David Chart's Blog

David Chart’s Blog

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  • Glosses and Commentaries

    I have just published a new RPG work. Glosses and Commentaries is a short supplement for Ars Magica Definitive Edition, released under the Ars Magica Open License. It is available for purchase on DriveThruRPG and on Patreon.

    In the medieval period, certain authors and texts were regarded as authorities on a particular subject (Aristotle, in particular). A lot of effort was devoted to glossing these texts, which meant adding information on the page to make the book easier to understand, and a lot of people wrote commentaries on them. This is not, however, something that the current Ars Magica rules really support — you might as well write a book as a completely original project.

    This may reflect contemporary thinking about the importance of complete originality, or it may just be a matter of trying not to make the rules too complex. I know that I was thinking the latter, but I may have been influenced by the former. Covenants includes some brief rules for commentaries and glosses, but they do not really encourage their creation.

    These rules do. The main tool they use for this is reducing the Source Quality of a book that is not a commentary, and has not been glossed. This makes the book worse as a source for study. The Source Quality of any book can be improved by glossing, up to the quality of a book under the standard rules, and a commentary can start with the same quality, if the author has access to at least six commentaries on the same work, as well as the work itself.

    While these rules do not specify authorities, they naturally create them, and the supplement includes an example, Bonisagus’s original text on Magic Theory. Bonisagus was, in this example, a good teacher and writer (as he really needs to be, given his historical role), but later glossators have made even better versions of the text available. Similarly, people have written many commentaries on his text, and so if a maga wants to write a book about Magic Theory, it is probably best to write it as a commentary on Bonisagus’s work, because it is easiest to get access to other commentaries on that book. Thus, the glossed version of Bonisagus’s book is an excellent text on Magic Theory, and most of the other good texts available on the subject are commentaries on it. This makes Bonisagus an authority, without including rules for it.

    It also makes it possible for a maga to turn her own work into an authority. Write a book, and then convince other magi to gloss it and write commentaries. Then have the glossed version and commentaries copied, and distribute them throughout the Order. It would be expensive, but it is another way for a maga to secure her legacy.

    If you want to try this out in your own sagas, the supplement is available for purchase on DriveThruRPG and on Patreon.

News Archive

My Writing

Fiction

I have written some fiction.

Academic

I have published a few peer-reviewed academic works, on philosophy and Japanese history.

Roleplaying Games

I have written for roleplaying games.

Mimusubi

Mimusubi is my project for non-fiction writing about Shinto. It has its own website.

Recent Blog Posts

  • Products of Creation

    The products of creation are an important part of the game, so their description does not need to be particularly simple. They are, for example, as important as characters, if a little less important than personae, and so their description could certainly be as complex as a character’s description. In particular, a creation need not…

  • Creating Things

    What rules enable the personae to create matsuri, or indeed anything else? Creation is a central part of the game, so it should not be resolved by a single roll. That would not give it enough emphasis in play. In addition, if creation were represented by a single roll, it would be difficult for players…

  • Matsuri

    Matsuri are the fundamental activity in Shinto. Indeed, a book recently published as an introductory text for people training for the priesthood is called “Jinja and Matsuri”. In contemporary Shinto, most matsuri are extremely ritualised and solemn, but some involve mobs of people running around the town with a giant wooden penis. There is a…

  • Options

    The third possibility for the success or failure of a single action is the creation of options. Success on one action might make it possible to take a further action, while that action is not possible if the first action fails. For example, if a persona convinces a character to talk to her, she then…

  • Possible Results

    How can success and failure on a single action affect the course of the game, without risking bringing everything to an untimely halt? One possibility is for success to give the persona an advantage on future activities. She can still succeed in those activities even if she fails this roll, but she is more likely…

  • Success and Failure

    There are going to be at least two broad types of activity in the game. The first is single actions. A persona wants to remember a fact, identify a picture, persuade someone to do something, or open a stuck door. These will be resolved with a single roll. The second type of activity is creating…

  • Core Mechanic

    Having set the scene in general terms, I’d like to start getting into the details of how I want the game to work. The core mechanic I plan to use for Kannagara is as follows. For every significant action, the player rolls a number of six-sided dice. She keeps some of them, and adds the…

  • Shinto, The Traditional Religion of Japan

    Shinto is the traditional religion of Japan. As is normal with real-world situations, every single word (even “is”, “the”, and “of”) in that sentence is controversial, and potentially misleading, but it is still the best place to start. I believe that Shinto is best thought of as a religion, but that word tends to create…

  • Why me?

    This post is basically about boasting. As I’m British, this doesn’t come easily to me, but since I am British, people might well wonder why I should be writing a roleplaying game about Shinto. Let’s handle the roleplaying game part first. I have been writing professionally for roleplaying games for twenty years, and I have…

  • What Does It Mean?

    In the last post, I explained “kami” and “jinja”, and I will return to “matsuri” in more detail later. However, there are two other Japanese words that should be explained. Specifically, what are “Mimusubi” and “Kannagara”? “Mimusubi” is taken from the name of two of the first kami to arise in the creation myth found…