But, from the core rules, a ritual can be used to create a Magical being using a ritual. This has been confirmed in Hermetic Projects. Many mystery virtues are extremely powerful. They all do crazy stuff. Bind Magic Beasts is just one of them.
Plus, for any magus to keep a Might 60 Creature in their lab, they need some serious magical power. Circular Ward against Magical beasts lvl 60, Penetration 60.
Any magus senior enough to do this sort of thing has any number of ways to earn vis. They could be a longevity ritual specialist and get paid 40 or 50 pawns per season for the best LRs in the Order.
Right. This is why my preference is not to rule against all this, just tell players that specifically generating vis in such away is against the spirit of the game I run, so I disallow doing so.
Eh, it's not nearly that hard. Let's say you do a level-65 ritual to make 13 Might-5 beings. How has is it to keep them? I don't think a ward against them really requires that much magical power.
Which is ridiculously cheap if you allow unlimited vis with ease. Once you've done that you have created massive inflation and none of the pricing in the books makes any sense. That's why I rule against harvesting from things you create/summon.
You might say that you only get out what you put in, so things created with Verditius or Mercurian discounts only leave behind reduced vis. It gets complicated though and your approach may well work better.
As to summoning and harvesting, it's reminiscent of the early editions of the game and the theme of magi devastating their natural environments in search of vis. The results of this were portrayed pretty negatively and could be a guide for stories about covenants that attempt to suck up all the local flora, fauna, and spiritual beings.
With the complexity of Ars Magica 5, there's always a "loophole" in the rules that provides power inconsistent with the default background setting. Perpetual motion vis creation techniques are just one such loophole. If you like a setting with so much vis, then there's no problem. I'd rather not change the setting in this way myself, at least in most sagas.
Exactly. That's why I would just prefer telling people not to exploit a loophole.
This creating magical beasties via magic item seems like exactly such a loophole, and it's not even clear that it should work as suggested. That's opposed to things like this some of this vis farming that are clearly within the rules. Is this creature creation valid? And if it is, it is just essentially exploiting a loophole?
First, there is the issue of one of the books stating a ritual is required, making it questionable whether the original guideline is a ritual guideline.
Second, is there really anything at all that indicates the caster gets to custom design creatures to be created?
Then there is the whole question of whether a creature from an item, without vis put into it, actually has Might.
Then there is the question about whether a creature without Might could have and use powers.
Why can't we do it with elementals, then? Seems inconsistent.
The Virtue Hermetic Theurgy doesn't even let you put an effect like this in an item, but you can from this interpretation of the core guideline? So beyond elementals, you even have an extra Virtue and can't pull it off. Seems inconsistent.
Speaking of Hermetic Theurgy, this gives you what amounts to a better version of what had required a Virtue.
You get to make one power in an item that gives you many powers. And your vis investment can't be destroyed vis might stripping, as opposed to using a ritual.
Did I miss any? To me that's quite a lot of questionable validity and questionable loophole stuff.
To be fair, TMRE is full of rules requiring new Virtues for effects that seem legal by the core rules.
I think the simplest argument is that creating magical critters is a "major effect", requiring Ritual Magic according to the corebook. Under this interpretation, the point in Hermetic Projects is a clarification, not a retroactive change. There's a spell in the corebook, Curse of the Ravenous Swarm, which creates a swarm of locusts and is specifically listed as "ritual because it has a really major effect". If insects are a major effect, so are dragons.