GROGS  IS A SUPPLEMENT FOR ARS MAGICA 5th edition, edited by longtime ArM line-editor David Chart, released in 2012 and still in print. Ars Magica is a roleplaying game of a community of wizards in a medieval world where magic is rare and feared by the general populace. This supplement presents systems and advice for expanding multi-character ‘troupe play’, a core concept of the game.

We explored Ars Magica way back in season 1, episode 9. It’s an important title in the history of RPGs, co-designed by Mark Rein•Hagen who went on to create Vampire: the Masquerade, and Jonathan Tweet who was lead designer on Dungeons & Dragons 3e.

Click here to see Grogs on DriveThruRPG
Click here to see Ars Magica 5th edition on DriveThruRPG

This episode is brought to you with support from Laszlo Szidonya, who wants a shout out to his friend and longtime GM Aron Peterfy. We are enormously grateful to Laszlo (and Aron), and everyone else whose generosity helps to keep the podcast running.

“We’re never going to get pronounciations on this [Latin] stuff right, are we? We still pronounce ‘Ludonarrative Dissidents’, the name of the podcast, in different ways…”
–James

 

SHOW NOTES

These are the show notes for the episode, where we delve further into things that we don’t have time to explore in detail in the podcast itself, usually with copious links for your rabbit-holing pleasure.

The word ‘Grog’, in the sense of low-level characters in a narrative, is distinct to RPGs, particularly Ars Magica. ‘Mooks’ is a similar term, but that word already meant unskilled hirelings before Robin Laws used it in Feng Shui. Mooks are easily dispatched NPCs, of course, whereas grogs can be PCs.  
I dropped co-designer Jonathan Tweet a line (this is Ludonarrative Dissidents, we do things properly) to ask where the word ‘grogs’ originated. He replied: ‘As I recall, we came up with the term because it sounds good. It’s sort of like “guard” and sort of like “orc” and sort of like “grognard”. Grognards played historical miniatures and wargames, so the term had military associations. That’s part of why the word “grog” sounded right to us. We wanted a name that no one else used (for this). Probably we could have done better, but it seems successful in setting a tone. I am not good at naming things.’ Maybe not, but he is an excellent correspondent.

Pronouncing Latin. Latin is a dead language and there are different ideas on how it should be pronounced. As English speakers we are pulled in three directions: Anglicized Latin, which was the general form used by the English-speaking world until the end of the nineteenth century, and the reason we pronounce ‘Caesar’ as ‘Seesar’; Church Latin, which is an Italianate form popularised by the Roman Catholic Church; and ‘restored’ or classical Latin, which purports to be Latin as she was spoke, with hard consonants and a few alternate sounds, including a ‘w’ sound for ‘v’ – so ‘weni widi wici‘, as Seesar said. 

‘Viaticarus’, which appears in Grogs as the idea that people who had received the last rites but didn’t die would be in a peculiar state of grace, which we mentioned in the episode, appears to be another term specific to Ars Magica. I contacted line-editor David Chart to check, and he confirmed it with writer Mark Shirley who penned that bit of the book: both the term and the concept it describes are unique to Grogs.

Speaking of him, David Chart has been the Ars Magica line-editor for much of the game’s time at Atlas Games, though the third edition was actually co-created by Jonathan Tweet and Jeff Tidball (apologies for the error in the recording). David has been writing ArM material professionally since 1993, took a break in 2015 as the original run of 5th-edition supplements came to an end, but has now returned to work on the new definitive edition of the game. His blog is a great read.

As I was writing to David I was reminded that he was a scholar of Latin – in the 90s he translated Hogshead Publishing’s motto into Latin for us: Brevior vita est quam pro futumentibus negotiam agendo (‘Life is too short to do business with fuckwits’) – so I asked him why scholars think the Romans pronounced ‘v’s as ‘w’s. His excellent reply is too long to quote in full, but it boils down to Romans using the same letter for ‘u’ and ‘v’, as well as how Latin names were transcribed into other languages, mostly Greek, and comments in documents on words and phrases that sounded alike (such as ‘cauneas‘ and ‘cave ne eas‘), and spelling mistakes in graffiti. So now we know.

Peter Ackroyd is best known for writing dense historical novels about London esoterica (Hawksmoor, The House of Doctor Dee, Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem, &c.), filled with research that often borders on showing-off – tangential facts are included because he likes to parade the things he’s found out, not because they’re relevant to the story. This can be annoying in fiction, and I found his Clerkenwell Tales almost unreadable because of it, but for RPG material it can be a fantastic source of details for NPCs and possible adventure hooks.

The ‘Great Man’ theory of history, the idea that history is shaped by individuals, emerged in the nineteenth century, where it mostly belongs. Thomas Carlyle broke the great men of history down into six categories: the hero as divinity, prophet, poet, priest, man of letters, or king; and if you are thinking about using that as the base for an RPG system then friend, I am way ahead of you.

Hiyo Miyazaki’s use of pacing and space in his storytelling is not new, but is perfectly executed. The train-ride in Spirited Away and the bus-stop in the rain in My Neighbour Totoro are both perfect moments at the centre of perfect films. Let a narrative breathe, let the audience – and the protagonists – pause, look around and examine the landscape. The slow bits of rollercoasters are just as important as the fast bits.

‘Bleed’ comes from larp theory, specifically the Nordic school of larp design, and covers the transference of emotions between the character in the game and the player in the real world. If you don’t understand the relevance to non-live-action games then you’ve never played Diplomacy.

The Atlas Games Home for Wayward RPGs is perhaps a misnomer, but the company does have a track record of successfully re-releasing games that have not thrived elsewhere. Ars Magica is the most notable, but Unknown Armies and Feng Shui were not originally Atlas titles either.

Open-sourcing RPGs: Atlas has made the text of all Ars Magica 5e books available under a Creative Commons licence. There’s a page on the Atlas website explaining what this means, how you can use the material, and what you can’t legally do. 

The Unknown Armies community content programme through DriveThruRPG is still online but is currently closed to new submissions.

It’s long been understood in the industry that RPG supplements don’t sell as many copies as the core books, for obvious reasons. I first learned the concept of tertiary products from Steve Jackson talking about why he didn’t publish adventure supplements to GURPS sourcebooks: it’s because you’re making the potential market even smaller, from the primary market (people who buy the main rules) and the secondary market (people who buy the sourcebook) to the tertiary market, of people who’ll buy the supplement to the sourcebook. Often that fraction of a fraction is not big enough to make a book financially viable. This is exactly the same trap that TSR fell into with AD&D products in the 1990s, or at least one of the traps. They fell into quite a lot.

Affiliate links are a way for content creators to earn a little money from people following their recommendations. For example, if you click this link to the Ars Magica 5e page on DriveThruRPG, it sets a cookie in your browser that means if you buy anything from DTRPG for a short while, LND receives a small percentage of what you spend. It is a simple way of supporting websites that you enjoy.

The bodyguard maidservant, one of the book’s templates for Grogs characters, is a good example of the game’s tone. The idea is given space to breathe, with game-stats but also notes on backgrounds, suggestions for chagen, a couple of well developed story seeds, and useful notes on how to play this character and the role they should take in the group. A nice package.

As a writer it’s difficult to know how much hand-holding to do in RPG material: how much guidance the reader is going to need to understand the material and mechanics, and to know how to use these ideas in their own game. There’s no single solution but I tend towards examples of play: even if they’re not needed, they’re always fun to read.

We covered the One Unique Thing mechanic in our episode on 13th Age (season 1 episode 11), but to quote the game’s SRD it’s ‘a special feature invented by you, the player, which sets your character apart from every other hero. It is a unique and special trait to your player, and markedly unusual. The intent is that it provides a special flavor to the campaign’.

Atlas Games’ Furry Pirates RPG was released in 1999, the same year as the better known furry game Ironclaw. Both are still available and do what they say on the cover.

Torchbearer is an old-school classes/levels fantasy RPG by the creators of the Mouseguard RPG, Luke Crane and Thor Olavsrud. It’s based on a modified version of the Burning Wheel RPG mechanics but here the logistics and the crunch are the point. Lots of dice-rolling and book-keeping. It is a game deliberately designed to be difficult. Some people love it. 

THAC0 (‘To Hit Armor Class Zero’) is unfairly maligned: it’s clunky by modern standards but at the time was a clever and elegant way to distill pages and pages of look-up combat tables in the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide into a single number. Ross notes that DCC still uses it.

The correct accents on ‘melee’: mêlée. The use of it as a game-term comes down to RPGs from H. G. Wells’ 1913 wargame Little Wars (which accented it correctly) and 1812’s Kriegsspiel (which didn’t).

Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable is a thick dictionary of esoterica – quotations, proverbs, terms, idioms, things from myth, folklore and culture – that was compiled by the Reverend E. Cobham Brewer and first published in 1870. It is a source of endless ideas for RPG material, and one of only two dictionaries that I have read from cover to cover. The early editions are in the public domain but it’s a book to browse so a print edition is best.

Bizarre as it sounds, TSR de-emphasised Dungeons & Dragons in its product line for much of the 90s, instead pushing AD&D as the primary version of the game. This was partly because D&D co-creator Dave Arneson would have received royalties on D&D, but got none from AD&D. It did not end well for TSR.

The quickstart rules set for Salvage Union is downloadable for free here.

The book we mentioned, which we thought was called ‘Medieval Manor’, is actually Fief: A Look at Medieval Society from its Lower Rungs by Lisa J. Steele, first published in 1996 by White Rose Publishing. Although there are similar books (The Time Traveller’s Guide to Medieval Europe by Ian Mortimer, to choose just one) this one is specifically written and formatted for RPG creators and runners. It’s a hundred pages of excellent stuff, including a superlative index and bibliography. Strong recommend, along with its companion title Town: A City Dweller’s Look at 13th to 15th Century Europe.

We assume you know that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are minor characters from Hamlet, and you probably know about Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, but did you know that W S Gilbert (of ‘…and Sullivan’ fame) also wrote a comic play about them in 1874, in which Rosencrantz is in love with Ophelia and trying to get rid of Hamlet, using a performance of a terrible play written by Claudius in his youth. It has moments – the subversion of ‘To be or not to be’ is brilliant – but overall it’s a minor work.

 

Thank you for listening! The hosts of this episode were Ross Payton, Greg Stolze and James Wallis, with audio editing by Ross and show notes by James. We hope you enjoyed it. If anything in this episode has spurred your interest then we invite you to come and discuss it on our Discord. 

If you click on any of the above links to DriveThruRPG and buy something, Ludonarrative Dissidents will receive a small affiliate fee. You will not be charged more, and the game’s publisher will not receive less, it’s a win-win-win. Thank you for supporting the podcast this way.