Ars Magica 5e Standard Edition Core Rulebook
Ars Magica at a Glance
- Play magi and their loyal companions and grogs in the fantastical world of medieval Mythic Europe.
- Explore this benchmark roleplaying system with a focus on storytelling and troupe-style play.
- Over 40 expansions, supplements, and scenarios to explore roleplaying in Mythic Europe.
- Released under a Creative Commons open license, which welcomes community contributions.
What is Ars Magica?
Ars Magica is the award-winning roleplaying game by Jonathan Tweet and Mark Rein•Hagen about wizards and their allies in Mythic Europe. This flexible, deeply built world can support games that are historically accurate or fantasy-based, epic or small scale, political or personal.
Players work together to tell the story of their covenant — all of the magi, their companions, and grogs. This history can span decades. It might be heroic, tragic, or both in turn. The covenant could influence the entirety of Mythic Europe or the fates of a small corner of the world.
Spells will be cast. Duels won and lost. Houses may rise and fall. But magic is forever.
Grimoire: Gameplay Basics
Ars Magica is a troupe-style, storytelling game. This means that players will not only play a magus, but also the companions and grogs who serve them. Each of these characters contributes to the covenant they belong to, and therefore to the story itself.
The game is famous for its magic rules, which set a new standard for RPG magic systems. The system is divided into arts, each of which comes with a set of verbs and nouns (called Techniques and Forms). Players simply put them together into phrases like "Control Fire" to represent what they want to do.
This fifth edition core book contains all of the rules you need to play, and there’s an enormous library of Ars Magica supplements in our catalog to help develop your campaign. As a rule, older sourcebooks are usable with the newest edition.
Content originally published in Ars Magica: Fifth Edition, ©2011, licensed by Trident, Inc. d/b/a Atlas Games®, under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license 4.0 ("CC-BY-SA 4.0)
Table of Contents
Chapter Two: The Order of Hermes
Chapter Four: Virtues and Flaws
Chapter Five: Abilities
Chapter Six: Covenants
Chapter Seven: Hermetic Magic
Chapter Eight: Laboratory
Chapter Nine: Spells
Chapter Ten: Long-Term Events
Chapter Eleven: Obstacles
Chapter Twelve: Realms
Chapter Thirteen: Bestiary
Chapter Fourteen: Mythic Europe
Chapter Fifteen: Stories
Chapter Sixteen: Sagas
Appendix I: Fourth Edition Conversion
Appendix II: Formulae Review
Appendix III: Spells Index
Appendix IV: Index
Appendix V: Character Sheets