All articles filed in Ars Magica

An overheard discussion of Marco the Redcap, recorded by his grand-daughter. “It is against the law to believe the story I am about to tell you. It breaches the damnatio memoraie applied by the Quaesitores after the War.  You may not, must not, believe what I am about to say to be true.  Fortunately I’m widely…

In early versions of Ars Magica, the pawn of vis was a quantum: you wither had a pawn, or you did not. There were no fractions of a pawn of vis. I can’t recall how early this was broken, but I certainly recall a vis source being given which was a cave of bats, with…

Labyrinth of Lanes is another of those episodes which is best represented as a text which has inserts. So, please find it in the February 2017 pdf.

In Mythic Europe, faeries are drawn to stories, and to transgressions of boundaries. In the real world, people like to play at being ghosts. How do these two ideas combine? Can pretending to be a ghost cause a haunting? I recently listened to an episode of the Folklore podcast by Mark Norman, in which he interviewed Dr…

I’ve been listening to The Hero With A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell, and he made an interesting point about mystagogic initiations, that struck me as at the crux of many of our problems in terms of mystery cult play. The man who is self made is idolized by the American and Australia modern societies,…

For this post to make sense, you need to be familiar with the idea of moral luck. You can watch an excellent Youtube video by Hank Green, or listen to my ten second version of how Thomas Nagel uses of the term. Imagine two people, with two identical cars, who leave two identical parties, and…

This podcast covered the first two chapters, the Introduction and the Hemetic culture in the Greater Alps. Future Sanctuary episodes will each be a single covenant. Ars Magica was a very different game 15 years ago. it was low fantasy and the historical research was, if not worse, then deliberately less detailed. The level of…