Playtest - The Raven’s Ars Magica [ EDIT ]

If you haven’t seen Roger Corman’s 1963 film The Raven, starring Vincent Price, Peter Lorre & Boris Karloff, this’ll be a little harder to explain.

Wizards don’t concern themselves with the affairs, great events, wars, or politics of non-wizards, what they dismissively term "the Mortal Realm." They concern themselves exclusively with their own obscure obsessions, projects, hobbies, ambitions, and intrigues.

They live generally secluded lives, in mansions and towers in the countryside, away from the small imaginations and suspicious eyes of their fellow wizards, the Church, and people at large.

(Some keep rooms in the city. Some visit the courts of dukes and kings. Some go to the theater or take an active hand in the farms and orchards of their estates. Some indulge in poetry, commerce, or romance. Some hold tenure and engage students. These are unwizardly behaviors, treated with affection, scorn or indulgence by your fellow magicians.)

The Oath of Hermes forbids magicians to directly attack one another, so when you want to steal another wizard’s secrets, you must use misdirection, subtlety, trickery, intermediaries, blame-casting, temptation, and deceit instead. You might try to infiltrate a servant or your child into your intended victim’s household. You might send an enchanted bird to peer into their windows or an enchanted cat to ingratiate itself with their own child. You might seek and form a secret alliance with a third wizard — against whose treachery you must inevitably guard yourself in turn.

Wizards’ Duels: When there’s no other way to resolve your differences, magicians engage one another in formal duels of magic. The Raven’s climax is just such a duel, an extended sequence of scenery-chewing, cheesy special effects, and genuinely entertaining visual puns.

The Tone of the Game: Wizards’ bizarre obsessions and baroque intrigues are the backdrop for the game. Against it, the game plays as domestic comedy: sometimes light, sometimes dark, heavy, sometimes bittersweet or just bitter, astringent, unflinching. Sometimes broad, silly, whimsical; sometimes acutely observed, sharp, even surgical. Sometimes warm, sometimes cool, mannered and witty, sometimes shocking, violent, garish, sometimes over the top, campy, a slapstick farce, a comedy of errors, a sitcom, a rom-com, sometimes heartfelt, tender, sentimental or maudlin.

Sometimes you hope that your wizard comes out on top, sometimes you hope that they find a better way to be, and sometimes you hope that they get their comeuppance, long overdue.

Play for laughs and for fun, but play honestly and see where the game takes you.