After reading reading this entry on Magical Industry, I am wondering how valuable and how far charcoal can expect to travel?
I have been considering an NPC mage who can grow an acorn into a full grown tree in a month, and how the NPC might fit into the broader Hermetic landscape/economy.
Good, huge, straight tree trunks were very valuable for construction work - like e. g. for masts in shipbuilding or for halls and roofs. Such trunks were transported over long distances and also over seas.
not that far, the suspension on wagons and carts, such as it exists, will pulverize it into dust if you try to transport it too far
Well, the price for charcoal in City & Guild is 2 mythic pounds per ton (versus 1 for wood and 3 for coal -- "fuel" line on p.141, per the description on p.134).
Absolutely! The roof of Notre Dame de Paris was made from Baltic oak, because they had good wood and moving it over water was very easy compared to the alternatives.
Here is a good summary description of the roof truss of Notre Dame as constructed around 1220-1240, the famous "la ForĂȘt": Charpente de Notre-Dame de Paris â WikipĂ©dia. It is not translated, though.
Using magic to grow full grown trees in a fraction of time is incredibly useful for a huge range of industries. I would say it is actually pretty common within the Order for any locations that have a Magus with the appropriate arts (or willing to spend the Vis to have an item enchanted).
Yes all forms of construction will get a boon from having a source of large high quality trunks (homes, buildings, walls, ships). But you also have the knock on side effects of having large amounts of trimming (firewood, weaving) and leaves (green mulch).
One issue you are going to run into is stumps. You will need some means to remove them and without magic that is hard back breaking work. PeHe or magic pulley are very useful, otherwise all of your land will end up overflowing with the stumps.
Not necessarily. Many kinds of trees, usually deciduous, can regrow from stumps. Doing so deliberately is coppicing, and a standard medieval timber production method.
Which means you can, say, put a permanent circle of some sort around a copse (that is, a designated woodlot for coppicing), and then use that circle as the basis for a level 30 CrHe spell (base 15 "Bring a plant to maturity in a single day or night.", +1 for Range Touch, +2 for Duration Sun [or Ring], +0 target Circle). Take acorns to oaks in a day, fell the wood, and then cast on the stumps to take them back to full oaks in a day.
Of course, you might want to clear the stumps anyway, and regrow from seed each time. First, coppiced wood tends to have multiple trunks from a stump, so you won't get as many broad, straight trunks as growing from seed. Second, a level 30 spell inflicts a point of Warping, so the fifth repetition will cause the trees to gain the equivalent of a Minor Flaw, the thirtieth a second equivalent of a Minor Flaw, the 75th an equivalent of a mystical Minor Virtue, and then a Major Flaw equivalent at the 105th, 140th, 180th, etc.
Fairly valuable to smiths, but itâs a high volume material - you need a lot of it - and fairly easily produced.
Charcoal burners were on the very low end of society, and had a faintly sinister and magical reputation, which makes sense, as theyâre using fire to transform wood to this glassy fuel material, and tended to live on the outskirts of society, deep in woods.
I figure there are local charcoal burners wherever thereâs source material.
A so-inclined mage should be able to produce vast amounts of charcoal, but Iâm unsure on Arts:
CrHe 2: Create a processed plant product, like a finished plank of wood.
Seems to work, although the âplantnessâ of charcoal is debateable.
MuHe 4: Change a plant or item made from plant products into metal or stone (Terram requisite)
This works, but your charcoal will change back. As long as you burn it soon, no problem.
ReHe 5: Treat and process items made of plant products.
This makes the most sense to me, except the end product (charcoal) seems Terram.
Hermetically, I can see where the argument goes: The burning away of the woody material at a specific temperature releases the gross, earthly fire from the wood, transforming the wood into a more basic Terram material and leaving the purer, hotter fire still trapped within. The interesting if crude alchemical process performed by lowly charcoal burners can be much improved by suitable Hermetic wisdom.
So, you start with Herbam and transform it to Terram as a natural process, reducing the complex compound to a more basic elemental compound.
Perhaps thereâs a sidebar on charcoal buried somewhere in the vast text.
Stumps are actually good for some uses. They make good material for many types of wood working, such as bowls, plates, spoons, furniture, etc. Stumps make good work tables/stands. They make good firewood and can make good charcoal.
If you have the ability to remove them easily thanks to magic, then you can actually save the big straight logs for uses they are best for and use the stump/root wood for areas they are best for.
My Covenant does it with really powerful âmagicâ cranes and winches, where we just rip them from the ground.
Possibly some context would be helpful.
Are you thinking of having magic produce charcoal? Why? To sell or to use?
Are you thinking of needing fuel for a covenant forge? Why charcoal, and not directly enchanting a self-firing forge? (I suspect the answer is that the mage is good with Herbam, not Ignem.)
Seems like a lot of work when there is ReHe [5]:"Control an entire plant, moving it around as you direct, and it need not remain rooted."
Range: Touch (+1); Duration: Concentration (+1); Target: Individual (+0) Gives something like 'Compliance of the Obliging Stump' level 15 -- cast it, and just keep it up long enough for the stump to walk itself onto a waiting cart.
Now, thereâs a creepy-crawly image. Ambulatory stumps, root-walking through the woodland.
That would be creating a new item. But the people handling the trees are the same ones who run the shipyard, where they have access to both the magic cranes and a magic winch which can lift a whole ship. No need to enchant something new when a secondary use handles it.
EDIT: Not saying it isnât a good idea because it is, just explaining why we use a magic winch capable of easily lifting a 300 ton ship instead.
When using an Individual or Group target for trees, including moving stumps and roots, don't forget magnitudes for size. The base Individual plant is only one pace in each direction, after all.
Note the expanded rules for Targets and Sizes (Definitive Edition p.310, second column); a spell that changes a plant's size will only increase it to a factor of ten above the size for the Target without extra magnitudes. As a mature oak or the like will be more than ten times the size of a base Individual plant, by my reading, a spell that takes a tree to full maturity will need at least one magnitude for size (so it can target an immature tree up to ten cubic paces in size with a final size of up to one hundred) or final size (so it can target an immature tree of up to one cubic pace in size with a final size of up to one hundred).
This is part of why I suggested a circle-based maturing spell above. (The ability to target a stump-and-root system regardless of initial size is the second, getting multiple trees at once without having to pay Group magnitudes is a third). You generally don't need to worry about opposition when tracing a circle on covenant grounds for reschedulable economic production, and it potentially saves lots of magnitudes. (Just, you know, get your Intelligence + Concentration up so you can make the target number of 6 on the concentration rolls to trace the circle.)
The short answer of how a magi fits in to Hermetic economy is if it is mundane resources, they do not. Either a covenant is wealthy enough they do not care about mundane resources, or they use magic to cover the gaps.
Perdo sea water to make salt, and rego to get the salt from the other materials is easily spontable. If there is vis, creo terram chunks of gold, gems, or silver solve mundane financial problems. These are just a few of the ridiculous amount of money making schemes magi can do with low level sponts.
Tree guy can be one of those options, but that magi is not that special. The magi can grow a tree closer to the end user point, but trees were not in short supply in medieval Europe. Rego guy can cut and move the trees. Ignem guy can turn the tree in to charcoal.
Charcoal for home use, Creo Sun duration can be sponted easily, Moon if one wants to sell some charcoal is a little harder, but not ridiculous.
Actually using Rehe(ig) to convert wood to charcoal is probably more useful than growing the tree. It was a process that took about a week of labor by a couple of people to tend the fire, and also consumed additional wood to keep the fire going that heated the wood which was kept in a low oxygen environment (usually a mud mound that had to be built before the burning and torn apart afterwards). simply waiting a few years for a tree to grow was pretty low cost by comparison.
Now if you are talking olive trees, which could take a century to reach maturity and start providing olives, thatâs a different matter, not in terms of continual production but in terms of getting to the productive phase a lot faster, which tended to keep the resource relatively scarce (along with some rather specific growing conditions)
Youâre right except that a big part of The Stress in 1220 is âHey theyâre really gettinâ through the trees where all of our faeries and vis and nature livesâ, admittedly part of that is felling forests for grazing, roads, town expansion, etc; but being able to rapidly grow a tree in order to preserve a forest is probably a âEveryone needs to learn this ASAP, get on it bro itâs like Level 25â spell for the more harmony-seeking Bjornaer who want to get ahead of that and help guide civilization growth where they prefer it to be.
And this is the thing. A level 30 spell (15 base, +1 touch, +2 sun) needs a bit of effort, but nothing extreme. The moment growing a forest becomes important, enough magi learn the spell, that it no longer matters. 10 minutes each morning gives 300 trees a week. Iâm assuming not going extreme, a bit of a walk so 5 a minute, and resting on the sabbath.
The tree growing magi is not unique enough to be important. level 40+ I think is where a magi offering a specific spell may become more valuable, and depending on saga power level, even 40 may not be enough.
Now I find myself trying to envision a forest grown by a mage, and how their Casting Sigil will manifest.
I should have mentioned considering Casting Sigils in the mirror thread.