Would a spell to destroy writing be perdo herbam / perdo terram or perdo animal. This spell will be used in a book that players are making
Probably Pe He with an animal requisit, given that eggs and oak galls are the primary components in many inks (though oak galls are a plant's reaction to wasp eggs, so even that seems to combine both forms)
So, book writing, as I understand used the ink to mark as they wrote, but the acid of the gallnut would literally burn the velum and so the text would be burned into the page. So ReAn or MuAn would really be the way to restore a book to a true Tabula Rasa.
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There's a PeAn3 spell in Covenants that does this already, p. 97.
I do not have that 5th ed book. I have been mainly playing using 3rd-ed rules With MCA the group has been using and playing since the early 90s, and use what few 5th-ed books I have as reference and theory.
Ah, that's important information.
The spell in Covenants uses PeAn base 2: Damage something made of animal products, and requires a finesse roll to determine the skill with which it was done. It's targetting a book, so PeAn, and you could argue He or Te requisites because of ink materials if you want. It should be pretty low level though.
If you are using PeAn to scrape the vellum it makes sense that the composition of the ink would not atter. That being said I doubt medieval ink was acidic enough to actually burn into what amounts to stretched animal skins.
Upon further research it seems that sometimes the ink could be this corrosive, indeed corrosive enough to destroy the parchment over time, while other times a black carbon was used that had no acidity at all, with levels of acidity of different batches running the gamut in between, sometimes creating a ghost image of the writing on the other side which is part of why writing was only done on one side of the vellum.
So depending on who made the ink and how it could be part An, part he, and part Te. Presumably by the time you want to erase it the Aq component would no longer be an issue, and it may have damaged the surface it was placed on either through acidity or through some other change as many forms f ink would be permeable with some surfaces depending as well on whether it was written on parchment or vellum as well as the composition of the ink.
Pe Aq for the ink, with requisite terram, herbam or animal depends the nature of the ink. Restore the book under the ink, Creo Herbam or Creo Animal depends the material.