# A Covenant on Fire tags: #game/rpg/a-covenant-on-fire ![[A Covenant on Fire (cover).jpg|600]] **A Covenant on Fire** is the other free [[Fiasco]] playset Atlas Games commissioned for [[Ars Magica]]'s **Mythic Europe**, and it's the one where the wizards finally get what's coming to them. The score, *"The Fires of Reason,"* is a tragedy of hindsight: the covenant of **Mistle Lake** has burned to the ground, a single young wizard named **Veritius** survived and is dying in a nearby abbey, and a church **Inquisitor** has arrived to hear his confession. Your whole game is the deathbed testimony of a half-delirious wizard and the priest trying to decide what's true in it. It's zealotry, heresy, and lies, and it's the best premise either of these playsets came up with. ## Setting Mythic Europe is the medieval Europe of Ars Magica, where the wizards of the **Order of Hermes** gather in covenant fortresses to study, experiment, and try to build a better world against Church, laity, fay, and Hell itself. Mistle Lake failed at the better-world part and burned down, leaving Veritius to tell the tale — a version of the tale — from his sickbed while the Inquisitor grills him about the covenant's downfall. What makes it sing is the structure. Veritius isn't anybody's character; he's *everybody's* character. Whoever sets a scene voices the **Inquisitor**, demanding to know what happened when; whoever resolves the scene voices **Veritius**, explaining how it all went sideways. There are two channels of information — the "truth" of what plays out on stage and the story Veritius chooses to tell — and the playset explicitly lets them diverge, because hindsight is a liar and so is a dying man. The custom **Tilt** table even drops Fiasco's standard "something precious is on fire" element, because the covenant is already a smoking ruin by definition: the fire is a foregone conclusion, and the only real mystery is why it happened and who's lying about it. ## Mechanics Standard Fiasco set-up — relationships, needs, locations, and objects drawn from the playset's tables, with white and black dice amassed through the scenes and rolled at the end to decide everyone's fate — wrapped around the playset's bespoke **Hearsay and Heresy** rules. You need the **Fiasco** core rules to play. The mechanical novelty is all in the Veritius/Inquisitor voice-switching and the hindsight-driven structure, which leans hard on your ability to let what happened and what gets confessed drift apart. ## Editions A single edition, released free in **May 2015** as part of Atlas Games' Ars Magica celebration and its farewell to line editor David Chart. Written by **Will Hindmarch**, with edits and cover design by **Renee Knipe**, published by **Atlas Games**. *In the library.* ## References - [Ars Magica Fiasco playsets - Atlas Games](https://atlas-games.com/fiasco) - [Download A Covenant on Fire (PDF) - Atlas Games](https://atlas-games.com/pdf_storage/CovenantOnFire-20150518.pdf) - [A Fiasco in Mythic Europe! - Atlas Games blog](http://blog.atlas-games.com/2015/05/a-fiasco-in-mythic-europe.html)