So, I was looking around the internet, and came across some sites that talked about how much wood was used for fuel in the middle ages, and how deforestation around cities then made that wood expensive. I thought about making a Creo Herbam item that would create firewood for the covenant to use. Creating firewood is easy, and while group target and moon duration add difficulty, it still is a pretty low level effect to make a load of firewood.
Then I started to get greedy.
Suppose I put unlimited uses on it as well. I obtain space inside the nearby city and a place outside the city as well. I hire two people in the city to sell firewood and two people outside the city to deliver two or three wagonloads of firewood every day to the firewood merchants. I only sell two weeks worth of wood to any buyer, but I undercut everyone else’s prices. I find other jobs for the woodcutters who are now out of work, both so they don’t attack my firewood merchants and so they don’t concentrate on timber for construction and deforest even more than they had before. You also start spreading a story regarding someone who was very generous to angels who came to test him, and so was given a box that would provide as much firewood as he wanted, so long as he never told anyone how he received it. Make sure that the firewood vanishing after a couple of weeks is part of the story, just as manna was not wholesome if not used within the day it was collected, the wood disappears if not used quickly enough.
So, obviously, eventually someone is going to learn that the wood is fake, either because someone takes a piece and tries to make a doorstop out of it, or the ashes that were going to be used for gardening go missing or the chimney sweep can’t get any work and gets suspicious. They bring the suspicion to the man just outside the city and he truthfully tells them that if he was the man from the story, it would stop working if he confirmed it.
On the one hand, this is interfering with mundanes. On the other hand, if this is done in the Rhine Tribunal, it is protecting the forest. Just consider all those trees not cut down for firewood.
Now, some difficulties spring to mind. First, it seems like either some robber will come and steal the box or some official will discover and take the box. Of course, with magic, it should be easy enough to find the thieves, retrieve the box and make those taking it believe that they are being divinely punished, and that since God wanted him to have the box, he got it back.
Second, faeries may well think this is a great story, and start reenacting it all over the place. This will cause all sorts of revenue problems.
Third, the purported owner of the box had best actually be devout, else real angels are apt to come deal with the situation.
So, what are the problems I have overlooked?