Hermetic Culture

I think that one of the problems with maintaining a unified culture for the Order is the speed of communication and the frequency of moving between locations.

Magi have letters and an international postal service, it's true but nothing as fast as modern telecommunications. They have libraries but no press. The average mage will find an agreeable covenant (or found one) and then spend the rest of his life there. He may visit other covenants for politics or to do research but he's basically a stay-at-home.

It's odd that the magi haven't come up with better means of communicating. But if they had that they might well break the 'medieval paradigm'.

They have better ways of communicating, they are just expensive investment wise (generally enchanted items) and not something that gets produced in volume. I mean I can see a single verditus specializing in communication mirrors, but honestly how many would you consider buying? Given that they require arcane connections to each other they have to be sold in pairs- you can't have a telephone network...

That, and made house Mercere nearly superfluous.
Which is why I'm always hesitant every time my troupe asks for magical communication - as they do almost every saga.

After almost a year of excessive use of home offices and video conferencing, you are not going to convince me that magical communication is an effective means to propagate and unify culture. Teleporting might be though.

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Considering that there have been cultures which were unified and propagated by the written word alone, I think anything above and beyond that would easily accomplish the job.

Tangential, at best, to the primary discussion.

This seems a misunderstanding to how penetration works. If I cast an Intellego sense spell on someone my penetration for casting that spell must beat the MR of those who are sensed by that sense for the magical sense to grant any information. Another example is a flaming sword spell, if I hit someone with that sword either the whole thing is stopped by MR or the spell penetrates so penetration, at least would be helpful in the instance of food altered by MuIm.

Now, that said, Illusions such as Disguise of the Transformed visage never have to beat the MR of a viewer (insert the canon species explanation for this) so why would altered visual species coming from a person they see not need to beat MR but the altered taste species coming off of food need to?

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I think it's the result of the food itself being enchanted- something that's actively magical usually needs to penetrate to come into contact with a magus.

Like if you turned rocks into food, they would need to penetrate or the magus couldn't eat them.

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Ok. Maybe so, but in that case Penetration is important and I point you to my first paragraph and the statement it was in response to that said [paraphrase] penetration does nothing on the person because the food is the Target.