And to be clear, I can veto anything. This is supposed to be fun, not an exercise in "He doesn't know the entirety of the ruleset, so let's take advantage of that". I'm expecting you guys to self-police in some instances and not be total [redacted] about stuff. Please don't force me to implement rules to compensate for people trying to take advantage of my limited knowledge.
But, seeing as you put it that way: Nothing in excess of Quality/Level that the library has. Happy?
I'm not sure how to answer this. According to the write-up, the Covenant wasn't established until 1217, which means you would have to set up a lab elsewhere, do all your stuff, move it, then set it up again once you get to the Covenant. I don't want to penalize you guys in any way, so I'm just going to handwave the lab stuff at this point and say that your lab, however you have it defined, is at the Covenant on day 1, Spring 1220. Remember that this game is about what happens after the game starts, not before.
As far as the library goes, I'm going to say (handwave, SG rule, however you want to look at it) that it isn't fully equipped until day 1, Spring 1220. Covenant resources are not available for your use until after the game starts.
All Hermetic books are in Latin. All non-Hermetic books are in French. Anything that falls in-between is assumed to be for the use of magi, and therefore in Latin. The Latin book, specifically, is in French.
Ever be typing something, and you think you type one thing, but you end up typing the other? I was thinking Latin, my brain said French, and my fingers typed Latin. Mistake corrected!
atlas-games.com/arm5/arm5errata.php
edit: The Ambulatory Laboratory (p. 122): Increase the base level to 25, and the spell level to 50. The guidelines for this effect were defined in Magi of Hermes, p. 92.
1 Skilled parens
2 Inventive genius
3 cyclic magic (positive)
4 Educated
5 Puissant Pe
6 premonitions
7 Puissant Vim
8 Puissant comprehend magic
9 great per
10 great per
Pralician House virtues and flaws
comprehend magic
weak magic resistance
Minor focus (exotic magic)
1-3 Driven: become a quaesitor
4 optimistic
5-7 deficient muto
8 mentor (close to parens)
9 Flawed Powers comprehend magic (only when parma is up)
10 fragile constitution
Str -2 Sta +2 Per +5 Int +2 Pre 0 Com 0 Pre -1 Dex -1 Qik 0
general direction: good at comprehend magic, perdo and vim
PeVi battle spells, PeIm, PeIg and PeMe spells, Vim spells
And to be clear, I can veto anything. This is supposed to be fun, not an exercise in "He doesn't know the entirety of the ruleset, so let's take advantage of that". I'm expecting you guys to self-police in some instances and not be total [redacted] about stuff. Please don't force me to implement rules to compensate for people trying to take advantage of my limited knowledge.
But, seeing as you put it that way: Nothing in excess of Quality/Level that the library has. Happy?
[/quote]
Not trying to take advantage of your ignorance. I educated you! I said "Hey here is an area of the house rule that needs to be addressed. Here is the way an approved source handles it." after that it is fair game.
Honestly I expected one of the veterans pipe up on the topic, no one was going to say buying a level 60 book was ok. But without a ruling... is a L20Q20 ok? L30Q20? My character would seek out the best books on his chosen field before starting work on his magnum opus, that just makes sense, so I needed to know where it was.
When you say no Higher than the Library does that mean I can buy a book on an art with that stat line or nothing better than each literal book.
As an explicit example can I buy a Rego equivalent to our Perdo book or can I only buy additional Q10 Rego Tractoi?
Another fair warning thing. As a Mercer Magus I can get my Vis traded for free and they will lend me 10p without interest, they will hold the debt over my head but only that value.
That is a reasonable solution. I would have been harsher about it, since it was our choice to make our magi older, but I appreciate the favorable ruling.
The Ex Miscellanea chapter in HoH:Societates, p.126
Hi!
Could you elaborate on what this means? Is it that your Magi’s CM only works linked to your Parma, while it’s up? As a Necessary Condition? If so, I would argue that’s not really a flaw, though, since a HM wants their Parma up 100% of the time except during very specific and extremely narrow windows of the Magus’s choosing. But I might have misunderstood.
Usually the typical best for really old magi is in the ballpark of 40. Puissant doesn't help for writing, so 40+3 is still 40. So as a general rule the maximum possible level is in the ballpark of 20. So writing at level 20 probably wouldn't leave room for a Quality boost by writing to a lower level than your max. Practically, the best writer will max out around 14 base quality. But how many of those Com +5, Good Teacher writers are the ones with a 40 in an Art? So level 20, quality 14 would be a truly extraordinary work.
Yes, I can build a character coming out of apprenticeship with a score of about 30 in an Art, though that requires ridiculous focus. Yes, I know how to get a base quality of 23, but that's requires more cheese than cheesemongers generally have available; tweaking things with less cheese would be more like 16, much lower. But I don't think we're really looking at those kinds of crazy builds here.
So level + quality of 34 is at the point of a covenant Boon, and so is much higher than I would expect to be able to pick up without doing it in-character. The core book limits starting libraries to summas of level + quality = 31, which is still really high, reaching close to the upper expected limits.
Character wise - I can't find a hook for a "game/strategy" angle for a magus yet, and have started thinking about luck, chaos and order as aspects of magic. I found this post and this negative onewhich started talking about similar topics and suggested Hedge Magic for influencing luck, and integrating Fortunam from the Learned Magicians, in Hedge Magic is interesting to me.
Few questions before I get too excited:
Do you think the game will move at a pace where finishing Original research is possible?
Is "finding" the Form: luck viable? I ask as one post really smashes the idea, but I think it would be something interesting to do as I have never done this in game before.
Particularly I do not mean transcribing the way learned magicians "do luck" but instead research how hermetic magic might influence luck. My end goal would be to have a virtue which a hermetic magus can learn which grants them access to a new Form: Luck (probably with a sexier latin name), which they they use with the normal Techniques.
Fortunam is a minor virtue, but is part of a large body of virtues and flaws of Learned Magicians, ... so a minor breakthrough, or ?
Think of it economically. You spend 4 seasons writing. You get scribes to make some copies. If you get 20 pawns per copy and only sell 4 copies ever, you just made 20 pawns/season of work. Not bad! More realistically, you might spend 3 seasons writing a Q12, L18 book and be able to sell at least half a dozen copies for 7.5 pawns on average. (I'm sure half a dozen covenants would buy that good a book at that price.) That would still be 15 pawns/season put into it on a far more realistic end. If you charge much more, seeing how much can be made, others will likely undercut you. If you can write/teach well, you can make it quite lucrative by keeping prices reasonably low but not too low.
Doing this devalues the product by flooding the market, which over time - and I am the purveyor of how soon in this game - returns less and less vis for you while not lowering your burden for paying for the scribes.
Is that what you were trying to do, I really didn't get it. My point was we should not have access to books with no level caps. YOU already established why such books shouldn't ever exist so the economics are not relevant.
I was responding to the "only pay" part, which comes from the formula, figuring I'd already gone into enough detail on the level and quality. The reason I was responding to that, is we could talk about how much you only have to pay to get a level 18, quality 12 book, for example.
Like, 7.5 vis is fairly affordable. I'll probably still get a book Equivalent to our Perdo book for Creo, Mentem, and Corpus. Maybe not all at once but They would be nice to have.