Can you open multiple items for enchantment in a season?
Assuming of course that you have enough Vis
What if you're Verditius with a high craft and Philosophiae and Verditius Elder Runes?
Let's say we have a magus with Magic Theory 6, Philosophiae 5, and craft 5, with Verditius Elder Runes.
Verditius Elder Runes let's him use Magic Theory 6 x Philosophiae 5 = 30 pawns of vis in a season when enchanting Items.
His Verditius Magic Virtue lets him reduce the cost to open an item by his craft score, to a minimum of one pawn.
Let's say he wanted to open a set of bone daggers, which would normally require six pawns apiece, but because he has a craft of five, they would only require one pawn to open.
How many can he open in a season?
A. One - You can't use the multiple laboratory activity rules here because there is no lab total.
B. Five - which is how much vis he could use in a season
C. Twenty-five - each one takes one pawn of vis, due to the Verditius Magic craft discount, and he can use 25 pawns of vis when enchanting items
One. Preparing an Invested Device, opening it for enchantment, is a seasonal activity that takes a season. It does not have a Lab Total, which is required to perform 'Multiple Laboratory Activities'.
" Invested devices are powerful items that require special preparation before any effective enchantments can be performed on them. Once you have the physical item to enchant, you must spend a season preparing it. To do this, you must simply expend the time..."
By the RAW just one, exactly because there is no Lab Total and no Form/Technique involved.
It's the same (unfortunate, in my view) issue with fixing arcane connections.
Might be a good Mystery Virtue to be able to open multiple Invested devices in a season - though, not one that feels like it would see much use? Maybe a broader "Do multiple things in a season that normally are a one-per-season thing" virtue, including fixing Arcane Connections.
A Verditius Mystery for opening multiple items in a season seems entirely reasonable to me. Maybe up to your Philosophiae score, with the Vis limit still applying?
Maybe there's something to the idea that those items are now linked, and it's easier (in some sort of math way) to invest enchantments in them as long as they're the same enchantment, or one that works together?
Perhaps when opened in this way they count as touching for the purposes of calculating invested effects, shaving off several magnitudes if you were going to do something involving an Arcane Connection.
As Troy pointed out, the RAW answer is 'One'. But... it does not seem egregious to allow up to 25 separate (identical) items to be opened with just one pawn each -- because that single pawn of 'Opening' forever limits the enchanted item to just effects of level 10 and below.
Now some mixture of (even identical) items, where some are opened to dramatically different levels (for example, two identical jeweled daggers; one opened with 25 Vis & the other opened with just one Vis), seems like it might be fodder for min-max abuse. I can understand a mage wanting to eliminate the drudgery of opening several similar magical items, but someone whining that their mage cannot maximally squeeze out every point of capacity in a season doesn't garner a bunch of my sympathy. One wrinkle on this IF I was to allow it as a house rule (or just part of the outer Veriditus mystery), is that the amount of Vis which can be used must be evenly distributed among all of items being opened, and any 'fractional Vis' is still spent & lost (opening four items with a maximum of '26 Vis per season', costs all 26 Vis and opens all four to six pawns of capacity) without effect; or something similar. Maybe a pyramid scale cost in Vis for each item after the first, I dunno. This is certainly house-rule territory, though; and no Saga I am involved with affects anyone else's.
Also:
Fixing Arcane Connections in DE (p 250) is apparently still one whole Season per connection. Was there supposed to be an errata on this, or is this still something to foist off on your apprentice?
There is philosophic alchemy in TMRE which lets you do a vis extraction along with any other seasonal activity that doesn't take you away from your lab. It also has some extra interactions with opening an item for enchantment.
I had very vocally proposed that fixing one AC should be treated as a 7-day distraction while undertaking other activities, and that a magus could instead spend a whole season fixing as many as the MT limit on vis use allows.
David Chart said he liked it as an erratum (and a bunch of other people did), but then Troy said 'no need for an erratum, since this can always be made the result of original research'. And David said 'oh I like that even better' and nothing was done about it
Sometimes I imagine that the meaning of "time" here represents that certain activities have to be done at certain significant astrological points in time. An activity that monopolises your time until the astrological conjunction or whatever is over - so you can't do more than one item at the same important time.
That is fair, but the whole sky is moving at very much the same speed (mostly from the speed of Earth's rotation) -- a zodiacal Sign occupies two whole hours of sky. Even if seasonal enchanting was conducted as Ritual magic, adding one magnitude (ten times as many things affected) is only adding another 15 minutes (just one minute for someone with Hermetic Choreography) across the whole season. Or, at worst, an extra 15 minutes per night. It is hard to see this as a deal-breaker, especially since actually enchanting the effect in an item is something which can be done with multiple items or effects in a single season.
I love this approach as well; it gives mages another (small) incentive to put points in Magic Theory. At the very least some NPC in 'Magi of Hermes', or some similar other source, should have lab notes from having recently made this breakthrough. It seems less world-breaking than 'Subtle Opening' and 'Non-Sterile Longevity Rituals' from a story perspective.
Hard agree that any version of this ought to be "Both/Each object has the same Vis requirement when investing", or at least a comparable amount (eg, 'no more than your Philosophiae score of separation'). I like this idea a lot more when it's "This virtue lets you make a set of things that go together" as opposed to "This is a way to minmax your seasons."
While there's an argument for "Okay but what are you doing for the rest of the season while you wait for Jupiter to be in Aries" to suggest the "It's at most 7 days of distraction" rule, you could make the argument that the rest of the time is preparation for that - reconfiguring the lab Just So, leaving your jeweled sword in a Ring to give it like ¼ of a warping point, just enough to slide your magic in there and wedge it Open, etc. I don't hate the idea of there being time for other things, but those things should mean you can't make use of your lab. You have to go read/write a book, or practice a craft or something.
That said, could also be a fun Laboratory Major Virtue, one that requires a decent amount of space.
Thank you, that's the conversation I was half-remembering. Apologies for the error. Part of my confusion is that we have adopted it as either a house rule, or as a minor breakthrough that a useful NPC made and shared. Pick your flavour. (I agree with Ezzelino: this is a lot more workable than the written rule, and the Vis cost prevents abuse.)
Alright alright, I screwed up telling David that. Can everyone stop kicking a man when he is down already...
EDIT: At least the ability to do it as a one week distraction got through.
EDIT EDIT: I thought I read it, possibly in Distraction, now I can't find it. Apparently I'm losing my mind.
If you like the 7-day version you can also introduce it via e.g. a tractatus on MT or similar. This is maybe a middle of the road approach where you have to invest the time to read the text in order to be able to fix an arcane connection in 7 days.
I'm quite positive to the idea that hermetic magic can be expanded this way - reading a new text can sometimes give you new options, not just experience points.
