1238, Spring
In our Ars Magica campaign, we are finishing off things at the village of Ardmair on the West coast of Scotland. One of our distractions this session was something that our GM brought up, about experience awards for adventures.
Most XP in Ars Magica tends to come from study, rather than from adventure. When you get XP from adventure, it’s generally recommended to be around 5-8 points. However, we can sometimes spend 2 or 3 sessions in a single adventure, so the GM was wondering whether they should increase the amount awarded for the longer adventures, and was looking for thoughts from us players.
One point I raised was that you can only gain XP from one source per season. So if you read a book, and go on an adventure, even if the adventure only took a couple of days, you have to choose between getting the XP from the adventure, or getting the XP from the book. At first glance, it seems odd. It has meant that my maga has barely increased her skill in speaking Gaelic, despite having spent a lot of time travelling around in Scotland and being amongst Gaelic speakers. She has never taken any Awareness or Survival skills, despite spent many weeks on the road.
Why? Because when given the choice between taking a few XP to put on general skills (which cost five times as much to raise as art skills), or putting maybe 12 points on one of her arts, it’s almost always more beneficial to put things on the art. It could take 2-3 seasons of dedicated adventure to get my Gaelic from 2 to 3, whereas I could get two to three magical arts from 0 to 5 in that same time.
But, I think there’s also a good game reason for this. Though it makes real world sense for magi to be picking up some generic skills without it impacting their primary study, there’s a good in-game reason for it (I think). It makes Grogs and Companions more important. It gives a reason to leave magi at home and not always send them out on an adventure. If I know I’ll have to make a choice between study experience and adventure experience, and can’t just take both, I’m more likely to only take my magus out on an adventure when it’s important for them to go. Either because they’re invested in the outcome, or because they have some unique skill to contribute.
This fits better with the Ars Magica aesthetic, that companions and grogs are just as important, and should have just as much story focus as the more powerful magi.
So despite raising this as a problem, and as a reason to change, I think I also talked the GM out of making a change. I’m not sure whether we decided to give larger rewards for longer adventures, but that’s another issue. The skills are probably balanced to not rise quickly, so it may be better to hugely change things.
Jack – Winter, 1238
I drag the body of the villager up onto the beach, and Maedbh casts a spell upon it in order to get it to talk to us, even though it is dead. I get the impression that the corpse is looking at her.
It begs her to stop the voice in his head. There is a voice in his head that called him into the sea. It was a terrible voice. Allistair burns some of the seaweed, as it begins to twitch. The corpse begs for more to be burned. He says that it sees through him, whatever it is. More seaweed starts coming out of the water, and Allistair begins trying to burn it.
Maedbh ends the spell, and the seaweed stops moving.
Maedbh asks for a sample of the seaweed, so I delegate to one of the Grogs to chop a bit off with his axe, and then to drag a bit away from the mass. Maedbh shouts some words over it, and waves her arms about in an exaggerated fashion and peers at it intently. She tells us that it is seaweed. But she can’t describe what she saw. She casts another spell and we all see a confusing mash of images.
Maedbh wants to collapse the cave, but we don’t know whether that will stop it from doing strange stuff.
Whilst Allistair is burning as much of the seaweed as he can, myself and the grogs go house to house, looking for any signs of anything dodgy that might suggest if the villagers were doing something stupid to cause this. We don’t find anything other than seashells. All the houses have two or three large conches in them.
Malcolm listens to one, but just says he hears the sea. But Maedbh thinks that something tried to get through her Parma Magica. She wants to collect them altogether, but I think we should smash them all.
Meanwhile. Alistair is smashing up the rocks under the sea, collapsing the cave mouth.
Maedbh finally collects all the shells together, and casts a spell which causes them to crumble to dust, apart from a small part of one, which she picks up. More magic causes it to glow in a range of different colours. I do not know if this is a good thing.
The magi magically pull the seaweed left floating on the sea to shore, and it is all burned. The houses are burned, the boats are burned, and soon there isn’t much left. We bury the corpse, and the grogs say a prayer over the grave. I put a small crude cross at its head.
We hear that Queen Joan, Alexander II of Scotland’s wife, has died.
Pisciculus ex Criamon – Spring, 1238
I have started feeling strange this season. I am trying to concentrate on my work, but keep on getting distracted by the walls. There are patterns on them, lines of magical power that I can trace out just by looking at them. And they are beginning to speak to me.
What is going on? Is it time for me to walk another path into the Enigma?
