Crateuas' lost Herbal book

Games Discussion Ars Magica
1

Hi everyone,

In page 124 of Houses of Hermes: Societates there is a boxed text about Crateuas, founder of the non-Hermetic tradition that eventually became the Ex Miscellanea Pharmacopeian tradition. This boxed text states that the lost book that Crateuas wrote was a summa for Profession: Apothecary (quality 14, level 5), a summa for Medicine (quality 14, level 5) and a summa for Mythic Herbalism (quality 9, level 10). I have been trying to reproduce the writing of this book, but have found myself unable to, and wanted to ask you people for ideas.

You wee, the problem I face is that, in order for one of the books to have quality 9, that means the base quality of books written by Crateuas must be 9 or lower. This means, for example, that he might have had Communication 3 and no special Virtues like "Good Teacher". That would give a base quality of 9. So far so good. So if he had Mythic Herbalism at 20, as astronomical as that sounds for an Ability, that would indeed produce the Q9L10 part of the summa for Mythic Herbalism.

But then, in order to have the other two parts of the summa have a higher quality, he must have lowered the level of those texts to increase its quality. Since they are Abilities (Medicine and Profession: Apothecary), this means every level substracted increases quality by 3 points. So if he had both Abilities at 14, he would have a base level of 7 for each book. Reducing the level by 2 would give the proper level for those summae (level 7-2=5), but the quality would be off by one point (9+(2x3)=15).

So any ideas here? Or do you think I'm overthinking this and should just either disregard the whole thing and have them be Q14L5, or simply make them Q15L5?

Any thoughts on this?

Edit: I am aware I could reduce the quality by 1 just by having them be damaged copies, for example. But I get that those numbers are for the actual, original books, so I wanted to try and make sense of this considering those were the original stats of the book.

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2

Perhaps he had a way to increase his Communication by 1, temporarily?
There are a few ways.

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3

That's a nice idea, but considering the three summae are actually three "parts" or subjects of the same physical book, I assumed it was written all at once, during the same time period.

4

There are summae in the 13th century which took their authors on-and-off a decade to write. A famous one is Aquinas' Summa Theologica, unfinished even after a decade.

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5

You know, you're both right about that, and it makes for a very sensible and period-appropriate approach.

6

A simple solution would be that the Q9 / L10 have 1 point of resonance (Covenants, p. 87).

Crateuas would have Communication 2, and the rest of the numbers fit

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Yeah, I already thought about that, but I'm assuming the stats in the book refer to the content, not the actual physical volumes, so that any copy of those books would have those stats. That wouldn't be the case with resonant materials, as only that particular copy would have it.

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Besides, resonant materials only add to the Quality for books on Arts or Arcane Abilities, so they wouldn't be of any use in this case.

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9

That's totally true, I had completely forgotten about that.

10

There's another option, which is that the sections on Medicine and Profession: Apothecary have been Glossed (P.91 of Covenants)

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11

Hmm ... how would that work? Glossing increases a work's Quality by a single point. What you need here is to either decrease the Quality of the mundane sections by one point, or to increase it by two points.

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