Help With Buying/Trading Guidelines

New player here, I'm just starting to read through the 5e rulebook and made a character with Book Learner. Naturally, I want to eventually buy or trade for some magic books, but I can't find anything in the core rulebook about what that would entail - prices, rarity, etc. Are there any guidelines in the rules for trading and buying books/vis/magic items/other equipment? If not, does anyone have any good guidelines and/or good prices of their own?

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The Covenants book has some information, and there is a tiny bit in HoH:TL. C&G has some mundane stuff.

These are my personal guidelines for approximately what to expect, though actual prices will vary.

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I think this is an area where the editors have been careful not to pin down the answers very much, I believe because they think this should be something that varies from campaign to campaign. And in some cases, the rates may change as the result of player actions, or different Tribunals could have different rules.

As Callen says, HoH:TL has some info: it includes note on what the Redcaps will do, and the "benefits for Tremere by seniority" lists can be useful too.

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I'll be sure to check out those sourcebooks, and I appreciate the guidelines. Thanks for the help!

Book economy is one of the most contentious elements in Ars Majica, I think. You need to carefully consider power levels, and player enjoyment.

I'm a big fan of heaps of books. A bunch of decent summae (Q21/L6, or maybe Q15/L12) so magi can get Techniques and form to level 5 or 6 in one season is important.

The problem with focusing on power levels and restricting books, is what do the magi do? If there's only a few good books, and little else to get good XP with, all the magi will read the good summaes, and end up with similar magical skills.

Also, if there's one or 2 great books (q15/L17 type stuff) in the focus area of one or two magi, the other magi might get a bit annoyed. By having a bunch of decent books, the magi without the great book in their area can get all their weak techniques and form to level 5, so they are much better at sponting, and closer to be able to take an apprentice.

After my justification, to price. I value a season of non-specialised magi labour at around 4 - 5 vis (which a Q15/L12 book is), going much higher for specialised work. A longevity potion created by a CrCo expert, could easily be 15+ vis, as well as the vis needed for the potion.

As books can be copied by scribes, decent books (Q15/12), I think 3 or 4 Vis is reasonable. Great books (Q12/L20) much pricier, and likely a prohibition on copying the great book.

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Book economy is continuously contentious because, under the Ars5 rules, good books are rich sources of XP that only require mundane materials and labor ("silver") to copy.

That implies that books on magic should be buyable for silver. But silver is easily obtained by magic, so lots and lots of XP can be easily obtained.

So, instead you do something that causes books on magic to be priced in vis, right? At that point it become hard to explain why the players' covenant can't set up a scriptorium as a means of converting silver into vis.

(The best solution I've been able to come up with is a combination of copying restrictions a la "Cow and Calf" on pretty much every book with proven quality, and nothing a PC writes being able to achieve a reputation for quality in anything short of decades. So if you want to buy a Q9+ tractatus instead of Q4, it'll cost you vis, but when you try to sell a PC-authored Q11 tractatus, all you'll be offered is silver on the assumption that it's Q4 . . . at least until your covenant is old and powerful enough that vis availability is no longer a real constraint anyway.)

Your scribe does need to know Magic Theory to do this, and that's knowledge that the Order doesn't want to share (not as much as the Parma Magica, but still). So we have taken the view that only people strongly bound to the covenant can learn this and copy books. So you can't just buy a scribe's time.

It's another way to limit book-copying tricks.

These figures seem plausible to me. One of the few conversion rates that are baked into the rule set is that a young mage competent in CrVi can make 4-5 pawns of Vis, and a senior specialist maybe 8-9. It seems reasonable for other seasonal activities done to order to have similar fees.

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The only people who's price structure is truly relevant to your game are those who have a matching play style, roughly same Magi, roughly same players, starting power level, and overall Saga arch. Changing just one of those when using someone else's numbers can easily result in a power explosion or stagnation that throws the whole Saga off the rails.

The reasons for this are that no two groups play at the same Vis availability, book availability, target growth rate, target power level, and planned conclusion event. Some groups want to tell a story, some want to fight epic battles, some want to "win". There is noting wrong with Callen's numbers and they would function fine in a Saga like his. However using them for example in my group's Saga would result doubling or tripling our annual Vis income instantly.

If you make something exceedingly expensive then your players could easily decide to use it as a base of their economy. To counter that you would have to go with the "it cost you tons to buy but is worth a pittance if you sell".

Most groups play with an "Artificial Rarity" for books and enchanted items. By the age of the Order, the number of Magi who have existed, and the average rate of lifetime writing/enchantment the numbers found in published examples are a fraction of what they should be. That is understandable from a publishing point since Atlas would have had to pay an author to write it up and the additional space it would take in printing.

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What my group did was posit a type of knowledge between "normal" knowledge, that can be passed on by book learnin', and mystical knowledge, where something must be experienced to be understood. The new knowledge type is arcane knowledge. Art and MT are arcane.

Arcane knowledge can be transmitted via reading, but it must also be written - not just authored - by someone with the Gift*. Also, arcane things tend to be mislaid easily. In our games, summae, especially high-level books, are relatively rare and valuable.

So our answer to the "summae economy" was to stomp on it until every deal is negotiated individually. Tractatus, OTOH, are almost completely abstracted. (We turned them into infrequent sources of xp.) In general, we tilted things much more toward vis experimentation. We did add curiosities and artifacts, though, that are like vis that can be experimented on multiple times, but not indefinitely.

*There are cautionary tales about magi who read a copied summa.

On rpg-economies: Group started Traveller game. Small time traders. I was GM. I read the rules, thought about the economy described vs. implied by the rules. Researched how trucking and shipping work IRL. Thought thought thought ... Read up on the freight industry. More thought. About a month in now, but I had a significantly altered description of the Traveller universe economy to describe to the players, and dozen custom tables to handle the player's business activities. We went half a dozen sessions, then decided to play Ars again instead.

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Yeah, changing the book rules to require non-mundane inputs (whether materials or labor) neatly solves the "silver for XP or silver for vis?" dilemma.