Sors Magica: FATE Core Version of Ars Magica

[RobShanti]

Google Plus Community user Jeremy Downey came up with a way to convert Ars Magica spellcasting to FATE, and created a cool "starter" rules set and character sheet for it. I ran with it, and expanded the "starter" rules to be as complete as possible, and made a few tweaks to the character sheet for Grogs and Covenants and such. Here is my development of Jeremy's great Ars Magica hack, which I call "Sors Magica." ("Sors" is Latin for "Fate"!)

The Sors Magica Rules:


Sors Magica Character Sheet (Magus):


Sors Magica Character Sheet (Grogs):

 

[RobShanti]

After a few revisions and a playtest, here is the new version:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B273FvqAirAlZmpoNEFTTEJTWms

 

[Fireball36]

Looks cool! I'm glad to see that you left the cover from Ars Magica 3. Thank you for your work on this Jeremy Downey and RobShanti.

 

[RobShanti]

My pleasure!

The design goal here is, whenever an issue arises, to resolve it as a FATE Core game, and not as a "hack" or as an Ars Magica game. We love the setting of Mythical Europe, and always liked the concept of rolling Technique + Art to create a magical effect, but always hated the rest of the mechanics of Ars Magica, particularly combat.

This seems to be a workable solution.

 

[Cam Banks]

Hey Rob! Always nice to see fan appreciation of Mythic Europe and Ars Magica. Do you think you could maybe not use the art from the game, though? We don't generally consider it fair use to borrow art like that without proper consideration of the original artist's rights and copyright on the part of Atlas Games.

Cheers,
Cam

 

[RobShanti]

You mean the cover? Sure. I used the 4th edition cover because I figured since Atlas is offering that whole book for free on the internet (art included), that it'd be safe enough. But if you think that'd still be a copyright issue, I guess an abundance of caution never hurts.

 

[Cam Banks]

Offering a product for free doesn't confer the right for others to use the product. There's no license or implicit permission there.

Cheers,
Cam

 

[Brandon Fairweather]

I came across this thread while looking for a magic system for Fate and since it is a few months old I don’t know if anyone is still following it.
I really like this idea but something I am a little confused about in Sors Magica is that the difficulty rating appears to state that it is based on Range, Duration and Target but there does not seem to be any aspect for magnitude, (though it appears to be implied at certain points). Does the difficulty rating increase the more powerful the affect, eg. If a party is on a boat and they want the wind to pick up to increase the speed would the difficulty change if they wanted to increase by 20mph rather than 5mph and how would this be calculated.

 

[Fox4ce5]

Ars Magica 5 combat rules were ok. System is very heavy though...

 

[Blue]

5 year old necro thread....