The first crop of apprentices are gauntleting 24 years after the game started. If the game began with immediately post apprenticeship magi and the apprentice character went through a fifteen year education, then the mentors picked up apprentices only nine years out of their own gauntlet.
That strikes me as extraordinarily young.
In my last game one of the four magi was ready to take an apprentice at 20 years out of gauntlet but the other three weren't. The character who was ready was too busy chasing down plot to take the time out to find an apprentice (although he could have made the time if it were important to him).
How old have magi in your games been when they took their first apprentice? I'm looking for experiences in play.
Second generation magi were 10 years or so after apprenticeship when the covenant collapsed in legendary fireworks. Surprisingly one of said apprentices was the last living being in the covenant to be taken down, and he had been in the front line against the forces of hell from the start. Talk about upstarts!
The decision to take apprentices was a Council one (and a metagame decision by players to take all apprentices in short order) to prevent stagnation of the covenant and get more votes at tribunal. The apprentices were speed-teached by the 3 residing magi in only 8 years (2 seasons per year of hermetic teaching, instead of only 1). They were also used together as lab assistants, so they developed a strong relationship between themselves. NNot always positive: One of the apprentices (Jerbiton) became an enemy of the other 2 (Verditius and Flambeau).
In fact the magi could have started teaching the apprentices sooner if they had wanted, but nobody cared to develop all their arts to the appropiate level to do so until the decision was made. After that, we saw a learning-intensive period with those books on Imaginem and Aquam being dusted off and studied before the magi were readi in 2 years to teach the apprentices. 2 adventures to get the apprentices and kickoff of the process. Quite some fun with invisible apprentice teenagers lurking into the laundry to slap maid asses and breaking stuff in the lab with their -3 teenager dexterity.
In the other sagas nobody has taken apprentices. They have not been long enough.
well, it was quite spectacular, so my references. Will try to explain the end of our iberian saga in an other post. Be warned: it included more demons than the White Wolf Iberia and Rome supplements put together!!: And the incredible thing is that it was accidental!! :Lol:
In our last saga, we were 2 on 5 mages to have taken a apprentice a little before being 10 hermetic years old. We were specialists but had a pretty good library.
I had a character take an apprentice 13 years after his gauntlet. There were OOC reasons for this (I was curious to see if an apprentice raised in play would look like a starting character), but there were also strong in character reasons for doing it early.
Twelve game years later, the magus is pretty sure he took an apprentice far too early.
Our magi took apprentices young more for the lab perks than for the desire to nurture young minds.
We spent a lot of early seasons hitting the books getting our art scores all above 5.
In retrospect, our apprentices are very much lab assistants first, the magi have trained them extensively in magic theory and have even neglected their arts and other abilities, especially the number of spells known by the apprentices.
Since they gauntlet soon, our magi are already searching for new kiddies to take as apprentices. Luckily one of our magi has sense the gift and tends to go on "apprentice hunting" jaunts.
Our current apprentices all have a great deal of potential, with good magic theory and some solid background, to the point where we want them to stick around just because we've gotten to like them.
