Magi Lifespans?

Games Discussion Ars Magica
33

Putting together the various other archetypes which people have suggested:

Xavi suggested the magical bloodline archetype: Having a student to pass on what you know. Similarly, humboldtscott suggested the passing on the legacy archetype. Both of these would probably use the same growth rates as my Wulfenbach: the apprentice is selected with great care, and taught demandingly but well.

ladyphoenix suggested the Ambition and Social Pressure archetypes. As she points out, different houses have apprentices for different reasons. Her Ambition and Tremere-style growth rates can probably be modelled using my Walder Frey archetype (multiple apprentices over time, taking care over each one); the Bonisagus one would use something closer to the Accessoriser, with an apprentice taken once one has some power, to show that you intend to pass it on. (The number below is an average of the two).

humboldtscott also mentioned the Grow the Covenant archetype, where a group of magi will all take apprentices at once. The way apprentices are looking pretty rare in my count right now, I would say that this might have been an archetype further back in history, but no longer - 4 or 5 suitable apprentices all being available, all at once, just when you want them, isn't really something that occurs in the modern age. Respectfully, humboldtscott, I'm going to leave this one out of my calculations for those reasons. I like it but I don't think it fits the world.

If we assume that all the archetypes
Abraham: 0.4
Accessoriser: 0.9
Ambition: 3
Apprentice Factory: 5.3
Atoner: 1
Doubler: 1.6
Magical Bloodline: 0.8
Passing the Legacy: 0.8
Social Pressure: 2
Walder Frey: 3
Wolverine: 0
Wulfenbach: 0.8

Assuming an equal split between all these archetypical parens types, this gives us an average of... 1.6. Which matches Chris's numbers very nicely.

Drum roll please. I think we have a solution.

With the number of roughly 60 million giving us 6,000 Gifted, it would appear that 1 in 5 Gifted are Hermetic. Which suggests that Intelligence and The Gift correlate extremely strongly, since there's no way that 1 in 5 people have a maxed-out Int if it's normally distributed. Even if we assume that Hermetics are twice as common because they live, on average, far longer than other Gifted traditions, that's still only 1 in 10.

To be honest, that fits my growing perception of the Order as having already maximised in size, and already having the mechanism for locating and acquiring every suitable apprentice in Christendom. It's nice when all the data points in the same direction.

Something else I wanted to mention - Xavi, Chris and I all work on numbers which assume that the Schism War was apocalyptic in proportion. 40-50% population loss would probably result in something like 20% of all covenants being abandoned, and the surviving ones being depopulated significantly. Lots of wonderful, slightly glowing ruins lying around, many of which would not have been repopulated (nobody knows they're there, or nobody wants to go there).

1 Like
34

IIRC, At the time of the Schism, House Diedne was reputed to be as large as the rest of the Order...

1 Like
35

If before the schism war, Diedne was about 1/3 of the order, THat would explain a 40%-50% loss. Some houses lost less and some houses lost more in the war. I would say Jerbiton, Criamon, Verditius and Bonisagus had a lot fewer casualties than say Tytalus, Flambeau, Ex Misc, Tremere, Guernicus and obviously Diedne.

Not sure how Bjornaer and Merinta faired in the war. They could have hidden out and not taken part or they could have gotten caught up.

36

Not sure if it's canon, but I've always suspected that the Merinita numbers went up during the war, from Diedne refugees.

1 Like
37

Bjornaer and merinita retreated. IIRC Njornaer did some covert ops in favor of diedne unider the idea that "onece the other non roman house is gone, we are next". ExMisc joined in the fray against the diednes according to old non canonical examples, specially in Scotland, but dunno where they will stand in 5th.

If diedne was so big maybe we should redo the numbers and make casualties amount to 50-60%

Xavi

38

I remember someone saying that the Diedne were big, but I have difficulty believing a number as big as "half of the order by itself." However, I doubt we're going to get reliable numbers; I have argued elsewhere, and I hope persuasively, that I do not want canon information on the Diedne.

Therefore.

If it's as high as 60%, losing only one house becomes odd. How the Guernicus, being a True Lineage and a tiny one at that, being stuck in the middle of the fighting, survived is a little puzzling, but then real life always strains credibility a little bit too.

On the other hand, if it was as high as 60%, then we could go for a massive Marshall Plan-style postwar rebuilding, pushing all the houses back up to more reasonable numbers again. Which is hinted at in the books, especially the Tremere book.

(I suspect that, at this very moment, David Chart is looking at the numbers we're bashing here, then looking at his Super Secret Compendium Of All Canon Yet To Come, and laughing at our naivety. Either that or we're terrifying him.)

1 Like
39

I agree it would be at best a rare case and not worth including in your calculations. Besides this motivation, each of these magi had their own personal reasons that fit into the suggested archtypes anyway. These are presently undefined; I'm going to let they players of these newly-gauntleted apprentices define their masters motivations somewhat.

The way I sold this all-too-convenient situation in my setting is that the covenant has the "dedicated" boon, so they potentially have the "pick of the litter" of new apprentices, as they get support from other covenants. Its in provenecal tribunal, for which I have no published books, so I don't have things defined the way say sundered eagle does for theban apprentices, and thus feel more license without adjusting the "canon" setting.

One of the senior (npc) magi is a Bonisagus, so he could take an apprentice from someone else. Another is an ex-misc; he brought in a gifted individual from outside (a distant cousin of the witches of thessaly) and gave her more of a crash-apprenticeship. The third is criamon, the fourth verdetius, and the fifth is an ungifted mythic companion redcap.

The criamon, ex-misc, and Boni are all pc's and are passing gauntlet at the same time. The redcap passed gauntlet a few years ago, and the gurnecus apprentice (an npc) started apprenticeship 5 years later than the others and failed out after 5 years, 5 years. So while there was a concerted effort, it took some time and effort to find suitable apprentices, and they didn't all find them in the same year.

Just this year, they have founded their first new gifted individual in 10 years. The redcap has been spending his two seasons for the last few years doing his usual redcap work, but also looking for gifted children in his travels through the Provenecal and Iberian Tribunal. This has freed up his former master from having to perform this task. He still hasn't found any suitably gifted children in Provenecal, but did find one in Iberia. This child is being closely guarded in the covenant while he is taught latin and arts liberalis. As yet, he hasn't been "claimed" as an apprentice.

1 Like
40

I imagine that a lot of established covenants have this sort of arrangement, whether de jure or simply traditional. (In the 13th century, the line between the two blurs.) It might be another reason why the Greater Alps and Rhine tribunals restrict the founding of new covenants.

The more I think about it, the more I'm convinced that the paucity of apprentices creates good story. It stops being a situation of "I will give this child a Hermetic education, for that is the greatest gift anyone can bestow" and becomes closer to "this child will be taught magic, by me or by another; the question is, how willingly will he come?"

Some story seeds that jump out at me:

  • A Tremere master is instructed to take another apprentice despite already having one and being too busy. When he protests, he's told, "If she doesn't get trained by us, another House will pick her up. Better an ally than a potential enemy. Do it." The two apprentices become close, and eventually become lovers. Decades later, with both now respected members of the House themselves, their relationship ends in acrimony and they begin plotting one another's downfall.
  • A Trianoma mage tours covenants, asking people about their apprentices and making notes on them in order to create an "a la carte" menu for his Bonisagus colleagues.
  • A Redcap commissions a magic item: A device which will locate the nearest Gifted person not protected by the Parma (to avoid accusations of scrying), in order to sell them to the highest bidder.
  • Two Verditius, involved in a long-running and enjoyable vendetta, begin purchasing Gifted children for training, trying to outdo one another on their extravagance.
  • A magus's new apprentice goes missing in a faerie forest, and despite a thorough search, cannot be found. Some time later, a Merinita at a nearby covenant has an unusually bright new apprentice themselves. The matter ends up at Tribunal, but what can be proven?
  • A Tytalus maga starts encouraging other wizards to cease taking apprentices, since "the child will be trained anyway; look to your own development rather than another's". Thanks to her oratory and disputation skills, she persuades many magi, including some scions of magical lineages that others would be worried to see die out.
  • An Ex Miscellanea master, the last of his particular tradition, is searching desperately for someone to carry on their ways. Eventually, with all other avenues exhausted, the Infernal offers a seemingly perfect apprentice...
  • A Jerbiton magus, faced with an apprentice with only mediocre intelligence, decides to open the Arts and then teach only artistic skills rather than magic. The debate rages - does this constitute legal teaching? Does this violate the apprentice's rights?
  • A Guernicus mage, tasked with finding an apprentice as part of the strict one-in-eight system in that house, is long unable to locate a suitable candidate. Then, suddenly, one is found, much to everyone's relief. Although that last Quaesitorial investigation did end very suddenly...
  • Following his master's death, a Flambeau knight errant embarks upon a great quest, ranging across Christendom... to find the family from which he was abducted at a young age and traded to a distant magus to serve as a surrogate child.
  • After a long session of riddles, a well-travelled magus from a large Autumn covenant converts to house Criamon to seek the enigma. In order to rid himself of distractions, he casts aside his travelling notes... including a long and well-researched list of Gifted children in the region which he was keeping tabs on, in order to sell off to other magi when they reached a mature age. This list, together with his other possessions, is given to his sodales at a covenant council. The scramble begins.
  • An elderly Bjornaer has been seeking an apprentice for some time. Eventually she finds one... but his temperament is badly matched to hers. While she should pass him to others who will train him better, she's waited too long for this chance and isn't going to give it up.
41

Interesting discussion. I think rare apprentices makes for better stories. Glad to see it works out demographically too.

Note that The Sundered Eagle mentions the tribunal finds 15 apprentices each 7 years (p. 28). For whatever that's worth.

The one thing I don't understand is why you all seem to be assuming high Intelligence. Sure, that is a nice thing to have in an apprentice and magi teaching one to get a bonus to their lab score might actually care about that more than anything else. But most magi will train apprentices for other purposes, and while intelligence is always good the person's spirit, magical aptitudes, and so on should actually matter more IMHO. A Fifth Edition wizard with mediocre, even negative, intelligence isn't actually that crippled - he can still be a fine wizard. I don't think magi would realistically demand high intelligence - although, of course, high intelligence is always a bonus.

42

I think the intelligence bit comes from the example magi in the core book (p. 24ff).
Only 2 of them (the Mercere and the Flambeau) have Intelligence +2, the rest have intelligence +3 or higher (Bonisagus +5, Tytalus +4).
But yeah, it's really mostly an artifact of previous editions.

43

No, it's not just an artifact from previous additions. Neither is it an assumption. Rather, the usual Intelligence is around +3. Noticeably below that is considered a flaw. It is explicitly an example of the type of flaw that would be overlooked by Jerbiton magi in favor of the Gentle Gift. "An Intelligence score less than +3 reflects a premium placed upon Gentle Giftedness by masters of House Jerbiton" (HoH:S pp.55).

From my own experience, I don't tend to see Virtues used to raise Intelligence. Not that it doesn't happen, but it's relatively rare. So the typical maximum I see is +3. Meanwhile +2 is not uncommon, and once in a while a +1 might creep in. I would expect the average I've seen is roughly +2.5. YR7 is right that a lower Intelligence is not crippling.

Chris

44

I'm going from what I've seen on character sheets. I tend to assume that PCs are a fair sample of any group to which they belong, and the vast majority of PCs which I've seen, have Int of +2 or +3. I have seen a +5, but that was an over-munched Verditius.

Even if it's not mechanically optimal, it might just be a cultural thing in the Order. Very few groups select only for those traits which are necessary for the group's primary purpose, after all.

In my Toulouse campaign, one of my players found a Gently Gifted apprentice with an intelligence of "only" +2. Having the Gentle Gift himself (although a Flambeau) he esteemed that trait very highly, and agonised for ages as to whether it would demean him as a wizard to take a "stupid" apprentice. The player roleplayed the moral uncertainty very well, and portrayed the transition from "I am ashamed of my Apprentice" to "I am protective of my Apprentice" to "I'm proud of her, even if she happens to be stupid". At no point did anybody mention that +2 Intelligence is perfectly respectable, and indeed will not hold somebody back much.

45

Reversing the order here a bit I know. Please bear with me for a moment:

Yes, by definition. We are talking about a game about fictional characters in a mythical (european) setting.
Further more, we are assigning simple numbers to not-easily-quantifiable attributes of imagnary people.
Everything about it is by definition an assumption.

This is our assumption.

Written re-troactively to justify the characters in the core book? Perhaps.
But it is our assumption.

I would argue that every character in the core book is build on the assumptions made after hours and hours of play in the 4th edition.
Yes, they follow 5th rules, but they are in many ways 4th ed characters.
I call it an artifact because in 4th ed (as you may recall), intelligence was the be-all-end-all stat for magi (not my words, see this thread) and so the example magi are made with very high intelligence.

And here you are largely arguing my point - that the very high intelligence is less than necessary in the 5th edition.

Also, I believe the average I've seen is a gnat's whisker above 2, on the average.
Haven't crunched the numbers though.

46

In our saga, me and another magus just found an apprentice. Myself one at age 16, but with an int of +3, the other at a better age 10, but only +2 intelligence. This will work nicely. I will try and find a younger apprentice after that, but I also wish to start educating about the right way to perform magic now.

47

I think you misunderstand. We're not making an assumption. We're reading what's in the books. This is essentially the same difference between postulates and theorems. The books lay out the postulates. The postulates are those initial assumptions. From there, if we follow what is written we can theorize things. While it is true that the theorems only hold true if the postulates are true, they themselves are not postulates. From another perspective, would you call a reporter a liar for accurately quoting a liar lying? While the quote may be a lie, that does not mean the reporter is lying. Likewise here, telling an assumption written in the books is not making an assumption ourselves. So, again:

We're not assuming it. It is stated explicitly in the books. We could, rather, question why the books assume a high Intelligence, especially since it doesn't really seem necessary.

Yes. I stated that I'm in total agreement that low Intelligence is not crippling. In lots of games I've been in we've hand-waved away that bit in HoH:S or assume the mark is much lower than +3 for just this reason.

Chris

48

The core rulebook also states that they are often intelligent and curious, on page 106 middle column.

49

Roughly the same holds for our troupe. Average Intelligence is somewhere between 2 and 2.5. Most magi get Intelligence +2 or +3, but slightly more tend to get +2. A few get Intelligence +1, mostly characters who are designed to be something else first (warriors, minstrels etc.) and magi second. Other than that, I've seen a snobby +5 Int Bonisagus, and a -3 "I'll take the challenge of a negative Int mage" Bjornaer.

50

I rather expect to see Int +2 as the 'default' these days, as it makes a decent compromise between cost and effect.
You can still have another characteristic of +2 (before negatives) which is nice if you can use it to underscore your "actual" concept without making yourself a laughing stock among magi.
Int +3 seems rare - if you go for +3, why not invest and make a point of having high Intelligence?
Int +1 or even +/- 0 has poped up, but that was by deliberate choice.
So the compromise is +2.

51

Why yes, apparently it does.

This does mean, however, that apparently by RAW the Gifted are "almost invariably" intelligent, so this should figure into the above calculations.

Another point to consider is how the Gift varies with "lifestyle". Many Gifted children are apparently found on a certain Faerie-touched Greek island, for example. I think it would be appropriate to have a higher abundance of Gifted children amongst those living in Magic auras.

52

Given that almost all of humanity lies on a -3 to +3 scale, the number of people who have a +2 and +3 in anything would be absolutely miniscule. If we're assuming +2 intelligence as standard for a Hermetic magician, which seems to be the case, then far less than 1 in 10 of humans would have that level of intelligence. In order to meet the previous estimate of the Order of Hermes as consisting of between 1 in 5 and 1 in 10 of Christendom's Gifted population, we'd have to assume that the Gift correlates highly with intelligence, with perhaps +1 being average for the Gifted (and therefore +2 and +3 not being that uncommon.)

This being the case, I think RAW supports us once again. The Gifted are almost invariably intelligent. However, the Order isn't satisfied with merely "intelligent"; they want people who're a cut above even that average. This gives us a situation where apprentices are scarce, but where non-Hermetic gifted are much more common than Magi, but are mostly ignored and treated as being castoffs and second-rate magicians. I feel that this situation models the attitudes of PCs, and enriches play, significantly.

...and therefore being covenfolk.

Since vis and Gifted children therefore seem to be at least partially increased by the presence of a Magical Aura in an area, auras might be the real treasures within any Tribunal.

Since it's not difficult to build an item that detects an aura, and then equip an adventurer with it, I imagine that in most of the more populous Tribunals, information about where the strong auras are is pretty common knowledge, and most of the powerful auras have had chapter houses or even whole new covenants deposited on them to take possession. Sure, your information might be somewhat out of date, but it's unlikely to be entirely wrong.

1 Like