Since the text allows for the Council to pass ordinances, those could be used to establish rules for the covenfolk,and for the enforcement of those rules.
Arguing a charter might take weeks (been there, seen that). Can't we simply take the one from Covenants (also freely available from the Atlas Games website)?
I don't have specific requests, but plenty of general ideas about the library:
Don't put too much emphasis on Arts. At least basic Summae on all Arts, with maybe a few higher-level ones. A good number of Tractati.
Lots of translated Lab Texts for spells, some for enchanted items.
Good books on Academic abilities (Artes Liberales and Philosophia, Medecine, etc.)
The library should also be rich in books on Arcane abilities. Not only Magic Theory, but the various lores. Provides many seeds for adventures, and help visitors research items, creatures and other stuff they meet during their previous explorations.
Some books on the academic languages (Latin, Greek, Arabic) are a must, IMHO.
My primary magus can't do Ritual magic, so these hold no interest to him. But we should still have a sizeable library of those, including Aegis of the Hearth at different levels.
Maybe a lot of the books were copied quickly for the covenant (ArM5, page 166) so could have a lower Quality. (BTW, can a book that was written quickly be later recopied as a regular book, restoring the Quality?)
Have wild variations in the Quality of the Tractati.
I buy the idea that most Summae (particularly the low-level ones) have copies of the best Quality books around. But maybe for that reason, a covenant is off-loading a copy of a lower-Quality one, since they now have a better one? Saves them the trouble of copying a new one.
Sorry for the delay on this (and thank-you for all the work you've put into investigating them). I'm going to express a preference for Tanais, but it's not a strong preference, and I'm happy to go with Berezan Island if other people do feel strongly.
I'm happy with either. It won't make much of a difference to me. Tanais is further east, though, not further west. I had a little trouble finding it until I payed more attention to the description of the location.
As for the library, I think a lot of mundane academic stuff makes sense because they're relatively readily available and magi would tend to want them.
For rituals it can make some sense to have casting tablets, but probably not a lot of them. And don't forget lab texts for spells - other than that I think Arthur has good suggestions.
I've edited my description to change west for east. My mistake!
I'm not familiar with casting tablets. Remember, I'm coming back to the game after a lot period of absence, so I don't have all the books. Which supplement are they from? Just so I can add it to my shopping list...
Casting tablets are in Covenants. It's a really nice book. Running games, I would put it at the top of my list. Playing in games, I would move the HoH books above it.
Covenants, which also has a number of other book types, and extended library rules. Casting tablets let you do what you used to be able to do with casting from a text.
I may offer ideas later, but for right now, you have my permission to use your imagination. Since the covenant was on the fringes of the Order, though, I'm guessing it wasn't there for very long.
I would assume maybe 5 or 6 magi, and appropriate mundanes. I think it would be more interesting if it was experienced magi, rather than a bunch of newbies. The traces....Well, I was assuming that most of the buildings (or caves, or whatever) would be intact enough that we could reinhabit the labs fairly easily by installing new equipment. Beyond that, exactly what things look like now depends on what happened, I haven't decided on that. Are you going to do that, or am I? At the very least, the cause of the covenant's fall should be ambiguous.
Scott (MTKnife): Seemed to prefer further east, so I would guess Tanais.
Salutor: Slight preference for Tanais
callen: No preference
I've had no response from the others. As far as I could tell by going through the messages, I'm missing answers from Arya, JeanMichelle, Flux, Ivan (Domazhir Slipoi), wardenj, Wits.
If you don't have a preference, simply say so. I'd like at least a few more answers before I go forward with one site or the other. This is a troupe-style saga, so let's hear it up!
Condition of the buildings would depend on how long since the covenant was abandoned/destroyed. So how long ago would that have been?
I'd figure at least 15 years (3 tribunal meetings). They skip sending a representative at a first meeting. By the second meeting, tribunal gets result of investigation at the second meeting but doesn't move in case one of the members survived and reappears, at the third meeting the covenant is declared dissolved.
From that point forward, the new covenant can be formed. It would take a couple of years before the resources (lab equipment, books, grogs/specialists/covenfolk) can be gathered and made ready for transportation.
I was seeing maybe as a smaller covenant made up of 3 or 4 mid-level Seekers trying to prove themselves (or absorbed by their quest). They didn't make many friend in the Tribunal, so not much energy was put in trying to discover exactly what happened. Some information was gathered from the Redcaps and the investigating Quaesitor, but it was inconclusive as to what happened to all of them.
Tribunals are every 7 years--if that matters for your purposes--though I guess you could have 3 of them in a 14-year span, yes.
We can assume this has been in the planning stages for a while, if you like, but if the labs will mostly be created by a ritual spell, that'll simplify things enormously. However, the last Tribunal date was 1221, which means that, either it took a long time to arrange, or it wasn't a Tribunal that organized the new covenant.
OK, a couple of stupid ideas: I was wondering if we could have something that looks Berezan, but in a regio near Tanais. Another possibility is the Cimmerian Bosporus, the modern-day Kerch strait--apparently in ancient times what's now the Taman peninsula was a bunch of islands, some with cities on them.