Creating a multitude of fruits and vegetables

Games Discussion Ars Magica
1

Is there an official ruling for increasing the TYPES of things created by a Creo spell? In my specific instance, I'd like to CrHe a bunch of different fruits and veggies. AMDE, in the CrHe section, simply states "spells generally only create one type of plant matter": OK, what if you want to create more?

Two thoughts:

  1. This is fairly difficult, so +1 magnitude per different type, as though you are tacking a completely separate effect on top of the existing spell. -OR-
  2. This is a fairly easy issue of just expanding the existing spell, so it falls under the "10 different types per +1 magnitude", as though it were expanding the size.

Personally, I prefer the "10x per +1", just because I don't think it should be 100 times as difficult to (say) make a 3-bean salad as a one-bean one. However, this sounds like something that might have already had a ruling that I'm unaware of.

2

Serf's Parma; but I think a formulaic spell has One Defined Thing It Does; a CrHe to create a wooden (made of Oak) stool will always produce the same (made of Oak) stool. A spell to create a different wooden (made of Birch) stool is no more challenging, but it is a different spell -- and that new spell will always produce the same (made of Birch) stool.

Similarly, filling a big bowl with three-bean salad is no more difficult than creating a similar (approximately stool sized) amount of a single wood, or the same volume of a five bean salad -- but a spell which produces three-bean salad will always make exactly the same three-bean salad.

If you are producing a wooden desk, which is made of different kinds of wood in different places, you might run into an additional magnitude (or a finesse requirement) for the complexity; particularly if some of the parts are meant to fit precisely or be especially beautiful or exacting.

3

I'd go with "+1 Magnitude" for complexity, with a Finesse roll if you want something specific.

I note that Phantasm of the Human Form and other Imagine spells seem to just waive the requirement.

4

I'd also go with +1 Mag for complexity, but unless its terribly important that result is 5 different types of stuff you could just do a Finesse roll or even nothing. You could litigate ratios of the products or do a Finesse roll to determine that.

I'm pretty sure someone in a book has a sigil that means when they make a bunch of feathers they are all from different birds instead of 100 cubic paces of eiderdown and that guy gets that effect for free!

5

Kinda... there's the below, but it depends on if you view something like "fruit" as the type, or say "apple" as the main type.

No matter how much flexibility is added to a
Formulaic or Ritual spell, it can still only create one
type of thing, such as a sword or a stone tower.

I'm inclined to say the type is 'fruit' or 'vegtables' based off of TM, which allows using creating grass to target wheat.

This spell covers just under 1.25 acres of land with
thick grass about a pace high. Wheat is, of course, a
grass. Characters making an island 3 miles across have
just over 6000 acres of land. Player characters adding
4 magnitudes to this spell can cover just over 12,000
acres of land.
(Base 1, +1 Touch. +2 Group, +1 size)
Source: Transforming Mythic Europe, 62

That said most examples of fruits and veggies creation creates one specific fruit or veggie, so I'd put it at +2 or +3 complexity for each.

6

I think it's always a judgement call, but my default ruling is:
Default, it does one thing. ex; Create Lima Beans
You could increase variety with some extra work: Create Beans Matching This Example In My Hand.
You can increase variety with extra magnitudes: Create Beans Of Some Variety (+1 Magnitude Flexibility)
You can increase the deliciousness complexity of the beans with extra magnitudes: Create Three Bean Salad (+1 Magnitude complexity, always the same 3 beans)

Any other changes for me are based on these guidelines.

PS: This is for formulaic spells specifically, which I allow a bit of wiggle room and leeway in their design. I'm actually MORE strict for spontaneous.

PPS: I am proud of my spell names.

7

Hey - thanks for the replies, all. Some additional context:

  1. The original spell was conceived as a set of static foodstuffs - ie, "the 10 most common food items eaten by peasants that isn't grain" - that a brief search seems to be "peas, beans, onions, carrots, turnips, cabbage, leeks, parsnips, cauliflower, and spinach." (at least for English peasants, anyway.)
  2. This would likely be paired with a standard lvl 20 ritual to create a million sq yds. of grain, likely wheat.
  3. Of course, this begs the question as to "where will you put all of this?"
  4. The PC in question managed to create a variation of the Watching Ward, where instead of delaying in time, the effect delays in space and volume - that is, it keeps a circle/ring full of the target material, until the spell fully runs out or the circle is broken.
  5. Because it uses standard R/D/T, it's formulaic - which means you can set up "sacks of everfull grain", or similar spells; the PC in question uses large stone bowls.
  6. He's got a proof-of-concept with a standard grain spell (which now contains 1 million cubic yards of grain), and the idea is that the covenant's village gives all of their grown wheat to the magi, who in turn give them magically-created wheat from the everfull bowl.
  7. This allows the covenant to get around the rule of silver, as the grain they sell is created in a completely conventional fashion, while the magically-created grain is kept in-house and used to feed the population.
  8. The 10x idea is the next step, as obviously peasants don't just live off of grain (or even one type of grain.) As the top 10 vegetables are (mostly) easily-storable, it can ALSO be used to swap out what is grown and sold.
  9. Obviously this isn't as efficient as grain as a commodity, but it's only 2 pawns of herbam vis that will functionally create enough food to feed a village for 50 or so years, (100k cubic yards, +1 magnitude for different vegetables.)
  10. The bowl itself would likely have 9 wooden spacers, and the plant matter would appear in each sub-section of the bowl. Or alternately just use a low-level ReHe effect to sort it out as it is poured out of the bowl.

My basic math is that the average peasant eats 1 c.y. of grain a year, and 1 c.y. of "other stuff". So 100k of miscellaneous veggies can feed a village of 1000 peasants for 100 years, assuming they have a source of grain as well. (Or at the least, it can mostly replace what they need to eat.)

Now obviously this has some serious implications for the campaign narrative, as this basically creates a 10x efficient farming villiage: instead of producing enough surplus to support 1/10 of its population, it now produces enough to support 100% of its size.

More generally, the ability to functionally use CrHe rituals to create enough food for entire populations to eat, and have somewhere to functionally store it so it can be distributed, is a massive economic game-changer. Which is of course part of the story.

(EDIT - ah, some of this math seems to be in TME; it's a bit off; looks like they use 24 bushels, and a cubic yard holds 22 bushels - but TME assumes that 24 bushels is all a peasant needs, if only because some of that is traded away for the other foodstuffs. So maybe having an additional c.y. of "other vegetables" is a bit overkill.)

8

I'm not sure permanent ritual Creo magic is allowed to have a Duration; it might be restricted to just 'Momentary'. Of course, if you have allowed a special research project / breakthrough which changes that, then seems like it is all good.

9

You can put Creo spells into watching wards just fine - that's how you get Fireball (CrIg) traps that go off if you open a door without a password. As such, there's no reason you can't put a ritual Creo effect in one either, although the utility of such an effect would (likely) be fairly limited, unless you were moving a bunch of stuff and didn't want to cast it at the location it would ultimately be. (A "castle in a box" sort of delayed effect, maybe?)

The insight the wizard had was "instead of delay by time, can we delay by volume?" The part of the Creo effect that actually goes off is momentary; it's just that not all of it goes off. The rest is delayed until there is room in the circle (in this case, a bowl) for the spell to continue.

In other words, it's not the Creo effect that has a Circle/Ring duration: it's the Watching Ward itself.

The implicit question is "does a creo effect have to have all of its matter appear at the same time?" which is different than a Minute or Day duration, which would create all of the matter all at once, for a specified duration. The normal answer is "yes, it normally does have to appear all at once" - but is it REQUIRED to do so, under hermetic theory, or can some portion of it be temporarily delayed from manifesting?

The answer the PC came up with is "yes, of course it can be temporarily delayed; that's just a Watching Ward - the trick is to delay only PART of it, based on existing R/D/T"

EDIT - just as an alternate example, it seems reasonable to me that a variation of a ReVi watching ward could trickle out a stored CrAq effect over the course of 1 minute, with 1/60 of the effect being released every second. How long the water would last once released, of course, is dependent on that CrAq effect.

EDIT II - just thought of something: it's pretty standard that ReVi magic can affect part of a spell: Parma, for example, resists only the part of an area-effect spell that targets the wizard. So it's not unreasonable to think that you can use ReVi to supresss only part of a Creo spell, based on a trigger.

10

Create a separate Muto Herbam effect, timed for the same time, that shrinks all the magically created food until it leaves the circle. You reach in, grab a handful, toss it into a wagon and watch it expand over the course of ~6 seconds.

11

This would likely work better under existing hermetic theory; it would, however, cause the food to warp over time. However, depending on what the warping effect WAS, it may simply be easily ignorable or easily dealt with. (Personally, I'd say that the warp causes a percentage of the remaining grain to shrink so small as to be functionally destroyed, even after being removed; once you hit Warp 10, it's all gone. So basically it's just a variation of rot, only it occurs over 275 years.)

It would likely also need a CrHe effect to keep the shrunken vegetation fresh, as over time such a pile would inevitably rot.

12

A +1 Complexity added is enough. A maga I play has researched two ritual spells. One creates 100 adult trees, of the same type. The other, a later ritual, creates 1,000 adult tress, of a variety of species. the second ritual is 10 levels higher, +1 for Complexity, and +1 for Size of Group.