Is the door I identified above the correct one? I just want to make sure before we start that we're both on the same page. I suppose she could do that during the same season she's studying the curse--it would be logical to explore that door before doing the research.
Scott
Yes.
I keep meaning to mention this....When the magi arrived in Tanais, the aura in the center of the ruins was 4. However, when spring ended, the aura dropped by 1, and didn't increase again until the next spring. The drop affects only the aura on the surface (hence, the caves are still aura 5), and also doesn't reduce the vast aura-1 area to being mundane (it might shrink it a little--the magi haven't studied the boundaries enough to be sure). One interesting quirk is that, when the magic aura in the center of the city drops to 3, it becomes apparent that the temple has both magic and faerie auras, with the faerie aura being a constant 4, but drowned out in spring by the ever-so-slightly stronger magic 4 aura.
Scott
Okay, yes. And this information is on the Covenant thread already, so I didn't drop this ball. Just answered it in a weird place.
Carry on....
Okay, so a base Group probably isn't going to work, which puts a spell outside Gregorius' capabilities short of a very lucky roll.
Is Tasia around for him to find? I think she can manage a casting total of: In 11 + Te 6 + Sta 1 + Aura 4 + +W&G 2 + Talisman Intellego bonus 2 = 26 + die, which should be enough for a Group + 1 spell (level 15) which should hopefully be enough unless there are a lot of pipes.
I've been trying to figure out which magi had left and how. I know we expicitly wrote Portia out, but I'm not sure about any others--I'm not even sure which magi among the ones we have character sheets for actually showed up.
I would prefer just to write out any magi whose players are no longer with us, but if you need Tasia for something specific, we might able to use her.
What do you think?
Scott
I'd been under the impression (without rereading the relevant thread), that Portia left in a huff, and Aetos left after failing to find what he considered a satisfactory laboratory site. Tasia has never explicitly left.
I note that if Tasia has left, the only two actual members of the covenant (as opposed to visitors) are Gregorius and Viola, and that one of them is going to have to be the covenant leader. That sounds like it could be an "interesting" combination.
We made Tasia leader, didn't we? Bleh, yeah, and it probably has to be Viola, given how young Gregorius is.
Once we have thing sorted out, we can recruit new players, and if someone wants to play an older magus/a, we could potentially make that character the leader; however, I only want to give that position to someone I'm sure is going to stick around, and that's hard to gauge.
Scott
Did we ever figure out what we were going to do about the labs? We originally had a bunch of vis to power Portia's rituals to create labware, in lieu of the glassware we would have gotten instead. So what did we do after that point?
Scott
OK, in re-reading the stories, I've found a couple more loose ends left by Tasia's departure.
First, she was going to take Gregorius to meet with the local (Kipchak) hedge wizards. Evidently we lost callen before that story began.
Second, Tasia was going to be the one to learn Aegis of the Hearth after Portia left. If Tasia left, too, then who's been casting it?
Scott
I've now gotten through Chapter 1, as well as 1a and 1b. One more loose end I'm tying up right now: Theodoric mentioned that he knew of a couple of other vis sources, and so I'm adding those to the covenant description.
And, ugh, I see that one of the newly discovered vis sources is in that stupid labyrinth--that's yet another hit to Safety, if I recall correctly (and possibly Warping). Sigh.
Scott
-1 Safety, +1 Warping, +2 on an appropriate Art specialisation for the vis source in the lab, yes.
Gregorius can nearly learn the Aegis of the Heart lvl 25 labtext, but does have the Waster of Vis flaw, so he's not a great person to be casting it.
And that bonus is completely useless for Viola....I'll have to drag out Covenants and see if I can salvage the lab somehow, or maybe we'll have to go back to having three levels. Or maybe if we can transform the story, the nature of the vis source will change.
Viola has about the same ReVi casting total as Gregorius, which is to say, inadequate in the long term. Let's wait to answer this question until we get new players. I don't think we've actually had an entire in-game year pass yet, have we?
Did we ever decide if Portia was going to make at least some labs? I know she offered. If she made them for Gregorius and Tasia at least, that would give us two labs (though many less than planned), and Viola could even take over Tasia's lab equipment when Tasia left....Mind you, without Portia's spell, we can't actually maintain the bonuses for magically created labs, which makes the effort more or less fruitless, unless we have a magus that can cast a similar spell, or greater mundane resources.
Any ideas for writing Tasia out of the saga gracefully?
Scott
Just to check - do you mean the Perdo one there? (I'd at first thought you meant one of the new new ones, so just checking I'm not missing anything). I'm happy for you to just decide that Viola doesn't use the second level of the regio - you'll lost out on at least some of the space bonus, but also all of the problems it brings.
Hey, at least she can cast it with 5 pawns rather than 7! When we have a total vis income of 8, that's quite significant. There's in character issues with getting a visitor to cast our aegis for us, unless we have specific reason to trust them (and the covenant charter explicitly says visitors are not permitted to participate in the ritual).
My understanding is that we've had two years pass - Gregorius' advancement up to the start of the barrows thread looks like this:
1226
Winter: Read Book on Magic Theory. 11xp -> 3 (11)
Spring: Adventure. 5xp to Don Delta Lore -> 1 (0) [I.e. the starting adventure.]
Summer: Read book on Magic Theory. 11xp -> 4 (2)
Autumn: Read book on Parma Magica. 11xp, Parma -> 2 (1)
Correspondance with Slyvanus, 1xp MT -> 4 (3)
Correspondance with Carolus (ghosts), 1 xp Magic Lore -> 2 (1)
Correspondance with Slyvanus, 1xp MT. -> 4 (4)
Correspondance with Slyvanus, 1xp MT. -> 4 (5)
1227
Winter: Covenant service. Writes up 100 levels (speciality in Hermetic terms) of the spells he knows to add to the Covenant library: Ward Against Metal (ReTe 20), Frosty Breath of the Spoken Lie (InMe 20), Posing the Silent Question (InMe 20), Aura of Rightful Authority (ReMe 20), Comfort of the Weary Travellor (ReIg 10), Call to Slumber (ReMe 10). 2xp Latin -> 4 (2)
Spring: Read book on Magic Theory. 11 xp. -> 4 (16)
Summer: Being taught Don Delta Lore by Theodoric. 10 xp -> 2 (0)
Autumn: Reading Rego Summa. 15 xp -> 8 (7)
Correspondance with Slyvanus 1xp MT -> 4 (17)
Correspondance with Slyvanus 1xp MT -> 4 (18)
Correspondance with Boustaphan on the strategic implications of local features - Profession Soldier 1xp -> 1 (1)
Correspondance with Slyvanus 1xp MT -> 4 (19)
He's also spent most of the first half (/ two-thirds) of Winter 1228 developing a PeMe 5 ghost killing spell, and the second half in the barrows adventure.
Could you add the lab texts he wrote up to the covenant library? I don't think they're there at the moment.
I think we decided that Portia cast her spell in each of the available lab spaces before she left (having been threatened with various things if she up and left leaving us with no lab equipment because it was all in vis which she was now refusing to play her agreed part with. It was all offscreen, I think, but my vague list of possibles included a negative reputation, charges of deprivation of magical power and unhappy Tremere). This created labs which didn't need 2 seasons of set-up in the Big Cave (Tasia's lab), the curtain of flame lab (Gregorius' lab), the second level of the caves lab (nobody's), the two storerooms on the first floor of the cave (as they're actually big enough once you start looking at the scale on your map) and Viola's if she got Portia into the regio. We also have a few sets of labware lying about somewhere.
I'd completely forgotten about that - it's definitely something he'd want to do. He'll still want to do it, even without Tasia. I'd suggest we say Tasia only left quite recently, having cast the most recent aegis of the hearth. Maybe she's been called away on Hoplite business? Plenty of scope for not coming back from that. (Dead, twilighted, just mysteriously vanished...).
Well, if Viola doesn't want it...
More seriously, Gregorius knows that he's young enough to have potential problems being seen as a serious leader of the covenant by outside magi. He doesn't think Viola is great covenant leader material either, though (plus she's far to ready to sacrifice things to pagan gods and generally drives him up the wall). So if Viola says she doesn't want the position, he's not going to push her to take it. It would still have been far better as Tasia than him, though.
The charter requires three years of maintaining a sanctum at the covenant before you're eligable for membership, which makes fast-tracking someone from outside in difficult unless we have a large time jump (or change the charter).
Yes, but the point was to create a lab of my own design, one of the main parts of which was the Regio Virtue--and that Virtue requires two levels.
Yeah, I recalled something about a couple of years. On the other hand, I can't imagine Viola would have sat around for a year or two waiting to deal with the regio. So that's something I have to sort out as I get to Chapter 2 in the chronology.
As I get there--I'll deal with the Seasonal Advancement and Covenant Development after I finish getting through all the chapters.
Whether we decided that way or not, it works for me. That does bring up one small detail: we never established whether or not Viola can enter and leave the regio as well.
Yeah, that could work.
Scott
Do you actively want the two levels, or do you just feel you have to have them as it's part of the virtue? I'd got the impression it was the latter earlier, in which case I'm happy to fudge things so that the upper regio nominally counts for the virtue, but the things in the upper regio don't become part of the lab's stats. If you do want a lab actively spread across two regio levels (which has the oddity that a lab across two floors is specifically described as being two labs elsewhere), I can have another think.
I think she definitely needs to be able to leave the regio at will. I was going to say "or would she really maintain a lab there?", although I suppose she does have Arcadian travel, which could probably get her out of there at a pinch. Maybe we say the entrance condition is having been invited in by an inhabitant/native/some variant which includes the 'creek fae' and could either include or not include Viola once she's settled? Alternatively offering a sacrifice could get you either unlimited or time limited access, which is probably more in keeping with the theories behind the original story (but if magi specific would probably have made getting Portia in to the regio to cast her spell tricky).
I'm happy for the Palace Thread to be happening before the Barrows thread. There does need to be a bit of time before the Palace thread to allow the various letters which preceded it to go back and forth, though (I think there were about eleven of them, which is going to take up at least the better part of a year).
The first time I designed a regio lab, I made it two levels solely because of the Virtue--why the Virtue requires two levels, I don't know, and it certainly complicates things mechanics-wise, because they have to have different levels of aura. Nonetheless, once I designed such a lab, I decided it was fun to have two different sections of the lab that are completely different.
You're right about the two floors thing, and I've wondered about that before, but you'll note in the Virtue description that the second regio level has to be one that "the owner can navigate easily." In this case, despite some misstatements on my part during Viola's exploration, referring to stairs, the regio boundary is a bas relief, meaning it's possible to move easily between the levels.
As for the things in the upper level, whether they're part of the lab proper will depend on how the lab is configured--it can occupy part of that level without taking it all in. I suppose partly things will depend on the centrality of those features, where Halia chooses to dwell, and Viola's relationship with Halia.
Both options work fine, but each would probably need to be represented as a different sort of Virtue/Flaw. I'm not sure which ones--it seems like the fact that no one else can get in easily should be a Virtue, but I don't see anything in Covenants that closely matches that (Shrouded isn't really right).
Ah, good point about the letters. I'll just have to sort it all out.
Scott
In the course of looking for the source on the necropolis, I discovered that Tanais was abandoned in the 5th century; it was never a part of the Roman Empire proper, and at most a client (and even that not for very long). The upshot--to my non-expert eye, at least--is that it's extremely unlikely that the cult of Neptune ever replaced the cult of Poseidon in Tanais; Latin probably was never a common native language in the city, which would make any replacement of a Greek-named god by a Roman-named god hard to imagine.
I'm not sure what to do about this, but leaving Neptune out of Halia's story really doesn't change its core plot, which is about infidelity. Moreover, given that humans identified Neptune with Poseidon, I've become a bit uncomfortable with faeries who, instead of directly reflecting the current human stories, are cognizant of the struggle between two gods humans see as the same (yes, there's some mention in the ArM sourcebooks about older gods retreating into remote places after being replaced by newer ones, and the fae involved must be cognizat of that to some extent, but having the major "theme" of a particular locale revolve around a struggle betwen the old and new version of what human worshippers see as a single god seems a bit of a stretch.
Thoughts?
Also, it looks like the Venetians refounded Tanais at some point, possibly in the 13th century, possibly earlier, but I don't think their settlement would have been on the old site, which would have made no sense as a trading post. That does though mean that we've probably got Venetian neighbors nearby (and possibly Genoans--at least one source talks about the Genoans taking over the area in the 10th century).
Scott
I'm inclined to just say "let's go with what we've already established" on the presence or otherwise of the romans - it's likely to get confusing otherwise, and I'd rather not change the story in the middle of it.