Perhaps realistic is a poor choice of words. Interesting is much more accurate. Can I see realistic NPCs in a world that looks like Mythic Europe holing themselves up in some tower reading each other's research notes? Maybe. But why would I care? I would only care, possibly, when they stop and decide that they need to do something to the PCs. Because until they come out of their tower, they are phantoms. And I have to ask, what's their motivation for coming out of their tower now? What is different about now?
Perhaps authentic is a better word than realistic or interesting. A character with motivations, with things that happened to him that made him like he is. Like Darth Vader, (ignoring his inept origin presentation by Lucas) the story actually makes sense. A petulant teenager manipulated into becoming Darth Vader makes a whole lot of sense.
Of course books would be far less valuable in Discworld. Since million to one odds pay off nine times out of ten everyone would study from vis. (1,1,1,1,1,9)288+aura 90% of the time you study would be sweet.
Hm that would be interesting. Although I'd be curious to see what assumptions it was based on. Like how common CrMe rituals are.
Personally I'd have no problem assuming that Com 5 and Good Teacher might be a once in a generation sort of thing. Although it also might be fair to say that high com and Good Teacher are a fairly comorbid. It might be rarer to find high Com individuals who are not good teachers.
Because you can bribe or pay them to teach your PCs and they probably leak books to the rest of the Order. Or they hand out quests to the PCs and pay the PCs with books or teaching or other services.
You can't bribe or pay them all, or the bribes and pay may come at too high a price.
And in that i agreed.
But please, oh please i beg of you, do not write "drug" when you mean "dragged"! It´s one of the most annoying WTF typo´s or whatever it is that i know of. It´s truly shattering to the experience when reading a story and someone writes something like "he drug[ged] them into the next room" and you go 
say WHAT?...
Certainly not always, as i said, paper has some advantages of its own, and magi can make sure conditions are beneficial for letting paper last long. For one thing, it´s easier to write on.
Of course. But that´s only needed for Q14 tractatus... Q9-11 should exist in fair numbers.
:mrgreen:
Yeah, but think of how impressed visitors will be if the books in your library tries to chew their leg off, or that you have to use a few grogs with swords and shields to make sure the books remain on the shelves... 
I normally don't make that mistake, but I don't actually heavily edit myself before posting. In my defense, I've been living in the southern US for a while, and it is part of the dialect.
Actually, my cursory research suggest the opposite, that parchment takes ink better.
Sure, and in sagas where magi start later than gauntlet, a large number of those Q9-11 tractatus have probably been read.
Much like has been done with populations of magi, a census of books available should be taken to determine some reasonable number of what quality levels of books could be available. What is a "fair" number? How many of those books were Q9-11, and then were degraded over time. How many copies were made? It's something I've been thinking about for a while. Of course, this presumes an Order that has a flowing and vibrant book trade. It's possible that such an Order does not exist for a particular saga...
Challenge accepted.
There once was a Maga and a Magus. They met when they where young and fresh out of gauntlet and were very much alike. They shared a love of books and learning as well as an interests in the same Art. (i.e. they both had Book Learner, Apt Student, Good Teacher, and Affinities in the same and Arts and Abilities like maybe Teaching and/or MT) Since opposite might attract but, despite what Hollywood has taught us, shared interests are what relationships are built on (That and good Communication and of course theirs was on the high side too) the two Magi fell in love.
The couple moved into an isolated covenant built for two, built his and hers matching labs and spent a long happy life together collaborating, doing all the things the munchkins (like me) theorize two magi like this could do if undisturbed. Constantly writing little, but oddly topical, love letters even though they saw each other every day. (Which could be bound in some of the most affectionate collection of correspondences ever.) Taking turns teaching, writing, and reading to leapfrog each others scores to imensly (though saga specific) high levels. Assisting in their spouses lab whatever their peers might say.
Though isolated the couple had occasional contact with the rest of the order, trading spells, a few texts and enchanted items for necessities. The Summa's they each wrote in their shared specialty are starting to become accepted as the Root and Branch of that Art. But, by and large the tractati the wrote where "for each other"
Of course all good things must come to an end. One of the couple has finally succumbed to an aging role or final twilight. Leaving the other heart broken, and perhaps a little mad. Oh yeah and insanely powerful.
Perhaps the surviving spouse seeks out the pc's covenant to help return their lost love. With a trip to the Magic Realm or something more insidious. Of course they can pay. A large stack of never before seen Tractati, Magic items, lab texts, not to mention truly amazing teaching services.
Maybe instead of trying to cheat death the survivor see's something of their lost love in a PC. (Many of the same virtues a focus in the same Art) They offer their patronage but it comes with, some unhealthy expectations.
This is a really nice idea.
It wasn't a challenge, so... It was a statement of how the game works. And it was qualified with a maybe.
That's a pretty good premise to work from.
Sure, and you've now regulated access to this "unlimited" resources you created. This works for NPCs, and I pretty much stipulated that you can create authentic NPCs that have done exactly as you described. My main point is that the benefits of the NPCs, while vast, may not be easily accessible, or as beneficial as promised.
Sorry wasn't actually trying to be confrontational. What I should have said was, Hey that's a good point. It gives me an idea for a story seed.
Yeah because nothing in-game should exist without a story connected to it. The more "awesome" it is the more story it should be soaked in. Here I figured whatever caused such an improbable situation to exist the would also be the source of it's drama. Two lab rats with very similar and very complimentary virtues meet and form a life long and committed collaboration. Sounds like love to me. Extend that sort of relationship out for a century then cut it off the survivor will probably be a little of kilter.
Plus you can have all sorts of fun with it.
Sure I'll instruct you in Magic Theory. Here wear this, and please fix your hair this way. Also could you possibly lower your parma so I could cast a tiny little Muto Corpus spell on you.
Or a stack of tractus with titles like, "You brew potions all wrong" and "Labs don't clean themselves."
Or the bound love letters of two people who couldn't stop talking about magic for five minutes. Hey if your going to have characters abuse a system like correspondences (even npc's) they mine as well do it with style. Create something a little more interesting then this is a tractatus on x with a score of y.
"You see each other every day, why would you ever write each other?"
"Duh 1 extra xp a season..... I mean we're in love."
"Yeah but you have to discuss what your working on to get the bonus, why would you do that when your pretty much working together."
"Ah we love our work to"
I didn't mean to come off as confrontational, myself.
And your story is great, as a story to trigger PC interactions with the greater world. But your idea differ so much from a PC writing circle, which is what has been presented previously in this thread. And I had been called out for interfering with PC plans of interrupting with a writing circle with stories. 
My Sister does Calligraphy, Printing and Paper Crafts semi-professionally and she has worked with real parchment as well as modern craft made paper. (Which is probably still better then the absolute best paper you could expect in the 13th century.) I got a blank journal for Christmas a and two of it's pages are made of dead goat. The parchment is decorative so I would never actually try to write on them but I did talk to her tonight and asked her about the differences between parchment and paper.
She said "Wait is this for a story or one of your silly games?" After that I did get a little information out of her. She quibbled a bit over which took ink better. Parchment is, according to her, a dream to write on but it takes a heavier hand and the ink doesn't soak into it the same. You get cleaner lines, but it takes longer for the ink to dry particularly she said compared to handmade paper which "is like a sponge". Though she guesses that someone used to working with parchment would "gouge the hell" out of paper the first time they tried it. Parchment is thick and heavy so books made all from parchment would have fewer pages and weigh more then paper books the same thickness. Above all real parchment is expensive even compared to handmade paper. I only got my journal because she retook a course in bookbinding that was cheaper then buying the materials herself. Or as I suspect she justified her summer vacation in the mountains by making all her Christmas presents there.
I think we concluded that paper's biggest advantages are that it's less labor intensive to make in quantity and it's lighter and possibly thiner. She also suspects that paper is really better for printing at least above the handicraft and woodcut level. Except for the weight and thickness bit not much of that matters to Magi.
Thanks 
A wasted effort in my experience. Players are usually like a herd of felines. Sure you may get most of the covenant to agree that they are all going to focus on one art and try to form something like a writers circle. But then you realize half didn't build their character right for the job. Of the ones who did most of them have other projects they HAVE to get to first.
"Dude I totally got to get all my arts up so I can get an apprentice."
"Yeah sure once you get an apprentice you'll have lots of spare time." 
One of the beauties of ArM is that the realities of gaming nicely mesh up with the problems facing the characters within the game. Magi usually work alone because they all see themselves as special unique snowflakes with their own motivations and goals. And they'd all become Gods if all the fraking distractions didn't keep getting in their way.
Generally when I hear a player tell me their how long their real plan for ultimate power will take I double or triple their estimate. If it involves another PC controlled by another player I go exponential. And that's without me actively trying to come up with monkey wrenches. Nevermind the ones who don't bother to actually figure out how long initiating 4+ mystery virtues, getting a familiar, training an apprentice, and gathering several queens of vis will take before they can start to enchant their uber talisman.
If your character can always, or most of the time do exactly what they want, when they want, then something has gone very wrong. If instead, characters can generally go in the direction they want, solve certain tasks that have been placed in their way by the SG, that's so much more interesting. A character of mine, might have mentioned it here in this thread, had to learn Inexorable Search without the benefit of a lab text. He had plans to learn that spell eventually, but he had to do it earlier than he expected. Further, he could have acquired a lab text, but it probably would have taken the same amount of time, a season to find it, and a season to learn it, but we had a problem with paying for it. So, he had to learn it at a time that didn't align with the player's or character's plans, and instead had to bend to the needs of the covenant.
Exactly. And when someone's schedule gets knocked off, the schedule blows up or falls apart, and with magi participating in stories periodically, that should happen rather regularly. Say two seasons out of 20 per magus. Some magi might get a story or two more, if they're particularly adventurous...
It is certainly possible to make
A bit more complex than that. Parchment works better with POOR ink(and with a poor scribe using a nonoptimal tool for writing).
If you use bad ink, or bad tools, or if you´re a bad scribe, then using paper is not the best of ideas, as it will end up with lousy quality writing, splotched and smudged all over. But for a skilled scribe that does minimal mistakes, paper is much nicer to use.
Huh, that it was part of that dialect, that i had missed. Guess that explains where i´ve seen it the most(in one place) before as well(a Texan girl).
Two seasons out of 20? Luxury! Our magi do an adventure a year, and these frequently result in major changes of plan.
Consider that it might be a function of pacing of the overall saga arc, rather than a matter of "luxury."
Absolutely. Short sagas, where more stuff happens, necessarily involve more disruptions to magi's plans.
So they don't have Communication 5? So they aren't all Book Learners and Good Teachers? They can get there with NONE of those three, it just takes a little longer.
House Bonisagus - 100 magi, most of 'em at least 40 years out of apprenticeship, you don't think five or ten of them have been collecting a huge batch of Tractatus? You don't think any of them are interested in making their name by writing new Branches?
House Flambeau doesn't have to share, but they tend to work in squads of four to six. And they're mostly specialized in Ignem or Perdo, so those two fields are going to have an awful lot of available literature. For that matter, there's going to be an awful lot of available Creo and Corpus, longevity being what it is.
Tremere is the frikkin' NSA and they could devote a small batch of magi to a project like this.
I can make a case for Tytalus, for Jerbiton, for Verditius easily.
It takes, like, four magi to write a mighty library of Tractatus on an Art. Then it takes two magi working together- a parens and an apprentice, both dedicated to writing the new Root and Branch of Creo, say- to gain this legendary level of expertise.
If your lineage is known as "Masters of Creo"... it's going to happen. And then the power level of the Order gets ratcheted up just a little farther on the top end, and new apprentices get ground a little farther in the mud.
I agree, by the way, that magi can't pursue their obsessions more than two seasons a year in general. And they often have to do their own copying. And no matter how wealthy you are, gold can't buy what doesn't exist yet. But if all it takes is twenty full-time years, and you have eighty years of Hermetic life, you can do some awfully spectacular things. And if you've got 1200 magi out there, some of them will do them.
Where is there? Communication + Good Teacher is needed to write books. Book Learner helps for improving a books SQ from the perspective of the reader... But, high com and good teacher, and techniques to improve SQ will be important to your next item.
Branches are not Tractatus, they are Summa. If someone has a high enough Art score, they can improve the quality by reducing the Art level of the book.
I don't agree that they tend to work in squads, that sounds very Tremere. Flambeau are little generals, and prefer to command their grogs in the manner they see fit, and I certainly haven't met a Flambeau that really goes for coordinated action, or knows how to lead/follow in a team of magi.
Tyatlus don't care.
Jerbiton is to busy searching for beauty.
Verditius are too busy making stuff to sell. Books on Arts are to be consumed, and it is someone else's job to write them. Any teaching they do is centered on furthering the House's requirements.
This assumes a friendly and loving relationship between master and apprentice. I've seen it go both ways. But eventually the filius has to go his own way, and only one person can write and get credit for the book, so we have some good old fashioned jealousy that can derail such a book every being published.
No, it's not. You think it's going to happen, but I certainly don't. As I suggested above, just because there is a parens and filius, doesn't mean that they are friendly to each other. Maybe the filius was kidnapped as an apprentice, treated relatively horribly (not even a Tytalus apprenticeship) and just can't wait to get away from their parens once they gauntlleted...
By the time you start jamming the standard stuff into a Hermetic life, you surprisingly begin running out of time. Want a familiar, needs time. Want an apprentice, needs an incredible amount of time. Want a talisman with many attunements, guess what? Even more time. Found a new covenant? Yeah, you need a lot of time. Restore a Winter covenant to Spring, same. Sure, some things happen, but not every magus is out for improving the Order in general... 