Game Flow

[Keehnelf]

Ars Magica is a generational-timeline kind of game. There are rules for ageing and natural death, and those matter. They're important because like magic itself, Ars Magica cares about the cycles of the seasons, the stages of life, and patterns of growth, death, and rebirth. Ideally, if this campaign goes for a while, you'll end up with numerous Companions who come and go with time, and more than one generation of Magus each--learning and accomplishing what they can, leaving behind what is useful or necessary for the next generation, and handing off the torch when the time comes.

In a sense, this campaign is starting out with a preoccupation about the very question of generational succession. The last great steward of this congregation of wizards didn't do his job as well as he could have, and as a result has left a bit of a mess of things. At this moment, the themes I've seeded here have mostly to do with how the PCs and the NPCs will navigate that mess--what they will make of it and what kind of future they will strive toward.

Mechanically, this means the game ranges from the very granular (the occasional combat where time is measured in seconds) to the very broad (with whole seasons or perhaps years passing in the comparative blink of an eye).

My goal is to structure the game forum chronologically, allowing for each Season to each give us a scene with a rotating cast of characters. The balance of each of these scenes, like in a traditional game of Ars Magica, will be with one player's magus as the focus or the initiator of the action or conflict for that scene, and any number of other players' Companions (no more than one each) as cast members for that scene. While you'll start the game each with one Companion, over time you are welcome to create and add more to the roster. Not every story will be right for the same set of Companions. Not every Companion will have stories or interests that intersect with every Magus.

So--one thread for each season, with the Magus identified as the focus at the start and then Companions joining the story as it unfolds. The goal is not for these to be protracted tales--but instead reveal something new about a character, or evolve a relationship, uncover a resource or initiate/progress/resolve a conflict or challenge.

There will be a companion thread to the main Story thread for each Season, reflecting the other things that are happening in the background. The study or training of the companions that are not featured in the Story thread...the work in the laboratory or the library of the other Magi, reflecting their preferred preoccupations...advancing their magical skills, binding familiars, scribing books or inventing spells, and so on. That will be a little bit of a free-for-all.

The pace of the story will progress via OOC chat between Seasons, to establish the next voluntary or involuntary scene--it could be as early as the next season, or if things are uneventful we could choose to skip ahead a year, or two, or three. Longer time skips will be rare because there's always a story to progress, and if we go too long without any scenes then the characters relevant to them will start to die off or become irrelevant!

Hopefully the cadence and approach will become clear as we go.