Think about it, though. In some ways, (most) apprentices might do better this way. Consider an Gifted child who's found five years before the next Tribunal. She might well get five years of quality education in non-Art related subjects before even starting her apprenticeship. So instead of having to spend the first year of her apprenticeship learning Classical Greek and then turning to Magic Theory, she might start off with good scores in those and be able to jump right into the Arts. She also might even have some Lore skills at decent ranks as well.
Of course, the 'auspicious' child who's found right before a Tribunal gets none of that and has to fit fifteen years of training into fourteen years. But what can you do?
Also technically a child could be kept by the mage who found her and opened as their apprentice, but he would earn a shard for doing so, where they would get a token for turning them in for pre-apprenticeship training.
Interestingly, he gets a shard for training her early. But he saves at least one token by not having to bid to be her parens, and he's guaranteed to get her as an apprentice. If you assume he'd have had to bid at least two tokens to get her as an apprentice, he comes out even, but with a guaranteed apprentice. If he had to bid three tokens or more, he's ahead of the game.
So from a cost-benefit standpoint, it seems like it's a viable (if underhanded) way to economically get an apprentice.
I am trying to do an Animal Ken Gold-Shirt Grog.
Looking at Feral upbringing, does the language restriction mean that I can not have language at game start, or just that I lose the free language, and can not buy it with the 120 points of early years?
Also, with a lisp and communication -2, what level of Romaic Greek should I take to net out that he can make himself understood, but not well? I don't want his language so bad that he can not actually function. But he won't talk much.
The leader (spokesman) of the shepherds?
An innkeeper on the road to the covenant?
The groundskeeper of the school?
The covenant's ink-maker, who often goes to Patras to get the raw materials he needs for the magi's weird requests?
I had not realized that we were starting in 1222 instead of 1220. Not a problem.
Should I work out 2 years of advancement for each charcter? If so, how much experience should I allocate?
And if I want to be more specific with my mage, should I use the books planned for our library, or some other source? (The complexity of that leads me to suspect that just taking 60 xp would be a LOT simpler.)
Do I allocate 20 per year to the merchant and 15 to the feral animal-handler?
