the middle ages are full of people behaving very badly to each other. Racism, misogyny, religious warfare… these are complex issues but they’re not unique to the middle ages. In any time period, including our present, we don’t have to look too hard to find people behaving badly.

Most fantasy games choose an ahistorical setting and stridently avoid any interaction with the “real world.” D&D used to engage with Earth history (TSR published D&D books on the Vikings and Charlemagne; parts of the Forgotten Realms were settled by refugees from Earth), but now does not. Other games, including the World of Darkness and Tweet’s Over the Edge, engage with the world with determination.

Ars takes the hard path. It leans into the historical setting, mining it for folklore, mythology, legends, stories, adversaries, and conflict.

A Large Cast of Characters

Ars Magica also innovated the idea that a single player has at least two regular characters, and might play other characters at any given moment, depending on story requirements. For example, your wizard character might lead an expedition into a ruined monastery looking for magical secrets, but your wizard needs help and protection. So one of the other players, instead of playing their wizard character, plays their “companion,” who in this case happens to be a knight. Another player thinks their companion, a monk with first-hand knowledge of this monastery, would want to go. Other players might bring their wizard, or their companion, or perhaps a lesser supporting-cast character, like a bodyguard.

You see this in plenty of other games now, like the Star Trek RPG and Dune, both published by Modiphius. Star Trek is a particularly good example. Ars Magica wizards are a bit like your Star Trek bridge crew. Every player has a character on the bridge. But on an away mission, the entire bridge crew does not go. A few bridge crew members lead the away team, backed up by redshirts or plucky scientists.

Creative Commons

Another way Ars has been influenced by other games is the decision by Atlas to put the game into a Creative Commons license, so anyone can publish material for Ars Magica. The final, 5th, edition of Ars Magica has over 40 books in the line, the last of which came out ten years ago. The game is, effectively, complete. Atlas does not plan any new content for the game.

The Definitive Edition of the game, currently crowdsourcing on Backerkit, collects material from across the game line, integrates it into the core rulebook, updates and clarifies it, and corrects a lot of errata. But none of it is new.

I like my games to get new content. I like to run and play games that are getting regular support from their publisher. Atlas can’t commit to that for Ars, and so instead they’ve taken the bold and commendable choice to put the game into an open license, so the community can create new material. Many 21st century games have done this, but I don’t know of any other game which transitioned into an open license after the publisher stopped putting out new content.

A Second Spring?

In Ars Magica, organizations grow, flourish, decay, and die according to a seasonal model. The youthful but fragile energy of Spring is followed by a hot and powerful summer. But the slide to Autumn is inevitable; it can be slowed, but not stopped, and eventually, all things must die.

Ars Magica hasn’t had a new book in ten years. The game was in Winter, and Atlas didn’t have the resources to do anything about that. So they took a gamble. They have opened the game up to us, the players and fans. If the game is to have a Second Spring—if it is to be renewed, and live again—it is up to us.

Check out the crowdfunding campaign and watch the video.

It’s a very cool game.