Absolutely I'd consider someone with Magic Theory 10 a specialist - in Magic Theory. The 200 net XP they've spent on that one ability is equal to buying an art at level 20 - which is higher than you'd expect from a specialist ~20 years post-gauntlet.
HoH: TL, p. 101-102 has a spell to copy a book, including the text. As written, it is a boosted spell, but this is unnecessary as all that does is increase the range at which the new book can be created.
Copying text is rather more complicated that simply copying a set of peces of metal it seems.
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Hmm I doubt there many covenants willing to spend the vis for a lvl 50 Ritual just to get the copy of 1 book.
Even for a sound summa its hard to get more vis for it then the vis spend and the more spread a summa is the cheaper it becomes in my opinion.
In my current saga our necromancer got a scribe as a present from his former-master, with the idea: you can never go wrong with an obedient undead scribe.
All depends on your moral standards and what you are ready to accept for the (Covenant's) greater good.*
First, find a monastery with decent scribes lectured in Latin, book maintenance, book paintings all you need with for a good scribe.
After acquiring his services (good story on it's own), put a simple collar of obedience (ReMe 30; Base 20, Ring, Circle in an actual collar) around his neck and teach him MT and some Realm Role, even your apprentice can do it in 2-3 seasons.
Kill, preserve, summon, bound... The obtained scribe will work extreme overtimes and in case of doubt you can easily compare the original and the copy with certain spells... so it is quite easy to build up a good quality Scriptoria... 
Although this might be the easiest method to utilize placid craftsmen in your Covenant (glassblower, bookbinder, silversmith), but compared to an always silent scribe in the corner of your laboratory, utilizing an undead for a more labour intensive craft can be quite unsettling for the rest of you grogs. I also have to mention, as it is dully written in RoP:M, sometimes the dead loses some of their knowledge when raised from the grave. You might have to try multiple times...
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*Pun intended.[/size]
Ahh, such lovely warping potential... ReMe warping can be fun. 
As i just the other day wrote in another thread, give the Tractatus a level based on the Score of who wrote them, then if the reader has a score higher than that level, halve effective quality, if they have twice the level, cut the XP they gain down to one third and so on. Works decently.
At the start of the 13th century? Considering how magi seems to interact more with scholars than their general surrounding, itĀ“s probably more likely that they know of it than not at least.
And itĀ“s very likely that they know of papyrus down south and using birch bark up north, with a fair chance that they know both regardless of where they are.
We canĀ“t know how much bark was used for serious writing as extremely little of either knowledge or actual historical pieces has survived through the ages, but findings in the last few years points towards bark being used a lot, possibly even being the single most used writing material in Europe up until massproduction of paper.
Comparing the difference between hides and finished parchment books, the difference in Vis to go from one to the other is probably irrelevant compared to the manual work needed to achieve the same.
Even if you add another 2, even 4 magnitudes for complexity, itĀ“s still probably worth doing it with magic unless you have a mundanely very rich covenant.
Nice and perfect empty books and you ask what to do with the? Use the ones you need, use magic to preserve what you need in the future, sell the rest.
If the players wants to spend time on powering up, and realise that it DO mean spending a LOT of time, even if it is very longterm effective, why would you step in and be the grinch and stop them?
DonĀ“t forget that creating with magic means they can get "perfect" paper...
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Do they, though? Not everyone goes to talk to Arabic scholars in the Levant. So the knowledge could be reasonably local. And has been mentioned elsewhere, parchment is generally a superior product. We're not using paper now because it's superior, we're using paper because it's easier to manufacture. If you can create books magically, and parchment is better than paper, then yes a Herbam specialist would choose paper, if they knew about it
I didn't dispute that. I said that a spell to create books needed to account for the underlying complexity of making a book, just as has been done for several canonical spells.
And then you have some nice warped books. 
Because, as the SG, that's my job. I need to introduce stories that pull them out of the lab. Those stories come at necessarily suboptimal times. Some stories affect the covenant, and the council decides to send one or two particular magi. Or a story flaw pulls someone out of the lab. I don't care about what their long term plans for powering up, that's their plans, but as a player to an SG, they've agreed to an underlying contract. Covenant hooks, and character story flaws trump any current plans. I'm not going to wait for stories until characters are "ready." They'll never be ready, that's the point.
"[P]erfect" but the wizard's sigil should be present in it. So, why is all this paper deep blue in color? It's useless!
Or why does it smell like rotting flesh? Or why do I get a shock whenever I touch the book, or any of a myriad ways a sigil could be expressed in a final object. And, Creo'd objects still require a finesse roll to determine their quality.
My own calculations indicated that magic can certainly do the mundane's work, but by Covenants/HoHS RAW this requires quite high Finesse rolls.
Regardless, I find magic can be used to generate obscene levels of wealth so that as long as mundanes can copy books it doesn't really make sense for covenants not to use hordes of mundane scribes. Dedicated groups (cults, societates...) can fairly quickly amass a large body of reasonable-quality tractatus on their topics of interest, and it makes sense that all primary topics are covered in this way in the appropriate places (Durenmar has the goods on Magic Theory, House Flambeau/Castra Solis on Ignem, and so on). With magic to protect books from deterioration and even damage, and provide the wealth for an army of mundane scribes and their equipment, the Order should realistically - in my opinion - have numerous libraries of truly gigantic size.
Which is kinda boring. It's cool to have collections of tractatus to lure PCs to join cults or as treasure. It's not so cool that covenants employ battalions of scribes and engage in brisk book trade.
I do think the "problems" can be hand-waved aside, however. Leave the good stuff (libraries of tractatus as treasure for PCs), ignore the bad-stuff (battalions of scribes).
On a related note - I like the idea that books on magic are really minor magic items, who serve to initiate the character into the deeper mysteries of the Art (say) more then to teach him knowledge. As such, they can only be written (or read) with benefit by the Gifted. Or in other words - only magi copy books. With this as a restriction, suddenly book scarcity is more reasonable and, more importantly, visiting foreign covenants for book trade - and running into adventures - makes more sense.
I'm wondering if it's not best to let "books" really be magic items. Each is a unique creation, employing appropriate materials (for shape & material bonuses) and specific enchanted effects, laden with their creator's sigil, to help their user improve an Art. Some may indeed be books, but others teach through reflections in a mirror, others by meditatively gazing on the created flame, others by inducing hallucinations... Mechanically, they would just be lesser enchanted devices that provide the RAW teaching stats; perhaps boosted by shape & material bonuses (on a pyramid scale?), perhaps requiring one magnitude per 5 Levels, or so on. Needing raw vis to create books also makes raw vis more useful, which is cool since I find it's often too common in the long-run, and further increases the rarity and importance of books - especially high-level ones.
I also like the idea of having just one kind of book, which doesn't require extra book-keeping on who read it and doesn't allow any junior magus to provide amazing insights to his elders. I like Eric Pommer's idea of Comprehension Level - basically, each book has an upper "Level", which is the level it can teach up-to, and a lower Comprehension Level, which is the level it can teach from. When you write, you start at CL=L-1 (a "tractatus"), but can invest more seasons to bring the comprehension level down.
If you really want to allow books to simulate the current tractatus in that they'd always be useful for a magus to have, then each book may be read one more time with benefit above its Level.
Anyways, that's my 2c.
Yair
The thing is, they should. You can't know everything. If I for example wrote an in-depth book on neural nets I bet I could teach my "betters" in math a couple things. Especially if I spend a season working on it. Now it might not be a lot, but it would be something. Similarly if someone writes an in-depth talk on "Magical methods for working with fired clay." Someone who knows twice as much as him probably will learn something new and cool.
Yeah, its not realistic, but to improve it we would need to make it a lot more complicated. For example, people who learn by studying vis, or practice probably get uniquer insights. Ditto for people on adventures. They should be able to teach an archmagi. Someone who just read a summa not so much.
/nod
There's the engineer's way : bringing everybody to the same standards. There's the academic's way : building insights into various facets of the arts. Summae vs Tractatus.
15 years of school is about a Bachelor's degree which is the point at which you should be able to read any paper and understand it fully in a few weeks' study. And that is why I feel Tractatus are orthogonal to each other and accessible to all.
Yair: Interesting idea to generalize the paper/tractatus system into working models/magical items. Although repeating an experiment and getting a different result is a few centuries too early.
Arguably this sort of extremely specific knowledge is reflected in sharing Lab Texts.
I've said before, my view is that the best solution is to assign each tractatus a level equal to the author's art score. If you want to push the idea of unique contributions from even beginning students, then you might allow a lower level tractatus to grant exposure experience, which is not normally applicable for magical arts.
Another easy solution is to get rid of tractatus entirely and go back to something like third edition book rules. Either of these options takes a good step in the direction of slowing advancement. I'm in favor of this. If you like rapid advancement, just go with the RAW.
Well, you know what?
Everytime I see this kind of talk, it reminds me of the Fermi Paradox.
To paraphrase you, some people have trouble reconciling "What obviously should be" with "what seems to be reality". Specifically, they don't see why there are not dozens of alien civilizations everywhere around us.
So there must be something wrong in their assumptions. Could it be the same with you?
Specifically, every time people write about this, they tend to assume an order where magi cooperate, write a lot, books are heavily copied (usually by mundanes) and traded, Good Teacher is relatively common, as are Stat-Boosting rituals. Oh, and where the magi with good teacher also are the magi with high arts AND the magi who are interested in writing books about that art.
"Obviously", one or more of these must be wrong.
To adress your first point, as an exemple, let me take another analogy. In theory, communism was great for the base citizen. In practice, the USSR failed miserably, in no small part due to human nature. So I'd be wary of theoretical evidences. System abuse aside (and I think arguing that, just because an imperfect model can be abused, "reality" can be, is problematic), the fact that magi could teach each other to easily reach 40+ in their arts doesn't mean they must. Maybe, in practice, they don't, because it's "better" to have Ignem 25 when the other guy has 10 than both of you having 40.
I think I touched on this earlier. Most of the easily gettable tracti are probably not particularly high quality. Probably more on the order of Q6-8, since that is what an average magi might accomplish. However, I would like to point out: the average magi gets 30 xp a year. So if you want to ask: "why doesn't the average magi have access to an inexhaustible supply of books to study from", my response is: "He obviously does".
That's a guideline for post gauntlet advancement for magi who are starting out later than their gauntlet. It's a convenient crutch, but it shouldn't be considered the primary means of advancement, and most of my important NPCs typically get a much more detailed advancement. Those 30 xps are supposed to include the purchase of spells, by spending XPs, so a 30th level spell costs 30 xp. Now that situations handwaves issues of having an available lab text (or does it simulate the effort expended to acquire the lab text necessary to learn the spell?) If you advance according to the strict 30 xp, and spend seasons in the lab, then you lose experience points. A lot of people do detailed advancement for post gauntlet advancement, getting guidelines on books and spells available to them, and will often spend in excess of 30 xp per year, and also have time in the lab to develop longevity rituals and create items. 30 xp is a very poor yardstick to measure against.
Query:
How precisely does one write into these books? Unlike today, where bound books are easy to write into, part of the reason books were written THEN bound was because the process of binding them made them hard to write into.
I certainly hate writing on the left pages on a book...
I had a similar thought yesterday.
One of the reason the mass creation of blank, pre-bound book would not be done is that it would end up producing lower-quality books. Scribes in period were simply not used to writing in already bound books, and by the nature of scribing and illumination, scribing into an already bound books would be a major pain and make quality difficult to attain.
Let's consider the process of scribing a books for a moment. It is fairly well described in Covenants p.84, but let me recap it here:
- First, the author put together the text he wants included into the book, along with his notes about the actual design, layout and illuminations he would consider appropriate, as well as any diagrams that should accompany the text. Let's call this the author's draft.
- Second, the author's draft is given to the scribe, who with the illuminator works on the design of each page, determining the actual layout of the space for the text, the illumination and any diagram. The scribe then pens in the text, checking for error on each page before passing it to the illuminator who adds colors, images and diagrams.
- Third, the author probably takes the time to check each page for errors or flaws in the text or diagrams. If there is a problem with a page, he probably asks the scribe and illuminator to redo that page.
- Fourth, when all the pages are correct, the binder gather then into folios of 8 to 12 pages, sewing the pages together. Then, the folios are sewed and bound together to form the body of the book. The covers and spine are then added to form the complete book.
The main problems with working on an already-bound book are with steps two and three.
Step two often requires each page to be placed in different orientations, multiple layers of paint, colors of ink, etc. Each page requires anywhere from 4 to 20 hours of work, with drying time between each layer of ink or paint. Or gilding (gold leaf application). So both the scribe and the illuminator probably works on several different pages in parallel, to prevent smudging ink or paint that isn't quite dry yet on a specific page. That is impossible when working on a pre-bound book, or even with pre-assembled folios.
And if step three result in an incorrect, low-quality, or otherwise flawed page, what are you going to do? Start over? Take the book apart to replace that page or that folio?
All of which would result in books with more mistakes, lower-quality scribing and illumination as the scribe and illuminator try to fix mistakes instead of replacing a faulty page, and/or taking the book apart to fix a major problem. And it would become extremely time-consuming, with the scribing or copying of a book taking years instead of seasons.
Which is why no one at the time would want to work on a pre-bound blank book, or even on pre-assembled folios for anything important. A ledger, fine. A personal journal, ok. A book of some quality? Never. A book about magic? Madness awaits you.
I've tried playing around with a system where the "unique insights" necessary for writing a tractatus are collected in play rather then allotted automatically. So you'd be able to write a tractatus after a particularly grand botch, or after completing research, or a particularly dramatic use of the art/ability in an adventure. While I think it might be fun for me it's just one more thing to keep track of. Ultimately I don't think you'd get to awfully different results then RAW. At least for players that want to write. It could justify fewer tractate being available.
I also thought it might be possible to make it a roll mechanic. Int+(art/ability)-(number of tractatus written*n)+(other modifiers) hit the target number get a topic write the tractatus.
A simpler version might be basing quality on the average of com and intelligence rather then straight com. It would raise the average level of tractatus slightly. (most magi seem to have a higher comunication then intelligence) But make really high quality books very rare.
Or even make the quality of a tractatus different for each reader. After all how does a writer or reader know if the topic truly represents something new. So maybe cut the quality of all tractatus and add a simple die. Make the base quality com-4 instead of com+3. So the average tract would be very low or even negative before adding the simple die. While there's potential for any book to be of use no magi would know for sure until they spent a season studying it. Tractatus would be similar to vis study but without the chance of big failure or huge success.
Good idea. But if you want to go that way, I'd suggest that the die roll should be made by the reader, not by the author. So the same tractatus might be useful for one magus, but not for the other. And you have to study it to find out if it's useful to you.
As this would bring the quality of tractatus in line with the aura strengths, studying from vis again become about as attractive than studying from a tractatus. A tractatus would be safer, while vis would be a bit better on average.