CrAn spell to create mundane animal(s)

Games Discussion Ars Magica
62

TL;DR Vineyards and orchards are an Income Source that can be setup and greatly boosted by subtle magic.

Vineyards and orchards are a great source of income. They are easy to setup with magic to overcome the years to decades buildup normally required, can use subtle magic to boost productivity, produce a product that can generally be traded almost anywhere with a long shelf life, and the products produced generally have a premium segment which you can work into.

For a vineyard you want to choose a grape that does good in the local climate. Even better if you can get "magic" ones that produce a better quality product. Even mundane grapes can become "magic" over time if they are in a Magic Aura and subject to powerful or ongoing effects (they Warp). Just being in a Magic Aura will also tend to make them better (being closer to perfection is a side effect of a Magic Aura). Generally avoid Faerie grapes and Aura since they can have unpredictable quality and effects.

If there is a type of fruit that grows well in the climate then you can make hybrid or fruit wines. Unless there is already a demand for a specific one this requires building a market up but could be a valuable alternative.

If you are not going to go for adult beverages from your orchard, then generally you want to focus on products with a long shelf life and good value. Olives are OK, but olive oil is much better. Varies nuts are also good. Things like fruit are not unless you are going to make something from it since they are harder to transport and have a much shorter shelf life so are generally consumed locally.

The initial setup phase is the roughest for new enterprises. It generally requires a massive outlay of capital and labor with no return for years. Fortunately this is also the phase which generally has the least external oversight and can be easily sped up with magic.

Magic to bring the plants to maturity quickly is a big time saver. This will shave three years off of a vineyard and possibly a decade from an orchard. It will also allow expansion of the fields easily later on if you decide you want more production capacity. Being able to mostly ignore that years in advance planning is very helpful.

Setup of the property and building the facilities are another big sink, though this one often is more labor and money. Terram spells will allow rapid setup of the fields without having to use massive amounts of labor and time.

Aquam effects can be used to power irrigation. I would recommend setting up a large underground reservoir on a hilltop. This would allow subtle means of filling it, such as magic water pumps through underground pipes.

For ongoing effects those suggested by John are good. There are lots of example spells and effects published, which can boost both how good the crop is and make it more resistant to disease. You can also use subtle weather effects to improve things. Spells and effects can also be used to keep out pest which could destroy your crop.

I mentioned a bunch of the ones for processing in my earlier post. Often you are better served by ones that do a very simple but labor/time intensive activity. These are the type that does not require Finesse and lets your craftsmen do a lot more work. For example rather than Rego Craft Magic to process grapes or olives, you create things like magic powered wheels/presses to crush them. Things where the craftsmen skill is still the deciding factor.

3 Likes
63

Note that picking the cotton isn't the labor intensive part, it's picking out the seeds from the cotton balls. It was the cotton gin that made this task (relatively) trivial. For comparison, someone (usually a slave) could pick 200 lbs of cotton in a day, but only separate the seeds out of 10 lbs of cotton per day. Cotton gins of a kind have existed in India since 500AD but it really wasn't until the late 1700s that a proper mechanical cotton gin made cotton production truly profitable (and this drove the slave trade to grow massive plantations of cotton).

Oddly, ReHe magic (fruiting) might be able to produce cotton fibers without the seeds (since the seeds are new life, they need to be Creo), completely eliminating the labor intensive step.

1 Like
64

Worth noting that basing your production numbers on these directly is probably worth avoiding, the peasants in your covenant are not chattel slaves.

65

Better numbers for hand picking cotton can be had by some of us asking our parents/grandparents or looking at something like cottonfarming.com. Hand picking is still done to this day (in limited amounts), but was very common throughout the south US going into the '60s.

200# would be an average day for an adult (mid teen or older), with 250~275# being a good day. People picking for the maximum possible sunrise to nearly sunset (mostly a contest or really needed the money) were often well north of 500#. In the late '50s/early '60s that was paid at about $2/100# which would be $25~28 a day today.

Paid laborers were often more productive than slaves. For picking cotton about 25% more is the average.

2 Likes
66

Yep, there's no need for slaves, especially if you can automate the most labor intensive parts of things. Not that spinning and weaving aren't labor intensive either, but automating every step just requires a boatload of Finesse that most magi and grogs won't have.

Going the lowest magic method (Craft Magic) you could do a day's labor route for a Per+Finesse requirement of likely a 6 (since removing seeds is simple but tedious), meaning your enchanted item operator would probably need a Finesse of 4-5, doing 10 lbs of cotton at a go. That's a specialist grog right there at that level of skill that would need several years of training (2 seasons a year) to achieve. Further stages are even more difficult, probably requiring a specialist magus, so are best left to the manual methods.

Once you've got the processed cotton, you can hire locals to spin/weave it for you. This was common with the wool industry, the wool producers were seldom the cloth makers. Then you sell the cloth abroad.

67

Actually you already stated what might be the best method. Use a ReHe effect to make a plant blossom in a moment. The SG would have to rule that the cotton fibers were still produced but if so this method would be a bigger money maker than the cotton gin was.

Granted it would be a fairly difficult item for a young non-specialist Magus to make, since you are looking at a level 30 (Base 15, +1 Touch, Unlimited +10) item at minimum. Group (making it level 40) would be worth it since that raises the effect to 10 cubic paces of material which is a whole lot of cotton plants. If you have the spare vis it could easily be worth the x3 cost to have one made to get this Income Source going.

Combine this with a CrHe effect to bring the plants to maturity quickly and you are looking at a truly rapid crop. The item would be 10 levels higher since its cheapest is Base 15 and +2 Sun. So a level 50 item with Group.

If you hired someone to enchant them you are looking at ~27 (lesser) or ~54 (invested) pawns of vis and a year of waiting. Worth it compared to rituals though.

You would still require a field set aside for blooming cotton the slow way to get seeds. A greenhouse to germinate the seeds before transfer to the fields for rapid growth would help. And of course labor for the picking but that is a lot less intense when you don't have to remove the seeds except for the ones you need for the next cycle.

68

Look at you, casually tossing around Rooks of vis like it ain't no thing. :smiley:

1 Like
69

Look at you, casually tossing around Rooks of vis like it ain't no thing.

Truth be said if you Focus your income source on It, for sure It can serve you for your entire life. It is easily worth the Vis payment. No doubts on it, although being so much Vis. will make you think twice or more for sure, before acepting you will probably try to lower it or will think other options. But the fact is that it is a great item. And they can not do it, even if they would like ,so they should pay extra to have it done.

70

There's no real reason for this item to unlimited per day and group, you're flooding the regional market either way, probably you would prefer unlimited per day, but the herbam base ind is fairly large, somone else can check lmao. Anyway that saves you 10 levels

71

Individual with a single use per day is worthless. No matter how big the Herbam individual is, it can only affect a single plant. However you could go Individual with unlimited or Group with a single use. In that case Group would be much better.

72

Well, even using this spell repeatedly, your ability to flood the market is limited by your available land, the capacity of the plants to keep producing fiber (since it's not Creo magic, the plants will be exhausted eventually). Even if your cotton fields are 10x more productive than normal, that's a drop in the bucket compared to the market of medieval Europe.

That's just assuming you only produce fiber for export. If you do your own spinning and weaving, you've got additional rate-limiting steps in there, and that takes time to develop, either normally or with Finesse magic training and Craft Magic devices.

That said, a single cotton plant basically is the base Herbam effect, so you definitely need Unlimited Use. Group just makes life easier for the user. Ideally a high magnitude Lesser Device like this isn't something you leave in the hands of grogs (theft), so making it easy and quick for a magus to handle this duty is worth the extra cost.

73

A base individual for herbam is 27 cubic feet
The best estimate I came up with for a cotton plant in Europe is ~3.7 cubic feet, so a group spell could target ~70 plants, I suppose based on this you're probably right about wanting both group and unlimited casts, i guess i was remembering the herbam base individual being somewhat larger and the cotton plants I'm familiar with are somewhat smaller

The first part of this is true enough. also afaik limiting the use of rego magic to force fruit production is a house rule so ymmv. Finally, you'll note that I said regionally, not continentally, also if you are using these on your fields every day of the growing season you might expect a yield multiplier of something like 100.

This is true enough, but certainly not a problem introduced by the thing I suggested.

@InfinityzeN Group 1/day or ind any/day, hence the 10 less levels not 20. But also see the first section of this comment.

74

Really it depends on if the plants are Perennial or Annual.

Ones that are Perennial you can use the spell/effect multiple times per year on them, though how long it takes to be harvest-able is YSMV. Even the published sources say it takes two separate spells/effects to do it quickly, the first to bring them to bloom and the second to complete the fruiting process.
[Note: Trees are Perennials even if the term is not normally used to describe them.]

Ones that are Annual (like cotton and wheat) however have to be grown to maturity, then bloom, then fruit. You will not be able to use the blooming effect multiple times to get production from the plants, but need new plants. You also have the same three steps: Maturity, Bloom, Fruit. Each of those requires a different spell/effect to happen quickly. Even if you cause the plants to grow to maturity and bloom in a day using two different effects/spells, you are still looking at some time (depending on plant) for the blooms to fruit.

For those looking for the sections talking about it, check TME, p.41.

75

Also, back of the envelope calculation, using the initial item on a whole field is going to take on the order of 4 hrs minimum(assuming continuous casting from the item without breaks), probably not a job for a magus

76

The weird thing here is that the line between perennial and annual is not so sharp, for example lots of plants are biannual, they take (at least) 2 years to reach maturity and fruit once and die, some take much longer. Also there are lots of plants that are annuals in some environs and perennials in others, cotton is an example of this, where it's an annual in high latitudes but a perennial at low latitudes. I think deciding how this type of magic interacts with these plants is probably important if you're in a saga making use of them

77

There are many plants that live two years classified as annuals. The important part for rapid magic growth/bloom/fruiting is if they can produce multiple times or not. Ones that cannot need to be cleared off and reseeded for each crop, in addition to three different effects to rapidly bring them to the end of the process for the quickest turn around.

However generally you do not need the quickest turn around to make a decent profit unless you are extremely limited in space (and in that you will exhaust the soil). Just bringing plants to bloom instantly for ones that can produce multiple times will allow you to get 2 or 3 times the output from them. Bringing them to maturity quickly will allow you to setup or expand your fields without a several year delay.

Doing things as fast as possible for single harvest crops needs:

  • Magic to keep the soil healthy (most likely CrHe Base 1)
  • Magic to insure enough water (ReAq)
  • Magic to prepare the fields (ReTe)
  • Magic to set out all the seeds (ReHe)
  • Magic to grow the plants to maturity (CrHe Base 15+)
  • Magic to bring the plants into bloom (ReHe Base 15)
  • Magic to complete the fruiting process (variation of ReHe Base 15 above)
  • Magic to conduct the harvesting (ReHe)
  • Magic to clear off the old plants (ReHe or PeHe)

This is of course if you are shooting for pure magic with the fastest possible timetable. Depending on location you might also need light, warmth, and protection. If a Magus was determined they could setup something like a greenhouse with enchanted items that did all of this automatically and output possibly multiple times daily. Not very efficient but it might fit a particular Magi.

EDIT: I am not trying to say efficiency is best. My own group has over 200# of unused annual cost savings and we are generating more. If your group likes being inefficient in some way you are better served looking for stories that can be raised from them than trying to get them to correct them. For us since we could support many more covenfolk without any change in our cost index (as long as they didn't need a Wage) we serve as a rest area for many Redcaps and have taken on a great many children at our schoolhouse. Both have produced some nice stories.

Heck, even if we had to pay a Wage to many it would barely dent our income since we focused so heavily on it for the first year of play. Having too much income actually leads to lots of time spent figuring out what to do with it. Lots of things that could get you in trouble since they skirt the edges of the Oath...

1 Like
78

I was going by modern cotton plants which are 3-5ft high and 2-4 feet wide. Close enough for all intents and purposes. Cotton plants aren't the most densely foliated things compared to some other bushes. And they can get as much as 20ft high in the tropics, so climate really plays a factor.

Even regionally you're not so much crashing the market as depressing it slightly. Economies are always bigger than you think they are.