Despite having lived in the same city as him for two years, inherited two of his players, and having had three of my friends taught by him, I somehow completely managed to avoid meeting David Chart. This is a shame, as apart from writing the spankingly good if somewhat dry AM4 rules, he's now written a really excellent sourcebook on England for Ars Magica.
"Heirs to Merlin" kicks off with a history of England up to 1220, the AM starting date. Normally these potted gaming histories are fairly pointless affairs, bad summaries of what you could look up in five minutes. Chart's is excellent, properly mythical in its early stages, and has lots of ideas for stories scattered throughout.
It also tells Hermetic history alongside mundane, rather than seperating them as earlier Tribunal books did, which makes things much clearer. I was pleased, too, that future history wasn't detailed; after all, we can always look it up, and Hermetic information would only restrict a campaign.
The quality of the history is maintained throughout the next eight chapters, which deal with topics like the peasantry, the church, the law, and the town. There's always enough gaming information and story seeds to keep you interested, and the material itself (particularly the legal section, amazingly enough) is very interesting. Some of it seemed more appropriate to other sourcebooks that to a book specifically on England/Wales, but all of it is useful.
Uniquely for an AM tribunal book, it gives a real feeling for the time, and its details on prominent mundanes are splendid.
I was a tad disappointed by the Hermetic section, not because it was lacking in quality but because it was much, much too short - 23 pages. Details tend to get rather skipped over. I'd have liked maps for the covenants, for instance. I did like the lack of stats or deep dark secrets for NPC magi, meaning the book can be read by players as easily as Storyguides, and encouraging Storyguide creativity, and I was impressed by the maintainance of continuity with other supplements without keeping the tedious "Blackthorn runs everything" setup.
I really loved the explanation for the silver inflation crisis (a real life historical mystery, I believe) and the capture of the Wild Hunt was very, very nifty. The politics section is simply fantastic, both mundane and Hermetic, as is the final chapter on myths and legends. None of that Druidic crap about Stonehenge, either (it being both out of period and just plain wrong, given that Stonehenge predates the druids by a thousand years and they never went near the place).
Flaws? Apart from the shortness of the Hermetic chapter, I could have done with some 'crunchy bits' - new & interesting rules snippets, Virtues and Flaws, and so on. I applaud the leaving out of NPC and monster statistics, but given the wealth of detail on mundane society, some more V&F relating to it would have been appropriate, and it would have been nice to have had, say, a Demon Blood virtue in a sourcebook named after Merlin. The bibliography is good, but a section on good fictional sources would have made it better. The style is perhaps a little dry in some places, and the artwork is unexceptional, which is why I'm being relatively mean and only giving a '4' for Style.
Overall, I've never read a better sourcebook for starting your own campaign, although it might be a tad intimidating for beginning Storyguides. The sense of time and place is wonderful. By far the best Tribunal book, and probably one of the best AM sourcebooks yet written, up there with "Faeries" and "Kabbalah".
Style: 4 (Classy and well done)
Substance: 5 (Excellent!)
