16 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Much anticipated, but a disappointment, October 1, 2006
This review is from: Covenants (Ars Magica Fantasy Roleplaying) (Hardcover)
Ars Magica is an interesting line for a rpg. On the one hand the game is set in 13th century Europe; therefore there is a historical basis to the game. On the other hand the major characters are wizards, and that of a not particularly medieval stripe. This being said, Ars Magica is, after 30+ years of gaming with various sets of rules, my single favourite system. I looked forward to Covenants because it was going to be the first serious attempt to nail down the "metacharacter" of the game, the covenant itself, since the 2nd edition. Sadly, it did not live up to my expectations.
The current notion of how to create a covenant is different from in earlier editions. Previously the creation of a covenant was an absolute endeavour -- you created all of the parameters of the covenant, top to bottom, with the notion that there might be rules within the covenant itself that might restrict access to certain sections. Under the 5th edition rules, however, covenants are designed stritcly around the players. Thus a covenant may actually have more goods and materials available to them than the created ratings suggest, at least in terms of magical volumes. This creates an odd situation. If, as I have had happen in various sagas, the players go over to the second generation (apprentices who become magi and take over for the primary magi, who are themselves more or less retiring to their laboratories), the covenant statistics are no longer valid. In simple terms, the statistics created for the covenant only work for a given group of players, not to older or young NPCs or subsequent apprentices. This is a failing.
In Ars Magica money has never been of central importance. Characters have very broad, generalized "wealth levels". This has worked well in that no one has had to really think about where the money comes from. For covenants in the past this was a good idea -- how is a covenant able to support itself? A handwave would suffice. With this supplement, however, the covenant must know precisely from what source its monies derive. This creates a major problem. As most wealth in the 13th century derives from land, and land is not a saleable commodity, the covenant must come up with some sort of plausible reason for why it owns the land. In addition the supplements list a "typical" holding of lands for a covenant to be equivalent to "a large tract of wheat fields ... with a half-dozen villages." This is more than a standard knight of the 13th century would hold, closer to a small barony. Such a covenant, therefore, is not simply a landholder, but a considerable one. Certainly such a group, assuming it could even persuade others that they have actual rights to the lands, would be drawn into the mundane conflicts of the day. Prices for various commodities are provided, yet not how quickly such items would be used up, so the costs versus needs are impossible to calculate.
Now while such sections seem to balance more towards the mundane, concrete, and historical side of the equation, the supplement also has material that, quite improbably, leans heavily towards the fantastical, bordering on the Moorcockian. There are options for mutable and flickering auras, pattern Warping, predetermined natural disasters, fantastical cavalry, death prophecies, and other bizarre environmental factors. Of course this is all intermixed with hard-and-fast rules on realistic fortifications and maintainence, so it is hard to tell precisely which direction the authors meant this books to jump.
There are also rules in here that make it much harder to run your covenant. The rules on prevailing loyalty are horridly broken was written; there are fixes to this over in the errata section at Atlas Games, but they do not go far enough. Instead of merely adding flavour to the game, it is now nearly impossible to have loyal covenfolk. The Extended Rules section on the writing of books, while appear to add extra options, instead takes the core book writing rules and declares that the only way to achieve the levels of Quality found in the core rulebook is with a greater expenditure of money and time than the core rules call for.
There are also a great number of spells of questionable use in this book. The Scribal Magic found in Chapter Seven, while quite charming, has no use or application. While each of these spells seem to be useful to the game there is again the problem of we do not know just how much is needed materially to create books, thus the spells, while at first glance useful, cannot actually be sued in the game. They create specific amounts of material needed for writing and copying books; since we do not know how much of this material is needed, the spells provide no benefit.
The book is not without redeeming features. Chapter Six, which deals with Vis Sources, is both imaginative and charming, the sort of thing that provides great colour to any saga.
Overall this book could have provided great material for Ars Magica sagas. Instead it provides minutiae that confuses many players, dwells on mundania that ultimately confuses the issue of the place of covenants in the Mythic European landscape, creates extra rules that limit (rather than adding to) options, yet also provides fantastical elements to add into a realistic setting. I cannot recommend this volume for any serious saga.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Some great gems and duds, July 27, 2010
This review is from: Covenants (Ars Magica Fantasy Roleplaying) (Hardcover)
I got this book for 3 chapters:
1.) The extended boon and hook list is very nice, flavourful and detailed.
2.) The laboratory Chapter is amazing. It finally details how to make very personified labs with a number of different scores that can go from the gleaming organized lab to the dank and smelly experimenters lab.
3.) Vis Sources chapter has a number of very neat vis sources.
I realize the other reviewer here was justifiable, in that the Covenant system of 5th Ed is *Narrative* in focus. Basically "what matters for telling stories"? 4th Ed was very focused on the actual statistics of the Covenant, not necessarily what hte stories of the Saga would be centered around, which is more *Simulationist* in focus. As for the covenant character chapter, I waived off on it, didn't seem so interesting.
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