I was reading the spidersilk clothing thread, and an odd thought occurred to me when it was mentioned that feeding a Conjured animal long enough and you get a mundane corpse/poop
It is the "poop" question. Do Conjured animals arrive with a filled stomach and able to produce non-mundane poop soon after, or get conjured with an empty gastro intestinal tract and start mundanely hungry?
I would think up to the Story Guide. The SG could say yes, no, or up to the caster.
Whatever the SG decision there, I would think if the summoned animal makes anything meaningful such as venom, silk, wool, etc, if that which makes the useful substance was there at the time of conjuring, then at the end of the duration the useful substance would disappear.
Similar dynamic if one magicked a chicken to lay golden eggs. At the moment the duration ends, any golden eggs become normal eggs.
That's not strictly true - if you conjured a bunch of dead cows (an odd behavior, I admit), and cast an appropriate ReAn spell to generate bees from the cows (see the guidelines on A&A p30), the bees are perfectly non-magical and will remain after the effect that conjured the bovines has expired. Likewise, if conjured food lasts long enough after consumed, the consumer retains the benefit from the food. (Otherwise, it would be a fabulous if horrible method of murder, as all of material suddenly vanished from the consumer's body.)
I believe if the conjured animal generated the material, it remains. If it is merely part of the animal (such as a chunk of meat), it disappears unless it has already changed in nature from digestion.
As for the golden goose, conjuring a bird capable of laying golden eggs would be a level 50+ spell and therefore a ritual no matter the duration, and a terrible waste of vis compared to simply using a more common ritual creo terram effect.
Ye ye ye, I was thinking on that spidersilk clothes post as well, since the maga Im making has a minor magical focus on silks and is a verditius textile wizard. Conjured silk would just disappear, so I plan on summoning spiders that produce lots o' silk. As for whether the spiders are hungry or not, that is a great question. I do agree that it probably depends on how the spell is designed. If you wanted a spider to bite and poison something, then it being hungry is kinda useless. As long as you had like moon duration, the spider and venom will have done their job already and the disappearance wont matter. For me though, needing the spider to have an empty stomach and empty silk-glands is actually kinda important. If it has silk already in it, then I need to pull all that out before I can use the spider for its purpose, thus, I need to be able to conjure the spider without any silk in it. It takes extra time for the spider to be useful, but that is perfectly fine because its needed for its secondary effects. A herd of bovines conjured to provide meat in a place where you normally can't get any would need to be hungry so that they may feed and start the process of leaving a corpse immediately.
That's not strictly true - if you conjured a bunch of dead cows (an odd behavior, I admit), and cast an appropriate ReAn spell to generate bees from the cows (see the guidelines on A&A p30), the bees are perfectly non-magical and will remain after the effect that conjured the bovines has expired. Likewise, if conjured food lasts long enough after consumed, the consumer retains the benefit from the food. (Otherwise, it would be a fabulous if horrible method of murder, as all of material suddenly vanished from the consumer's body.)
For the above here, IDK bout bees (The spontaneous generation of bees from bovines), but in ArM5, on page 121, the Creo Aquam guidelines do say specifically that "water created temporarily quenches thirst but provides no lasting benefit to the drinker..." and on page 77 it says "Conversely, magically created food only nourishes for as long as the duration lasts, and someone who has eaten it becomes extremely hungry when the duration expires." Thus, it doesn't matter how long the magically created food lasts, it'll just disappear after the duration ends. A person fed on magically created food for a year or three might just disappear in a puff of smoke as the spells end, nothing but old bones left behind. Death by false-satiation.
On a total sidenote, the golden goose may not actually be impossible, since in the Realms of Power: Magic book there is a sidebar about the nature of atoms and matter on page 133. Atoms make up everything, and the forms they come in are elemental (fire, water, earth, air) with different natures (hot, dry, moist, cold) and sizes and shapes and such. A goose that eats matter high in earth (such as from a tough, stalky plant if I understand it right?) should be able to create golden eggshells from what it eats. Alchemy is a thing (I dont have all the books so IDK where it is mentioned... ancient magics maybe?) from what I hear, and doesn't(?) in fact require vis to be permanent but isn't hermetic magic, so I'd allow you to summon a bird who does indeed pull the earth atoms out of its food and create golden eggshells as a purely mundane byproduct. The question then would be do you yourself need to know alchemy, have magic lore, research a breakthrough, experiment with the spell, etc., or would you just give up and use CrTe?
If Im misunderstanding the above side thing, well, I don't apologize, because I didn't do anything wrong, but I'd love to hear thoughts on it anyways!
The alchemy rules are in Art & Academe, in the chapter on Experimental Philosophy. However, they do not allow for transmuting one type of atoms into another -- for that you'd need Mythic Alchemy, which is in Hedge Magic Revised. And transmutation like that does require vis -- it's essentially an alchemy Ritual. But either alchemy isn't intended to affect living things; you could transmute the bird's eggs into gold, but not the bird itself so that it would lay golden eggs.
This is a contentious issue.
What you mentioned is an obvious end point, however, if you rule this, what about the mid point? If someone has eaten 5 kilograms of false food, what happens? What muscles atrophy? Where does the matter come from.
What about the food they metabolised? Does some of their poo disappear? What about a plant that used the poo as fertiliser? Does it shrink? Someone who ate the plant affected by the poo fertiliser; What part of them disappears?
There's a level of magical backtracking that doesn't hold with the setting. I consider it much better to say that if a duration is long enough, the food is metabolised, and nothing else happen.
I appreciate this means if someone creates food with a moon duration, they can feed people, however, that does require a relatively strong spell. Level 30 at a rough calculation, and that's a sheep carcass, not ready to eat food. If someone can spont a level 30 CrAn spell, good luck to them. If someone spends a season to make a CrAn spell to create a sheep carcass of moon duration, again, good luck to them. I'd just get the mundanes to be shepherds, myself......
Or just use a ritual. Id say its pretty simple, feed someone for like 3 months on magical food, give them a level of fatigue or something after the spell ends. Feed them for 6 months, give them a long-term fatigue and some light wounds maybe. Feed them for 9 months? Then you start getting into medium and heavier wound territories, a large portion of your body weight just disappearing in a moment at this point would leave you with some gnarly wounds.
There is a cost associated with the creation of permanent things, and that is either time, or vis. I dont think there's that much wrong with that.
Note that food created with (non-Ritual) Creo Herbam is canonically not nourishing (ArM5 p.136).
The same holds for water created with (non-Ritual) Creo Aquam, which "quenches thirst but provides no lasting benefit to the drinker" (ArM5 p.121) - I take that to mean that the drinker will eventually become dehydrated despite not feeling thirst, possibly well before the magic expires. It would seem strange if the same did not hold for Animal food.
I think that assuming all magically created food and drink is simply not nourishing from the start, despite feeling satiating while the magic lasts, cleanly solves the "Theseus' ship" issue of what happens after feeding a person with magical food for a month.