Go buy the other Ars Magica Venice book now

One of the team from the other Ars Magica Venice book reached out to me and asked if I could support their Backerkit campaign with a podcast episode, and I’m happy to. I’d like to quickly note this isn’t a paid advertisement and I don’t have any access beyond my status as a subscriber to their campaign. I’d like to encourage you to back them, and particularly their Ars Magica add-on. The link is https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/vortex-verlag/serenissima-obscura-rpg-setting-guide-adventure

I’m sorry if this is something of a ramble, but you deserve content beyond me saying “Just buy it” and I thought as the only other person who has tried what they’re doing I might be able to shine some light on the process. I’m sorry if this seems like a ramble about myself, but it’s about my writing process and why having one book on Venice means you want a second one.

I want you to want a second book because I’ve always intended to give you more Venetian books myself. In the writing of Mythic Venice you can see bits where I’ve obviously said “…and here goes a future supplement”. Off the top of my head they are the covenant, the ghetto, the Merceria, the demonic cathedral of Torcello, and the arsenal. Serenissima Obscura can fill some of those gaps.

You may ask why I didn’t wait until all of that material was written and put it out in one book. There are several factors. I needed a break from Venice: I write because I have post-treatment mental health conditions and that means I can only do my work in waves. This is why you get personal humiliations like me ghosting the poor fellow who was laying out the Cornwall book. I can, to some degree, compensate by running several projects so that the waves overlap each other’s lull points. That’s why the podcast is built on three “streams”, or subjects, you see. I have six in the can on Mythic Chester, now I’m going to put some in the can on Venetian faeries, then monsters. I then hide that my releasing them in a pattern. I had 150 pages of text, or thereabouts, and it could be a book or it could be scattered podcast episodes until I had that energy again, so a book was the obvious choice.

My writing is, as I’ve said, for me. a therapeutic tool., but I still want it to be useful. The added bits above would be at least three times the length of the central bit I’ve given you. It’s like asking why not wait until you’ve written the Winds in Winter before putting out Song of Fire and Ice. You want to know if people like it before spending years on it, and cutting it into chunks lets me know if people are finding it useful. A lot of RPG authorship is just sending books into the void and hoping they find someone who likes them. Doing it in sections lets me stop if I discover, or people I trust tell me, that its not any good. Yes: I know I’ve written dozens of books: I honestly don’t know how good some of them are. Support matters, particularly for something like Serenissima Obscura. It’s got a team of 16 and their sunk costs have to be huge compared to my tiny art budget.

A second concern was I knew a medieval Venetian book was on the way. Not Serenissima Obscura, though, a separate one by a company that’s D&D only. Since we are both, I presume, using the same folklore I was concerned people might think my work was a port of theirs. I needn’t have worried because in hindsight their Constantinople book is nothing like our Constantinople book so their Venice book won’t be like mine. I think my concern was mainly because my algorithms have me pretty firmly pinned and I was getting their adverts constantly. Also, their art was gorgeous and I knew I’d be using public domain art. I only realized I was in an algorithmic bubble because I’m now getting Serenissima Obscura adverts many times a day. The algorithm knew I’d spent money on Venetian books so it was constantly telling me that another book was coming. Having felt that it, I can empathize with the people working on Serenissima Obscura suddenly finding that everyone who backed Ars 5DE was getting a free Venice book. Neither of us knew the other existed. I’d tried signaling what I was doing, [daily posts of progress as part of #dungeon23 / #City23 for a while) but I believe they are from the German speaking bit of the fandom and somehow our paths didn’t cross.

A problem for them, and they haven’t told me this I’m just extrapolating from my own feelings,. is not just that there’s a book already out on your subject: it’s also that Mythic Venice anchors the mind of Ars players at a very low price point. I’m glad someone is doing the big shiny book with all of the associated costs so the rest of us can see how it performs. People write to me asking “Why can’t I get your Ars Magica magazine in paper?” and my reply is that I’m not sure it’ll sell enough to cover its electronic costs, let alone shipping and printing a physical edition. I did a couple of tip jar pdfs, and now a paid magazine, and that’s giving all of us creators a feel for market size because we are sharing data on the Atlas boards. We are watching this Backerkit to see if it works.

If we, as a community, want big chunky Ars books, we need to buy the big chunky books. When I went looking for the Backerkit link for Serenissima Obscura I saw that I originally joined Kickstarter to put $235 behind Black Chicken Studio’s Ars Magica computer game. I admit mostly I wanted it because one of the backer rewards was a Diedne house book. Take the lesson: we could have had a Diedne book in 2012. When the Ars community signals it is too small to support a certain type of project, the creators don’t make that type of project.

Don’t be fooled by the Backerkit saying it is “fully funded”. All that means for most crowdfunding is that the team have enough seed capital to gamble on making their product. I don’t know in the case of Vortex Verlog, but I really, truly doubt that the situation is that if it all stopped now and they fulfilled all of their orders they’d be rolling in so much cash they’d be desperate to do the whole thing again. Most people advertise projects are “fully funded” to promise this project is not vapourware. Fully funded is not the same as “The people making this are now safe and renumerated.”

So, parts of Mythic Venice are going to be wonderfully completed by Serenissima Obscura instead of me doing it. For example their Backerkit shows maps for a character-owned Venetian palace. Mythic Venice had an art budget of $600 and most of that were the floor plans for the Doge’s Palace. I can now skip paying that and say “Hey, there’s a great bit of art over at Serenissima Obscura!” and concentrate on other bits. For example if you’re following the podcast you know I’m writing a Merceria vendor per month to work underutilised monsters and collect up a new book.

Even if they have a faerie market in the Merceria, and I don’t know if they do but clearly I would, it won’t be the same as my faerie market and Ars players can enjoy both. As I’ve noted to people on various bits of social media my gateway character to the Merceria is based on Edward Cole, an eccentric Australian bookseller from the end of the 19th Century. Also, my task is to revitalize monsters we’ve statted but not used, the gorgon maskmakers being an example. Serenissima Obscura’s Merceria can’t be similar because they have a different story focus and are bringing different cultural capital to the experience. I’m sure the two will mix and match at your table.

When I started the Venice project I’d finished some of my source documents and I rapidly consumed guidebooks to get the lie of the land. I read one, and then took more hooks from the next, and more from the next, until I think I stopped at my sixth, with two plot hooks I could use and a heap of ahistorical things I was deeply annoyed by when I tried to confirm them as historically plausible. I should find my notebook because I really should have used them and just flagged them as impossible in 1220, given the time shenanigans I was playing with in Venice. Sure, there’s a futility point when it comes to reading Venetian guidebooks, but it’s well above two.

Let’s get more specific, what do I actively like in this project beyond the art? It says it’ll have 60 Ars Magica monsters, and as far as I know there are only about 620 monsters in the core books, plus roughly 100 in my bestiary. So, that’s a huge addition. Also, I feel like their monsters may be a useful bridge for people used to playing Dungeons and Dragons. I’ve only seen the one example, their stone winged lion, but it does let me talk about another difference in approach.

Mythic Venice is for people who have been playing Ars Magica enough that the question “Where did Tytalus go after the Maddenhoffen Woods?” isn’t gibberish and it salvages the idea from 2nd edition’s Order of Hermes supplement that Venice is a crossroads of the Order, despite that making no sense at all in historical 1187 or 1220. Serenissima Obscura is more likely, and this is a guess, to appeal to people from the game where you kill monsters and take their treasure. This is not a criticism: I play D&D with my kids and they’re far more likely to go to Serenissima Obscura than Mythic Venice.. Now that D&D has adopted milestone experience it can be played a lot more like Ars, but in classic D&D most monsters are generic, whereas in Ars monsters are generally individuals. This guess is based on the number of tribes of things mentioned in Serenissima Obscura’s social media posts. Ars had hrools to take the place of goblins and kobolds, then we went “No, I wish to keep them as pets” and we’ve not really done tribes since, although the dog-headed men from the faerie book will be coming back soon. Less ice magic, more St Christopher medallions. Oh, and the bleymes, I suppose, but I needed Isis cultists: it’s not like they are combat monsters.

As an example, they’ve only published one set of Ars stats for a monster I’m aware of, and it was the stone winged lions. I’d never have done that because I’m more interested in the statue as a piece of repurposed Egyptian protective sorcery that has been blessed and claimed by Saint Mark. For them it’s a species of creature, for me it’s mystery cult clue (with a side order plot hook of who stole its diamond eyeballs and how). Now in saying I didn’t even think of it I’m not saying it’s bad: I remember writing to Ben McFarland, the author of the Dragon Abbot, saying that I would never have thought to write that and it was brilliant. My point is that our two approaches mean you’ll get different, likely compatible stuff between the two books.

I’m really pleased that their covenant is in Murano. It’s a brilliant setting. It has a heap of useful features for Ars Magica built in. The island is the home of the Venetian glass trade, has a nobility that is drawn from people who make mirrors, and has formal equality for women who run glassworks. It also has the sort of canals and palaces you find in Venice proper, so it gives you all of the picturesque advantages of the setting. It also (time to delve into one of my faeries coming up) gives you the bead stringers. All around Venice you see women stringing glass beads. It’s the sort of piecework any poor person can do even if they lack leg mobility. The thing is, the beads are in meaningful patterns: the bead industry of Venice is an enormous code engine inscribing variations of the same thing over and over, like a prayer. I have a use for that in my setting, obviously, but I’m interested to see what the other group do with it, if anything. One thing I’m not doing, but which might be a cool plot idea so I’ll mention it now, is to revisit the idea that the Diedne went to South America and merged with the sacrificial cults there. What exactly are all these people making quipus, Incan bead texts, for? Anyhow, I’ve sidetracked myself.

The Serenissima Obscura team are good at social media. They’ve been collaborating fiercely over on the Ars Magica Discord. I can’t get the hang of Discord. Part of it is that I’m in Australia so you’re all asleep while I’m there. The other part is I’m really bad at social media. Well, being social in general. I admire their energy level and their ability to bring people together.

Also, they may be having a go at Ars firearms. I tried once in the Mythic China thing, long ago. It was…alright I suppose but I’d be glad to see fresh take on it.

Before I round up, just a note. Some people know from little mentions here and there that I was working on D&D Ravenloft port of Mythic Venice I’d called “Serenissima”. I’m still letting it bubble away in the background but I’m going to call it something else. Also, in tone it will be very different from Serenissima Obscura (we need an abbreviation for this), unless it turns out they were going hard for camp horror. I was stuck thinking “Oh, this is just more urban D&D and between Principalities of Glantri, Serenissima Obscura and that other D&D Venice book the useful work has already been done” but unless they really like “Carry On Screaming” and “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” actually no…I’ve got a very arch take I’d like to try.

So: go buy their stuff. 60 Ars monsters. 150 characters. A covenant in Murano. Floor maps for a palace. What more could you want? Do I need to guilt you again by mentioning Black Chicken Game Studio? I’m on the far side of the world, so I’ve backed at the electronic levels. Shipping and tariffs are no barrier.

When this goes live, there are 19 days left.

https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/vortex-verlag/serenissima-obscura-rpg-setting-guide-adventure