How much does a teacher charge?

Games Discussion Ars Magica
1

Mainly it should depend on lvl but also on teacher quality how much more xp you can get from him.
Any guidelines?
A teacher with lvl 10+2(pussiant) magic theory how much would charge?
And if he hade 3 communication+ 6 teaching+ 3 good teacher=+12 quality?
And if he want to learn magic theory he needs a lvl 13 teacher because of pussiant skill right?

How much does book costs? Based on quality and level also ...
How much to rent a book for a season?

Other question how much does superior weapons cost? Like +1/+2/+3 to attack and defense. Is it cheaper if you want plus only on attack or defense?

2

Depends what the magi are willing to pay. With a Source Quality of 15, that's a pretty good season. If he could get around 10 magi (and/or apprentices) with Magic Theory 9- together who would each pay him 1 pvf, he would make a lot in a season and they would get a good deal at the same time.

Magic Theory 11. Puissant doesn't count for learning/teaching.

There are some guidelines in Covenants.

There are some guidelines in the back of City and Guild.

3

Generally speaking, magi can get non-mystical books for a pittance. (ie, they just pay in silver, which, depending on one's Herbam and Terram scores, can literally grow on trees.) So really, unless it's a plot point, you can have as nice a non-magical library as you want. It might take a few years to put it together, though: the Order restricts paying for things with ritually-created magic-money to 2 pounds of Silver a year, per magi, per Tribunal. (The order does understand the basic concept of inflation.) So you need to spread your money out throughout Mythic Europe - which isn't THAT hard to do - all major cities do have booksellers - but it will take a bit of time.

Books of Arcane lore are paid for with vis, favors, or trade. A season of loan for a book that isn't on a wait list is usually a pawn or two of vis, as long as you're at the library that stores it, and don't take it out of the covenant. Taking it back with you for a few seasons costs a bit more. You may also pay with a season of service, such as in a covenant's Scriptorium - although that's more for Apprentices or VERY junior magi. Those rules are for larger covenents, such as the Great Library of Duremar - if you're a guest at a smaller Covenant, you can just use the book as anyone else, as covered by the Covenant's charter.

The exception are "the Roots", which represent the Hermetic version of "For Dummies" books for the Arts. They're the closest thing the Order has to mass publication, and are the one set of mystic tomes that you can pay money for - so functionally the Order doesn't charge anything for them. Instead, you just contact a Redcap, and the next time they're around they drop you off a set. Technically there's an undefined "nominal" fee, but it isn't stated what that actually is: I assume it's just a couple pounds of silver, or something.

Which sounds like a good deal - however, they aren't actually defined in terms of what they cover, what their quality is, or what their level is. According to the writeup, there are only 9 Official Roots, although there are 6 others which functionally cover the remaining arts. The reason they're undefined is so if any of the PC's wants to be an author, the Troupe can define which arts have the really good Roots, and which ones have an OK one - so that the budding author has a realistic goal to shoot for. The books themselves are pretty basic - no nice illustrations or bindings or embedded dragon's teeth or anything. They're basically the equivalent of a set of medieval paperbacks, and could very well be a copy someone made when they were an apprentice.

THAT BEING SAID - the wisdom of the forums (ie, us), generally consider a root to be level 5/Quality 15 book - anything less is too simple to write. The higher end is L6/Q21 - that's a pretty optimized (high com, Good Teacher, art at 40) archmagi at the end of their life, writing a primer.

Personally, if there aren't any budding authors in your Troupe, I'd recommend treating all the roots as Q6/L21. If there is one, treat the "official: roots as the 6/21's, and the unofficial ones as 5/15, and make sure the art the PC wants to write a book on is one of the 5/15's.

If you want a default "Recommended Official Root" list, I'd recommend the following, based on the popularity of the various Techniques and Forms (Note that I'm plagiarizing someone on the forums for this list, but I can't recall who):

Official
Creo
Intelligo
Muto
Perdo
Rego

Corpus
Ignem
Mentem
Vim

Unofficial

Animal
Aquam
Auram
Herbam
Imaginem
Terram

4

When borrowing a book, you may be restricted by Cow and Calf - the Order's version of Copyright protection. Basically, if a book is under C&C, you agree not to copy it without explicit permission from the owner. Some magi do this, while other's don't. (The justification is "depriving a magi of his power", from the Code of Hermes, I think.) However, having a Scriptorium in your covenant is pretty darned common - so it's more-or-less assumed that if you don't explicitly say so, any book you lend to a magi will be copied. Which for the most part isn't a big deal: they're a scholastic organization full of self-important crackpots who are obsessed with fame and academic glory, after all. Copying someone's book is considered a compliment.

Anyway - other books that a magi might reasonably get their hands on are the Branches - that's the next level up of Summae from the Roots. Unlike the Roots, the Branches are high-quality Encyclopedia Britannica, fully illustrated, leather bound tomes with copius notes. You don't Buy or rent these: they're given as gifts, or offered in trade.

If you assume that whoever wrote a good Root (L6/Q21) also wrote a Branch, but got the nice book quality bonuses (+3 - bindings, illustrations, and an edit pass by a theoretical Heroic Com 5/Good Teacher Mercurian) to them, you can roughly say that a Branch is anywhere from a L10/Q20, L15/Q15, or L20/Q10 book.

Branches are the things (IMO) you pay Covenant build points for, or get awarded by a parent covenant for doing service to the Order. They're the core basis for a Hermetic Library.

That being said, all those numbers could very well be too high for your Saga. Feel free to tone them down (or up, if that's your thing) as you like.

5

If a thirteenth century thatcher earns 2 pennies a day, and works 220-240 days/year (allowing for all the saint's days) then they earn about 480p or a mighty two pounds per year. Multiply this by a factor depending on how highly your teacher views himself or how precious his skills are to work out his annual rate. Now remember in Ars people's work is averaged out to two seasons per year, so divide annual wage by two to work out how much he'll charge a covenant. Not all of this need be in silver - room and board will cover a fair portion of this.

6

Thx for the answers.
callen: what is a pvf?
KevinSchultz: Scriptorium is a copy room? Equipped to speed up copying, how much?
So borrowing a book cost?
5/Quality 15 book cost a few silver?
L10/Q20, one vis?
L15/Q15, 2 vis?
L20/Q10 3 vis?
Well i dont know higher lvl or quality books should be much more rare and exponentially expensive.
Also magical skills books cost more right case need 5 times the xp.
darkwing: How do you cahange pennys to pounds?
How much vis you need to make 2 pounds silver?

7

I'm using the English standard 240 pennies to 1 pound (or 240 denarius to the Librum if you prefer Latin terms). This works well for games set in England, and can work as an abstraction in other places, even though the vast variety in precious metal content in history makes any idea of a standard tricky.

Creating silver with vis - the base for Terram in precious metals is defined on p152 of the rulebook as 1/10 of a cubic foot. A cubic foot is approx 30cmx30cmx30cm, or 27000 cubic cm. The density of pure silver is 10.5g/cc, so as magi can create pure silver you can make 283.5kg or approximately 600 pounds of silver per base amount. The base guideline for CrTe is 15 for create precious metal, so you get level 20 (base 15, +1 touch, duration instant as this is a vis powered Creo Ritual). One hour of ritual, 4 Vis and hey presto! Up to 600 pounds of silver, this is raw metal so you will need to then shape it into coins, jewellery or metalware. Making silver into coins without being an official licensed mint is considered counterfeiting in many areas at the time and is a serious crime, so try and be subtle.

8

Artes and Acadame gives a base price of 1/10 of a pound to attend a rural parish school and 1/5 pound to attend an urban parish school, per year, including 2 seasons of instruction. The rural school can teach up to Latin 2 (15 xp) in 3 years, presumedly with half the instruction points going into artes liberals and teaching- which suggests 30 xp over 6 seasons or a SQ of 5, urban parish schools have a limit of 3 in latin with a side of theology, which could be any SQ up to 15 (90 xp over 6 seasons). Of course latin and theology are pretty standard subjects, and these are the prices for classroom settings.
One of the major issues for something like magic theory is whether the teacher is a magus (who will expect to be paid in vis) or a failed apprentice (who will accept payment in silver)

9

To add to Darkwing's comment - Ars Magica uses the concept of the Mythic Pound (MP) - which is pretty much exactly what he says: 240 pennies to one pound of silver. It's a convenient monetary abstraction, and allows the game not to devolve into an exercise in medieval international banking.

You are correct: at its heart, a scriptorium is just a room with paper, ink, a writing desk, and good lighting. It's the minimum required for anyone with the Profession: Scribe ability to do their job without penalty.

HOWEVER - you can use the rules in Covenants to create a single-purpose Hermetic Lab which grants a skill bonus to the Scribe ability. This "lab" can, in fact, be your scriptorium - anyone with Magic Theory of...3(?) can do it (ie, they don't have to be Gifted). It takes a month or so to set up, and it's the medieval equivalent of Feng Shui: making sure the potted plant is in the corner, and the doors are aligned with the western sun, etc. Anyway, it adds anything from +1 to a +3 to the Scribe ability, which improves the Scribe's seasonal copying rate.

For the Roots (5/15 or 6/21), you could buy the entire set for a few silver - as mentioned above, "silver" is a pound of silver, and amounts to half a year's wage for most folks. (Fun fact: gold was so rare that very few governments bothered to use it for coinage during the middle ages.) If you just want to borrow a Root, you could probably do it for free - it's almost literally like asking a college graduate if you could borrow their freshman calculus book. The only reason these wouldn't be available to a magi is if there's something about the campaign you're in that prevents someone from reading them. (ie, you're off by yourself up in the outer reaches of Scandinavia, or something, where the Redcaps don't travel.)

For a book on the arts, you can use the Library at Duremar as a guide: while TECHNICALLY you can borrow anything from them for free (because they're a bunch of Bonisagus, and they're supposed to be all about the sharing), in reality you need to bribe the librarian with a pawn or 2 of vis. Beyond that, it's a roleplaying issue, and it depends on how popular the book in question is. Guardians of the Forest (the Rhine Tribunal) has more information on book-borrowing.

But to re-iterate: the Order is a scholastic organization - for the most part, they WANT people to read their books. The rules for Duremar are the extreme edge - you can actually borrow stuff from them for free, but you get put on the wait list. If you want it NOW, you need to bribe someone with the vis.

And also - the Branches (those 10/20, 15/15, or 20/10 summae), although useful, are relatively common - most established covenants (ie, anything but a Spring or early Summer covenant) will likely have a full set. And for the most part, magi will only be using a few of them at a time, if at all. And finally: magi aren't actually jerks: they're (boarderline Asberger's Syndrome) scholars who want to be acknowledged for their brilliance. As such, they're usually OK with loaning out the basic books (or else letting a travelling magi spend a season or two with them.)

In fact, "roaming around the Tribuanal for a few years, depending on the hospitality of various covenants" is the accepted norm for recently-gauntleted magi. It's the equivalent of a Gap Year for members of the Order, and most Covenants have spare labs for those folks. So walking into a Covenant and asking if you can stay there for a year or two and peruse their library is actually the NORMAL way of borrowing a book.

That being said, doing this does require that the travelling magi act in accordance to the Convent charter - and usually there's a clause in there about how much such folks have to contribute to the Covenant. And actually - yes, that might be a couple of pawns of vis. Usually, though, the default is "a season of service" each year, in which the magi has to spend some time doing some form of service for the folks who live there. That service might be "go out and harvest some vis for us" - so if you already have some vis available, you won't have to do that.

But usually it's something that doesn't actually take a full season - it's just something the other magi don't want to do - such as vis harvesting (which might take a week or two), or clearing out the redcaps from the local farie forest, etc. It's really an excuse for your magi to go on an adventure with some grogs, and get paid for it at the end.

10

As an example - it's actually totally fine to say to your troupe, "my magi is spending the next year at a neighboring covenant, reading one of their 15/15 Summa on Vis. He'll be back in the fall".

This does assume your troupe has set up that relationship with that other covenant, of course. This would be an excuse for you and some grogs to go out on an adventure that year that pays for that privilege with a season of service - say, spending a session wandering around in the woods and researching that covenant's theory on flower vis by trying to trap farie bees, or something.

Or if your troupe doesn't want to bother with that, yeah - just have them 'gift' the covenant with a few pawns of vis when you go there - or maybe a tractus or some lab notes on something your magi has created in the past. (Those are useful, as well.) If your own covenant has a scriptorium, you can simply bring a copy of one of your own books, and use it as trade in kind.

11

As these replies suggest - magi are, compared to the rest of the population, crazy insane rich. They're very much the one percenters of their society, and are roughly equivalent to minor barons, in terms of their wealth. The default assumption is that they live in their own castles, which is kind of like saying "I own and maintain my own personal army base, because frankly it was the nicest building around and I couldn't be bothered to magic up my own tower".

Mundane money is not, by default, supposed to be an issue. Your troupe can MAKE it an issue if that's the kind of stories they want to tell - freshly-gauntleted magi out making a name for themselves by founding their own covenant, for example. But getting your hands on even a moderate amount of cash is as easy as walking up to the local Terram specialist and saying "hey, can I have a giant block of silver? I'm setting up my own covenant, and here's my business plan to show that I'm not going to flood the local silver market. Here's 4 pawns of Vis, plus 1 for the consideration". (Most tribunals do ask that you have some sort of plan to avoid that.)

If you've got 4 magi in your covenant, that lets you spend 8 Mythic Pounds of silver each year, in each Tribunal. There are 13 Tribunals, so you could, in theory, spend over 100 MP each year across Europe. So buy your bulk goods locally, and send away to Transylvania and the Levant for those expensive mundane goods and spices (which you can ship through the Redcaps - they also do bulk transportation, I think), and you're good to go.

12

You cubed 30 correctly, but forgot to bring it back down to one-tenth that for precious metal. Sixty pounds, not 600.

Or, to be exact, here's the mass of a cubic foot of a pure form of each of the five classical base metals (the level 5 CrTe base guideline) to unnecessary precision:

Copper: 559.87
Iron: 491.09
Lead: 707.96
Mercury: 849.00
Tin: 455.67

And of the a tenth of a cubic foot of each of the two classical precious metals (the level 15 CrTe base guideline) to equally-unnecessary precision:

Gold: 120.68
Silver: 65.49

13

For the record, it says that the roots can be acquired for "a very small consideration" which does not necessarily mean silver instead of vis.

14

I've always read it to be Vis, just smaller amounts of it.
Or you can pay with a tractatus or 2? Or maybe a Season's assistance in the lab if your newfounded covenant is poor? No?

15

Sure, but that starts to get into the Vis/Silver transfers - which is listed as something like....10 MP/1 pawn of vis, or something like that? I forget. (20, maybe?)

Anyway - yes, it says "a small consideration" - which, in context, IMO, really does read like a small amount. So it's supposed to be defined by your Troupe - if vis is common, then yes, you can probably pay for the set with a few pawns of vis. If vis is rare, then you can probably pay with silver, or a single pawn, or something like that.

16

Last I checked, 12.

17

No, it doesn't get into silver to vis conversions, or vice versa. The money of the Order is Vis, and it always has been. Magi don't care about "silver" unless they are poor, so a small consideration is in the context of Vis. Even if a saga is stingy with vis, I'd still charge vis for Hermetic books, unless there's a really good reason not to charge vis.

That's not quite accurate. You can't borrow anything from the Library, it all stays there. You can use it and stay there, but it's not borrowing in the modern sense of a library having a book and letting you take it home. It's more like a reference text at the library that you cannot take out of the library. In addition, the requirement for using the Great Library (because you are also being boarded by Durenmar during the period) is a contribution to the Library. You can also provide a vis bribe, but the vis bribe, isn't described adequately, so calling it a pawn or two of vis is probably not accurate, and it's not what I would call a bribe. I'd probably make it 4+ pawns of vis (per season), to reflect Durenmar's dwindling vis AND also to more closely correlate it to the time requirement of making and submitting a book or scribing the backlog of texts.

18

As much as the market will bear?

19

Going back to the OP, and in response to the comments about silver, generally. A teacher of Magic Theory is likely a magus, and will have a high probability of refusing to take a teaching engagement for only silver. Even vis, unless it is a lot is something that isn't an automatic slam dunk.

Time is the real currency of the magus. Vis is just a bit more convenient to carry around, and is slighty easier to replace over time. But time spent teaching another is lost, and it takes a lot of vis to overcome lost time.

Some magus who has Magic Theory 10+2 (we can really forget about the Puissant, as it's not relevant to teaching or even learning as callen mentioned) is someone who has been around for a while and spent a lot of his own time improving Magic Theory. He has invested time, and he would like to reap the rewards of time that comes from that investment. Were I a magus teaching another magus Magic Theory, I would want your time for my time. Someone with a score of 10 can command at least a season of service in exchange for a season of teaching, if not more, where more is another season of service or even more vis. If it is a covenant member I would give discount rates to covenant members. Someone described as having Com 3 + Teaching 6 + Good Teacher 5 (was listed as 3, but 5 is the correct bonus for face to face teaching) is generating a SQ of 17 for classes larger than 2, or 23 in a single student scenario or 20 for two students! That kind of SQ is equal to two tractatus worth of learning in one season. You want a season of his time, it's easily worth two of yours to him. He has also, in addition to Magic Theory 10, invested a lot of time in teaching, warranting a premium on his time.

20

Keep in mind that a magus with magic theory 10 can likely extract something along the lines of 4-5 pawns of vis in a season normally, so it would have to be worth more than that to teach...