# Mythic Venice *Created:* 2026-10-26, *Modified:* 2026-10-26 ![[Mythic Venice (cover).jpg|600]] **Mythic Venice** is a city book built on one generous cheat, declared up front: Venice is a faerie theatre, its aura has been swelling since 1070, and everything anachronistic about the place — the cafés, the glass, the gambling, the tourists' idea of Venice — is quarantined inside that aura where it can't damage the rest of Mythic Europe. It is **[[Ars Magica]]**'s most accommodating setting book in years, and it isn't an Atlas product: Timothy Ferguson wrote it, funded it through his *Games From Folktales* Patreon, and released it under the Ars Magica Open License. ## Setting The hook is a redcap at the **Grand Tribunal of 1070**, carrying a plea from the Doge of Venice: any price for the salvation of his dying wife. Something granted the wish, and the city's Faerie aura has been growing ever since — making Venice opulent, confusing, and delightful, and leaving it genuinely unclear which of its customs are simply Venetian and which are the dictates of the faerie power that hides within and encases the city. ### The city as a stage Every public inch of Venice is built for drama. Its centre is a ceremonial stage, churches have verandahs for public exhortations, and every house on the Grand Canal wears a magnificent facade even when it's crumbling behind. The governing obligation is the **bella figura** — the beautiful figure — which is to say you must perform: priests of different faiths attend each other's services to steal rhetorical tricks, lawyers froth and gesture rather than stick to facts, and even servants are costumed for their role. A foreign magus is expected to be more flamboyant than the Venetians themselves. The patricians, meanwhile, have the opposite duty. Modesty is their class marker: sober black robes, gondolas painted black, houses that are never called palaces even when faced with gold, and a Doge who refuses a crown. The book's explanation for the restraint is pleasingly blunt — the ruling class are vastly outnumbered, and the poor only needed to incinerate one Doge in his palace to teach the rich that dignity matters. Sumptuary law then tries to keep everyone else in their place and loses, every time, to the bella figura. ### The actors The middle of the book takes the city's powers one realm at a time — **mundane** (the Doge, the Council of Ten, the Full College), **Divine**, **Faerie**, **Infernal**, and **Magic** — with named characters, their stats, and what they want. It's a book of factions with faces rather than an abstract gazetteer: a faerie queen who insists she's an infernal sorceress, a cult, a faerie market, the storehouse where the city's magi keep their goods. Then come the **staging and backdrops** chapter (the places you actually play in), a **year of festivals** keyed to the calendar, and an **offstage** chapter for what happens when the characters aren't the centre of attention. ### The compatibility trick The conceit exists to solve a real problem. Historical Venice in 1220 lacks almost everything players want from Venice — the great trade fleets aren't designed yet, the Bridge of Sighs isn't built, Murano isn't making the glass magi love. Rather than forbid it all, the book lets the aura pull customs and technology forward *inside* the city, so Venice can sit alongside the official tribunal books. Ferguson is candid that troupes wanting strict history will need to patch the seams, and sets one firm rule: characters don't exploit the repairs. ## Mechanics This is a setting book, so the core of it is places, people, and plot rather than new systems — but it carries real rules where the setting needs them. - **Venetian domestic alchemy** — a full chapter of secrets and remedies with Ease Factors from 12 to 21: healing bonuses keyed to Mythic Herbalism, poisons by wound level, medicines that improve memory, a "plaster to mend a ruptured skull". Ferguson also explains why nobody sensible chases lead into gold, and why anyone selling you the secret is running a con. - **Full NPC statistics** for the city's powers, in standard Ars Magica terms — Might, Characteristics, Size, and the rest — so the factions are playable straight from the page. - **The festivals** as an adventuring calendar, with the customs, the trouble, and the local supernatural traffic that each one brings. - **Regio and covenant material**, including the single regio where magi of the Order's many factions cluster, in a city where a wrong turn can cost you a minute or a lifetime. ## Editions - **Mythic Venice** (2024) — 156 pages, written and laid out by **Timothy Ferguson**, released under the Ars Magica Open License (CC BY-SA 4.0) and funded by the Patreon supporters of the *Games From Folktales* podcast; sold pay-what-you-want on DriveThruRPG and itch.io. The first chapter is also available as a free audio ashcan read by the author, so a troupe can absorb the setting without reading it. The book states plainly that no art in it was created with AI, and details its image sources in an appendix. Atlas gave Definitive Edition backers a free copy as a campaign stretch goal, but this is Ferguson's book, not an Atlas release. *In the library.* It is written in Australian English and uses English place names on purpose, so players can look up real material without fighting Venetian orthography — a small decision that says a lot about who the book is for. *Not to be confused with **Mythic Venice**, the Mythras city book of the same name from The Design Mechanism — different game, different city.* ## References - [Mythic Venice - DriveThruRPG](https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/499093/mythic-venice) - [Mythic Venice - itch.io (pay what you want)](https://timothy-ferguson.itch.io/mythic-venice) - [Games From Folktales - the author's podcast and blog](https://gamesfromfolktales.com/) - [Mythic Venice Player Chapter Ashcan (audio) - Games From Folktales](https://gamesfromfolktales.libsyn.com/500-mythic-venice-player-chapter-ashcan) - [Ars Magica Definitive Edition update: Venice, Dice, and Trade - BackerKit](https://www.backerkit.com/c/projects/atlas-games/ars-magica-5th-edition-definitive/updates/18194)