Elementals: A Major or a Minor Focus?

As-written, Elemental Magic is an excellent minor virtue.

...yeah, I know.

the following spell concepts are based off of the ward described in Covenents, which explicitly lists multiple separate effects, all combined into a single spell. (Covenents, pg. 104, "ward against mundane intrusions"). Thus, it's perfectly legal to combine multiple guidelines into single effects, if you've got the lab total to pull it off.

  1. Use the expanded character creation rules to spend 1 xp a season in all 60 seasons of your apprenticeship (or as many as you can - probably only 57, technically). That'll get you to just over lvl 10 in each of the four elements.
  2. Elemental Wards: relatively low-level wards that protect against all 4 elements. (Probably lv 15 base, +2 circle/ring, +0 for other elemental requisites.)
  3. Elemental (the creature) spells: single spell to create one, control one, or destroy one, have them affect all 4 elements.
  4. Elemental attack spells - choose an arbitratry level, and have it do 4x as much damage with the other 3 elements.
  5. Elemental Intelligo spells: stack 'em on top of each other to learn lots of stuff about an object.
  6. Elemental Perdo spells: again - stack 'em to destroy whatever it is you're pointing at.

But I do agree that those are kinda boring. With Troupe approval, I'd recommend you declare the integration of the guidelines for Hedge Elementalism. Or alternately, declare that the "if there's a relevant guideline in one TeFo, you can port it to another TeFo as appropriate" affects the elemental affinities for Animal/Corpus/Mentem. So, you could use Fire to summon predators, water to affect the cholic(?) humor, etc.