House Rules that Should be Core

The author can spend up to a number of seasons equal to their teaching score on editing books they write, improving its quality by +2 each season.

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Hoo boy, that sounds insanely abusable.

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Taken to the extreme? Yes, but only if you think the time it takes to write it is free.
Would your character spend a decade on their lvl 17 summae, just so it teaches twice as fast? Maybe five years on a tractatus? Do they even have a respectable score for this? Would you spend an extra season on every book you write just to imitate a worse Good Teacher?

This was mainly there for elder magi who spent their last years perfecting their legacy, and sadly not being able to actually finish it.

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You should probably add further limits to the number of seasons spent “editing.” I’d probably go with in addition to being limited by your teaching score you can’t spend more seasons editing for benefit to quality than you spent writing. This way you can’t have Q28 Tractatus and whatnot.

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That gives a weird counterintuitive benefit to keeping your Latin (or other relevant language) as low as possible while still being able to write.

If you think that's an issue then you have one rule for Tractatus, can't do more than 1 season of editing. and one rule for Summae, the quality can't be improved more than the base quality, in essence allowing you to triple the base quality if you lower the level to the maximum benefit and spend extra time writing. The main thing is Tractatus should be lower quality than Summae in many instances, outside of extremely high level summae. Getting almost 30 xp with a tractatus is not good in my opinion and makes those tracatus too valuable.

But the way to efficiently use this is to have your apprentice write a tractatus (probably average 5-8 range) and then spend the last two seasons of that year improving it. Suddenly Q11+ Tractatii are not so rare. That would really distort things.

This is exposure xp that you don't get. I understand that every season sunk into this can yield potentially unlimited xp, simply by the fact that a book can be read by any number of magi (in theory), but thats just how books are anyway regadless if you can or cannot edit your work.

You need to be a special kind of selfless AND a special kind of specialist to sink many seasons into editing. Building from the assumption that high teaching scores are rare, these sets are rather small, and their cross section might as well be empty.

This is not a rule that you should look at and think "I can gain so much!" but rather "I can give so much... if I really want to... but probably nah. Ain't nobody got time for that!" I'm happy with this one because it changes basically nothing in the world but still gives options to characters with the right motivations and makes awesome books theoretically possible if/when a storyguide wants to tell a story around one, instead of the usual "Hey here's this ridiculus book that cannot be written according to the rules but that just makes it extra special am I right?".

Your apprentice needs a Teaching score of 3(unlikely), a Latin score of 5(highly unlikely), and an Art score of 5 to do that. I dont see this happening too much, but a fair point nonetheless.
Thank you!

Given the existence of these rules, high quality books on Teaching will also exist.

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What do you mean exposure that you don’t get? You get at least exposure every season. When writing it could be the topic, the language, if you instituted this I’d say teaching would be acceptable.

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This is new to me.

Or 4 with the hermetic speciality

Fine, I missread your post for 3 seasons instead of the 2 you suggested, so Teaching score of 2 it is, still not too likely. The speciality is a fair point again, but with scores that good your apprentice must be close to the gauntlet right?

Well getting latin 4 and MT 1 are the most important thing for the apprentice, since that's when they start being useful. Add to that the Arts Libs at 1, that's the first 4 years of the apprenticeship (using the average 15/yr), Teaching 2 is year 5. MT 2 can be reached before the end of year 6, meaning that the first tractatus could be produced year 6 or 7. From then on, they can start churning tracttii out, if they are not needed in the lab.

The model get taught in the spring, write an essay to show how well you understood the topic (summer), make it better (autumn) and even better (winter) makes a nice loop.

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But you could already do this with a com score of one higher and a good teacher. How often did this happen in your games?

So far, never. Not only do we not have that house rule, but we prefer to play with the gifted being rare, so rather than having a large selection of potential apprentices to choose from, who will have all these optimal this and that, you are stuck with what you find. Either you make do with this Int +1 apprentice or you can cross half of Europe to find another one who won't speak your language and might not be better anyway and you might annoy the local mages whose pond you are fishing in anyway.

Not a "true" House Rule per say, but my group uses an OR and Integration tracker. Our SG maintains two copies, one full and one redacted. It has proven extremely useful for a long running game since it allows changing and developing Hermetic Magic Theory.

The redacted version is the one that the PCs can see. While it mostly only contains the research that has been completed or that we are working on, it is also somewhere that we can post ideas to.

The full version list out a massive range of OR and Integration that are currently being worked on, groups working on it, current points each has earned (if some PC manages to steal the research), and when it will be completed (if ever). There are some completed research as well which has an extremely small distribution so that it is not known.

For each completed research there is a ranking in "Spread". These are: Total, Common, Uncommon, Rare, Very Rare, Isolated, and None. This determines how much of the Order knows the effect and how common books that would teach it are. Below is the breakdown for each level.

Spread - % Order Knows - % New Books - Notes
Total - 100% - 100% - A change to MT that effects and is known by the whole Order
Common - 75% - 60% - Widely spread and on the way to being the norm. Useful effects reach this in a long time. Very useful effects reach this in a moderate time. Niche effects rarely if ever reach this level.
Uncommon - 50% - 30% - Something niche that has been around for a long time, something useful that has been around a moderate time, or something very useful that has been around a short time.
Rare - 25% - 10% - Very useful things will reach this in a span of a few years to a decade. Useful things will reach this in a short time. Niche will reach this in a moderate time and might not become wider spread based on just how niche it is.
Very Rare - 10% - 1% - Something along the lines of a House Mystery in its spread. All discoveries start at this level once book(s) on them are released to the Order at large.
Isolated - 1% - 0% - Something only known by a single Covenant
None - 0% - 0% - This is only known by its inventor

A short time is a decade or two, a moderate time is two decades to a century, and a long time is greater than a century.

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By default the Gift is only one in every 10k people. That is only about 6,000 alive in all of Mystic Europe (plus any in the outer Tribunals). While the Order is only about 20% of that total, there is a lot of competition for Gifted individuals with the varies hedge traditions and also a large percentage of loss which are not found until they are to old to apprentice (if found at all).

If we are looking at just the people in the age range acceptable to be apprenticed, there is a total of only about 1,200 of them in Mystic Europe. This means that at any given time there is only roughly one child in the age range to become an apprentice for every Hermetic Magus. And even then, some of them will be older than what a Magus would want or younger than 5.

In an older thread I did the math on how far and wide you would have to search to find someone with the Gift, as well as how far you would have to search to find someone in the age range to become an apprentice. They were massive enough that if the Order did not form groups who systematically searched out those with the Gift and age range required, they would have already become larger in size than could be supported.

I will try to dig up the thread and link it in this post since it does a better job of the breakdown.

EDIT Found it, this is my first post on the subject though you might have to backtrack a touch to find all of it.

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I think that I remember that thread. In the game that I will end next week, the mages learned the Sight range In spell to detect gifted people and then they walked from the Rhine Valley all the way to the slave market in Prague and back, by a different route. They got lucky in a brewery in Bamberg so they found a Vengeful tween girl who set fire to the brewery where she worked to cover her escape...

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Here is the thread.

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