I can completely understand why you see canon as being sloppy in this regard Lindenius. I’m sure we could all find examples where other magics should have caused radical changes to the game world but have not. If this particular example really bothers you, then change your game world. Personally, I rather like to come up with explanations as to why a game world has not changed even in the light of technology, or in Ars’ case, magic. And I think that is what others here are trying to provide, we get your point.
I think the Schism war should be a point in Lindenius’ favor. Conflict tends to increase the use of technology not suppress it. As has been already pointed out, effective communication is vital in war time, and this should lead to adopting more efficient means of sending messages across the Order. Unless there is someone or some group who is trying to surpress such an efficient system in 1220? A secret Mercere-Tremere pact anyone?
There is also the theory that the redcap network is part of a ritual to hold together the order.
The Redcaps must physically walk the roads, sail on the seas, to mystically bind the order together under Hermes's guidance, and the over reliance on Portals led to the disintegration of the schism war.
This doesn't have to be true, obviously, but Harco just has to believe it to be true.
That was my intention. And my original question was: how do you handle this in you sagas.
My own solution is: only people with the gift can handle high level effects without getting warping points. Even if the effect is specifically designed for the user.
Yes. Exactly this. And it will be irreversible. Because as soon as the "enemy" will have the option to travel fast – he will. And he will not be using hermes portals - he will use two or three leap of homcoming-artefacts. Or jump by an advanced ReCo ritual. So what if soldiers (or magi) warp 1 point (in this special case)?
I don't really see an issue with Mythic Europe, if Redcaps use ReCo items for fast travel.
AFAICS they would avoid The Leap of Homecoming, though, unless they travel to utterly stable, peaceful and trusted covenants. The Leap of Homecoming implies, that they end up where an Arcane Connection guides them. And where it leads to can be changed by the magi of the covenant traveled to, or by enemies: magi marching or waging Wizard's War, enraged faeries, even mundanes changing features of the countryside.
Being a human letter shoot shuttle is risky. And if really desired, the 'human' part is quite superfluous: just send a box with the stuff per ReTe from covenant to covenant and be done.
Seven-League-Stride looks far more like a Redcap-tool to me - and to my long-haul Redcap Potrimpinus. He can make his last decisions on whether and how to approach a covenant by the most recent informations gathered on his journey, and maybe after some inspection from many miles away. So he determines himself just where to appear after the last ReCo-leap, and whether to use that Arcane Connection he took at his last stay, or to jump on sight. And he needs not tell at the covenant just reached how he travelled, or when he left the previous covenant: you have to trust him that he worked in your best interest. Some magi will never know just when he used Seven-League-Stride, and when he walked, climbed or swum.
Cheers
EDIT: Yes, the occasional Finesse-botches add some quite cherished macho-element to the tales of his travels in the service of the Order.
@Lindenius: My answer to your question, in any event, is that in my sagas, the Order as of 1220, especially as regards the structure of the Houses, is growing conservative, calcified and is tottering on the edge of Winter, and just because a player thinks that the Order should have fully integrated a technology does not mean that they have, or that they will absent PC intervention. Before the Schism War, every Covenant that didn't expressly want privacy had a Mercere's Portal to their Tribunal's Mercer House (which meant that there was no demand for Redcaps with LoH), but nowadays that's broken down and the assumption is that a Redcap will do a large part of his route afoot.
There's nothing stopping a Redcap from taking a Leap of Homecoming item or a pair of seven-league boots, and quite a few Redcaps do have them, but it's not a part of the expected infrastructure and a league-striding Redcap is still expected to serve two seasons a year. And with that said, I'm going to reverse myself just a bit: many Redcaps who have Leap of Homecoming will still do four covenants a season and then bury their nose in a book for the rest. More conservative Merceres call that "shirking," but the Redcaps who do that see it as a perk of the job; it's up to the Redcap's covenant or Mercer House to police stuff like that, and a lot of them don't really care. Actually reforming House Mercere to assume a shuttle service would require House Mercere to have its act together as a whole, and it's pretty clear to me that House Mercere is not that organized except to the extent that they keep the records.
this is exactly where I am at on this question. I think the Order would need a lot more trust to have "postal boxes" and even then I would guess they would be placed a mile from the covenant proper to reduce the risk of a mail bomb.
I agree with your observation Lindenius regarding the opportunity to have faster/safer transport, but I won't go as far as seeing an inconsistency with the world as presented by RAW - most arguments brought by others members sounds solid (except the virtus one - see below).
I would see that more as an opportunity for a campaign which would like to focus on this change. If all the improvements magic is capable off would be implemented, it would be a very different settings and also won't leave as much opportunity for players to impact the world.
The only argument I found weak regarding what would prevent the general usage of items enchanted with different variants of teleporting spells is the virtus cost. If you consider that such items makes travel so much safer, it removes or at least decreases the need for many other effects (protection spell, disguise, invisibility and so on). So it would at least partially off-set some of the additional cost needed to build a TP-effect in an item.
Of course, there will always be the old generation of RedCap saying that these young ones don't know the cultural habits and are unable to blend in the crowd and the young ones eager to rush across the world and see so much more than their parens thanky to the high speed [strike]broadband[/strike] transport.
I could see this happening, but it probably wouldn't be led by the Verditius craft magi... I actually think it'd be led by a House like Jerbiton. Actually, I don't think Verditius actually play much part in equipping Redcaps as-is, especially with such high-level stuff; I generally assume Houses like Jerbiton, Tremere, Trianoma-branch Bonisagus, and Mercere itself cover the enchantments, because I think most (though certainly not all) Verditius would consider making equipment to help the glorified messengers do their job to be demeaning. Hubris and all that.
Reasons it hasn't yet happened:
Paranoia. As people have mentioned, the prospect of leaving ACs in public hands where a no-gooder can grab one and teleport onto your doorstep (possibly with an army) hasn't sounded very appealing to many since the Schism War. Faster communication is important for wartime and all, but there's a key difference between what you're suggesting and modern electronic communication: namely, while there are negative consequences for an enemy getting ahold of your radios, one of those consequences is not your enemies suddenly being able to roll tanks in one end of the radio connection and out the other (to use the modern equivalent).
Lack of convenience-based industrious personality trait among magi + other things to do. I view magi as pretty far removed from normal human-ness, and those closest to what becoming a magus has cost them (Jerbiton) usually associate with (and thus relate to) the less industrious among the mundane. Magi might like their messages getting to them faster, but how important is that (from their point of view)? "Alright, it's time to set my schedule for the season. Hey, wouldn't it be neat to revolutionize communication? I'd get paid a bunch of vis and it'd be really convenient if messages took minutes to get places instead of days or weeks. Alright, sounds good- Wait. It would probably be better not to put off diplomacy with the serpent living on the nearby mountain. It's too unpredictable a factor right now. Speaking of serpents, I stopped right in the middle of taking notes on the book on magical creatures. I feel quite close to gaining a new height of understanding in the nature of magic that would prove useful in future endeavors. And I got so caught up on that book when we got it that I still have an incomplete wand of flame creation. It's probably building bad habits in the long run if I leave unfinished projects lying around too long. I'll worry about revolutionizing communication later, then." Later keeps getting pushed further as new things happen, until it becomes never, you know the drill.
Status quo. Rather self-explanatory. House Mercere controls a lot of the Order's inner functions. They lose a lot of power and membership if the Redcap count can be reduced to 40 across the Order while getting the job done. Heck, if things really do start getting cheaper and quicker to make, it'll become cheaper and easier to just have your own messengers than to use Redcaps, and they'll pretty much die out. Every intelligent human in House Mercere will avoid the process even beginning: people benefiting from monopolies tend to want to maintain them.
Magic doesn't really work that way. "Any sufficiently advanced/reliable X is indistinguishable from Y" yada yada, but the fact is that there's not a lot of innovation inherently available to Hermetic Magic. Breakthroughs are hard and take forever for ones that will make a difference in this case. Reducing production time? Sorry, everything takes a season, period. Reducing costs? Have you tried Hermetic Breakthroughs before? Because I tell you what, most magi wouldn't be willing to spend 100+ years on something that might not work anyway in order to cheapen vis costs for everyone else (and they won't get to enjoy it long themselves, because holy getting older and more Warped than you noticed Batman!).
Still, all these explanations have plausible sidestep explanations. But it's enough to make the setting work well enough.
Given the threat of mail-bombs, etc. I'd expect the most likely approach would be to have a number of depots that are linked together, then have foot-couriers take mail from the depot to the individual covenants. Keeping the depots themselves in guarded locations with restricted access means less risk but still the benefits.
These are magi we're talking about, who as a rule don't need mail delivered faster than once a week. Those who want faster communication will typically source their own solutions.
Which is pretty much a description of the Mercere network as it stands.
Bit of a niggle, but they are called Merceris Magi. My Merceris magus thinks you are insulting the Redcaps when you call him a Redcap. They work for a living!
Explain how this scheme is to the benefit of the Redcaps? Because they're the ones who will lose most of their jobs. Done right, you'd need one person with one item to deliver messages across the entire Order of Hermes. Teleport in, drop off mail and newsletter, pick up mail and teleport back to the Domus Magnae. Rinse and repeat, hit every covenant every day and be done before lunch.
So the Redcaps lose. Who else loses? Well, when the Redcaps go out of business, they don't need enchanted objects or longevity rituals made. The magi who make these suddenly have more free time but no steady income making stuff for Redcaps. Canonically, Verditus magi agitate constantly for the right to sell MORE magic items - specifically to mundanes, but obviously demand by magi is insufficient to keep the Verditus magi working. Redcap work orders vanishing overnight would make every Verditus magus rather angry.
This has huge real world parallels. Replace "Redcap" with "Union" and you see why they would defend the status quo, and why many other magi invested in the status quo would object to the idea.
A better parallel in this case is probably the shipping industry when airlines first started appearing. Huge monopolies, massive push-back. Eventually they eased into a co-existence, but not before the airlines decimated large swathes of the strangle-hold shipping had at the time.
That's the thing, though. It's not one new industry replacing another. In this suggested case, it's the Redcaps who are eliminating the Redcaps.
Redcap1: "Hey, guys, I just bought this teleporting thing that renders all you other guys obsolete."
Redcap2: "So I'm out of a job then."
Redcap3: "Me too."
Redcap4: "Me too."
Redcap5: "Me too. Buddy, we LIKE traipsing all over Europe and getting paid for it. Who wants an honest job?"
And if anyone else tries this scheme, well, the Order of Hermes trusts Redcaps to carry messages, AND those Redcaps control the vis exchanges AND buy a lot of magical stuff. This is like a union auto worker buying robots to replace his buddies. Sure, it will be better for the company he works for, but not for all his co-workers or the people who sell stuff to his co-workers. The Redcaps are effectively a guild, and guilds are powerful in Mythic Europe. It's amazing that there are as many Mercere Portals as there are, as removing them would employ even more Redcaps.
That's only the case, of course, if the magi expect the Redcaps to do this all themselves. Which they aren't going to do (as you rightly point out!). There's just also been mention in this thread of mages being...upset? That the Redcaps are being even faster! At which point, why aren't the mages trying to make alternatives?
Well, they could. And it goes back to the shipping/airline thing. Though the real stumbling block there isn't a lack of capability, but a lack of will. Magi taking the time to obsolete the Redcaps (or at least do enough that the Redcaps are...encouraged to 'modernise') requires magi to actually take the time. And I think we all know how likely that is to happen!
And trust. Much of the Order of Hermes is built around NOT trusting each other. The non-Gifted Redcaps get trusted because they can't use most of the stuff magi want and have greater difficulty tampering with the mail, but have all the 'rights/protections' of Hermetic magi status. Minions of Magus Postus won't get that level of trust.
Each item with leap of homecoming or 7 league stride would have to be specifically made for each redcap or the casting of it would cause warping. That makes a magic item that you can't trade to other redcaps easily, or bequeath to your sons. That seems really tedious to make specific magic items for each redcap. If you make it a normal version of the spell, the warping wouldn't be worth doing it all the time. Occasionally maybe, but not all the time.
Seven League Stride is the only spell of the type that indicates you must roll Perception + Finesse, so for one more magnitude, go for the Leap of Homecoming if you absolutely have to get there in one piece.
But, I think the general consensus here, despite the OP is that these items are relatively uncommon for the Redcap. It's the Redcap's choice to acquire these, and not all Redcaps will value such an item over another item that might be more useful for their typical duties. We know that there are about 10 Redcaps in each Tribunal, from canon, so, it's not unreasonable to expect that 1 Redcap in each Tribunal has such a device. It's also possible that several items with these effects exist, were acquired or commissioned Redcaps who have long since retired or passed. They might even be in the hands of the filius of a Redcap, and are only used in dire emergencies, due to the way the device affects the user (warping).
