I got my book a few days back, and it's great. There are a few changes that work really well, some things are explained better (e.g. requirement of 5 in all Arts before taking an apprentice), but there are few things left out that I would've like to see in the main book as well.

The bestiary is left out completely. Sure, there are supernatural beings of all the four Realms, but when you're playing a Bjornaer or another shapechanger, you'd like to see some stats for normal beasts as well.

In appendix 1 it says that "Characteristics are unchanged between Fourth and Fifth Editions." This applies only to characters. There's a "A Magical Wolf" on page 193 and "Tarlan the Wolf" on page 195, but their stats are completely different from the ones in ArM4 p. 260. Since e.g. numerical values of Soak are lowered considerably, taking stats from 4th Ed doesn't seem to work. Who'd want to fight a Bjornaer, Shapechanger or Skinchanger in their bear forms, with a Soak of +25, when a very resilient character in the state of the art chainmail has a Soak of +12?

So... in your sagas, how would you determine the stats for Bjornaer and other shapechangers? I believe they are releasing something either in Mysteries or the second Houses of Hermes-book, if that one is about Mystery Cults, but they are coming out in perhaps six months...

This was one of the (very) few things about the fifth edition that really annoyed me. The book looks great and the rules have been streamlined and clarified but there are some core things that have just been dropped.

A few extra pages to give us some basic bestiary stats wouldn't have broken the bank I'm sure. Of course we can make up the stats ourselves, especially with the fourth edition for guidance but we should really have had that done for us.

My Bjornaer player came to the game fresh and chose the Wolf as his heart-beast. Then we worked out that the wolf wasn't as impressive as we thought it should be. I guess we now have the option to change that.

In our campaign we have a Bjornaer with a bear heartbeast, what we did was the following. We started by guessing the soak of the bear skin, when comparing for example the spell "the bears toughness" (or something similar... MuCo anyway) you can see that it gives +10 soak in Arm4 and +3 soak in Arm5. Considering that the bear has a stamina of 5 this gives the bear a soak of 8, which we thought was a bit low.
But then we thought that all bears are quite tough... so we gave it the minor virtue tough ending up with a soak of 11.
Just slightly less than the chainmail wearing knight.

Anyone got a better suggestion, or some kind of "official" ruling?

I think the conversion notes are meant to say that Characteristics (Int, Per, Str, Sta) are unchanged from 4th to 5th Edition - which is true.

Combat stats are another matter entirely. If you look at the Weapon and Armor tables, both weapons and armor have been powered down since 4th. Also, the new wound rules seem to have different implications about how much damage something would do. I think converting 4th Edition beasts to 5th would be harder than making your own beast stats.

Bump.

So has anybody heard more on this? I picked up AM5, and I'm liking it so far (about a third of the way through the book) -- but the lack of a basic bestiary puts a serious kink in its play potential. I'm a bit out of the loop: has there been any word of a bestiary on the release schedule (and soon if the game is to be functional), or perhaps even a rudimentary bestiary (with a half-dozen creatures or so) to be put out in a downloadable PDF?

Even if it's only the most basic of creatures outlined, that could serve as a basis for troupes to guesstimate their own creature's statistics: cat, dog (small and large), raven, hawk, horses (war and palfrey). Heck, going for the extra jump and including near a dozen animals total (throw in bear, boar, wolf, etc) would be wonderful.

See the Ars Magica FAQ at http://www.redcap.org/FAQ/FAQ.html. It needs to be updated for Fifth Edition, but the information about the Berk List is still correct.

There is a second Ars Magica list specifically dedicated to Fifth Edition. See http://davidchart.com/mailman/listinfo/arm5_davidchart.com.

The difference between the two is that on the Berk List, there are a lot of old-timers who have played 2nd, 3rd, and 4th Editions and like to discuss rule mods and things from supplements long out of print. The ArM5 list is meant to be more newbie friendly. There are old-timers there, too, but they try to keep the discussion to topics a newcomer could theoretically follow. The BerkList, well, gives lots more, umm, "historical perspective."