I was playing around making an NPC mage who uses standard Hermetic Magic to improve crop yields.
I ended up asking what would happens if he created a Herbam version of “Purification of the Festering Wounds” CrCo25 that gives +9 to stamina rolls to recover from injury and disease, modified to affect the grass in an enclosed (~Room sized * 10 stacked stone walls with stile) goat paddock.
Do plants depend on Stamina rolls to get recover from injury? Does grass growing out after being cropped count as recovering from injury?
It tentatively sounds like I have found a way to make a very lush goat paddock without using Vis. Which sounds suspicious. What have I overlooked?
The most relevant guidelines I found are:
CrHe 5: ward a plant against mundane plant disease.
With Ring & Circle for target & duration, and touch for range, that brings the spell to level 20.
CrHe : Ensure that plant grows well for the duration of the spell (which is used as the base for The Bountiful Harvest).
So you could go with:
CrHe 5 (the ward against diseases), +1 touch, + 2 Circle & Ring, +1 additional effect (to add the effect of the CrHe 1), for a final 25.
The main side effect you need to be aware is that extend use (like for a whole growth cycle) will trigger warping. So I don’t know how often you want to eat such food, it could have some interesting side effects.
Grass wouldn’t live long enough to accumulate sufficient Warping. However, unless they’re animated and statted up as creatures grass wouldn’t have a Stamina stat, and hence would not be making Recovery rolls per se. There’s the item damage rules in City & Guild but they don’t really cover items that can get plant diseases or heal from damage; it’s such an edge case that you’d have to come up with house rules for it I think. They’ll need a different Guideline to start with.
The flaw to this exploit is that (1) it’ll need to be a Ritual/enchantment for long duration (costing vis), or (2) the wizard will need to be around to recast it every Moon or so, or (3) the wizard will try Circle/Ring shenanigans and get upset when it doesn’t last for eternity because Circle/Ring is supposed to be fragile.
It looks like the player is going with Room target and if it’s a no-vis exploit then you’re dealing with #2. Keep track of the days recasting as a distraction and have an occasional grass consequence happen when they’re away for a Story. You can prorate the cost savings to the covenant by the % of the year it’s in effect. They’ll probably be saving a few Mythic Pounds per year in exchange for the time commitment… eventually they’ll make an enchanted item or something out of annoyance. Think of it as a very slow-burn minor Story.
Unless the region is a long journey from the Covenant this seems like something that wouldn’t ding distraction days - I just walked a (rough) square of my yard and it took all of five rounds - so, maybe five minutes of your time if you were spending some of that shooing the goats out and preparing yourself. It’s even less if it’s a Room target instead of a Circle. This is “A chore I do on my lunchbreak once a month” territory.
Although I guess if you’re prorating that, no one needs to know that.
Grass does not really ‘recover’ from injury the way an actual creature would. Grass does continue to grow, but it’s closer to replacing cut fingernails, which a recovery roll wouldn’t help with. You’re really looking at the Base 1 ‘ensure a plant grows healthy’. So what you need to compare with is the Bountiful Feast spell.
Which really just refines this question to ‘can I cast Bountiful Feast without vis’. The answer is yes, dependent on how your saga handles avoiding vis use by things like Circle/Ring. If you take the Bountiful Feast, and design a formulaic spell that effectively covers a modest paddock, and lasts a moon, and cast it once a month, then yes, you’ve done so.
Assuming your sheep are not paddocked right next to the lab, then you have a healthy meadow for grazing in return for your magus taking a nice long walk and a bit of enforced casual spellcasting once a month. A lot of players point out how silly it is for a magus to invent a once-a-year Boundary Ritual when they could instead cast 3-5 moon/Room spells every month, and it can be kind of silly. But if I was a grumpy old magus trying to discover the secrets of the universe, I would absolutely spend a season to get rid of that damned monthly ‘grass tax’ time.
I would honestly assume it’s the other way around - The Bountiful Feast feels like some pre-Hermetic, possibly even pre-literacy pagan fertility rite, with the lightest adaption to Hermetic formulas. The Hermetic work is to invent a fully secular, much more efficient moon/room/circle spells. Which you might not get around to for a while, if there are enough people who know The Bountiful Feast that it’s “redundant”, and “would mean you’d have to go cast a spell on the goat field so often.”
In my saga we enchanted a bunch of marker stones, which all use the Base 1 “Grow Well”. They are in my Covenant collection, in the “Plants, Crops & Food Production” section. Don’t forget that Base 1 gets a “free” +3 to Size.
A couple for greenhouses. T/S/S. Can affect up to 1M cubic paces of plants, which is thousands of trees. The reason we used Structure and not Room is because our green houses are multi room structures, with sections for different things. If you only needed Room, the level would drop and it would still affect up to 100K cubic paces of plants which is still crazy overkill.
For fields, you can’t really get away with using Room or Structure. So you have to use Group, but that isn’t all bad because you still have the free +3 Size. That means that the minimum without any addition is still 10K cubic paces. That is sufficient for roughly 5,000 grape vines, 3 acres of wheat (and more for grass), or ~10-100 trees (large to medium). We enchanted three with the default (grapes and community garden) and two with an additional +1 Size (orchard and wheat field).
They are actually fairly low level, 14 or 19. Not much Vis (2 pawns each) and a decent Herbam Magi can crank one out in a season without a lab text.
EDIT: A spell to do it rather than an enchantment would be
The Shepard’s Lush Fields
CrHe, Level 15, T/Moon/G, Base 1 “Grow Well”, RDT 6, (+3 Size free)
It would effect up to 10k cubic paces of plants, in a defined group such as the plants in a clearly marked pen. That is acres of grass. If the grass was uniformly 1 pace high and so dense there was no gaps, you are looking at over 2 acres. If it is only a foot high that is over 6 acres densely packed. That would be hay fields though, not actual grazing pens with animals eating it. Grazing isn’t densely packed and shorter, so even more acres.