Bjorn to be wild!

Ow. Ow. *pbpbpbpbt*

It looks cool and he seems to like it.

She does. As I noted above, she has a magical immunity to cold, as well as being an ice mage, so skinny dipping in the northern Baltic Sea is something she can do without worrying about it too much.

Some mages just feel the need to become one with their particular element.

As I recall, being a Bjornaer is a choice...

... but becoming a Bonisagus is someone else's choice. :)

I mean, I'm not entirely sure about the former: the Heartbeast is generally considered by the Bjornaer to be something you're born with, and there are people who can't manifest one (and the Bjornaer as a group generally don't talk about what happens to them).

The latter is definitely even more true than for most of the Houses.

I'm still sad I never got to play the character who was found by a young Jerbiton who then pretty much had to beg the crotchety old Bonisagus at the covenant to take her because of the 'you must have an Intellego Vim score this high to initiate a student with supernatural Virtues without losing them' rule. (When you find someone with The Gentle Gift who also has Sense Holiness and Unholiness, you want to keep it.) The Bonisagus didn't want to be distracted from his research, so he got the Jerbiton to actually do most of the teaching. The result, naturally enough, was a Bonisagus mage who leaned hard towards the Trianoma side. A diplomat co-raised by a noble and a lab rat.

What I was mostly referring to, for those who don't know:

There is a mythic version of Europe where a group of wizards banded together to make the Order of Hermes, where they would (theoretically) look out for each other and share learning so they all can benefit from it. (The Order is the organization of mages/wizards in the mythic Europe setting... there are others, this one is probably the most powerful and widely spread. There are others, sure, but none quite as... capable. This is a longer tangent to go on sometime.)

They're organized into twelve Houses. Four are 'Mystery cults', four are lineages which trace their way back to the founders, and four others are more... social groups who banded together. (And one of those was a 'catch-all' for those who didn't want to be in the other eleven.) House Bonisagus has a special provision in the Order of Hermes' code, however, where a wizard of House Bonisagus is allowed to just... take an apprentice from anyone else. I forget if there's some sort of compensation or not, but it means you could be apprenticed and trained to go into another House and a Bonisagus magus can just arrive one week and go "no, they're my apprentice now".

Now, as for Bjornaer, it is a choice... but this relates to one of THE nasty things about the Order: if they know you have the gift for magic, they're either going to recruit you or make sure you can't be a threat to their supremacy. "Join or Die" was in the foundation of the Order during the early days, and it never fully went away. And if you happen to stumble on one very particular part of their Hermetic theory? They're coming for you with all the power they feel is necessary to take you out. (Given that one part is the root of their own innate protection against magical effects, and is VERY potent...)

I don't think there was any requirement for compensation. That said, there were requirements regarding the teaching and treatment of apprentices, so any Bonisagus who poaches apprentices too openly is likely to get watched for how well they treat their apprentices, and potentially challenged over it.

And that's just the legal avenues; the Order of Hermes has all sorts of avenues to encourage people to play by the rules, but not everybody will, especially if they think they can get away with it. A Bonisagus who takes more than one apprentice from a Flambeau should watch his back.

And that's even before you get into the apprentice's reaction. An apprentice who doesn't like their master can cause more trouble than they're worth.

(A recent campaign I was in, I played a hawk Bjornaer. The sept I was part of had a new apprentice, and through lucky timing, he got his Heartbeast at the Gathering of the Twelve Years when he was still fairly early in his apprenticeship, and was basically in full "I'm a grown-up now, you can't tell me what to do!" mode from that point on. I'd missed much of the drama due to helping set up a new covenant, but at one point I got told "it's your turn to take care of the newbie while we get work done"... so I spent a year riding herd on a songbird who was used to being able to get away with things. Through a few tricks and a bit of psychology in playing to his interests, I actually did fairly well with him... and, of course, the reward for a job well done is another job...)

I really only played Ars Magica twice, and one of those times the group fell apart due to Real Life Interference. Trying to even set up a game can be a Big Project. That said, it's also kinda rewarding with people who are willing to "buy in" and do work.

Yeah, you can tell that the game designers were hard-core world-builders, and there was an active effort to keep things consistent with the theme (though they also ran into a little bit of the World of Darkness problem of having fleshed out so much there weren't many undefined spots left for players to make their mark). And it's a game where you can do monster hunting, deep number-crunching research, and politics, and figure out the balance of who wants to do what. It really rewards troupe-style play where people can have primary and secondary characters and play whichever one is appropriate for that session.

It is also, as you say, a lot of work to set up and run.