historical setting breakthroughs in hermetic magic

I'm cobbling together some ideas for a Sub Rosa submission on breakthroughs through the history of the order.

I want to be certain that I'm aware of things in the books already. Clearly there have been breakthroughs by Harrison (Legends), Fortunata (Legends), and Notatus (Core book).

Also although I don't recall the name off the top of my head one of Verditious' filli figured out casting tools.

There was a character from The broken covenant who took the Merinita mystery of awakening and unified it with general hermetic magic.

What else is there?

I find some of the pieces harder to put a finger on because Bonisagus's original work might include a lot of it. For example, was integrating some of the Columbae stuff done by Bonisagus or did that come later? I know integration of some of the Amazon stuff was done by Bonisagus as that is explicitly stated. Assuming we're looking at all of them, even if they are present and not really a part of history: I think there is someone from MoH who made a longevity ritual that doesn't cause sterility.

A few minor "expanding a House cult" examples, which may or may not count depending on exactly what you're looking for:

  • Tierent of Verditius worked out how to apply the Bind Magical Creatures mystery to faeries in the 12th century (pg 134 of HoH:MC). He could still be around.
  • Himinis the Mad invesnted the "Bind Curse" mystery (pg 131 HoH:MC).
  • Farrago of Bonisagus worked out a method of preventing faerie familiar cords from decaying in the late 1000s (pg 89 HoH:MC)

An idea I had is that perhaps, back in the early days of the Order, all Lab Activity (or most) required an "Extraordinary Results" roll unless you were working from Lab Text. That would explain many of the quirks of "Legacy Spells" and maybe you could have players discover an old-old grimoire full of adapted ArM3 Wizard's Grimoire spells that could never be duplicated with modern "safe" magic.

Is the core book one the Integration that unified the 4 branches of Vim magic into one Form?

And yeah, there's a couple of Integrations in MoH that aren't explicitly stated when they get shown to the Order at large - the non-sterility LR is one. There's another in there that I saw in passing that I don't recall, though. (It's in a callout box, if anyone cares to scan for it - done by a butcher? I forget. I think it has something to do with Muto Animal or Muto Corpus.)

EDIT - oh, and the Bjorner write-up (HoH:MC) discusses Bonisagus learning the first half of Sensory magic, but not getting around to integrating the OTHER half of sensory magic - which is why it's still a MC Initiation.

EDIT II - and I suppose there's the unstated date of partial Integration for the Elementalists and the Columbae (as mentioned above).

I quite like the idea someone posted previously that you can only write a tractus if you experiment, and score an "Extraordinary Result" on the Results table.

The corebook one is Aegis of the Hearth.

Anyway, the biggest two Breakthroughs were Magic Theory and Parma Magica, obviously.

Also, Certamen is Tremere's partial integration of Nightwalking (HMRE).

Admittedly, this is beyond the scope of the discussion, but please, no. Make it this way for summae to be written and it's much better.

It doesn't make sense for summae, those are fundamental collections of information. The tractatus idea has logic, as such texts are supposed to be specific advanced material. Perhaps one could remove the overall limit (1/5 of Art) on numbers of tractatus which individual magi are able to write, coupled with such a rule.

Erik, I'm running a game in the late 700s - we started in 783 and after 33 sessions are now at 801.

Here are my musings from a PM I sent someone else a while back:

I didn't make a lot of changes at first because I wanted to see just how much mythic europe would change with powerful wizards using the majority of the corebook. In hindsight I should have nerfed things right out of the gate. I did nerf:

i. longevity rituals (half as effective) - most of the founders did not live very long.
ii. removed pretty much all MuVi meta magic
iii. No Stat boosting rituals for CrCo, CrMe
iv. No hermetic books since vis is so plentiful - western Europe at this point had very few literate people and book making skills are hard to come by.
v. few spells are written up, so the PCs have to invent just about anything of interest
vi. Any time a player thinks up something that is too powerful, or uses some obnoxious part of the rule set, I've nerfed it. I think it's a good policy. This is the beginning of the Order, I was very upfront with them that I would be nerfing the rules as written, but was not completely sure where I'd start.

Here's what I think definitely needs to be nerfed, possibly in addition to the above:
i.) A flat +1 or +2 magnitude to all spell levels to reflect the lack of refinement of the magic of the order of hermes. These can be removed slowly over time with major (for a form) or minor discoveries (for a technique/form combination)
ii.) No, or at least very few Major Hermetic virtues for characters not part of a mystery cult. These virtues represent a deeper understanding of the arts that just shouldn't exist in the 700s and represent various half integrated major discoveries.
iii.) throw out a few things from the range/duration/target table that don't affect iconic "magic" spells in the game. (i.e.Room as a target, diameter duration, maybe even sight range)
iv.) Most of the the various Vim spells represent a minor discovery of some sort, especially Muto Vim.

One more: Theban League adapted the Hermetic Arts to work with Classical Greek.