Ars Magica: The Most Historically Accurate Shotgun Wizards Ever

What is Ars Magica?

Ars Magica is a tabletop RPG system about the medieval period. Unlike many RPGs, it is not set in a fantasy world - no Golarion, no Faerun. The setting of Ars Magica is Earth, 1220 AD. That is a fantasy world. You see, in Ars Magica, the world operates broadly in the way that people of the medieval period think it did. Kings rule by literal divine right, and have protection from God, who provably exists. Faeries stalk the liminal areas of the world, and can be kept away by traditional wards. Demons tempt humanity to sin.

Ars Magica is also fairly unique among RPGs in that each player typically plays more than one character. Every player has a Magus, an extremely powerful but usually socially awkward wizard. They also have a Companion, a less potent but often much more flexible character that hangs out with and helps the party. A Companion might be a knight, a priest, an alchemist or something weirder, depending on how complex you want to get (Incidentally, the best for just being a terrifying master of war will always be a knight, because a big, skilled person in full armor is more dangerous, pound for pound, than anything in the game short of a very combat-focused magical creature.) The party also shares control over a pool of lesser characters, called Grogs, who are servants of the covenant (read: awesome wizard team with a super cool wizard house) that the party runs and can range from bodyguards to cooks to blacksmiths.

What isn’t historic?

The core thing, besides ‘magic is real, Aristotle was right’ is the addition of the Order of Hermes. The Order of Hermes is an organization of wizards, come together to ensure that they are able to do the things that wizards like to do. Wizards like to gain magical power, study strange things and, occasionally, get involved in politics. (They aren’t supposed to, but that doesn’t mean they don’t.) There are other ahistorical elements, all of which are called out in the text, at least for Fourth and Fifth Edition Ars Magica. Earlier editions were much more ahistorical.

How historical is historical?

They had to add a disclaimer during the latest edition asking you not to use these books as a medieval history textbook. This is because there was a very famous event in the Ars Magica community where a guy aced a college history class using his Fourth Edition books to study. The books extensively rely on historical sources for their material, because this is a game for hardcore medievalists who like historical accuracy.

But let’s remember what historical accuracy isn’t. Ars Magica does. Historical accuracy doesn’t mean that women can’t do things. There are obstacles for women in the patriarchal world of the middle ages, but Ars Magica goes out of its way to demonstrate how women could and did become master crafters, warriors, leaders and more. Even priests, if they were willing to disguise their gender. Historical accuracy also doesn’t mean that non-white people didn’t exist. There was a remarkable amount of social exchange between Europe and the Middle East and North Africa, and Ars Magica does reflect this in its characters. Race and prejudice existed, but in a very different way than the modern era; they were primarily based on religion and local rivalries.

Ars Magica is a game about the past, and some parts of the past were ugly - but it is a modern game, written for a modern audience, and it tries to be as welcoming as possible even as it doesn’t gloss over the problems that you might run into. The Order of Hermes, notably, is extremely egalitarian, because the ability to hurl fireballs by chanting in Latin recognizes neither gender nor race.

This sounds super cool!

It totally is. I am going to admit flat out, this game is mechanically complex in a very frontloaded way. Character creation involves assigning massive piles of XP and picking from huge lists of spells, and it can be quite difficult. Play post-chargen is much simpler, but there are still a lot of complex subsystems that can trip you up. Despite that, I cannot recommend the game enough. Putting in the work gets you a game that is educational, interesting and extremely fun.

I mean, in one game of it I run, one of the players accidentally created Gargamel.

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Hi

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How many Smurfs did you murder?

None yet. Theyre more likely to kick my ass actually. It started with me taking a flaw to represent being pestered by a bunch of minor fae, deciding it was basically the nac mac feegles from Discworld, then taking Major Overconfidence as another flaw. When we realized what was happening i basically went all in.

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Good this is the tale of the ages

ive always wanted to play this because the setting is so cool, but I’ve only really run DnD and DnD-likes (with the occasional dread fiasco thrown in) and and this seems remarkably intimidating with the multiple characters per person and whatnot. Any tips for running this?

Sit down and just make some characters until you start to internalize and get used to it. Same for spell creation. Just set aside a few hours to work through some examples until the math starts to make sense to you.

E: beyond that, just…bookkeeping is the most important thing. The books will provide you with tons of adventure seeds. Running the game is about tracking what the players do and want to do, and providing them opportunities to do that. The players will give you their Story flaws and Hooks - use them when nothing else is going on. Don’t be concerned if the players end up spending a lot of time doing labwork. That’s fine. Just throw their Story flaws and Hooks at them when you’re bored.

First up, to help people who want to play Ars Magica I’m going to share a pair of character sheets I made a while back that have XP cost calculations pre-programmed in, among other useful traits.

This one is for magi and this one isn’t.

Now, for general medieval life, you may have played Crusader Kings II and, broadly speaking, this is a decently accurate picture of medieval life for nobles in many ways. (Not all, but you at least have some context for what medieval life was like.)

But you may have no context for what wizards are like because wizards didn’t exist and medieval ideas on wizards are only tangentially related to either Gandalf or D&D - and even then, the Order of Hermes is pretty ahistorical as well in several ways.

So, what is the Order of Hermes? To understand that, first I have to tell you about magic. See, in Ars Magica, the ability to perform most magic is tied to the Gift, a supernatural trait possessed by certain people. It may have some hereditary characteristics, but even if it does, they’re unpredictable in many cases, despite the research of the Order of Hermes. The Gift has been harnessed by many traditions of magic, each of which developed their own theories and methods of using it, and each of which was capable of very different things. Most of these traditions were small due to one of the Gift’s other effects.

See, the Gift freaks people out. It makes people dislike and suspect those who have it. Sometimes it doesn’t do this; these people are said to have a gentle Gift. Sometimes it gets to the point where they can walk in a room and be immediately hated by everyone in it, and that’s a blatant Gift. But for the most part, the Gift is fairly subtle - it encourages fear, distrust and suspicion. And other Gifted people are not immune to it. So most organizations of Gifted magic-users were small, because as they grew they inevitably fell to infighting and conspiracy.

The Roman Cult of Mercury was one of these small organizations that managed to survive a decent amount of time. They still fell with the Roman Empire, but their secrecy and their small but influential membership allowed some fragments of their magic to survive. These fragments formed the basis of study for a man who went by the name Bonisagus, along with Egyptian magic from the Cult of Thoth that he studied with his teacher.

Bonisagus’ studies led him to spend a whole lot of time thinking and theorizing about a unified theory of magic. He never reached it, but he achieved results that went far beyond what anyone else had ever done. At one point in his research, a pair of Greek sisters attacked him due to prophetic dreams. Bonisagus was able to defeat them handily, however, because the greatest fruit of his research was something no one had ever done before: he developed a method to block magic itself - the Parma Magica, which could shatter spells cast against him without him having to do anything. Bonisagus held them captive in his lab…and eventually, one of the sisters, Trianoma, began to be interested in his work, and they became friends. The other sister, Viea, remained paranoid about Bonisagus and later tricked him, stole a large chunk of his notes and fled, leading to a number of flaws in the finished Hermetic Theory (so named for Hermes-Thoth-Mercury).

Anyway, Bonisagus and Trianoma begin to work together, and it becomes clear that the Parma does something more than stop spells - it blocks the effects of the Gift. Now, anyone who doesn’t have the Parma will still feel all the negative effects of the Gift - the fear, the distrust and so on. But once Bonisagus teaches Trianoma, they realize that a lot of her negative feelings and the fears of her sister about Bonisagus were formed because of the Gift. They fall in love…but more importantly, Trianoma hatches a plan. She convinces Bonisagus that he needs to share his discovery, to create a group of wizards who can work together to perfect their understanding of magic. A group of wizards who can learn from each other, taking the best each tradition had to offer and unifying them into a single group that would benefit all members - including Bonisagus, who only cared about his unified theory.

The two of them set about to find the greatest wizards they could, to form the Order of Hermes.

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“They’re more likely to kick my ass”

You DID create Gargamel!

So, a good four hundred and fifty years before the game’s start date, Trianoma and Bonisagus are out hunting for wizards - and they find them. Eleven of them, specifically. Each of them has their own story, and each of them is the best. (Except Diedne. This is kind of a theme.) Each brought something to the table that Bonisagus could not have done on his own - and each had their own reason for agreeing to the terms Trianoma put forth.

Birna of the Gothic tribes of Germany was one of the Founders, though many modern magi would tell you her name was Bjornaer, because the House that she founded is House Bjornaer - a word meaning, roughly, ‘of Birna.’ Birna was a member of a tribal witch-cult who received visions of her ancestor, a spirit-bear that convinced her to break her cult’s power. It wasn’t hard - Birna’s fellow witches were not kind to her, as they believed she was lacking power. She heard about Trianoma’s travels in search of other wizards, and when Birna was given the option of joining a new society in which she would be equal and be taught extremely potent magic, she readily joined…but she warned Trianoma that her fellow Germanic witches would never agree and should be avoided, as a sort of petty revenge.

Birna’s tradition was about shapeshifting and ecsttic trances, much different from the classical philosophy that was the underpinning of the Hermetic theory of Bonisagus, and it was not easy for Birna to alter her worldview and grasp the new magic. She had help from another of the Founders, Merinita, and the two became as close as sisters. Together, they were able to get Birna on the level of the others, though Bonisagus never found a way to understand the ‘beast of her heart’ that allowed her to take on the shape of her ancestral bear. However, Birna found a way to teach this power to others, and it is now the signature ability of House Bjornaer. Her magic did, however, and it’s because of Birna that Hermetic magic is able to do things related to the senses and animals as easily as it can.

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There is little that can be said of the Founder Criamon. He was old already when Bonisagus and Trianoma found him. His lineage, his history - he deliberately destroyed all of it, telling his followers that it was his words they should remember, not him. It is known from the writings of Trianoma held by House Bonisagus that Criamon was a wizened old man without vanity of any kind. He had an intellectual sense of humor and was deeply well-read on Greek philosophy. He and his followers were pacifists who hid in a magical place in the Alps to avoid the chaos of the world around them. Criamon was a strict vegetarian, and he used tattoos on his followers so they would not need to suffer the moer painful investitures of power that he had in his youth.

Criamon died shortly after the founding of the Order. However, his mastery of metamagic and his deep understanding of the mystical helped Bonisagus piece together many of the threads that would lead to understanding the process of magical Warping and the experience later known as Twilight that could be experienced when magic went dramatically wrong, as well as a basic understanding of elementalism through the works of Empedocles.

Criamon’s belief system is still the core of his House. It is based on the writings of the Greek philosopher Empedocles, who held a view different than any other European philosophy. His works contain many insights that all accept, but the core of his beliefs are not accepted by many outside House Criamon. Essentially, Empedocles believed that time was circular, and that at the beginning (and end) of the cycle, all were immortals until he, Empedocles, ate the first meat and so created impurity and suffering. Empedocles believed this was a guarantee that all would become immortal in the fullness of time. For House Criamon, however, the conclusion is different: they believe that the cycle of time is a prison, that suffering is unable to be prevented because of this prison, and so the moral duty of the House is simple: achieve an understanding of time and magic sufficient for them to break a hole in the prison and get everyone out. To this end, they must work to maximize order and minimize suffering, so that they have more time to work before the world falls into total chaos and restarts from the beginning.

Most other magi consider their belief system insane, but benign. It is fundamentally a benevolent position, and whether it is true or not is impossible to prove. And hey, it leads the Criamon into some very interesting discoveries, even if it is false.

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These write-ups are really cool! Thanks for typing them up :smile:

Edit: the different houses really make me think of vampire - does the game have any world of darkness roots?

Has anyone tried the ars magical board game? I saw it for sale a long time ago and regret not picking it up (though it looks like it’s fairly cheap while I just looked it up now)

It does! The first editions shared the same writers, and 3rd Edition tried to explicitly make Ars Magica the past of the World of Darkness, not least by having vampires infiltrate and take over House Tremere and having a Realm of Reason added on to the four that are in Ars Magica - Divine, Infernal, Magical and Faerie.

Then White Wolf lost the property to Atlas Games, and Fourth Edition had the Tremere burn out all the vampires in a massive effort to purge themselves of corruption, because they wanted to break that connection and do their own thing.

Yeah this is really making me want to run a game either inspired by cadfael (which might actually be the wrong era?) Or involving antipopes

The default date the game starts in is 1220 AD, but it’s pretty easy to shift that date around as long as you stay medieval. (Going past medieval period will cause you a lot of work because the change in how physics works is going to break a lot of the future of science, among other things.)

Ah OK turns out cadfael starts at 1135AD (also that I just write C instead of cadfael whoops)

So, I mentioned that Birna had befriended the Founder Merinita. Merinita was famous, even before Bonisagus and Trianoma came to her. All wizards knew of the white-haired woman clad all in green who traveled Europe’s wild palces. It is said that Merinita knew all things in the wild places, could see through the eyes of every beast and bird, could take on any shape. However, she was no wild savage, but a wise and kindly woman, a healer and exceptionally shy person who spoke no words if she could avoid it. It took Trianoma a full year of searching to find Merinita and invite her to the Order - in a sense, anyway. She never met Merinita in person, but shouted her message to the trees across Europe. When the meeting came, Merinita emerged from the night to sit at the fire with the other Founders. It remains unclear, even to House Merinita, what drew the Founder to the Order. Some say she herself did not know - only that the will of the forest drove her to it.

Merinita was timid, but she did teach Bonisagus several of her tricks in exchange for the Parma. It was clear she knew many things about nature magic and healing, but she could not teach these to Bonisagus because of a combination of her crippling shyness, and the fact that Bonisagus had already developed theory that accounted for healing via ancient Mercurian rituals, and likely in part that she wanted to keep her greatest secrets to herself. However, she did demonstrate the ability to join her mind and soul to an animal. This was integrated into Hermetic theory as the familiar - the wizard’s greatest ally and assistant. The very first ever bound was Merinita’s partner, a massive white stag.

However, House Merinita does not today resemble its Founder. She did not seek out many followers at first, being too busy helping Birna. She did take on disciples, but after teaching them, she was rarely seen, and some time before the year 799, she vanished entirely. Her eldest student, Quendalon, went out in search of her, but when he returned, it was not with Merinita - and it was not as a human.

Quendalon returned as a stranger with eyes of ruby, proclaiming that he had been transformed into one of the fae, who were the truest expression of the world. He went to war with his fellow apprentice, Myanar, who wanted to keep the House in Merinita’s nature-worshipping mode. To make a long story short, Myanar and her followers were defeated and cast out, with the survivors seeking refuge among the Bjornaer. The house has studied the fae over nature ever since, in the way of Quendalon, and they are now the world’s foremost experts on all things fae. (They are also cliquish, exceptionally poorly organized and agree on very little except that the faeries of the world must be protected and preserved from the growing power of the Divine.)

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The origins of House Verditius are traditionally traced back to ancient Greece and the god Hephaestus, who was cast from Olympus twice and settled on the island of Lemnos, where he took twelve mortals as forge-companions, two of them Gifted. They learned many magical secrets from the forge-god, who then set about traveling the world and building new forges, though only two remain known - one built in Yanartas of Asia Minor at the site of the Chimera’s defeat, and the second and much larger one built on the island of Sardinia. Both were vital sites to the Cult of Hephaestus, which was later transformed by the Romans into the Cult of Vulcan, which focused more on the destructive power of fire than the forge. Both versions of the cult made many magical items, but the Vulcan cult focused on weapons over simple wonders, and they became very important in the spread of the Roman Empire. They suffered greatly in the Empire’s fall and the darkness that followed, fracturing into many smaller groups as they found that their focus on crafting magical items had left them weak in open confrontation.

Verditius the Founder was born into this chaos on the island of Corsica. His mother bore him a full year after her husband’s death, and between that and his extremely blatant Gift, he was suspected of being a faerie child. As his obvious skill at craft developed, some wondered if he was the kin of Hephaestus himself. He was raised by his uncle, a blacksmith, and his first masterwork was made at the age of five - a pair of knvies so sharp they could cut iron. Even as a child, Verditius was a moody, sometimes violent boy, and at s even he killed a fellow apprentice in a quarrel, causing a terrible feud between his family and the apprentice’s. His uncle sent him to Sardinia, where the Cult of Vulcan’s remnants found him and bought him from his new master for a magical soup ladle.

Verditius excelled in the cult, and by 14, he was their master and the most skilled mage-smith anyone could recall. He was even able to reconstruct the golden automaton-maiden of Hephaestus to the point that it operated for seven days before breaking down. Thus, he was sent to Lemnos to learn even more secrets - but he decided to go elsewhere instead, traveling north to follow the legends of Wayland the Smith, who had learned his craft from a Scandinavian deity in older times, then mastered the ways of the black elves and the dwarfs. He would be long dead at this time, or so Verditius thought, but perhaps some of his secrets survived. He was unable to find any, however, until a magical raven told him that he would have to ritually maim himself as Wayland had been maimed - so Verditius cut off his own left foot in a single blow, fell unconscious and awoke in Wayland’s foreg. He learned the master smith’s secrets and built five rings of immense power before returning to Sardinia and starting to reform the old Cult of Vulcan.

That was when Trianoma found him and invited him to the Order of Hermes. He liked the idea, the chance to learn the Parma and the chance to avoid the wizard-wars his masters had told him of in the past. He accepted - on the condition that Trianoma would invite no other craft-wizards, especially not the smiths of the north, who had refused him all lessons until he found Wayland himself. Trianoma wasn’t happy about that, but finally agreed based on Verditius’ reputation and obvious skill. He taught Bonisagus the secrets of enchantment in exchange for Hermetic magic, but refused to share his deepest secrets. He was never an amazing spellcaster, never mastering the art of formulaic spells, and he returned to Sardinia quickly, using it as the base for his new House. He never left, instead sending his apprentice in his place to all Order meetings. He and his many new students studied even more craft magic after this, and House Verditius are the undisputed masters of it, anywhere in the world - though they, like their Founder, are plagued by arrogance, hubris and self-centred thinking…and feuds, though unlike Verditius, the feuds his followers get into now tend not to be lethal and tend to be mostly with each other.

Verditius, on the other hand, met his death at the hands of Corsican assassins taking vengeance for the apprentice he had slain as a youth. The feud would continue for 30 years after this, as Gelon, Verditius’ first apprentice, took vengeance and then killed the assassins sent after him. It ended only when Gelon willingly passed on command of the House to his own apprentice and gave himself up to the Corsicans after realizing they would never stop coming until he died.

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Of Flambeau the Founder’s life before meeting Bonisagus and Trianoma, little is known. He wrote little and in fact was only literate later in his life. What is known comes from the writings of his students. Even his exact birthdate, hometown and Christian name are lost. It is known that he was born some time in the 710s in southwestern France, and that his family’s estate was destroyed by the invading Moors under Emir abd Al Raman in 732, shortly before the Battle of Tours. All of Flambeau’s family was killed, and he was left for dead, feverish and wounded. He was brought to the wizard Laberius for healing. Laberius’ magic descended from the Roman cult of Mithras, and he saw in Flambeau great potential. He healed the boy and raised him as an apprentice, but a willful one. Flambeau kept working to find a way to escape the paganism that underlied the spells.

Laberius offered to aid in the battles against the Moors, but the Franks denied his aid, so he and Flambeau went to Spain, where Laberius became a court magician and the two fought in the early battles of the Reconquista. The Moorish forces began to suspect magic after a few years and assembled a group of sahirs - Islamic summoner wizards - to fight back. They ambushed Laberius and slew him as well as the lord that had sheltered him and Flambeau. Flambeau escaped, however, and swore vengeance. He continued his studies alone, rebuffed by his master’s fellow wizards of the Mithraic tradition, and he eventually, through trial and error, developed the spells he’d learned to light braziers into a terrifyingly powerful fire-based weapon. This is when he took on the name Flambeau and returned to Spain.

Flambeau slew three of the sahirs that had killed his master, but the others eluded him with the aid of Infernal jinn, and Flambeau became convinced that all sahirs summoned demons. (He was not correct.) He attacked sahirs whenever he met them, and by the time Trianoma invited him the Order, he had slain about a dozen Moorish sorcerers and was one of the most feared wizards in all of Europe.

At first, Flambeau thought the idea was silly, as he did not trust other wizards, but after seeing the Parma in use, he realized he needed to learn it or he would be at a disadvantage. When he traveled to meet the other Founders, Trianoma shared her Parma with him, and to his surprise he found the other Founders likable and even trustworthy, and believed the Order could be a league of honorable wizards that would end treachery. He hoped that he could use them as a military alliance against the Islamic sahirs. His contribution to Hermetic theory was primarily in fire magic and his one original spell, invented by him with no true ties to any past tradition. However, beyond that, he cared more for using magic than studying it, and worked primarily on developing ways to defeat resistance to magic, in case the Parma ever fell into enemy hands. However, he proved a political godsend to the Order, traveling through France and recruiting any wizards he could find.

Flambeau was a skilled and enthusiastic negotiator, and his reputation meant few wizards wanted to fight him. He also used intimidation when needed, and was the one to say the phrase that would come to represent the Order’s apparent policy towards other wizards: Join or die. In truth, he only ever used it a few times, when he lost his temper and had to deal with extremely belligerant wizards, and preferred diplomacy when possible. He also championed the existence of Wizard’s War in the Code of Hermes, presenting situations in which magi might bully others without breaking the Code but in which the Code prevented them from being stopped, and Flambeau even defeated Guernicus in debate over the issue, convincing the other Founders that the right to seek vengeance by openly declared battle must be enshrined in the Code. He never actually used it himself, however, as no sahirs joined the Order of Hermes until more than a century after his death.

Flambeau lived a mere century, as he was never especially good at health-based magic and his longevity spells were weak. It is known that in the year 820, he wandered into the mountains alone, and no one ever saw him again. Some believe he fought the sahirs one final time, while others believed he tried to make a final peace. Others say he retired from magic and lived out his final days as a monk, for he had always been a pious Christian.

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Flavius of Jerbiton, Founder of House Jerbiton, was unlike most wizards. He was a born in 729 in an Alpine village, a cheerful and friendly child who loved horses and whose magical nature caused local objects to change color with his moods. His father was the valley’s lord. The family was of Rhaeto-Roman descent, theri ancestor a Roman soldier who was granted the valley as land in the early Roman Empire. His descendants, the Ierbi, never changed much since Roman times and even now still speak a strange descendant of Latin.

A man returning to the valley after work as a mercenary recognized Flavius’ power due to having worked under a Thracian wizard, and he encouraged the Ierbi to send Flavius for training. The Thracian wanted no apprentice, however, so instead, his ally, Bernice of Thessalonica, came to tutor Flavius. She was a member of the League of Iconophiles, a magical tradition that was primarily given to the Gentle Gift or being rich enough to not have to interact with normal people directly. Thus, the tradition and its relatives were actually a part of mundane society for the most part. The League of Iconophiles was the most potent of these magical leagues, and were opponents to the Emperor in Constantinople as he forbade them from displaying crosses or images of Christ and the Saints.

Bernice gave Flavius the name Flavius Ierbitonis, ‘the fair-haired one from the town of yesterday.’ As he trained, the Iconophiles grew in power before Imperial crackdowns reversed their fortunes. Jerbiton left for home, but returned after Bernice suffered a terrible spine injury in a lab accident. As he aided her, he met her allies and other apprentices, and mastered the magic of illusion and deception.

By 753, the Iconophiles were forced to flee when the Emperor began burning their bases and monasteries, and Flavius offered his valley as a safe haven, and it came to pass that apprentices of the League were said to be ‘of the house of Jerbiton’ because of his ownership of their new home. (This is actually where the House naming tradition of the Order began.)

Trianoma came to the Iconophiles, but they rebuffed her - they saw the Order as too diffuse over Europe to be effective, and Bernice was too injured to travel easily. However, she was interested enough to send Flavius, then usually just called Jerbiton, to give some of her books to Bonisagus. Jerbiton helped Bonisagus master the magic of illusions and the mind as well as the speech and gestures of spellcasting. He also convinced Bonisagus to refer to his fields of study as the Arts and the capacity to use magic as the Gift. Bernice did eventually join the Order, but she died in 763, before the first Tribunal could meet, so Jerbiton went in her place again and became the Founder.

However, Jerbiton and his fellow Iconophiles were far too busy fighting Emperor Constantine V and the forces of Hell that followed his atrocities to participate much in the Order’s works. It was interesting, the Parma was useful, but it was not a pressing concern. (Indeed, the Code seemed to say it was wrong to fight the Emperor.) Eventually, however, Jerbiton became friends with Bonisagus, Criamon, Mercere and Tremere…until Tremere’s betrayal.

In 775, Tremere and his House invaded the Empire, killing magi and stealing their resources. The magi of Greece formed the Theban League to serve as a united alliance against Tremere, Hell and the Emperor, and they joined the Order under Jerbiton’s nominal leadership. Thus, they were able to use the Parma to fight back against Tremere, and House Jerbiton was born - large, but unstructured.

Jerbiton died in his sleep, peaceful and happy. In his later years, he opposed House Tremere at every turn, with mixed success, and his death allowed the Tremere to move forward in earnest. House Jerbiton has never been especially organized - like their pre-Hermetic ancestors, they prefer to focus on their own interests and alliances, coming together only for shared work or a common threat. They are renowned for being both the closest to the mundane world and for being the finest workers of mental and illusory magic in the world, having made a great study of the mind and senses.