Salve! For a while I've been noodling on the idea of a Folio intentionally aimed at Apprentices. I know that it's generally understood that no mage would bother to write a whole spellbook of low-magnitude spells, but I'm imagining a Bonisagus whose goal is to create a standard curricula to hopefully improve discourse based on a shared foundation. His quiet hope is that this project will flourish, but that the varieties of approaches to magic inherent to different mages means that commentaries and marginalia will crop up, and by studying these slight variations he may learn more about the nature of magic.
Guidelines of this project
Spells no higher than Level 5
Covering all all five Techniques and all ten Forms
Include a number of other important aspects of Hermetic Spellcasting
A minimal amount of spells that could lead to Youthful Mischief™
Spells are generally useful in day-to-day life
The challenge is to determine what would be in said book. I'm trying to pull from only established sources, though one has a simple modification.
What I have so far are:
Creo
Intellego
Muto
Perdo
Rego
Animal
Circle of Beast Warding
Aquam
Comfort of the Drenched Traveler*
Auram
Chamber of Spring Breezes
Corpus
Eyes of the Cat
Herbam
Probe Nature's Hidden Lore
Ignem
Moonbeam
Imaginem
Taste of Spices and Herbs
Mentem
Whispering Eyesâ€
Terram
Unseen Arm
Vim
Sense the Nature of Vis
*While it may seem only circumstantially useful, learning this spell means the Apprentice may be put on laundry duty when they've been misbehaving.
†A slight modification of "Whispering Fingers" from Apprentices, it works on Eye instead of Touch (and thus is an opportunity to teach the Eye range)
As you can see, I have one too many Creos, and one too few Perdos. My trouble is that there are relatively few things that can be destroyed without encouraging the sort of mischief that the author wishes to avoid.
I'd love to hear suggestions for what you'd swap/move around.
I seem to remember a thread on 'apprentice level spells'; I will need to search for it -- but they collected quite a few. There is also an online resource / spell reference for original spells of all levels.
I would suggest Demon's Eternal Oblivion at level 5. Even at that level, it will destroy a Might of 13.
PeVi Base 3 (reduce Might of target by 3+10); R: Voice (+2); Duration: Momentary (+0); Target: Individual (+0)
Handy for an apprentice to defend themselves vs minor Infernal pests, and it will be useful even against more powerful foes as the Magus advances -- because the penetration total will steadily climb. An apprentice might usefully 'Experiment' with this -- an 'Enhanced Effect' version would be valuable to everyone.
Here are a few resources that I hope will be helpful:
You have only one Perdo and only one Corpus. Those are both extremely important Arts. I have included the text for a 1st magnitude PeCo spell, Greetings, Friend. It creates the sensation of a strong slap to the face. You may use it.
Tarquelne, follower of Tytalus.
P.S: I've also included 1st magnitude Perdo texts for attacking weak demons and faeries, to encourage your readers.
Hmm. The easiest approach would be to swap out one of the Creos for a Perdo, of course. Since you've got a specific reason for your CrMe choice, that means either the CrAu or CrIg, for a PeAu or PeIg.
Checking the collection of all published 5e spells, since you wanted established sources, there are no general or first magnitude PeAu, but there are three (listed as four in the collection) PeIg. Chill Touch of Exposure (listed twice) is ripe for abuse, but either A Time for Slumber (originally Magi of Hemes, 14) or Closing the Campfire (originally Apprentices, 46) seem okay, if not as generally useful as Moonbeam.
(I may poke at the selections more in a later post, but as the "instant fix", well.)
Perhaps, "Chilled, not stirred." A level 5 Perdo Ignem touch spell which can chill wine, and other items. One could remove moonbeam, fulfilling the removal of a creo spell.
A low-level Unravelling the Fabric of [Form] can be extremely useful.
Based on the collection of spells already listed, I think that Corpus would be a good choice there. It would allow the apprentice to end Eyes of the Cat (or any other Corpus prank from fellow apprentices) easily.
I think one problem you're going to have with a spellbook is that it's massively less efficient learning spells from labtexts than it is from a teacher, because you have to have the same TeFo for all of the spells. So you can learn Circle of Beast Warding (ReAn 5) or Comfort of the Drenched Traveler (PeAq 5), but not both in a single season.
You might therefore have the apprentice picking up a few of the spells if their master isn't using their lab and doesn't need them doing anything else for a season, but it's not going to be very many of them (and if they do have the season, all but the most junior apprentice can probably learn something more powerful).
That said, Apprentices does have a bunch of suggested "Cantations", i.e. low level spells, which may be worth having a look at.
On a closer look, your modified CrMe spell's reason is the Eye range. So if it were replaced by a PeMe with Eye range, that would preserve that bit. I Was Never Here (originally Magi of Hermes, 93) is a potentially-useful 5th level PeMe that, due to its limitation in targets, isn't all that abusable.
I kept coming back to this thread trying to figure out what felt off about the spells. The lack of matching TeFo. 'Spell books' are much more useful when you can learn multiple spells from it in a single season.