Alright, well I suppose a good starting point on the vis would be how much we would like to have, on average, per magi each year.
Could we perhaps agree that 5 pawns per magi per year is a good starting point? The book recommends this as a guideline for "low vis," which while we might not settle on this would probably be the minimum amount of vis we'll have. With the 6 players we have that would be about 150 BP for 30 pawns a year.
For the covenant library, I would assume the primary focus will initially be on primers for the sake of our apprentices, with perhaps a few higher level summae and tractatus for the more specialised magi. Perhaps a collection of 5/15, or 6/21, level/quality summae primers? Additional question: Can we use starting vis stocks to purchase the "roots" listed on the Tribunal Library page? Otherwise the 5/15 collection for all arts would be about 300 BP + an addition 100 or so to get various other higher level summae and tractus.
In addition to all of this we should consider how many covenfolk we should have per magi, presumably we'll have a rather significant number of grogs with the saracen presence nearby. However we should work out what labourers and such we'll need based on whatever income source we eventually decide on, though this part is all tied in with income anyway so we'll probably sort that out once we've fully decided on income.
Here's something I wrote up for a library, general vis suggestion and factoring in 6 labs for each magi (assuming the players listed on the wiki are all still participating):
This quick write up provides decent level pimers for every art, and a bunch of decent level summae, it is missing ability related booked but, there are more than enough points for that.
And then if we were to assume an income of 10 pawns of vis for each of our 6 magi per year that would be 60 pawns/year or 300BP
Plus an additional 50BP each for 6 laboratories, totalling 300BP.
All in this is 1215BP so far, of our 1912 points we have left this would leave us with 797 poitns to spend on non standard labs, ability books for our library, starting money, enchanted items and lab texts.
Thoughts/Opinions? I basically wrote this up in like 10 minutes so it certainly isn't perfect.
You can purchase the roots, and thee are also the Authorities which may be copied relatively cheaply, which has a lot to do, I believe, with why the purchased library is not more robust.
Also it is assumed at 0 cost that each magus has a standard lab.
Ah, in that case nine of the primers in my table could probably be replaced with the roots which can be purchased more cheaply than the build cost of the book, that would save about 239BP.
oh and with the starting standard labs at 0 cost then we have about 1336 point remaining rather than 797, including the exchange for the roots, and the build cost of the vis they would cost.
ANd in terms of ability Sumae we coudl have something like:
And then we could have 4*Level 7 Quality 14 summae 38 points ea. = 140BP (got the level/quality limit wrong - fixed)
And that would result in a pretty good library for an additional 490 points. Which would take the remaining BP back down to 846, which is still a lot.
So if we went with that thing I drew up in five minutes it would give us 14 ability books, 30 art books, 60 pawns/year for vis income and 846 points left to spend on any additional books, tractatus, spell texts, enchantments, and start money.
This is the slightly edited table of what I posted earlier, assuming we buy the Roots listed on the wiki as well, I kind of like this library template as it would be kind of fun to work around not having all 15 arts in high level books, however for the hell of it this is a another library I thought of:
This table is kind of just stupid power-gaming, with this you could get an art from 0 to level 15 in 8 seasons, I basically made it for the sake of comparison to my other table that I made to sort of highlight why I'd prefer to have a more varied library than whatever the hell this is.
Also on a side note we could buy all of the "Authority" books listed on the wiki for an additional 4BP.
If you look at The Authorities, which may be copied at 1 pawn per season (either by a magus or a mage provided scribe), you might want to consider re-examining those decisions.
Also there may be other people who want to spend points elsewhere- several enchantments have been suggested previously as possibilities.
Yeah I'm just providing ideas at this point seeing as the library hasn't really been discussed in any detail.
Also right, I missed the detail about "per season" in which case they cos around 2-3 pawns each or around 6-9 bp total depending on what kind of scribe we have. Of course it's also not really necessary to start with the authorities because we probably won't need them that early into the game and it would be better to spend the points on enchantments, nonstandard labs and additional vis income.
Sounds about right, in terms of enchantments 60bp is 150 levels of enchantments which is at the very least a good starting point. We could also spend additional points on another specialist like a scribe if we wanted.
On the note of enchantments, there's a really cool one inthe Transforming Mythic Europe book on page 102, which is basically a book copying enchantment. The description lists it as being capable of copying 300 pages of text in about an hour and a half, the obvious drawback is that it's 94 levels of enchantments, or about 38BP for this single item
Other interesting enchantments include:
The mentioned salt maker
Magi of Hermes P.69 "granary Chest" basically creates a chest that can store large amounts of food stores and protects them from mustiness: level 43 item
Magi of Hermes p.69 "Token of the Harvest Evening" protects all plant materials from decaying if they are in the same room as the token, can bee stores in the granary chest, causes warping over long periods of time.: level 14 item
Some form of ReHe for cotton cloth weaving would probably boost our income a little if we decided cotton farming is the way to go.
Magi of Hermes p.77 "Shroud of the healed body" grants a +12 to recovery rolls if worn for the duration of a wound/sickness: level 24 item
And a whole lot more, but I think this is a nice list of things that could be considered in addition to anything else people want.
Alright trying to catch up as there has been a lot of suggestions thrown out.
Boons- I think that we should highly consider school boon. I am not sure that I have ever seen such a group of multiple good teachers (something I will most likely take also) and high communication. We know we will be an apprentice focused game, so lest just embrace it and say its a school (that we use to teach our apprentices the mundane stuff) .
Enchantments- I like the items suggested, even the one for copying books. Just think Vis should be worked out first.
Libraries-I don't think we should start using build points with any of the books we have an open invitation to buy/copy with vis.
Vis - I really think that this is what we need to decide first. I would suggest that we agree on what our Vis income should be divide that among the player and they decide what type it is. This will spend a nice chunk of our points and may assist with character development also.
My adjusted table (most recent post containing a table) has the BP cost assuming we buy the primers listed on the wiki
Fair enough, well in one of my comments I mentioned that 300BP would 60 pawns per year which equates to 10 pawns per magus per year, what's your opinion on that? Personally I think that is a fairly significant amount and any more that we may need could perhaps be acquired through play? But I am of course open to suggestions.
The only school I find is a major hook. but I am also looking at felicitous tribunal and believe that may be mandatory, especially given how it makes texts easier to obtain and provides rules on vis sources...
Most do, but only Normandy has an equally well developed code for it, and that is based upon tourneys rather than legal precedents and mundane politics. The Roman tribunal's management of texts is far more generous than any other tribunal.
Felicitous tribunal and a secondary income source might work. We could have a source like salt production and another source of crafts people? That's my suggestion.
I still like the idea of ghosts for the a vis source. Haunted temples maybe?
Felicitous tribunal and secondary income source balance out boons and hooks for now- given the conversations it would seem income is from cotton and salt.
Keep in mind that we are likely to add hooks when we add a vis source- for example ghosts providing mentem vis will add both a haunted hook and a rival of whomever was harvesting the vis before you moved in. Also if you take the school hook this will increase available points (possibly to include the school as a third source of income?)
Could you explain what you mean by crafts people? Earlier we suggested cotton farming as an income source that could lead to tapestry and textile crafts. Is that along the lines of what you were thinking of?
Yeah, that's not a bad idea for a vis source, what's your opinion on the proposed income amount on the previous page as well?
Yeah I was thinking that about the school hook, it makes for a unique covenant environment and adds a few bonuses. I was also thinking that it could work as a kind of Hermetic school for the tribunal, that can be used by others in the region to be taught arts or other abilities like languages at the cost of vis. Thoughts?
Additional question, in what way does it increase our available points?
Arts can only be taught one on one, and for mundane abilities there are other Universities in the area. The hook indicates that mundanes would be coming to the covenant for their education, presumably pre-university, similar to the parish schools.