Yes indeed it sure is! 
Yeah. And a good idea for any SG/ST is to have one or two "backup" plots, of the vauger type that can be brought in to suit as many actions as possible by the PCs.
Oh but its not a bad thing to have Castle X or Y finished, or more correctly, mostly outlined, possibly based on a few different parts combined, meaning you have an "insta-castle" halfready for play IF they just happen to run off to some castle somewhere.
Maybe, but he can only teach one person at a time, and from a game mechanics perspective he is no better than anyone else at writing a tractatus.
It seems you would need to pay him a lot of vis or equivalent for each season he spends teaching other people. Unless you pay him a ludicrous amount he'd be much better off working on a lab project. And you'd be better off using the vis to study yourself.
I think his real value will be in making lab projects quicker, and in casting effects (like Aegis and Wards) for others with a very high penetration.
Except for the minor detail that he could write a much higher level one than anyone else.
And using a cow-and-calf agreement, he could sell rights to copy that one text for massive amounts.
Tractatus don't have levels.
Did you say Tractatus? Summae - I'm sure we were talking about summae.
(I was anyway. NM.) 
Ah, well this would be our disconnect.
I don't think this would be a train wreck. I think this is an unexpected event. I don't think this would ruin a campaign, I think it would merely change it.
I also don't believe that my hard work as an SG counts for all that much. In a good saga, everyone's putting in hardwork and it belongs to all of us.
I also believe that I have had campaigns get destroyed, and invigorated, by far smaller events. This doesn't seem like that big a deal to me.
Call me a cynic, but I'm rather sceptical that this roll was genuine. If real, it is almost certainly the greatest roll in the history of all Ars Magica, worldwide! (Rolling nine 1s is a one-in-a-billion chance; consider that the number of stress dice rolled in the history of Ars Magica must be much less than one billion.)
I have personally witnessed a "positive energy die" (a crooked d10) being used in an Ars game, and a brief internet search sadly reveals many tales of players using crooked or loaded dice in other games.
Thus, in the absence of any knowledge whatsoever about you and your players, I would simply observe that it is statistically far more likely that your player was using a crooked die (or otherwise cheating) than a roll of nine 1s. Did you personally witness the roll? Does the player use a different die for special occasions? Have you personally used or tested the die in question?
I apologise if I have falsely impugned your player, but these are questions that I, as an SG, would be asking!
Quite a huge roll, but I have seen rolls in the hundreds as well. Not as high for sure, but 3 or 4 times a massive roll has caused quite some fun IMS.
Cheers,
Xavi
Assuming cheating because its statistically uncommon...
Ok, remind me never ever to play with you.
I once rolled 18 6s in a row with a D6 in a game ( figure out the odds of that! ), no "funny" die, no cheatrolling(which i CAN do even if im not good at it and never use it in any games) no nothing except severe "luck of the die". My brother grumbled a lot about it and about how he was right in the first place about not playing luck games against me(for some reason, against him i always have good luck)...
But it still happened, and you making a "it cant be real" assumption is rather "low".
Fact is that extreme odds happens every day. Extreme odds means extremely unusual, unlikely to get, it does not mean that it does NOT happen at all. It does. Otherwise the odds would be zero, and it isnt.
Don't take this personally, but I don't believe you. The odds of rolling 18 6s in a row with a d6 are slightly less than 100 trillion to one. You are talking about not only the luckiest sequence of dice rolls in gaming history, but in all of human history. You could give every human being on the planet a d6, and give each of them a thousand tries to roll 18 6s in a row, and it would be unlikely to happen (about a 7% chance). If you really did manage this (I concede that it's statisically possible) then I congratulate you on this truly extraordinary feat!
However, IMHO it is far more likely that you did this with a crooked die (either knowingly or unknowingly) or that you are taking this sequence of 6s selectively from a larger sequence of rolls, or that there is some other "massaging" of the facts or some other explanation.
I've just rolled 6, 4, 1, 4, 4, 4, 6, 5, 1, 5, 4, 2, 1, 5, 6, 5, 5, 1, and 6 which is precisely 6 times less likely as the Hound's sequence. Will anyone believe me? 
If you read recent threads, there was someone discussing another roll with lots of 1's. I remember on the old berkeley lists of some rolls of lots of 1's and also 9 0's out of 18 on a botch roll (high faerie aura and a lot of pawns of vis) which is also off (50% a single number).
These things happen. My offline saga has only had a single botch since it started and that was a lab experimentation roll. Thankfully it was just a single point of warping.
Weird dice happened and accept it. 18 6's in a roll and might happen in course of die that that is used for several hundred or thousand rolls over course of a campaign.
Hardly likely.
How many times through your life have you rolled a die?
Even if i just counted the number of rolls while playing Axis & Allies, i have already rolled probably many many thousands times (rolling 5-25 dice per roll makes it go real quickly).
If i count just for Battletech or B5Wars, there´s another few thousands each.
Then, getting over to RPGs, thats alot of rolls, probably many thousands as well...
And all the above still doesnt include basic "family board games" played a whole lot while younger. I wonder how many times i have played Yahtzee? Lets say 40 dice rolls per game with an average of 4 die, and level off to 150 die rolls per game... My dad likes the game so i played it quite a few times, 500 times maybe? That would add a nifty 75000 dierolls just from ONE game.
Oh yeah, shall we include simulated dice rolls from computer games? Well of course...
So at age 33, how many times have i "rolled a die"?
Without computer simulated die rolls, probably many tens of thousands. Probably several HUNDRED thousands.
With computer rolls added, well i have had maybe 60 chars in Diablo 2 above level 80, just that one game will give you one insane amount of RNGs(random number generations)...
Im quite possibly already counting my "die roll total" in the millions.
If you start counting seriuosly, how many thousands have you rolled?
And of course, die-games exists all over the world, literally, so your wisecrack about giving every person on the planet a D6 and let them roll a thousand times, isnt funny, just a very LOW estimation, as the overall number of RNGs for a person living today is vastly higher.
I said, no cheat, no nothing. 18 straight 6s when it was my turn in a game, and since only a 6 would allow me to reroll and keep going, i couldnt have kept rolling on the same turn without getting those 6s.
The same die was used all the time by all 3 players, and did not give any surprising results otherwise, not for me, not for them.
And you actually dare to accuse me of cheating? Well im actually not surprised, which is exactly why i said i would never want to play with you. 1 ) Because your type kills games, 2 ) Because you would rather assume cheating than plain old luck without any reason for doing so, and 3 ) Because those who whine most about people cheating are usually those cheating most themself, which is why they think everyone else is also doing it.
You say that and then insult me? Oh wow... A truly upstanding and brave citizen indeed.
No!
Exactly. Sometimes for good, sometimes for bad.
I once lost a game of Axis&allies for the sole reason of rolling almost no "1"s so every time attacking with alot of infantry i dont think i got a single hit from attacking infantry that whole game, which btw was a very VERY short game, as i played against a friend of mine who is insanely hard to beat at the game even with average rolls.
I was in an Axis and allies Tournement at Origins once. I won the first game with a hard fought battle and then came round 2. I rolled not a single number die below 4 all game. It was a quick and painful death. Only reason it wasn't over quicker was the time it took for opponent to maneuver his units at only a few countries per turn for victory conditions.
Worst die roll I've seen was on a West End: Star Wars Game.
One of the players had been injured in a shotout, and another player tried to cure him
D6
5 dice=1,1,1,1,1
Character worsens to Medium Wound (or wathever it was called)
Medic Retries (1 dice less)
4 Dice=1,1,1,1
Character worses to heavy wound (or wathever it was called)
3 Dice=1,1,1
Poor character worsens, and the medic gives up
Aaprt from that everything else palises in comparison, that's 12 straight 1's, in a game where the 1's where the worst possible result
All of us who play the game have plenty of stories of weird dice rolls. I have a bi weekly D&D game where the GM managed to get about 20's about 40% of the time when attacking my character vs the usual 5%. Considering he often needs 20's to hit, it is harsh (esp since I am the damage sink, My character goes down, the rest pretty much run).
I have sets of 6 sided dice that when I roll, I can't seem to get over a 3 but when my opponents pick them up, it is straight 5 and 6s. Sometimes the lucky happens and luck is perverse. Just remember that odds apply only to a huge statistical set and that every time you roll, there is 10% chance of a specific number coming up that has no relevance to what the last roll was. The dice don't think 'I rolled a 1 so now I need to roll a 5 to balance the curve."
ladyphoenix says
I'm completely agree with you, unprobables dice rolls are not impossibles dice rolls, and probability is not "what must happen".
Btw, I don't understand all these problems with a dice roll! If wasn't me the writer of this post, I would simply think "what a lucky guy!" reading it. IMHO
Vasili
one time while playing RISK I rolled tripple "6" on three consecutive attack rolls. Strange dice happen, and in the case of the roll that started this thread, the roll was oserved by the SG (and may have even been using his dice).
I understand this position, and I respect it, but I do not agree with it. Or, more correctly, I consider it a "cinematic" position, where henchmen always seem to shoot to miss, and all problems will end with the hero and villain facing off in Act V. It's formulaic, it's mythic, it's epic, and that's great fun; but the flip side is that the players all recognize that they're playing heroes that don't have to fear flukes, so they can safely beat up on lessers because, hey, the lesser will never get lucky enough to kill them. I tend to find I prefer different genres for cinematic play than for non-cinematic play. And, for me, part of the point of Ars Magica is that it's placed in a world grounded in reality, but with mythic elements. I tend to emphasize the non-cinematic portion of that. (I got my fill of epic fantasy with all the pre-AM sword & sorcery games.)
I prefer a style of gaming where a situation's danger is not so directly tied to the "importance" of the characters to the plot. If characters want to avoid the potential of dying in fluke events, they can lead a cautious life. (My current character, a Bonisagus, does this, though not to an extreme.)
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I can certainly understand attachment to characters, but if one enjoys character creation (and I do), and especially if one is the sort who creates characters even when there's no campaign immediately available to use them (I do that, too), the loss of a character shouldn't be devastating. (My tastes in fiction that is willing to kill main characters suggests that this may be a distinct philosophical point in my head from the cinematic/faux-realistic argument.)