When it grows (within one day) does it go through a cycle of seasons as it grows or does it enlarge to full size like a balloon shape? If it went through simulated seasons I would say it has rings even if there were no actual seasons.
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Unless there is an ignem component the only thing I can see that would simulate seasons is if it gets cold towards morning and evening. It might have a single āseasonā if there is bad weather mid dayā¦
I was not thinking scientifically. Does the tree grow as if in a fast forward film where it visually cycles through āseasons?ā If so I would rule that it has rings. Does it inflate, for lack of a better idea, into a full grown tree where it expands to itās greatest extent and then as a final touch all of the leaves spring out or even simply pop into existence fully formed? In that case Iād say no rings although in the case of just popping into place fully formed Iād be willing to swing either way.
Iād lean strongly towards having most people feel that wood without rings is unnatural.
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It seems unlikely to me that a tree grown to maturity in a single day runs through (say) twenty years of blossoms, leaves, fruits* and bare branches. That suggests no rings.
* If it does, that's a very handy side effect, though a bit daft: āQuick! We have ten minutes to harvest all these apples, and then we have time for a swift half before the next harvest starts!ā
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Arguably if it is producing fruit it is already mature, but leaves are a different matter. If you want a massive pile of dead leaves, running through the 100 years it takes for an olive tree to grow in a single year can provide lots of food for livestock. Some other plants could probably produce a massive amount of tea (obviously not actual tea in terms of the tea plant, but you get my point)
LOL! I love how ArM magic brings out different thoughts in different people.
To me it feels natural that magic would cause the plant would grow through how ever many years of blooming, leaves, fruit and so on but that it would be in almost a magical bubble such that you couldnāt get anything from it during that time. At best you would have your few minutes to harvest the apples but they would also go bad in minutes because the magic is producing a grown tree and not the fruit, leaves, and so on.
Too each his own.
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People keep assuming there's any biology-of-the-subject involved in the maturation, rather than the spell directly making the subject into a more perfect version of the subject. Yes, sure, an immature subject "grows" in the physical sense that the magic makes it get larger, but that doesn't actually imply that the natural biological process of growth is involved in the change.
Let's consider what happens when a maga casts a Moon duration version of a spell based on the level 15 CrAn/CrHe or level 30 CrCo maturation guideline. (Maybe she's got Flexible Formulaic Magic and just bumps things a magnitude to see what happens.) Well, for the first 12 hours or so, the subject continually matures (because that's how long the guideline says it takes to reach maturity), and then, even though the magic continues to exist for between 14 and 29 more days, the subject stops changing. Because Creo magic doesn't do "aging" past maturity -- to quote chapter 7, "Aging after maturation involves becoming a worse example of your kind, and thus is covered by Perdo."
If the spell were making the biological processes "move faster", well, the magic of the spell is still active for weeks, and thus faster biology should still be happening, shouldn't it?. But the spell isn't a make-biology-faster spell. It's a make-subject-closer-to-ideal-age spell, and once the subject's ideal age is reached, there's no more to do, even as the magic lingers.
(And now I'm wondering if, in fact, the CrHe version would have any effect on a still-living tree stump, and what interactions the spell should have with propagation via cuttings.)
The perspectives are interesting. Iām considering there is a large degree of overthink. All the modern day advanced Botany thinking, is it appropriate?
There is a simple question. Would an average person of the time think a mature tree has rings? Yes. Would a tree be considered better without rings? I canāt think why. Cutting with the grain is a thing. Therefore a tree matured by magic would have rings.
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A few things, first the grain and rings are not the same thing- the grain is the direction that microtubules in the wood grew, a tropical hardwood with no rings still has a grain. (A tropical hardwood has no rings because it has no effective seasons in a tropical climate)
As to a tree stump, it would depend on the species of tree. If it is one that naturally coppices (grows new trees from a stump) then the spell would cause a new tree to grow from the stump. If it isnāt then nothing happens.
Part of the issue is a simple desire to avoid overcomplicating a game system, and then asking complicated questions the game design ignored because they were complicated. so figuring them ut requires looking at how things worked in the real world and then combining that with what was known at that point of history and trying to determine what people of the time would think, and disregarding complexities within that, because the experiences of an English farmer in 1220 are very different from the experiences of a farmer in the Levant or Iberia in the same period, where seasons are milder and sub-tropical.
Does magic work differently in England from Spain? Cultural traditions and the understanding of the period 9where magic was believed in, which was far from universal) would suggest yes. design simplicity in Ars Magic says no, so we already have a divergence between the gameās philosophy (this is how people expected things to work in the middle ages) and the game design in pursuit of simplicity.
Fundamentally every table (or online group) has to decide for themselves how comfortable they are with things getting complicated, and how complicated.
I will note that creo produces something closer to the āidealā, not something ānaturalā, though it is also bound by natural constraints. Growing a tree quickly would not, IMO, introduce flaws from a periodic dormant cycle imposed by a period of cold if that cold does not exist in the plantās current environment. Then again there are also no rules regarding environment in the spell, I could, in theory, grow a cactus to maturity with the spell within the arctic circle in December, soā¦
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While rings have no effect on grain direction, the rings have a great effect on using wood in furniture, where the rings, evidenced by the pattern they create in the timber, has been, and will be used by woodworkers in their work.
That said, some trees have a smaller distinction in that regard, and no, not all of them from tropical locations. Maple, while north-American, is the one tree Iāve used that generally displays it. Thereās no darker and lighter areas, in general (unless itās birdās eye or spalted), or at least, not as apparent as oak, for example.
So, I think for trees grown by magic, it should be a decision of the Magi developing the spell whether they want the rings to form or not. And if they want things like birdās eye, theyāll need to make that Int + Finesse roll.
This is a really good point. This is an entertaining conversation, but this really isn't important to play, and I don't think there should be an official clarification on it.
Personally I think āspell designerās choiceā is a good answer.
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Probably true! To me the biology is more of a side note at this point. Instead Iām much more interested in what the magic would look like and whether it would look the same for everyone.
Does it? Creo magic explicitly cannot age something past maturity.
If you have a fully-mature tree, and you hit it with the CrHe age-to-maturity spell, nothing happens, any more than if you hit a mature-or-older animal with the age-to-maturity CrAn, or a mature-or-older human with the age-to-maturity CrCo.
So, now, you have a mature tree, and one limb has been cut from it. and you hit the tree with the age-it-to-maturity spell. Does it grow a new limb? Or does the spell have no effect, because it was a mature (if damaged) tree, and a Creo spell cannot age a mature tree?
So, now you have a mature tree that's been stripped of half its limbs, and you hit the tree with an age-it-to-maturity spell. Does it grow several new limbs, or do we still have casting a maturing spell on a mature (if damaged) tree have no effect?
So, now you have a mature tree that's been pollarded -- all of its limbs have been cut off -- and you hit it with an age-it-to-maturity spell. Does it grow a whole new canopy, or do we still have casting a maturing spell on a mature (if damaged) tree have no effect?
So, now you have a mature tree that's been cut near ground level, leaving a stump, and you hit it with the age-it-to-maturity spell. Does it grow a "new tree", or do we still have casting a maturing spell on a mature (if damaged) tree have no effect?
Lets break this down instead of treating it like an unanswerable philosophy question:
If a branch has been cut from a tree and you use a grow to maturity spell it will do nothing because it is the wrong spell. You arenāt trying to grow a tree to maturity, you are trying to regrow a branch.
If a tree reaches maturity and is cut down and coppices, what is growing is a new tree, not the old tree. In fact generally when a tree coppices there are multiple new trees growing from the old stump, but since the spell doesnāt have a group parameter it would only grow one, at least quickly.
If you take a tree that either does or has borne fruit (mature) and cut it down, the new tree will still need to grow for years (reach maturity) before it will start producing fruit.