I am trying to compile a list of all the canonical ways through which a magus can "instantly" generate (or save) vis for some magical activities. With "instantly" I mean anything requiring less than a season of activity, so an hour of prayer for a Holy magus qualifies. "Eating up" the vis of supernatural creatures (by killing them, Ablating them, using the Ghostly Vis power as a Living Ghost etc.) does not count. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Tytalus Leper Magi (HoH:S) can accept wounds, gaining the equivalent of 3 pawns of vis of any type for every wound level accepted. Overuse leads to extra aging rolls. The vis can't be "extracted" but can be used in any magical feat (including lab work) that the magus is working on. It's unclear if this can be invoked multiple times on the same feat, at least for magical feats such as Rituals or lab work that take a long time -- I would say no.
Holy Magi (RoP:D) can replace long-term fatigue levels for vis (1 level/ 3 pawns) in Ritual Magic, but they can regain the lost fatigue only once the Ritual Duration expires. It's unclear what happens if combined with the Gift of Vigor.
Mercurian magic (ArM5) allows one to only spend half as much vis on Rituals.
Hermetic Sacrifice (TMRE) allows one to replace "appropriate sacrifices" for 1-6 pawns of vis when summoning pagan deities at their altars. Now, that's a very narrow Virtue!
Imbued with the Spirit of <Form> (RoP:M) allows a magus to substitute Long-Term Fatigue for vis of when casting spells or doing lab work (1 Level/1 Pawn). It also taints the magus so that nearby Magical Creatures associated with <Form> fear/hate him.
Profaning holy items (RoP:I) effectively allows an Infernalist to convert one confidence point and one item clearly associated with the Divine (not necessarily a relic, e.g. water from a baptismal font is enough) into a pawn of infernally tainted vis of the appropriate Form.
If the item has faith points the infernalist does not need to use confidence, but they do need to have a high enough confidence score to match the faith points.
Interesting thought- can an infernalist sacrifice a person with True Faith in the same way? Or corrupt them?
magical creatures with vis mastery may convert confidence to vis.
Root-cutter: lets you substitute normal herbs for vis for healing rituals.
Philosophic alchemy: lets you extract vis or spend vis to open items as a background activity not really requiring time.
Personal vis source: the time taken to gather this vis is abstracted away.
Wilding from HoH:MC - doesn't count as it takes a season. As temprobe pointed out Nature Lore can allow you to locate vis with only a few days searching but doesn't specify how much.
Cradle & Crescent p152 has a sidebar on Hyrcanian vis - going hunting for vis in an area full of temporary vis sources. Each point you beat the Ease Factor by allows you to gather another pawn of vis or to halve the search time - the base is a season, but if you beat the ease factor by at least four you can reduce the time to under a week's distraction.
Would Verisculture count? Though it does require an initial investment of multiple seasons, once begun it can produce vis that is merely overseen by the magus where they can maintain other seasonal activities at the same time...
My original intent was to exclude those activities that, although taking a negligible amount of time per se, could only work 1/season. The goal was to only include those that could generate, or more typically substitute for, vis "on demand" for Rituals and similar magics (e.g. non-hermetic); hence the clarification that an extra hour or two would not be a problem.
The one good match for my original question was then Root-cutter, reported by temprobe. (Personal) vis sources, Philosophic Alchemy, Nature Lore, Verditius Magic and Wilding would not count. Hermetic Viresculture would not count either, in that it's basically about nurturing "standard" vis sources.
"Vis-hunting" as per Hircania rules is borderline, because if I remember correctly modifiers quickly pile up against you if you loot the same area too often, so in some sense it works as a very open-ended, contested vis source.
But I'd rather see a few extra methods that I do not consider applicable than lose even just a "good" (or borderline) one because whoever thought of it doubted whether it correctly matched the original question!
Exactly. It also makes the thread more useful to the rest of us, if as many cases the "don't quite fit" as possible are included for ezze to weed out as possible.
I'm surprised you didn't consider hermetic sacrifice and spirit of (form) virtues to be good examples. Hircania vis hunting could qualify under your restrictions if they applied to enough areas that you could search more or less at will (I am considering adapting the rules for my game but with a higher threshold for most places- like in the 20's...) but searching the same area more than once a year starts accruing penalties.
