I really like the idea that Kodlak already said about Flexible Supernatural Abilities. I'm more on the side of changing Folk Witch Magic to assimilate the concept of Hermetic Magic without it being too similar to that, to maintain a Folk Witch feel.
To have a more flexible magic you can try to do something like the Muspelli's Utiseta, maybe using the rules of Augustean Brotherhood to learn new rites.
In an early draft of this Virtue I came up with this: Witches' Rituals
I've done other iterations using the Brotherhood rules and another one tied to the Sabbat (modifying the RDT of Sup Abilities can only be done at Sabbat)
You're right, I looked at the specifics and Creo Corpus makes a much better set of guidelines anyway as Miracles don't need Vis, which Folk Witch healing explicitly does. I just needed to add the ability to recover fatigue (which does cost Vis), but this can be reverse engineered from the Vis cost of fatigue recovery.
Healing a Wound costs 3 pawns (Light), 4 pawns (Medium), 5 pawns (Heavy), 6 Pawns (Incapacitating)
Looking at the CrCo guidelines these correspond to the level of the effect (Lv 15 for Light, Lv 20 for Medium and so on).
So because removing the "winded" fatigue level costs only 1 pawn, the guideline should be a Lv 5 and removing the "weary" level (which costs 2 pawns) should be a Level 10.
This depends largely on what you are integrating and what you are going to get.
First, I note that you are talking about integrating Gruagach Arts and Holy M&P... This isn't just integrating hermetic magic anymore. As another person mentioned I'm not even sure if you can directly integrate holy powers (but you probably could develop a major virtue akin to Holy Magic that allows the folk witch to add Dominion to her casting and allow extra effects with holy inspiration).
Second, integration is different than OR in that the researcher doesn't chose what is going to be the end effect. For example, if your insigth comes from an hermetic PeCo effect, you are not going to transform Folk Witch cursing into Gruagach cursing. I'm not sure you could completely do that even if your insight comes from Gruagach magic, because of the different ways both traditions were developed. But you could expand the limits of FW Cursing until it resembles Gruagach GiCu effects (in both scope and ways of use) by studying and integrating GiCu.
Third, what you are describing sounds more like completely rewriting Folk Wicth magic. I'm not saying that it can't be done... but it took the Order 450 years of combined effort to push Hermetic magic to it's current standards (of course, Bonisagus took the first and biggest step).
This might be just me (I'm partial to partial increments), but I find it more likely (and satisfactory) for a slower growth (eg. integrating Hermetic voice PeCo effects to allow for use of Folk Witch Cursing with the Incantation casting method, or to integrate hermetic Intellego effects at R:AC to allow Dowsing to search for anything the witch has an AC for) than a complete change/merge of abilities and arts.
It's also wirth mentioning that Insight for the same thing could reasonably come from different sources. Both hermetic PeCo R:Voice and Gruagach GiCu R:Conversation/Voice could provide the witch with insight on how to cast her own curses with Incantation.
It's not Integrating Holy and Gruagach arts, (The Holy arts inspiration turned out to be completely unnecessary) and the Gruagach was just inspiration for effect guidelines as Folk Magic and Gruagach magic both feature cursing a s a major element. There's no attempt to integrate them, it's just a case of the Gruagach rules for cursing already being an advanced ability that would fit the situation well. I just needed equivalent rules so that the end result was balanced with the rest of the game.
I am working out the logistics for this as both an out of character exercise in understanding rule structures and for an NPC in a game who has this as their goal. It's extremely unlikely that this NPC will manage more than one of these in their lifetime, I just wanted to work out what the end result is that they are aiming towards.
The attempt at integration is to apply the flexibility of some Hermetic ranges, durations and targets to folk witch magic. On an OC mechanical basis, this can't (easily) be done with the simple supernatural score system, so I needed to translate it to an art so that it would be mechanically compatible with the concept.
The NPC in question has this as a life goal and at some point might manage to integrate a single development as you mentioned previously Folk Witches have a much harder time integrating that even with a wealth of research material, he might only get one or two of these done.
Sadly our mage doesn't have access to any Gruacgach to inspire their research (They oddly do have access to holy mage and a Hound of God, but neither of those offer the sort of insight this person is seeking.
by studying the way hermetic magic enchants items, a folk witch could add shape and material bonus to her fetishes (limited by her Folk Witch MT bonus). For example, using a rat skull in a fetish doll could add +3 to her roll when casting a curse of disease, or add +5 to her flight ability if she has a pin feather in her festish. When skin kniting (creating the festish for her shapechange ability) this could add S&M bonus to the her soak while transformed. In any case, this requires additional pawns of vis equal to the bonus she is adding.
by studying the way hermetic magic enchants items, a folk witch could add shape and material bonus to her potion lab totals (limited by her Folk Witch MT bonus). For example, using sapphire dust when brewing a healing potion would add +3 to brew potency.
by studying Incantation (infernal method), Invocation (divine method) and R:Voice hermetic effects the witch develops a Folk Witch Incantation ability. She adds her FWI to her casting total when using incantation (Animal Ken, Healing and Second Sight at the moment, but consider my suggestion of integrating Incantation to Cursing).
Short post to point out the two paragraphs on Integration by Hedge Wizard Researchers on HMRE p. 16. Adapting features from hermetic magic to folk witch magic is possible, but harder than adapting folk witch magic for an hermetic researcher. On the upside... hermetic magic has more to teach, including a breakthrough for being as innovative as hermetic magic, which is probably the first thing that bonisagus wannabe should research.
I am not certain if it is relevant, but when Bonisagus invented Hermetic Magic, he made it so that later improvements and Mysteries could be integrated in.
I tend to think that Folk Magic, nor any other Tradition, has self-improvement capability built in like that of Hermetic Magic.
So the target number for an improvement breakthrough in Folk Magic should, at the very least, be higher than for a commensurate breakthrough in Hermetic Magic.
That sounds a lot to me like saying âthe process used in China to discover how acupuncture worked wasnât science because they didnât use the same words to describe the experimental process and didnât have great controls for those experiments.â And to add mechanical weight to that sort of chauvinism sounds problematic. Except here itâs two fictional groups within the pretty much the same sets of cultures only one is less wealthy.
And so was science and it ignored a whole lot of known information because that information was known by a non-Christian or a woman. Hermetic Theory really only incorporated a bundle of similar priestly traditions of Roman ancestry, the Bjornaer, and Diedne. Itâs explicitly not actually a very wide survey of the magic of the time. Science didnât start out some gleaming, pure thing, it was (and is) messy and tied to its social and cultural medium.
Bonisagus explicitly did gather information far and wide on many types of magic before settling down and working on his theory - and that's not counting what he later learned from the other Founders.
Teaching himself some of the minor rituals, he dis-
covered commonalities with his own spells, those of the
cult of Osiris and others from the temple of Diana. He
believed he could create a system of magic that would
encompass all of theses types of magic. Funded by his
uncle, Bonisagus began a passionate search for more mag-
ical texts, roaming the Aegean basin and deep into Persia
to retrieve many legendary tomes and magical papyri. His
early library was immense, including memoirs of
Cappadocian wizards, the secret lore of the Chaldeans,
Gnostic, Christian, and Jewish mysteries, and even the
magical writings of Moses and Solomon.
But he didnât go down to the market of his home town where a folk witch was selling charms or seek out any of the other non-scholarly traditions. Sounds to me like a whole lot of theurgical traditions mentioned, both Pagan and Christian, sure but he didnât find actual members of non-roman lineages until Trianoma (I forgot her before) and then she went and found Diedne and Bjornaer.
Isn't this already covered by the rules in HMRE p. 16 ?
"The possible effects of such activity by
hedge researchers are too numerous to list
here, but usually (due to the theoretical infe-
riority of hedge traditions) a hedge research-
er requires double the number of break-
through points that an equivalent Hermetic
researcher would require."
I guess that the more research-inclined traditions like the Suhhar or the Learned Magician could have the standard requirement of points.
No. That only comes into effect when they have no theory. Ivgreen was saying there should be another malus even after the theory is created as it already is for Hedge Witches.
EDIT: I was wrong. that's terrible. Not sure how I got the notion that it was only the process of designing the theory itself which was doubled.
I do apologise. It is the end of the week and I am knackered enough I can't quite parse that paragraph. It sounds like you are simultaneously comparing fiction and non-fiction - historical acupuncture, and the wuxia version of acupuncture , against Western medical practise.
And it is bothering me like a chipped tooth.
I don't know much about Acupuncture, and not a lot about Western Medicine other than it came from refining a bunch of Folk Cures that could be made to work effectively and reliably and adapt to new medical issues. Stuff that didn't work (or not well enough) got dumped, though some of it is now called Alternate Medicine.
As for acupuncture I am vaguely recalling reading a report many years ago (or maybe conflating several reports) where the Chinese government ran a multi-year scientific study to prove how effective traditional chinese cures stack up against western medicine, and the conclusion was in favour of western medicine, with chinese cures at best as complementary, or something.
Sorry, I may be rambling. Let me see if I can get back on track.
Does the theory behind acupuncture adapt easily to handle heart pacemakers, organ transplants, bionic limbs, breast implants, liposuction and other body modification techniques?
That seems like a better comparison for how well Folk Magic Theory can integrate Hermetic Magics.
Yes, I am comparing fictional things to things from history if you donât do that I have trouble understanding why you choose to play this game over others where itâs not a pretty basic part of play.
I only mentioned Folk Witch because itâs all over the place in one form or another and there is something to study there so you choosing that as the weakness in my argument is pretty funny. And, no, I donât expect Bonisagus would learn how to throw fireballs from a folk witch but maybe he would have learned more than he did about affecting fatigue with magic.
I will have to find the True Lineages book (I think), but Bonisagus was supposed to have been dealing with Fatigue loss, but Trianoma's sister stole his lab notes on it. I presume Bonisagus wasn't able to recreate it for some reason (maybe he was too busy integrating the other Founder's magics)