I think 5th is much more streamlined, consolidated and all-in-all easier to play than 4th or 3rd. I cant say anything about 2nd or 1st.

Societates Other Sourcebooks City & Guild Ancient Magic Art & Academe. As the best rules for magic. Latex Template For Conference Program Booklet on this page. Free PDF version of Ars Magica 4th Edition. If I wanted my little group of gamers to get into Ars Magica (or, more precisely, a Medieval Witches & Wizardry Done Right sort of game, if you know of others), what edition would you recommend? 4th edition can still be gotten as an official free pdf, here: robb. Ars Magica Third Edition Core Rulebook. Course of years to craft magic items, gain secrets from ancient. Ars Magica term for gamemasters) so your whole.

I played 3rd for a long time, skipped 4th and happily changed to 5th. While the quality of the source books is pretty good you dont need a thing other than the core rule book. The not-so-simple stuff (that involve some number crunching and maybe a chart or two) are the long term projects of the magi (that dont get resolved in action scenes anyway), it never bothered me much.

EDIT: I really want to try Ben Robbins Kingdom in the Ars Magica setting. It seems like a game to jump directly of the good parts of an Ars Magica campaign. 5th is by far the most playable version of the game in my opinion. 4th E was probably the worst. From the developer notes for 5th Edition.

'The Ars Magica Fourth Edition combat rules were, it must be admitted, broken. They had the consequence that, the more armor you wore, the more damage you took. This was, needless to say, not the intention. Other quirks of the weapon statistics meant that, according to ArM4, the mightiest force on the medieval battlefield was a naked man with a stick. Fixing this was up at the top of the list of priorities for ArM5.' 5th edition Ars Magica is smooth and elegant, a vast improvement over 4th edition. And the sheer volume of numbers to be allocated and crunched eventually drove me away.

I had a bit of an epiphany, really. We'd had a saga running for a couple of years, with some problems but also some good stuff. And this NPC magus was shaping up to be the villain of the piece, so I thought I'd better stat him up in case the players decided to get mechanical with him, and what with wizard PCs not being easily constrained by plot due to their eldritch powers.

Call Of Duty World At War Zombies Android Apk Free Download. Then I found my self putting off statting him up, winging his stats during his appearances for more than half a year. And then finally the true horror of why I'd been putting it off dawned on me: Statting him up properly would require me to first distribute some five hundred points in scores of different boxes across some half a dozen different categories, stopping along the way to check in some cases if his total values in three different stats summed up to allow him access to stuff in a fourth category. This would leave me with a 25-years old magus. AND THEN the system would, in dead earnest, like me to age him from 25 to his actual age of 70 by distributing an extra 30 points per year, year by year, all the way up to seventy, and also making an aging roll, taking into account the strength of his longevity ritual, for every year from 35 to 70. At this moment, I realized that if I had a choice between statting op Dietrich Eulenauge and digging my own eye out with a fork, I'd probably stat him up.

But I'd think about it. We wound up the saga with a grand climax within a month or two, and I stubbornly ad-libbed him all the way to the end. When someone mentioned the possibility of starting another saga, my laugh was more than slightly hysterical. I left Ars Magica and I'm never ever coming back. Having played my way from 2nd to 5th, and based on your stated preferences, I heartily recommend 2nd edition. I successfully ported it to Heroquest, and the few sessions we ran using those mechanics worked like, well, magic. 5th edition is solid mechanically, as it nails down ambiguities inherent to earlier editions.