While magic can not seem to give birth or create new life, the question is can it enhance the fertility of people that they are more likely to give birth.
One of the mages in my current saga is focused on Fertility and Birth (Gentle gift Criamon that acts as midwife publically).
She wants to create spells to increase fertility in animals and then people (so our population grows). We could not determine what sort of level it would be or if it could be done. I looked at Arts and Academe, The main book and I could not find a clear example (perhaps I am missing something).
A healthy young women has about 95% chance per year becoming pregnant if she is fckd regularly. Is this few?
Half of the children died in the middle ages because of different diseases. So curing these diseases is the key to the growth of people and not the fertility.
However she may help the barren or women who want more than a dozen children.
Blessings of the Bountiful Womb (CrCo 5)
R: Touch, D: Moon, T: Ind
Cast upon a woman, this spell ensures her fertility. If the target of this spell lies with a man before the next moon, she will become pregnant.
(base 1, touch +1, moon +3)
I based the level on the Creo Herbam magics to ensure a bountiful harvest.
I also have:
Easing the Birth (MuCo 5)
R: Touch, D: Sun, T: Ind
When cast upon a woman in childbirth, this spell alters her pelvis to permit the child easy passage into the world.
(base 2, touch +1, sun +2)
Curse of Sterility (PrCo 30)
R: Voice, D: Moon, T: Ind
This spell renders the target infertile and unable to perform the sexual act.
(base 5, voice +2, moon +3)
.. as well as Animal versions of all of the above (same levels, just Animal instead of Corpus).
Bountiful Feast keys off base 1, Ensure that a plant grows well. Closest thing to a fertility boost I know of. Base 1 also allows for creating a plant. In contrasl, creating a mammal is a Base 15. If you boost the CeHe effect a couple magnitudes for size, you're talking a base effect between 3 and 15 for reference. If you want to limit the effect to fertility, without any extra effect for growth etc, I'd allow a player to split the difference - magnitude 5 base.
Bountiful Harvest has a +9 magnitude modifier, so you're talking about a CrCo50, ritual, to boost all human fertility in a boundary for one year.
That's strictly a ballpark guess too. If I were to err, it would be to increase the magnitude, and then include effects that foster growth and health. The spell wouldn't counter disease, but would help insure that the humans in the effect were more resistant to getting sick, which would also boost population growth.
Tough for a new magi, but certainly achieveable by one 15-20 years out of apprenticeship, especially with a minor focus in fertility.
I think that's wayyyyy overstated. Absent modern medical intervention, there's a one in seven chance that any given couple will be infertile. 14.3% infertility does not 95% fertility make.
Getting back to fertility chances, there is always the issue that infertility is a Divine curse, which means that it cannot be counteracted by magic (see City and Guild's section on Leprosy). Beyond that, though, I think hermetic magic might be able to do some things (like determine fertility and give it a slight nudge in an otherwise healthy person), but for something more complex, I think it would require a Breakthrough.
I think that base 1 is too low. I think something around base 15 is more reasonable.
Also, I think that the spell description should note that it does not allow a woman who is sterile (because she has taken a longevity potion, for example) to become pregnant. Also the man can't be sterile either. You might want to think about whether it should allow a woman who is past menopause to become pregnant too.
I think that this needs to have a Part target (to make it level 10).
Minor point, I think the wording you use here is confusing the ideas of impotence and sterility.
Which is way too low in my opinion. A base 1 CrCo spell gives a +1 bonus to Recovery rolls. That is definitely not equivalent to ensuring fertility. If infertility was caused by disease or injury, then the Level 20 "Heal the debilitating after-effects of a disease, poison, or injury" is appropriate.
Whilst there are different ways of doing most things with Hermetic Magic, A&A has some guidelines for assisting childbirth:
As a Muto Corpus this should definitely be Part, and is likely to be very disturbing to the mother. Furthermore, the level 2 base (grant a minor ability) seems inappropriate here; I'd suggest the level 3 base which allows you to alter the form of a person so long as they remain human.
Simply modifiying the description of the spell to "making the mother more suitable for childbirth" removes the need for a Part component. Some people are just naturally better suited for safe childbirth ("Fine wide, child-bearing hips" as my rather nasty uncle was wont to tease my mother), and you'd need to alter far more than just the pelvis. I agree that the mother might find this a bit traumatic, but it's not quite the same as her suddenly bulging three feet wider about the hips to give birth instantly and more or less painlessly. That would be a much higher level spell and would definitely require part.
Unless you want to go solely off Islam (Allah alone determines the quickening and infertility) then there's really nothing wrong with Hermetic magic affecting fertility. After all, our pre-Christian friends did it all the time, though the supreme control they had should require Fertility Magic.
God seems content to pass out souls as long as women are able to chuck out infants. Ye, go forth and multiply. Besides, as Thomas Aquinas will soon note, God doesn't insert the soul until a week or two anyway, so he has plenty of time to decide whether or not to proceed with the birth. That is, assuming you aren't going with the 'God is merely a powerful X' instead of the 'arbiter of all things' setting. (With X equalling Magic Being, Demon, Faerie, whatever. My bet is on Faerie. ;D The Twilight Void seems a much better source for the beginning of existence. Clearly, he simply won the game of Dominions and became the Pantokrator.)
If you want to screw all that, target the baby and teleport it out. If she has a wand talisman, it's fairly easy to get into Touch range (so long as you make sure you don't damage anything.) Crude, yes, but effective.
Though I think Part would work just fine while the baby is still connected, no?
This was done in Voyager once, though it magically has a good chance of turning the baby into a disturbing puddle of goo. (Horrible show anyway.)
Waaay too high... I´ve seen numbers for that sometime, expect something between 25% and 60% on average instead (depends on lots of things, person.itself, enough food, food quality, etc etc)
Note, not just because of disease, accidents in a society without ability to rapidly get someone injured the treatment(when such treatment was at all available) needed was a big killer(even if you find a surprising amount of evidence for people surviving despite extreme injuries...(like loosing more or less of one or several limbs)) and also a year of bad weather brought malnutrition which always struck hardest against small children.
Ancient Magic puts the baseline for ensuring conception at 15. It includes a charged item with Sun duration that guarantees conception if consumed a day prior to intercourse. If the man isn't human, but fae for instance, it provides a stamina target for forcing conception. However, it uses the target of Unborn child, which requires Fertility Magic. Otherwise, I believe it would require a target: Part, as hermetic magic doesn't distinguish between mother and child that early, and range touch-- which would put it at CrCo35 (Base 15, +1 touch, +2 sun, +1 part). Which, honestly, seems ok for something that's set up as part of a lost tradition.
