I'd rather not go overboard by doubling the wages right from the start, although paying them a bit more (up to 50%) sounds good.
We'll need the extra income and it's better to build up reserves before adding to our expenditures. It's easier to raise wages if we see after a few years that we really can afford it (which would bring another boost to Loyalty), rather than risk having to reduce them because we can't meet our monetary obligations (that would be very bad for Loyalty).
Do we still have 9 magi? We recently discussed the fact that two of the players hadn't posted in a while. So I'm not sure how many we are at this time.
Maximilian thinks he can do a better job at enchanting his own lab than anyone else could (Proud flaw), so he will only want it good enough to get the Superior Construction lab virtue. And sufficient space for a Size +3 lab.
BTW, lab improvements are quite efficient at sucking out excess income. A lab with +5 Upkeep costs 15 pounds per year just to keep it running 2 seasons per year. As opposed to a normal lab, which costs only 1 pound per year. And you can be sure that Maximilian plans on improving his lab. :mrgreen:
As for the order in which we will want the labs built, I think this should be based on need. Obviously, younger magi will spend most of their time reading books at first, so they might not need labs as much. Older magi will need their labs sooner. So will lab rats (including my Verditius).
We may consider a shared lab initially, which could be used by anyone who doesn't have his own built and installed yet. After that, the shared lab could be used for visitors. Installing the shared lab might count as covenant service.
Which leads me to another subject, which may deserve its own topic: The covenant's Charter.
You also miscalculated- the autocrat is good for 24 loyalty points and the turb captain 9, for a total of 33 loyalty points. Zenobia has the blatant gift (If snape is still around), so our starting base loyalty is -27, total of 6 with the 2 specialists, for a final loyalty score of 1.
Now one house rule I have used in other games is that loyalty modifies annual wealth rolls from income sources- greater loyalty means more willingness to put in the extra effort to improve success. I would like to discuss if this is a rule others think should be used, either for both sources of income, for one or neither.
What about having an initial order based on Hermetic age (older first), and then allowing magi to make their own arrangements to swap places on the list, if a younger magus feels they need a lab sooner?
I slit off the name thread because it was both important and seemed to have derailed actual design discussion, which right now comes down to use of build points.
Right now we seem to have the following points in general consensus:
we want a percamenarius up front, build points for this position are uncertain
we want to spend most of our build points on books
vis sources are a definite priority
If nobody disagrees with the first point we should figure out how many points we should spend (up to level 5 ability will produce cost savings on writing for the covenant) and the rest should either be discussed or expounded upon (such as what books)
As for how many points to spend on a percamenarius, it seems like level 6 is the standard that people seem to hire. But if level 5 is better, then that's okay too.
As for how many points to spend on aspects in general, my thoughts are to spend about 30-40 on specialists, 100-150 on vis, and 350-400 on books, with a few points in vis and cash reserves.
Library: 300-400 Lab Texts: 0 Vis Sources: 150-200 Vis Stocks: 0-10 Enchanted Items: 0 Specialists: 35-50 Money: 5-10
TOTAL: 490-670
Essentially, 60% on the library, 30% on vis sources, and the remaining 10% on the rest (specialists getting the greatest share of those).
I have no specific wishes as to the exact distribution within each category. Although, as I mentioned before, it is fairly easy to ass mundane books to the library using silver so it might not be worth using build points for those.
I'm a bit unclear as to how many build points we have exactly. We started with 150, then the "lab-in-the-box" concept adds 49 bp for each magus who will spend 2 seasons to install his lab himself instead of being ready right away. Am I getting that right? So if 8 magi do that, we might get up to 542 bp?
At this point we have 6 magi committed to the lab in a box, with Agapitus (Joel Halpern) having expressed no preference., which gives us a total currently of 444 build points.
For the Arts covered in the library, I would propose (in the library above):
Art #1 summa L16 Q15 (31 points) --> Creo
Art #2 summa L16 Q15 (31 points) --> Intellego
Art #3 summa L13 Q18 (31 points) --> Aquam
Art #4 summa L13 Q18 (31 points) --> Animal
Art #5 summa L12 Q14 (26 points) --> Vim
Art #6 summa L10 Q15 (25 points) --> Corpus
Art #7 summa L8 Q21 (29 points) --> Imaginem
That's a soft suggestion, however. I picked the topics semi-randomly as stuff that might be useful. Since I'm sure we will try to expand the library aggressively right away, I'm sure any subject that individual magi are interested in will quickly be covered.
Also, with 2 scribes, 2 illuminators and 1 book binder dedicated to the covenant's use (that's aside from the scriptorium income source), we will quickly be able to make copies of our books for trade. That is, as soon as our scribes and illuminators have been trained in Magic Theory.
I am not counting Constantine, but am counting Aureliano of Mercere, who is technically a magus and entitled to a sanctum with lab even if they can't do anything with it (besides optimize it for copying texts or teaching or some such)
If you spend build points on scribes etc. I would assume they are trained at level 1 magic theory. If we recruit them from the scriptorium we will need to train them.
Even quicker to begin making copies of our summae to expand the library.
Our skilled scribes can copy 12 levels of summa per season, so each of them can crank out 3 copies of a L16 summa each year if they do nothing else. (Questions, do they work 4 seasons a year or are they rather abstracted as 2 seasons like most mundanes are? I would suggest that 2 seasons a year makes more sense.)
We may need one of the magi to act as diplomat to trade copies of additional summae to complete our library. I'm sure we'll be able to get a few tractatus from magi interested in studying our exceptional book. We can certainly publicize that while visiting other covenant when arranging trades for other books.