I realized some funny things that I have no use for in my game, so I’m going to share here to amuse the Tytalus magi in the audience (hope I got the math right).
Fleas weigh 0.03g. An Individual in the form of Animal is ~340 lbs. With a level 5 ReAn spell your apprentice can command the Group of 51,407,093 fleas that includes the ones on him (or maybe on your familiar); so don’t give him too much reason to get back at you. As vermin fleas also spontaneous generate in Mythic Europe – although I don’t think that Pliny tells us how – so you can create that 51 million with a non-ritual ReAn20 spell and then inflict them on that Tremere archmaga who annoyed you and you only need a spont ReAn 5; you didn’t magically create them just prompted spontaneous generation so her Parma won’t help.
Fleas not your style? A Group of flies is ~65 million. A Group of bees is ~13,600,000. Pliny does mention how to spontaneously generate those, so fill the countryside with bees and make those fools who laughed at your Minor Magical Focus in bugs pay! Only losers do plagues of frogs.
Wasps weigh ~0.5g, so a Group is ~3 million. You probably don’t have to command them to sting whoever you don’t like, since they’ll do that all on their own… may want to use Sight range, though.
Yea ReAn generating any vermin can get out of hand quickly. My covenant has enchanted items for doing it for food generation, which can easily overload our ability to process it (they are in my covenant items thread). With Group or +1 Size (depending on table) you are generating over one and a half tons per casting/activation. For food that is over 1.5 tons of eels, shellfish (crab, crayfish, lobster, prawns and shrimp), mollusk (clams, mussels, oysters and scallops, as well as various types of octopus, snail and squid), or other foods per casting/activation.
Our setup has three groups of ten pools setup for filling at once. That is over 45 tons of food that can be generated. Processing and storage are the major limits, if every adult in the Covenant was helping you are looking at having to process 160~220 lbs each and produce somewhere between 350 and 400 barrel fulls.
I think your math is out by about a factor of ten.
A pound is ~453g; so fleas would be (453 g/lb x 340 lb) / 0.03 g per flea = 5134000 fleas. Still -- that is a very large number of fleas to plague someone with; well done!
[Edit:] I missed the bit about this being for a Group of fleas! The original math is spot on; sorry! [/Edit]
Yea, the control spell is really just to move them into his sanctum. After that just let them do what comes naturally. Actually you don’t even have to command them, they are going to make a massive area have issues.
51M is enough to have 1,180 per square foot in an acre or 1.85 per square foot in a square mile. Anything around 100 per square foot is most likely unlivable (so around 12 acres) and even with lower density it would be annoying. And of course they won’t have an even distribution, instead concentrating on places they can feed easily like bedding. A single casting would make even a large town a really bad place.
Around 13 million bees with a 20th level ReAn spell does match my calculation notes for the bee-creation spell I have in my files.
But the trick, as specified in Art & Academe (p.30) is that for every one thousand specific individual vermin created, no matter how small, you need a base Individual of the matter they're spontaneously generated from. So to generate 13 million bees in one casting, you'll need about four and a half million of pounds of beef. If you've just got one dead cow to hand, you'll only get 1,000 or so bees per casting.
Good catch SEE, that slipped my mind even though it is why we designed our production the way we did.
You can use a non-ritual Creo spell to create the matter they are generated from. Also some types of vermin are not created from animal matter. For the water based ones, they are created by water environments with a specific bottom, with thick mud or sand being the most common. For those calculating the amount of matter needed, it is the mud or sand rather than the water.
For many types of insects, it is just rotting meat or offal.
For generation of the seafood vermin, you build pools that can hold a base individual of water (strongly recommend magically creating the water) on top of several base individuals of dirt (mud) or sand. You just have to calculate how much of the material you need or just fudge it at five to eight cubic paces (when we did the math, the eels were just under five while the prawns and clams were 7.xx).