The base Individual target for Terram is 1 cubic pace of stone, so that's basically how much stone you'd be able to affect with each casting. And with repeated casting of spontaneous spells, botching will eventually happen.
But if stone simply disappear each night, faster than what they're able to do during the day, it seems reasonable to think that the villagers will ask questions.
sounds to me like we need to just pay the villagers for the work. I was actually worrying that digging out the cellars was going to be too difficult.
Given that, do we need full-height or just crawlspace? I think we want full height, since we don't know what we will need to store.
Lothar will indicate that digging up cellars into the rock will be time-consuming. Even with the villagers helping, that will add a month to the construction, and additional iron tools to cute into the rock. The good news is that he will reuse those rocks to build the walls.
Still, that will add to the cost of building by about 5 pounds for the one house.
Apparently, one of the tricks used in medieval buildings with good wood second floors was to put very small gaps in the floors so that heat from below would rise into the upper floor. Presumably we can ask folks to do that, and use two hearths for this one building, saving the other two for when we get to building the second building or enlarging this one.
So how much are we looking at spending for this one building, with a good cellar and good floors and roofing? I presume we will have to give Lothar a bonus to make up for only doing one building.
I am assuming that we can arrange a hearth to heat the library without getting sparks (or worse open flames) in there?
With basic roofing and general carpentry, the house is now expected to cost 30 pounds. As I mentioned before, how much additional money is invested into better roofing and carpentry is up to the magi.
A solid tile roof and good-quality carpentry would probably add another 5 to 10 pounds.
Torros is not there so I use this topic to add my opinion to the latest discussions in the “Heart of Stone” topic.
I think we should develop a spell to assist diggings. In parallel we should start to remove the stone in the “normal” way. This will help us to keep a low profile. Once the pit for our cellar has a certain size some magical assistance would not be too obvious. If the building (or most of it is standing we can extend the cellar by use of the invented spell.
One possible option to consider is not to add size +1 and use stone as target. This spell would need more applications but we would not have to deal with the waste material. Just in case we like to extend the cellar a bit more (after the house is finished) this would help to prevent attention due to unusual amounts of spoil around the covenant.
Of course the rock we'd excavate would be useful for building. So if we can get a good cover story (e.g., that our grogs are doing the digging), we'd get a supply of smaller stones we could use for building.
Good Idea!
We should go for a spell that cuts the rock in useful nicely formed peaces to be re used for buildings.
Eventually we can cover the use of this spell with a story about a skilled stonemason (Lothar) who always works alone at night preparing the site. Next morning the workers have no problems to break up the ground, and most of the stones braked out have a rectangular shape.
Break the ground into bricks PeTe 15
The spell breaks a rock into bricks. The rock can have a size up to 10 cubic paces, and may be part of the ground or another structure, mountain, etc. The single bricks can be moved by a strong person. Size of a brick is 1/5 cubic paces.
Assuming a pace is a meter this would result in 125 bricks a 0.2 meters with a mass of 22.4 kg per brick (in case the stone was granite or limestone, 21 kg for Sandstone)
Base 2, touch +1, stone +1 , part +1, size +1, precision +1
I was thinking we'd want to keep the pieces of rock irregular for a couple of reasons: (a) it'll raise fewer questions among the locals, and (b) it'll make our houses look more like what the rest of the island has.
We're inevitably going to bring some oddities with us, but the fewer we have the better, I say. A mysterious stonemason who only works at night and doesn't want to accept any other work on the island (we can't let anyone else see that he's not really a stonemason) is really odd. And if our houses are made of dressed stone while the rest of the island has broken stone, it'll be just one more reason that the people can look upon us as weird.
Let's try and keep the weird explanations to a minimum. For irregular rock we can do the spells little-by-little and say that some of the grogs do excavation work after hours. That's odd, but believable. The mysterious Midnight Stonemason is not.
I have to agree. The use of this spell would not be as secret as I thought. And the story with the Stonemason is also not fitting in the idea of keeping a low profile.
Thinking in that way brings me to another point.
Assuming we want to use this spell later on to extend our cellar. Wouldn´t the people ask where all this stones are come from?
A spell that produces irregular stones is useful for the surface mining. But later on its use is will bring up the question where to store the rocks. We can invent a second spell to get rid of the mining waste.
That's moving into the direction of Rego craft magic. Perdo wouldn't produce directly useful material -- it breaks rock, it doesn't cut it precisely.
In my view, PeTe (Base 2, +1 stone) would weaken the rock so that it is easy to break using mundane tools, speeding up work tremendously. This could be explained by something like the technique of lighting a fire over a section of rock, then pouring cold water on it in order to fracture it. But the weakening would be irregular and produce a significant amount of stones that may be too small to re-use for stone blocks (but which can be used as filling).
This is basically what Rusted Decay of Ten-Score Year (ArM5 p.155) does using the Base 2 weaken dirt and adding +2 for metal (as well as +2 Voice).
Why not use “Rock of viscid clay”(ArM5 P154)?
We can dig out the rock, form it as needed, and re use the new formed stones after the spell duration elapsed.
Sure, that spell is a classic and often used for exactly that purpose. However, none of the current magi knows that spell. So that means inventing it either from scratch (and it is level 15 as opposed to level 5 or 10), or acquiring a lab text. (Did you notice how small the covenant's library is?) And again it requires investing one or more seasons in the lab.
We could invent it on level 10 with duration conc.
Btw. I´m really bad in MuTe! To be more precise I´m bad in Terram.
Japik is decent in Terram and Muto. I think he gets a lab total of 17, 16 for PeTe and ReTe.
Japik is not the most patient person and it's not above him to take risks so for now he could easily spont the effect we discussed earlier to excavate the cellar quicker. 11 level 10 castings minimum.
Konrad could get a MuTe lab total of 22. So he could learn the Conc. version in one season if he had to.
Bump. What are the magi doing now (i.e. during the Summer of 1211), for the contruction of the first large building?
It's all well and good to be discussing the invention of a spell for future use, but I still haven't seen any action regarding the current need to dig the cellars. For now, I am assuming that Lothar is proceeding with mundane means...
Japik will spontaneously cast that spell we were talking about earlier. 11 castings to cover the whole area. He is impatient and doesn't care as much what the other say if he has a solution to a problem himself.
So feel free to roll for him. He will not do all the castings in one night if it means he will get too tired and of course botches may stop him as well.
So I was curious about how the covenant would look under the rules in Covenants. It wasn't as bad as I thought. Here's what I came up with:
[size=150]SITE[/size]
[tableborder][tr][td]1[/td] [td]Difficult access[/td] [td]minor boon[/td] [td]The covenant is up on a hill[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]-1[/td] [td]Weak Aura[/td] [td]minor hook[/td] [td]The covenant's Aura is 2[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]-1[/td] [td]Road[/td] [td]minor hook[/td] [td]The covenant is right next to a major port for the island[/td][/tr][/tableborder]
[size=150]FORTIFICATION[/size]
[tableborder][tr][td]0[/td] [td]Manor house[/td] [td]free[/td] [td]Charitably we'll have the equivalent of a manor house when building is done[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]1[/td] [td]Bedrock[/td] [td]minor boon[/td] [td]The covenant is built on solid rock[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]-1[/td] [td]Wooden[/td] [td]minor hook[/td] [td]The 'manor' is made of wood[/td][/tr][/tableborder]
[size=150]RESOURCES[/size]
[tableborder][tr][td]-1[/td] [td]Indebted[/td] [td]minor hook[/td] [td]We owe 20% of any vis we find to Bernhard[/td][/tr]
[tr][td]-1[/td] [td]Poverty[/td] [td]minor hook[/td] [td]All we have is the ship as a source of income[/td][/tr][/tableborder]
[size=150]RESIDENTS[/size]
[tableborder][tr][td]0[/td] [td]Sailors[/td] [td]free[/td] [td]We have grogs with some useful skills[/td][/tr][/tableborder]
[size=150]EXTERNAL RELATIONS[/size]
Nothing
[size=150]SURROUNDINGS[/size]
Nothing
Also, I can see one possible boon and one possible flaw that may apply.
For the Site, we might have the Healthy Feature minor boon. It all depends on whether the sea breeze rises to the level of a healthy feature.
For External Relations, we might have the Beholden minor hook. It all depends on whether we are beholden to the local lord since he granted us the land for the covenant.
Obviously, I don't know what might be hidden boons or hooks.
In any case, we only came out three up on flaws, which was a lot less than I thought it would be.
Actually, the aura around the oak is normal (3). I put up the results of a survey performed by Quercus when the magi first arrived to Helgeland.