Two confidence points for everyone as a reward for being patient with my internet situation and my move, and more so for carying on with stories and materials and such 
So, for some reason I've got Vibria on the planner spending two seasons investigating the harness despite the fact that her InVi lab total is rubbish (16). I suspect it has something to do with the fact that it has that ginormous ruby in it and that she thinks she would look fabulous in it.
Do we want to try to persuade Vulcanus to investigate it for the Covenant? And if successful, any ideas on what Vibria should do with her two unexpectedly-free seasons? (Something covenant-service related, mayhap?)
Well I think Solomon is the resident InVi expert (his is 68 I think), and he now has two free seasons since the City of Brass mission was pushed back. He could do it as a personal favor to Vibria. Or as a covenant service if the harness is a covenant asset (I can't remember).
I believe we decided that the harness was technically covenant property, since it was acquired during covenant service (looking for vis and/or vis sources).
Just looking over it and some knowledge of magic lore will suggestthat it is probabl a non-Hermetic item. Maurice had called it a "Pan-Caudrax Amulet". For anyone who has read Land of Fire & Ice (Iceland for 4th edition), the book contains stats for the dragon Pan-Caudrax and mentions a harness/amuletthat he can use to heal himself. It is something like that, though not exactly. Lore states that it allows him to heal faster and invoke "spirits of the host" to heal injuries outright quickly. This is notthe same amulet, though it is very similar. Investigation will give you a rough idea of what it can do in hermetic terms and how to use it. But you might not be able to duplicate it.
And keep in mind, for what it's worth, it is designed to heal dragons 
And has a huge freaking RUBY!
That dragon needs a ruby if I ever saw one.
Bloody birds...
Sorry I've not been posting that much last week or so - busy period at work (including a visit to Switzerland), and in real life hobbies...
I also need to work out how to speak pidgin Hungarian to Isolde's father. If I can convince him to let me extend my parma to him, does he stop being affected by the Gift?
yes
True story. :mrgreen:
I suppose I should have checked my assumptions before I had Vibria act upon them.
But my understanding/assumption is that pretty much everyone knows that wizards and witches (or magi, to use the "proper" term) are real. Most people know or believe that magi tend to congregate in small groups in scattered groups (covenants).
And many people may have heard of the Order of Hermes, even if they don't know anything about it or what they "think" they know is wildly off-base...in much the same way that everyone's heard of Freemasons (for example) and may even know a Mason, but don't actually know anything about the organization.
And the higher up you go in the food chain (nobility and church structure), the more you know about the Order, especially in areas that overlap with whatever the muggle's standing is. For example, landed barons probably know about the Order's rule against interfering with mundanes and that they're forbidden to take court wizard positions, while bishops may know about the prohibition on dealing with the Infernal.
Is this more or less right?
Just to warn: I will take a leave of 2 weeks at the start of august. Worse, when I come back, I may have the joy to find accumulated work, or not, so I may be little present for the whole month.
And afterwards, we'll have end-of-the-year madness, but that's another story 
Arachne would look at vibria, pause a little
Improve your arts. The stronger you are, the stronger we are.
You could also see if you can create an item that could allow covenant guards to see in the night, or to illuminate the night. We are still very vulnerable to a nightly attack or intrusion, and such an item would go a long way towards strengthening our defenses.
Probably, yes.
Although, due to the scarcirty of hermetic magi (1200 in all of Mythic Europe, which is very little), this is probably only true in area relatively near covenants: There are very probably places where "wizard" means Hedge Witch.
Which is great, IMO, since it allows us to tell different kind of mundane stories.
According to Wikipedia (which is fairly accurate most of the time), the population in the High Middle Ages (1000-1250) peaks around 100 to 120 million.
So let us presume there are around 1500 magi, quoting the core ArM5 text. That's barely more than one-tenth of one percent. Then let us presume that there are around ten thousand people total that have interacted with magi or are somehow otherwise touched by the supernatural world (toss hedgies in that category). Twelve Thousand is only one percent of the population. Enough for very many tales and endless characters, yet still something very rare and mysterious.
Another reason I don't like the canon statistics, because when you include the fact that many magi hide the fact they are magi most of the time, and interacted with many of the same people, the per magi people who knowingly have interacted with magi are probably on the order or a dozen per magus. Which means 18,000 out of 100 million. Not really even enough to get legends started... but the math in AM has always had some holes in it.
Well, considering the fact that legends of wizards and witches exist in the real world and (at least as far as I know) they don't exist at all, I can see how legends would get started with even this small of a sample size.
That said, those numbers are strictly for Gifted members of the Order of Hermes. There are a lot more hedge wizards and folks with just one supernatural ability floating around that would contribute to all kinds of legends and superstition.
Witches most certainly do exist in the real world, though the forms found in fairy tales are certainly not any relations to anyone I've circled with. The Pew Forum in 2000 put our numbers at roughly 240,000 at that point in time. For reference that is 80 out of every 100,000 Americans, and yet people still shoot off with statements that we don't actually exist. Magi in Mythic Europe are supposed to be 1500 out of 100,000,000 or about 1/52 the percentage of witches in the US, but whole institutions are supposed to have opinions and discussions about the state of their souls and so forth?
My apologies, I did not mean to imply that wiccans, pagans, or other groups do not exist. What I meant to say is witches as portrayed in folklore and fairy tales do not exist in the real world (at least I've never seen a woman with a large wart on her nose and a wide brimmed hat flying around on her broomstick), and yet there are all kinds of legends, rumors and superstitions that accompany them. The same could be said for wizards of the Golden Dawn or other organizations.
And perhaps less controversially, there are scores of legends referring to vampires, werewolves, the fair folk and others that don't exist in the real world (at least in my opinion) and yet were believed by many people in the Middle Ages.
In a world where those things actually do exist, I would thing those legends and superstitions would be even greater. Even if it was your father's best friend's mother that saw a man flying across the sky on a carpet, it's still going to be real to you. And institutions like the Church and ruling elite would definitely have knowledge of them, if for no other reason than because they're eventually going to notice that castle over there with all of those strange folk.
A couple of interesting things on the Andorra Wiki to call your attention to
Fixer is (mostly) finished with Wirth of Flambeau, a character from a previous saga recreated and updated. Also, our old friend Jarkman has posted the original "Flambeau Apocrypha & the Knights of Seneca" article from Sub rosa in his personal blog. The link is here. I have also posted it in our wiki, with a link to it here. I wrote it a while ago, and some of the information may be iffy.
For what it's worth, I agree with PoB and Peregrine - the existence of actual supernatural practitioners, both within the Order and without (not to mention dragons, fae, etc.), would significantly increase the legends of supernatural activity over that seen in the 'real world' Middle Ages. The presence of magic would be accepted as fact by a large percentage of the populace.
Fwiw, I have a spreadsheet, part of which adds up the House populations from the three Houses of Hermes books (including Redcaps), which adds up to 1,241. I also have sheets which have every canon Covenant (and I have every Tribunal book except for the Levant one and the Andorra one which may or may not have come out yet), and every NPC magus named in almost all the Ars books I have (I keep forgetting I have Hermetic Projects for some reason), the PC magi fromThe Stonehenge Saga on RPOL, and the NPC magi from that and Canaries Are Dying (sagas I have run), and I still have room for 707 more magi before I hit the "official population."
There's also a nifty article (if you're a math/stats geek) in Sub Rosa #14, starting on p. 24, which traces the numerical growth (and decline) of the Order of Hermes from founding through about 1635.
I think I had a point when I started this post, but danged if I can find it now.