Salve Sodales, I am trying to get together a new Ars Magica (5ed) saga troupe style, running evenings in Europe, i.e. GMT to GMT+2. The call is now open for co-storyguides (alpha, beta, gamma SGs). A co-SG does not necessarily have to SG a lot. A player wanting to run one story (1-2 sessions) every three months or so is very valuable. We start with an empty slate, and I have very few constraints myself. Let us use this thread to agree on the style of game that we want, and then the game time. I'll try to present my own starting point and ideas below, so if you are interested, please add yours. Keep in mind that I am not going to be the judge of applications. If we end up with enough people who agree on what kind of game to play on which day, then we start, (or you if I am not part of the agreeing group :-). Your starting ideas are as good as mine. About myself. I started roleplaying in the mid-nineties, and we played a couple of sagas of Ars Magica until 1999. Other games I have GMed are Call of Cthulhu, Expert Drakar och Demoner (bet nobody even heard about that one), Twilight 2000, and Tales of the Floating Vagabond, plus one attempt on Over the Edge, but that was no success at all. (I cannot remember all the games I have played only as player.) Since then, I have played very little, but for the last eight months, we have been playing Ars Magica on Discord/Roll20. We have had some great fun, but we eventually found that the players did not want to continue in the same direction. About my style. What I like about Ars Magica is that it is multi-faceted and ambiguous. It supports different genres of stories, and I like being able to run one session of puzzle solving, another one of social roleplaying, and even the occasional session of combat tactics. I also like the ambiguity of the World, where Good and Evil are not well-defined, and the magi need to find a subtle balance in their relationship wit the nobility, the faeries, the church etc. I like the fact that the PCs may reasonable disagree about what is right and wrong in character, and not the least, the long-term play, where player actions have consequences later on. That said, I have no problem avoiding particular themes if some player finds them offensive. My constraints I have a family and can only play evenings. . Assuming I am alpha SG, I only want to play in a tribunal with a 5ed source book. Voice game. Weekly or biweekly. I prefer weekly. As alpha-SG I can run up to half the sessions; in a biweekly I might be able to do a little more, but I need others to run in between to fuel my own inspiration. One proposal. This is just a proposal, an idea I have been fiddling with. I shall be happy to play and run in any tribunal, as long as I can get a 5ed sourcebook. I like border regions, and I am most familiar with Northern Europe. The Order of Odin fascinates me, and I would like to use it for one strand of the saga. A covenant in Hibernia (facing Iceland) or on the North Coast of the Rhine would be suitable. I'd like to start with a Summer or Autumn covenant, where the PCs are underdogs, largely because I do not want to have to deal with all the challenges of founding and surviving as a Spring covenant at the beginning. A stable framework make it easier to make good pointed, themed stories. This leads me to the idea of starting as visiting magi (not members) in a covenant on the North Coast of the Rhine. This means that if players come and go at an early stage, the covenant is not disrupted. Five (game) years down the line, the magi could found a new covenant or a chapter house under a covenant they join. We could even make the start year 1210, and found the canon covenant on Jutland in 1215. Or they could just join whatever covenant we want to design. Other musings. Below are couple more matters to address, at least by those who have strong preferences. I only have weak preferences, so I give them mainly as a starting suggestion. 1. Pace-wise, I would suggest that we aim for one story of 1-2 sessions per season as a rule of thumb. I think it is important to have sufficiently fast pace to get significant character advancement. 2. Power level, I prefer medium. Getting resources should not be trivial, but the shortages should not be constant. This goes for vis, books, correspondents, etc. 3. I like to assume that most covenfolk (pool characters and NPCs) do not spend every waking hour working for the covenant and developing their primary skill. Normal people have a life, and they spend the evenings sharing stories of lore and legend or learn to play the flute. Even if your scribe could reach a score of 6 at the age of 25, he probably will not bother. (If it is a primary PC, it is a different matter.) 4. I prefer to start with newly gauntletted magi. 5. I prefer to keep rules simple and minimise house rules. If we need to deviate or decide on interpretation, fine, but we need to write it down when we do.