We now have a totally final funds raised number, officially certified by Backerkit. Are you ready for this? Drum roll, please …
Yes, we really truly did hit $1 million! That means in the end John pulls ahead of Ross as the winner of our Staff Pool!
What was my guess again? Oh, right … that's me down at the bottom at 250k. Well, that'll teach me not to ever underestimate the Ars Magica community! LOL!
MORE OPEN LICENSE RELEASES?
You might remember that as part of the Definitive crowdfunding, our Spanish publishing partner Holocubierta put their huge Iberia: Finis Terrae sourcebook under the Open License. We followed up by licensing their gorgeous artwork, commissioning a translation by Ben McFarland, and hiring David Chart to edit it.
Over a year later, we have TWO new Ars Magica books nearly ready for layout. The first is the promised Iberian Tribunal sourcebook, and the second is a history of Iberia sourcebook with all the extra goodness that went beyond a Tribunal book's scope.
So now we're thinking about how to launch these, when we thought Definitive would likely be our last official Ars Magica release. Two things are looking firm …
First, the crowdfunding printing will be hardcover with color interior. But after that runs out, we'll likely switch to print-on-demand (as we've done for the line), to be sure it's available for decades to come. That means softcover with grayscale interior for the long term.
Second, we want to release EVERYTHING ELSE WE POSSIBLY CAN under the Open License. We're completely blown away by how the Ars Magica community has supported the game, but we've also been surprised by requests for things we never would have thought to include. So this is your chance!
Please post in the comments everything we probably won't think of, to add to the Open License. Yes, we're prioritizing all of 4th Edition, and as much of the earlier editions as we have clear rights to. But what else might you want to use for your own future projects? Tell us now!
Covenantum Demo on Steam:The seasonal covenant-management strategy game. Lead a fledgling community of Magi, Companions, and Grogs through decades of magical research, political intrigue, supernatural mysteries, and changing relationships. Help our community develop the game buy contributing your own playtest reports!
Ill-Fated Meeting: John recently came across this demo scenario by Neil Taylor, that we used to have available to our Special Ops demo team. He just posted it to DriveThruRPG as a FREE download, so go get yours now!
Forgotten Magic of Hermes Update: This free download on our site has been updated to include several more spells, including Perceive the Magical Scent, Craft the Bottle of the Elements, and spells from the Faerie Magic chapter of Wizard's Grimoire Revised Edition. Get it on the Ars Magica Open License page, in the sidebar. Our thanks to Patrick Murphy for compiling it.
The Sorrows of the Young Wiedergänger: A folk horror mini adventure by The Medusa's Lair. A Wiedergänger (revenant) is haunting his former neighbours after his family died in a famine. Can the party end the haunting before the harvest rots and the villagers are killed? Includes everything to run the scenario in two to three hours, including maps. It's especially suitable as a Halloween adventure! Find it on both DriveThruRPG and RPGTrader.
Ludus Mercurii: An Ars Magica 5E dungeon-crawling RPG set in Mythic Europe, by Dragynrain.
Liha' al-arz “Bark of Cedar”: Description of a jinn of Damascus, her stat block, her history, and a Mythic blood associated, by Lothindil.
Adventure Recast: An online layout editor for your RPG module. With AI, or without it. Write, adapt and shape your manuscript, characters, and illustrations, with support specifically for Ars Magica. In beta now, prepping for their Kickstarter.
Praecepta Hermetica: This is a 50-page extended primer to the Ars Magica setting and important concepts, by Original Madman. You can grab (and critique) the nearly-final Google doc in the dedicated thread on our forum:
Three topics today! First is a new DriveThruRPG download option, then a status update on shipping rewards, and last is a work-in-progress I want to share with everybody.
DriveThruRPG Downloads Option
I figured out how to do the Backerkit-DTRPG integration, so any backers who would like can have the PDF from their campaign in their Drive Thru RPG library. You should have gotten an email about how to access that.
Reporting AWOL/Damaged Packages
Nearly everyone has their packages by now. Unfortunately, there are a few outstanding. In particular, numerous parcels going to Germany haven't had any updates since their original tracking number creation. We're still waiting for a response from Asendia looking into these. If it were only one or two, we'd suspect labels separated from boxes or something like that; but the number and the common destination makes us think there's something else going on. Another issue is that DHL, which is doing the final delivery in Germany, seems to sometimes apply weird restrictions, like saying they're returning a package because the name of the recipient was not printed on the mailbox. I saw this even in a case where the recipient had scheduled a delivery date and time.
If you haven't received your rewards yet, the best thing to do is to write us now at [email protected] with all the details you can. Even if you've already contacted us about it, please take a moment now to email again. Sometimes we can track down the package. Sometimes we discover that shipping software "corrected" an address into something wrong. Every day backers are continuing to report things arriving, so it really is just very slow delivery in some cases. But we're going to make sure that everyone does get their rewards, even when it means we have to send another copy.
Please also e-mail [email protected] if your rewards were damaged in shipping or were defective in manufacturing. (E-mail is easier for us to track than Backerkit comments or social media direct messages.) Photographs are appreciated, as well as descriptions of damage and what needs replacing. We may provide you with a return label, depending on the circumstances.
Thank you for your patience as we try to sort out these issues.
Bibliotheca Vulgaris
I've recently started work on a project called Bibliotheca Vulgaris, a resource for the mundane libraries of Mythic Europe. Whether stocking a covenant’s library or looking to add flavor to a cathedral school or scholarly monastery, storyguides may find themselves wanting a list of books ready for game use. To intensify the flavor of your game, why not turn to the real world for examples of actual books that might have been found in a medieval library?
This is 100% Creative Commons-licensed content, meant to be something you can cut and paste from when filling up a library. I'm adding to it a bit at a time, and have already included some third party contributions (and would love to add more!). I plan to add all the canonical stats of real-world books described in Ars Magica and its sourcebooks, which are in the existing fan-created ArM5 Books By Ability Index.
-John Nephew President & Co-Owner, Atlas Games
There are still yet even more Open License releases from fans! Check them out:
Rhine Adventures bundle: All 6 adventures The Medusa's Lair has published for the Rhine Tribunal, at roughly 1/2 price.
The Ars Magica Chronology: Another interesting thing OriginalMadman is doing. It begins with 5201 BC: God creates the World, so you know it's pretty comprehensive.
Ars Saga Manager:A fully featured Ars Magica 5th Edition character creator. Build your magus tonight, with everything in one place. Find every Virtue, Flaw, spell, guideline, and ability from the core rules and open-license books in one place, then create custom spells, bind familiars, and customize your lab. Make Ars Magica characters more easily than ever.
Manuscriptum Illuminatum: Turn WordPress into an illuminated home for your Ars Magica Saga. Manuscriptum Illuminatum combines a classic WordPress theme with a companion plugin. Paginae Manuscripti Illuminati provides the manuscript-inspired presentation, while Ligatura Manuscripti Illuminati supplies the campaign content, relationships, roles, and privacy rules that bind the site together.
We're currently #5 on and climbing on the DriveThruRPG bestseller list! Yay us!
There are also a bunch of unboxing and early reviews starting to post! It's incredibly exciting for us, after years of working on this labor of love, to see others loving it too. So here are a few for you to enjoy:
Are you as excited about Ars Magica Definitive as these folks are? Help us spread the word by posting to your socials about it! Send folks to https://atlas-games.com/definitive to learn more.
We're very close to being done with fulfillment! A truck is coming this morning to pick up 13 pallets of international orders (one for each house ... plus a secret Diedne pallet lurking among them!). That's 1,800 packages and a total of 13,894 "mythic" pounds.
About two dozen Founders/Durenmar orders to the US are also going out today and tomorrow, and retailer orders have been shipping as we hear back from those backers. Over 98% of physical backer rewards will be out the door by the end of today!
It's been a crazy few weeks, though. We even had our teenage kids assembling dice and pulling together the FORTY sourcebooks for the huge Library of Durenmar orders, despite their natural tendency to want to sit around doing nothing during summer break. ;P
If you haven't received yours yet, don't worry, it's coming VERY soon! UNLESS you're one of those folks who still need to respond to our e-mails about address corrections or tax ID numbers? Or maybe you haven't filled in your survey, or your shipping charge had a problem? Please check your email!
We're also beginning to see damage reports coming in, which are pretty low for a project this size. We put a lot of thought into packing orders, so there's a word (or several) about that below …
DAMAGES VS OVER-PACKING
For a premium item like the Definitive Edition Set, each damage can be expensive. In packing the orders, I tried to get the right balance between cost, environmental impact, and shipping efficiency. Because, you know, the cost of bubble wrap for EVERYTHING would have been huge, and the time cost would have been enormous too, as well as being a LOT of disposable plastic. And there still will be damages and lost packages. So we chose not to go that route.
The preparation that let us pull off such a huge launch of immediate shipping was having the Definitive sets pre-packaged at the factory in individual double-walled cardboard boxes. That meant we could slap labels directly on when they arrived at our warehouse (after opening the master cartons that each protected four individually boxed Definitive sets for the sea voyage). If we'd had to repackage each book, we would have barely started fulfillment by this point in time.
Double-walled cardboard with the extra cardboard sheets inserted on each end should be good -- but if someone drops a box on its corner from six feet up, it's gonna dent. And it would if we had an outer box and/or a layer of bubble wrap, honestly. I can tell because I've seen damage reports from boxes sent with that extra packaging.
I suppose we could have custom-extruded styrofoam inserts like you see with televisions and computers. But those still don't protect against some of the piercing damage I've seen in at least one damage report. And of course they would cost a bunch to make, increase shipping costs (which are based on dimensions as well as size), be an environmental horror, and would no doubt run all afoul of new or pending packaging regulations in California, the EU, etc.
The sad truth is that it's a tradeoff between increasing packaging cost and just being prepared to eat the cost of replacements when necessary, with diminishing returns on the packaging investment -- you could easily spend more on packaging material and labor than we paid per copy for manufacturing Definitive, after all.
It turns out that sometimes it's both less costly and more environmentally friendly to replace the damaged books than to over-pack them in a futile attempt to avoid any possible damage. Thanks for understanding!
I should note, we're replacing damages as promptly as possible, and keeping track of how many are damaged and in what ways (including lost packages and manufacturing defects). In at least some cases, shipping insurance will cover the replacement costs. I intend to gather and analyze the data to inform future projects, and see how well our packaging choices ultimately did in balancing cost and benefit on this one.
-John Nephew Atlas Games Co-Owner
NEW OPEN LICENSE RELEASES
Hand Signs for Techniques & Forms: By request, the ArM3 Technique & Form hand signs from p171 are newly designated as open license. Those images are in the sidebar on the Ars Magica Open License page.
Then, check out this new fan content for Ars Magica Open License …
Kickstarter LIVE for The Shining Dragon: Launching Sept 1 is Jason P. Crawford's first novel in a series of seven, following the life of Roland of Flambeau. Here we see him as a young boy, first inducted into the magical society of the Order of Hermes, and watch him grow into a capable magus in his own right. A classic fantasy with intrigue, combat, magic, and dragons.
Le guide de Luxovia: Moines, curistes, lutins et vouivres, nombreux sont les habitants de la vallée de Luxeuil-lès-Bains... Découvrez ce supplément de contexte riche en histoire et en trésors, pour le jeu de rôle Ars Magica V5 (Edition définitive). Amazon Canada & Amazon France
Covenantum on Steam: The pre-launch page is live for this seasonal covenant-management RPG on STEAM, inspired by Ars Magica, where you guide a growing magical covenant through decades of political intrigue, supernatural events, magical research, and strategic seasonal planning in Mythic Europe. Planned release is early 2027.
Ars Magica 5th Edition Character Generator: Norbert Langermann published an Ars Magica character generator on Github. It's a native desktop application for building Ars Magica 5th Edition characters — grogs, companions, mythic companions, and magi — as well as covenants, with everything running locally.
A Game of Grogs - Medieval Sports for Ars Magica: This a compilation of rules and mechanics to play medieval sports within the Ars magica frame It isn't an adventure but a mix of rules, examples and story seeds. So whether you are still cruising on world cup fever or not, the grogs and companions have an opportunity to take to the field.
The Magical Renaissance – Conversion Guide for Ars Magica: The year is 1500. The Middle Ages are ending – but magic is not. This 144-page sourcebook contains everything you need to bring the settings, characters, creatures, and mysteries of The Straight Way Lost and Serenissima Obscura into your Ars Magica saga – and carry Mythic Europe into the dangerous brilliance of the Renaissance.
Last weekend John was busy as all heck, giving a finishing polish to his Ordo Hermae and Bonisagus medallions. I remembered I'd taken photos of him pouring the molten metal months earlier, so I shot another photo of the finishing so I could show you the entire process that goes into these handcrafted treasures.
It all started with carving the mold. Here's the mold in progress for the Order of Hermes medallion. John created this design digitally and then engraved it in aluminum with a CNC machine, and used that as a mold for recycled plastic. In this image, he was testing the mold with play-doh.
Next up he took that plastic medallion, and pressed it into special petrobond casting sand to make temporary molds for the molten metal. Yep, that's a plain old cupcake pan.
Here's his backyard setup. On the left is his furnace, with the crucible full of molten metal sitting next to it. The crucible looks like a cup made of graphite, and is thoughtfully up on cinder blocks along with the furnace, so as not to melt our asphalt driveway. At center is the cupcake pan with sand molds, and at right is a bucket of water in case of emergency. Also notice John's industrial-thickness gloves, because the newly poured medallions are actually ON FIRE!
Let's take a closer look at how the medallions are actually ON FIRE! OK, actually it's the casting sand on fire. (This happens with the copper alloys, which have a higher melting point than the zinc used for most of the medallions.)
Exactly HOW HOT is the molten metal? EXTREMELY hot. This is Fahrenheit temperature, melting copper for bronze.
Don't be fooled by the lack of flames on these recently poured zinc medallions. They might still be liquid in this picture, and have a temperature in the hundreds of degrees.
The Bonisagus medallions were made by a slightly different technique: John made a disc from plaster of Paris, and then carved it by hand into a master form that he used to press the shape in the casting sand.
Left to right in this photo are the original scrap zinc, then an ingot he made by melting scrap, then the Ordo Hermae medallions molded in plastic, and finally zinc medallions cast in petrobond sand impressions made with the plastic medallions.
Finally, we arrive at last weekend's polishing frenzy. John used a rotary wire brush and sanding disc to take off misshapen bits, any casting sand, and bring out the luster of the metal.
Zinc will develop a layer of oxidation over time that gives it an antique look. You can accelerate the process by putting it in a pan of vinegar overnight; or you can reverse it with polishing/buffing/wire brushing, or going at it with very fine grit sandpaper. If you carry it around with your keys, you'll find that handling and friction in your pocket/purse will naturally develop a contrast between the low points that are gray with oxidation and the high points that are kept shiny.
Now the medallions are ready to send out to you, along with Ars Magica Definitive Edition!
After all the years leading to this moment... IT'S HERE!!!
Here are a bunch of photos of our big day in the warehouse.
The truck carrying our 20' shipping container
Woody and Brian deal with some boxes that shifted in transit. Good thing that net is there!
"Floor Loaded" means we have to stack all these heavy boxes on our own pallets so we can get them into our warehouse and move them around with the forklift. Each master carton weighs about 30 lbs and contains 4 copies of the game.
Each individual copy comes in its own sturdy cardboard box, ready to be sent with just a label applied for a majority of our backers
Ta-da!
Deluxe dice!
You get a Storyguide Screen inside each Deluxe slipcase set, but we made it available as a standalone product for folks with the regular 5th Edition or digital editions
A second container will arrive early next week with the remainder of the print run. Soon people will start receiving ship notifications and tracking... I even managed to get a few dozen packages into the hands of UPS before the end of the day, but please be patient! It will take us a while to get everything done, especially given that the warehouse is currently in the midst of a couple of other fulfillment projects.
Excalibur Con
Despite feeling a compulsion to spend the entire weekend packing and labeling boxes, I will be spending Saturday and Sunday at Excalibur Con, a pleasant little gaming/SF/fandom convention here in Duluth. We don't go to a lot of conventions these days, but this one is just down the hill, our whole family enjoys it, and Atlas Games is delighted to be there.
Given the vast geographic dispersion of our backers (as I was preparing for shipping I realized that nearly half our rewards are going outside the USA!), YOU, dear reader, are probably not going to be at the convention. But if you are (we do have quite a few backers within driving distance!), stop by the booth (booths 82-83 in South Pioneer Hall) and say hi!
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