Build Point costs for Significatos?

Games Discussion Ars Magica
1

Covenants, p. 101. has an alternative to a book, a significato. These are regions where one can study an Art, as if the magus was using vis. One example of a place is in HoH:MC, p. 52. I was thinking of a forest that allowed one to Study Creo in the Spring, Perdo in Winter, and Herbam in the other two seasons, gaining experience as if you were studying vis.

Would this be the price of a Summa? Assuming your source quality was a 6, would this be 26 Build Points? Would you change the price if multiple magi (say, four) could use it simultaneously?

This would be of intense interest to Magi with the Study Requirement Flaw.

2

Well, how to gauge this???

A Significato works IIRC as a set amount of vis for a certain Art for Study. It is reusable season by season, but only to a certain point when you need more pawns of vis.
IMHO it should be more expensive than a Tractatus , since it can be used more than once. Also it does not have a set Quality, so it is not really comparable
Less expansive that a vis source of the same amount since it is limited for one activity only, and can't be stockpiled like normal vis. I mean a Significato woth 2 pawns vis to study from eventually becomes irelevant once the Art is raised sufficiently high. But a source of 2 pawns per season is 8 pawns per year - usable for a lot longer as study source (just not as often)
Mind you Covenants p 101 mentions that a vis source used as Significato is usually worth a higher amount as Significato that you can actually harvest from it. No mention of how much though.
Should it be comparable to a Summa? It is level-limited in sort of the same way...One pawn of vis per 5 levels (or fraction thereof). So a 1 pawn Significato is lvl 5, 2 pawns lvl 10 etc. And the Quality is the average gain - so 5,5+Aura (and I'd round down). Normally you'd study vis where there is a good aura, since you don't need a lab. But a Significato is in a set place, so you have a set Aura.
BP of a Significato could be: Might (or #pawns x5)+Aura+5

3

I agree that a Significato should be priced as a Summa, with some caveats.

Level (the maximum Art score at which you can still benefit from it) is clearly equal to 5 times (pawns) where pawns is the number of pawns it substitutes for.

Quality would equal stress die+Aura. Now, here's the rub. The average for a stress die without botch dice is 5.175. But having a certain gain is, in most cases, better than an uncertain gain with the same average, since you can plan your other activities around it. And botches not only reduce the average (if you roll a botch, the total is counted as 0, not just the die) but more importantly are likely to cause trouble. A double botch studying from vis can send a magus into twilight; I guess a botch when studying from a Significato would depend on the Significato, with botching while watching a tree grow being significantly less dangerous than watching a volcano erupt. I talked about this with my troupe, and the rough consensus was to price the "Quality" of a Significato as:
Quality = 4 or 5 +Aura-(danger x pawns), where danger equals:
0 for something that will not cause anything more than a minor inconvenience, or a story, even on a major botch,
1 for something that will cause trouble and a measurable, significant loss (like warping, aging, loss of a magic item etc.),
2+ for potentially lethal danger.
I think this rather overprices "dangerous" Significatos, but magi who'll study from them are probably ready to cope with the danger ...

There are a few additional twists to it.
Many magi can usually study at a time from a Significato, but only one from a Summa. Then again, it's often easy enough to make mundane copies of a Summa that the advantage is minor, and cancelled out by the fact that a Summa is easily portable.
Some Significatos can only be studied at a particular time of the year. Again, this seems a minor inconvenience, since magi can often adjust their workplan accordingly, but possibly worth a 2 or 3 point reduction in equivalent Quality (this seems the consensus of my troupe).
Finally, the Significato you are proposing is technically three Significatos, one on Creo, one on Perdo, and one on Herbam. The actual cost should be the sum of the three.

Summarizing, the total cost of a Significato would then be:
2 + Aura + (pawns x (5-danger)),
for each different Art that can be studied from it,
where danger equals 0, 1 or 2 depending on whether a major botch causes respectively at most a story or the loss of a season, a more significant loss like warping or aging, or a lethal danger like angering a dragon mama.

4

This looks like a reasonable result. Thanks.