When something this big happens, there is going to
be a few blog posts about it. They say it is one of the top ten most
profitable Kickstarters of all time. Two million dollars, just
to write a game supplement – that is really
something. Let’s do the math, shall we?
Word count in a normal GURPS
or White Wolf supplement hovers around 60K. Divide two millions by
60,000 and lo and behold – Matt
Colville will earn $34 per word
he types. It’s almost absurd. This
right here is peak RPG profit margin if there was ever such a thing.
Between Arneson and Gygax who both ended their
lives in near poverty, and Steven Erikson who received one
million dollars for his entire Malazan
Book of the Fallen (ten tomes and over
2 million words total), this Strongholds
& Followers thing looks like an
aberration. Erikson earned 50 cents per word – which is already a
very sweet
deal for a writer.
If Colville had been writing this blog post, he
would have made $5,440
already.
But how can his
book ever live up to its landmark profit margin? It’s unimaginable.
The end result is bound to be a disappointment. Yes, I admit I am
curious to see that “two-million-dollar supplement”. At least one
of my friends will buy it, since he buys everything RPG. But I don’t
need to buy it,
since I already
have Lion Rampant’s original Ars
Magica.
Because that’s just it, isn’t it? Strongholds
& Followers is really Ars
Magica for D&D.
Ars Magica is a
role-playing game of political alliances, political borders,
diplomacy, intrigue, public relations with the “mundanes”,
tribunals, and basically managing the resources of a covenant. The
magi have Companions and Grogs – in other words, followers –, and
they seldom have to trade and interact with other covenants. My
friends and I played Ars Magica
for a solid ten years, and it was awesome. Here’s a confession:
sometimes you will skip the tedious upkeep and go straight to the
next adventure. Who around the table is going to make contact with
that old beekeeper who lives downhill from the covenant? Who wants to
role-play the boring negotiation scene with the local fishermen?
Vincent, you up for it? Fuck that. Just roll percentile dice and be
done with it.
Sooner or later, the magi always end up going on
yet another adventure anyway – and leaving the covenant into the
(usually) capable hands of some NPC. So, the covenant or stronghold
or temple isn’t the centrepiece of the game; embarking
on adventures
is still the centrepiece. True sedentary campaigns only work up to a
certain point.
And let’s not forget vis.
What is an Ars Magica
covenant without a source of vis? For those who are definitely not
familiar, what we call “vis” is the main commodity in Ars
Magica. Raw vis consists of physical,
storable, tradable “magic points” that need to be harvested in
remote magical places (for instance, a sacred glade or mysterious
cavern) at exactly the right time of year. Covenants usually have
jurisdiction over one
such magical place. Some covenants can control two, three, or even
four different vis sources. Very powerful / influential covenants may
control five vis sources – we’re talking between 15 and 30
resident magi here. And of course
there are some “disputed” sources of vis. These may be located
halfway between covenant A and covenant B, or maybe there was a very
old clause in that covenant’s charter about the magi from the
neighboring covenant being allowed to harvest a fixed quantity of vis
once every seven seasons – but the head of the covenant has been
replaced in the meanwhile, and that new master refuses to honor that
outdated clause. Clashes often ensue. Sometimes, the dreaded Mage
Tribunals are needed to settle disputes – and the votes there can
be bought... with vis,
obviously!
Now, tell me why in hell wouldn’t Matt Colville
implement something eerily similar to vis in Strongholds
& Followers, some
kind of magic currency that will generate
constant competition between neighboring Strongholds / Temples /
Towers, and force the PCs or their followers to encroach upon the
domains of rival Strongholds / Temples / Towers? I believe Colville
would be crazy not
to include that.
In the end, bringing higher level D&D characters into a
geopolitical Ars Magica adjacent setting is not a bad
idea. It’s the sort of thing DMs do all the time in their home
campaigns. I had a friend who ran an extensive, multigroup campaign
of HârnMaster set in Middle-Earth’s Second Age; he called
it “Middle-Hârn”, and it was a good idea. I myself once
ran a King Kull campaign using Warhammer Fantasy’s system
and career paths. That, too, was a nice idea. Dungeon Masters have
been doing stuff like this since 1974. It’s called a homebrew.
The difference now is that you can put your homebrew “idea” on
Kickstarter, and pretend like Middle-Hârn is a fresh, never
before seen take, while in fact it’s nothing more than Tolkien’s
ideas plus HârnMaster.
If you look up “plagiarize” in the
Merriam-Webster dictionary, it says, “to present as new and
original an idea or product derived from an existing source”. I
mean, look all around you. It’s
everywhere. We have undeniably crossed the
Rubicon––
Midnight, Texas
is Grimm.
Deception is The
Mentalist.
The Emperor has no clothes.
And nobody cares.