Discount Price: $29.95
Price fluctuation possible.
How soon does it ship: Normal ship time within one day
Shipping? Absolutely FREE if you qualify for Super Saver Shipping.
Type of bind: Hardcover
EAN num: 9781589780835
ISBN number: 1589780833
Label: Atlas Games
Manufacturer: Atlas Games
Page Count: 144
Printing Date: January 31, 2006
Publishing house: Atlas Games
Sale Popularity Level: 788715
Studio: Atlas Games
Other books you might be interested in perusing:
Editor's Notes and Comments:
Product Description:
The covenant is the home of magi and the heart of an Ars Magica saga. Much more than just a base camp, its prosperity determines the power and safety of the characters who live there, and the challenges faced by a covenant shape the whole saga. The Covenants sourcebook includes:
New Boons and Hooks, for a wide range of saga styles
Guidance on governance and covenfolk
Story-based rules for determining the covenant's wealth
Rules for developing libraries and enchanting books
Rules for personalizing and improving a magus's laboratory.
Everything you need to bring your covenant to life is here!
User popularity level:
Rated by buyers -
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 very first serious endeavor 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 acess 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 very 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 ... Read More
Find other books like this one:
