About Project: Redcap

Project: Redcap is named after the fictitious messengers of the Order of Hermes, the redcaps of House Mercere. Its slogan is "the crossroads of the Order." It is an online reference for fans of the Ars Magica roleplaying game.

Primary Goals [Edit]

Project: Redcap has two related goals.

1. Provide a centralized place to where visitors can browse and find links to as much Ars Magica material as possible, in as many languages as possible. We want to link to everything related to Ars Magica, without passing judgment on the importance or quality of the site. The Internet Site Index page addresses this goal.
2. Be a guide and companion for the rules and game world of Ars Magica, providing useful rules summaries, examples, and especially page references to topics from across the game's extensive product line. This is done by means of the online ars encyclopedia index.

This Site is Unofficial [Edit]

Project: Redcap is a fan-created site. Atlas Games, the publisher of Ars Magica, is not responsible for its content. Original material posted here is not official. All trademarks used will be attributed where possible, but are used without permission. Their use here should not be construed as a challenge to their ownership.

The source for official information about Ars Magica is the Atlas Games Web site.

Important Policies [Edit]

Project: Redcap respects the copyrights of other people's work. It is very important that contributors not post material without permission. This is discussed further on our Policy page.

In particular, do not post excerpts from Ars Magica books on this site. Doing so would get the maintainers in trouble, and could also undermine sales of Ars Magica Products, which would harm the fan community in the long run. Note that this rule applies even to ArM4, which is available for free (but still protected by copyright).

How This Site is Organized [Edit]

Project: Redcap is made up of pages on individual subjects, such as Stress Die or the Grand Tribunal. Each page contains lots of links to other, related pages within Project: Redcap and elsewhere on the Web. For instance, the page on the Grand Tribunal might have links to topics like Durenmar or the Code of Hermes. The result is a web of topics where (if we've done our jobs right) topics are inter-connected according to semantic relationships.

This is in contrast to a hierarchy or "tree" structure where pages would be organized into categories. There is no hierarchy in Project: Redcap; there are only relationships. We have no comprehensive "index" or "site map" because the web of inter-related topics is growing and changing; it would be impractical to try to keep a site map up to date.

We do, however, have overview pages that give a starting point from which to browse information on particular topics. See the navigation links at right or go directly to the internet site index, online ars encyclopedia index, and fan community pages.

Navigation and Searching [Edit]

There are three ways to find what you're looking for:

1. Use the navigation tabs at right to get an overview page with lots of links related to each major topic. These are meant to be starting points for browsing, not comprehensive indexes.
2. Use the Find function to search for a page by title.
3. Use the Search function to find pages containing specific words.
4. You can also Search for pages by category.

History of Project: Redcap [Edit]

Project: Redcap was started by Geoff Grabowski on September 9, 1994. It grew to about 25 entries in the first two years.

David Chart took over Project: Redcap on March 23, 1996. Under his editorship the site expanded to gain a U.S. mirror. It grew to:

* 50 links in August of 1996
* 100 links in November 1997
* 141 links in January 1998
* 200 links in June 2000

Andrew Gronosky took over on September 15, 2005 when David's time commitment as Line Editor started to make it difficult for him to regularly update the site.

In March 2008, Andrew and Pitt Murmann began working on the online ars encyclopedia index with eventual plans to integrate it into Project: Redcap. This started out as an independent site with the goal of eventually merging with Project: Redcap and providing a modern, wiki-like community hub.

The encyclopedia proved to be a much bigger job than it seemed at first. Work continued in the background for over two years to develop the encyclopedia and migrate the Project: Redcap contents.

Meanwhile, some problems occurred in the history of Project: Redcap.

The contact address for Project: Redcap was regularly used by spammers starting around 2006. This led to the redcap.org domain getting added to black lists, making it impossible to notify the maintainer of new or changed links. Updates became rare due to lack of contributions from the community.

On October 27, 2009, the free Web hosting service GeoCities closed down. Many excellent Ars Magica pages from the mid 1990's through early 2000's disappeared from the Web.

Today, in 2010, the Ars Magica community is still strong and vibrant. The official forums are more active than ever. Ars Magica conventions have been annual events since 2007. The online encyclopedia had grown to over 800 pages. I am sure we'll have a lot of growth in the months ahead, and the new integrated site will be a great resource for many years.