House Rules

PART I: OFFICIAL RULES
Well, Ars Magica 4th edition is a good product indeed, but is far from perfect. Some rules works very well, some don't, and some others are missing or poorly detailed.
Even more problems arises if you started to play with 3rd edition and want to move to 4th edition without rewriting all the characters from zero.
Driven by the interest for the new edition and the necessity to keep some of the rules we were already using, our Solomonic choice was to update to a mixed 3rd/4th edition. This transitional 3.5 edition, detailed below, seems to work fine, so fine that we'll probably stick to it even in future campaigns.
Character creation: For obvious reasons all the process of character creation comes from the 3rd edition. Except maybe for the House Templates it will remain the same even in future campaigns.
Virtues and Flaws: Except for Magic Addition all the flaws comes from third edition.
Abilities: Full conversion to 4th edition. Hermes Lore and Hermes History are still in use.

Note: Players have been asked to assign the points coming from the reduced combat abilities to other abilities the character already owned, spreading as much as possible to avoid significant alteration of the character concept.
Spells: The process of spellcasting and the general details of the spells are those of 4th. Instead of changing the level of the spells already owned by the characters, the descriptions of 3rd edition spells whose level has been changed in 4th edition have been adapted (more or less) to the new guidelines.

Example: 3rd ediction Twist of the Tongue (Lev. 20) has now a duration of sun/moon instead of moon/perm.
Laboratory: Rules from 4th edition apply. We use an home-breed rule to calculate the duration of laboratory activities. See below.
Combat: 3rd and 4th edition rules have been accurately mixed. The result is more similar to 3rd edition dueling combat. For detailed rules see below.
Storyguide: Concerning fatigue, 3rd edition applies (removing long term fatigue was a real bad move!). The rest of the stuff is 4th edition with the exceptions: (a) I still allow the seasonal xp bonus. (b) Confidence sucks in either edition, we'll use the 3rd edition version until we design some interesting replacement.
Covenants: The design of the Covenant creation rules is nice, but they produce way too powerful Covenants for my tastes, so 3rd edition applies.
PART II: NEW RULES
Splitting up Seasons: A character is allowed to use less than a season to perform menial tasks, the lab total/study total/px total generated according to the rules refers to a full season of work. Reducing the time dedicated to a projec reduces the relative points earned by the same fraction.
This rule should work well for:
  • Training and Practice [reduce final xp]
  • Exposure [If INT >0 gain 1 xp in half a season]
  • Reading Lectio, Disputatio, Summae, Libri Questionum and Tractatus [reduce final xp]
  • Studing from Vis [reduce final xp]
  • Learning spells [reduce lab total]
  • Inventing spells [reduce lab total+aura]
  • Copying spells [reduce the total number of levels]
Example: a magus has a lab total of 30 to learn a 10th level spell from a book, he can learn the spell in a month and use the remainig two months for other projects.

Note: This rule has been pleytested somewhat resulting to slightly faster rates of growth for inexperienced characters, due to an optimization of the time dedicated to research.

Combat: Sorry, not ready yet.
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Last Updated: 14 january 1999
� 1998-1999 Leonardo Croatto