magically driven forestry/husbandry

Games Discussion Ars Magica
21

Not changing everything written above especially of fact than impact on vulgar world need to not be too visible/big to avoid any vulgar and then later hermetic reaction

i would like to point than the things you wants to make is not that easy.
The effect is certainly "only" 15 (in fact 15 is already a very impressive effect) but the final level will be a lot bigger.
You were already pointed out example of "Fast Grow" spell from Gwydon, which is a level 30 spell (effect15, +3mag for touch and sun)... and this is only for one single plant.
Note than nothing say it would already works from just a seed, the way the effect and spell are described seems to say you need an existing young tree, so you would require a few weeks or even month to get living young tree.

now, if you want to make an orchard, you will need lots of casting (more usage for a magical item? better target like group or zone? the latest switching spell to ritual)

Next... there's a big difference between a mature oak and the big giant oak which makes the best material for wood. an oak is mature at 15-25 year and can live 600, high quality oak will be 200years old, when basic medieval material will usually be more like 50 years old.

Note than depending on trees, the result will be different, but still, for any tree, there's a big difference between a mature one and a timber elected one.

Well finally, the item you would like to create would carry a 31+ to 40 effect, would require weeks of usage to field up your orchard, will require ~one month of initialization, appropriate period being only once a year.

None about these point will be a blocking issue, but it's difficult enough, especially in the spell/item creation than it will feed your campaign with more stories.

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22

Its a valid point you raise about plants. Here are my considerations.

The guidelines for Corpus state that a human is mature at age 20 (serfs parma). As the age of 20 most closely fits with the point at which human bodies do not develop further in terms of physical prowess to me that implies that maturity in Ars Magica is mostly dependent on reaching full bodily potential, as opposed to sexual maturity which occurs earlier than age 20 and mental maturity which is most likely reached later into the 20's.

However a plant does not have a "full bodily potential" in the same way as humans do. Which raises the question, when do we consider the plant to be mature? sexual maturity is not consistent with the Corpus guidelines and also would result in plants a lot (a LOT) smaller than we would conventionally expect of a mature plant. This gets even weirder when considering perennial plants as they generally die soon after reaching sexual maturity.
What then about the more vague "full bodily potential"? I would argue that for trees the best way to tell if a tree is mature, is whether or not its big. Trees can in principle remain small their entire lives if they remain under the shade of another tree, but so can humans under similar circumstances namely if we starve as children and continue to do so humans will also fail to grow to their normal size. I cant speak for oak trees but for beech trees I am reasonably confident that this usually puts maturity at around 80 years of age and lets them remain so for between 250 and 350 years at current estimates, possibly longer. This is kind of like how, in Ars humans are mature at 20 and remain at peak fitness until at least 35.
However the issue here, is that beech trees, and indeed most other big trees can grow big much faster than 80 years, but if that happens then they will be weak and live short disease ridden lives because their wood does not harden if they grow too quickly. So does this happen to magically grown trees? Since it is certainly a Creo spell to do so, would forcing the tree to grow in a manner that renders it weak and stunted constitute making the tree better?
A good illustration of this problem is if you go into a modern beech plantation/man-made forest and look around you will see big trees (50ish meters tall) and small trees (2-3 ish meters tall). If the forest is less than 80 years old chances are that the small and the big trees are all be the same age, the big ones are just the ones that won the race towards the sky. How would a CrHe spell to mature plants affect the small trees? What about the big ones? What about a sapling growing in the shade of one of the big trees? Will it grow to the 2-3 meters it could naturally grow where it stands or to the 50ish meters it could grow to if it was not shaded out?
I am not raising these question to disprove or discredit your post. I am genuinely curious how Hermetic magic handles these problems, because I am not sure how to interpret the spell guidelines. On a somewhat related note, I am not sure how to apply the terminology of magic to plants because the terminology is very animal-centric and trying to fit it onto a plant is going to involve some serious stretching that I am not sure how to apply.

As for the timescale, In the campaign I play in I would be perfectly happy to grow just one tree a day as I specifically dont want to disturb the local economy too much. I also totally agree that actually developing these spells is going to be a big project as a level 30 spell outside of ones specialty is no easy feat.

23

There are some very interesting points here I'd never really considered before. The core rulebook explanation of Creo maturation spells is " Since maturation involves becoming a better example of your kind, Creo magic can make something mature quickly. Aging after maturation involves becoming a worse example of your kind, and thus is covered by Perdo."

This very quickly gets odd when you think about trees because, as you say, the size of many trees is not limited by age but by available resources in the environment.

To my mind there are three options, either plants grow to maturity in the sense of bearing fruit/seed in which case these spells are much less useful than you would expect (and this doesn't 100% fit with "Aging after maturation involves becoming a worse example" as the tree will continue to grow from here); alternatively the plant grows until it reaches the limit of its environment (that is, it grows to the point where getting any larger would actually harm it) which will be much bigger and older than you might anticipate; or lastly the end size of the plant is limited by the base individual size - at the base guideline a tree grows until it is the max size of a base individual, but a more powerful spell could make it grow larger. None of those are terribly satisfying and some have their own issues.

Well, a fourth option is to say "maturity" is just an average sized example of the species for gameplay purposes but that's no fun.

I wonder what the hermetic understanding of plant life cycles and maturity is?

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24

with animals maturity is a few cycles past the point of reproductive viability- basically to when reproduction becomes safe and reliable. a similar guideline could follow for plants- basically to when they would reliably provide fruits (or equivalent) though as noted the usual creo/perdo breakdown would not apply until far older...

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25

As you say those are pretty much the options. I would like to add that its hard to argue for a tree that getting bigger is anything but getting better, at least from the tree's perspective.

As for the tree's growth being limited by the base individual I would offer the following counter argument. Imagine casting Preternatual growth and shrinking on a human of size +1. The base individual for Corpus is a human of size +1 or lower. So if we use Preternatual growth and shrinking to increase the size of my hypothetical human it would now be size +2 and thus no longer a base individual human. Would you argue that its not possible to increase a humans size beyond +1 in that situation? My gut feeling is no since the human is a legitimate target at the time of casting.

My favorite take is the second option that you present, but giving the caveat that the plant in question remains limited by the available resources in the environment (bar time and sunlight) and will not be especially big unless it also would have been so naturally. (also are micronutrients even a thing in mythic europe?) Essentianlly this is the "the earth depletes" approach.

26

one more option exists- trees do have a maximum height they will achieve, after that they only grow outwards. The same could be said, albeit with a different connotation, of humans. therefor you could say that "to maturity" means until it reaches its maximum height.

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27

I may not have expressed it the best but this is what I had in mind with the second option too, the tree essentially ages up to the size it would grow in that spot given an indefinite period of time to do it, just sped up.

also are micronutrients even a thing in mythic europe?

If they don't something with a fairly similar end result does exist - the observation that certain plants need the right soil and to be fertilised (i.e. nutrients added to the soil) is a pretty ancient one. Medieval people lacked a proper understanding of why this was the case, but well understood how to maintain soil nutrients and that it was required even if they didn't understand what those nutrients were at a fundamental level. Keep in mind crop rotation was already being practised in Europe at this point, and the more advanced three field system was beginning to be used.

The 13th century is actually quite a boon time for horticulture, as some ancient works were filtering into western European thought and you have people like Albertus Magnus writing books on the topic that actually advance it with original observations. Also, although it wasn't translated into Latin until the 15th century, Theophrastus' Historia Plantarum is surprisingly advanced in it's clear and accurate explanations of a lot of things to do with plant growth and cultivation for something written in the 4th century BCE (he's not called the father of botany for nothing!).

The earliest English vernacular work on horticulture The Feate of Gardening from the early 15th century also stresses the importance of soil fertilisation:

In this manner thou shall cut the vine-tree
To be set it shall have knots three
Two shall be set in the ground
And one above for ground
In the land where it shall grow in
It would ask to be dressed with dung
Everywhere w’ oust-drede
They would ask dung about them spread

That's a very long winded way of saying, imo, soil nutrients exist in Mythic Europe at a practical level.

one more option exists- trees do have a maximum height they will achieve, after that they only grow outwards

True, though that raises the question of how much girth the now "mature" tree has - will you end up with a tree a hundred feet tall but only as thick around the trunk as a sapling? I suppose the easiest sensible answer would be "as wide as an average tree would have gotten over the time it would have taken to grow that tall naturally".

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28

My favorite interpretation is that when a tree hits a certain level of growth - like a human or a cow - it is now mature. While more Creo magic can turn a 10 metre tree into a 40 metre tree, as it's still making the tree a BETTER example of a tree, it's now a different guideline. A corpus-equivalent is that once you've grown your human to maturity, it's not the same spell to enhance his stamina and strength, even though it's clearly still Creo to do so.

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29

which also brings up the question of whether soil can be revitalized with crTe without the use of vis- since soil left fallow does recover I would suspect so, but I have no idea what the mechanism of recovery would be under a medieval paradigm.

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30

If you were using CrTe to restore soil nutrients (which seems reasonable to me) I'd imagine it would be somewhere between the guidelines for healing magic and maturation spells - by replicating the process of leaving a field fallow to allow it to become restored you're essentially "healing" the depleted soil at an accelerated rate.

Alternatively it could be more like instant healing magic and require vis to do properly. I haven't done the maths on it but that might actually balance out the benefit of resource generation schemes like in the OP. You can keep growing plants to maturity overnight but every so often you have to expend vis to replenish the soil, or wait a season for it to regenerate naturally.

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31

Since soil does not naturally replenish without some sort of transfer of nutrients from outside the soil I would be inclined to say that for replenishing soil with CrTe the spell is like instant healing i.e. requires a ritual spell.
However it is not entirely true that soil cannot replenish itself naturally, as that is what laying fields fallow do. Its just that the nutrients are transferred from nitrogen gasses in the air by clover plants (which is also done by the pea-plant, hence its use in the crop rotation system). Perhaps some sort of Herbam spell to force the area to go through its entire seasonal or annual life cycle quickly would work? This would be equivalent to the maturation spell option.
Maybe a spell to accelerate the uptake of various fertilizers, this way it could be possible to spread manure, bones, plant waste etc. and force them do break down quickly? By far the most important nutrient is nitrogen, at least until we get into industrial farming, which is why manure is so important.
Maybe its an option to do some sort of crop rotation with the trees being farmed? perhaps even treat them like just another crop to include in the crop rotation system.

32

keep in mind as well that much of this is 21st level science, not medieval understanding. To medieval understanding gems reproduced sexually and grew within the earth. Soil replenishment may not even have a model, or it might be better described as a characteristic which can be raised permanently with vis or temporarily with a spell and which is based off some sort of soil based fatigue characteristic that requires a season of rest to regain a long term fatigue point after 3 seasons "labor" creating plants.

3 Likes
33

You make a solid point. Even while bringing up all of this modern day stuff I know that the medieval paradigm is significantly different. However it is the best I have, not being a medievalist.

I do get the distinct impression from the posts by Argentius that there was something of an understanding of soil science in the medieval period.

More than that however I must say I find the model of soil replenishment as human rest and labor to be absolutely hilarious. It feels like the quintessential Ars Magica solution. Of course the soil feels tired and that why crop yields go down over time until the soil can rest and be ready again.

34

To me, there is indeed a pragmatic understanding, in that you need to feed the soil to grow good vine/plants again and again. That the plants and trees need water and a rich dark soil to grow well, and that every few years it is good to let the soil rest.

The fact an surnatural growth will lead to an early exhaustion of the soil is not something that could have been part of the medieval paradigm, as this is not something that can be observed or deducted. Some plant will exhaust the soil faster, but only because it is their nature to do so, the abnormal rate of growth should not have an impact on the nature of the plant (light or heavy feeder)

To me, when the spell is cast on a plant, the nature and quality of the environment will tell the end product :
If the seedling is set in a rich soil, with room to grow and in a sunny spot, with an amount of water matching its needs, it will grow big and tall. If some or all of these elements are missing, it will grow the best it can in such environment.

The soil would not degrade as all it does it to host plants and as it has been fed properly once a year, it is a great soil, that is the "natural behavior"
The water will not be sucked out dry, as a rain shower every few days is enough to keep the soil wet enough to grow plants.
For plants to grow properly they must be planted in a place exposed to some degree of sunlight, the actual exposure of the plant during its growth does not seems to be a factor (it can grow overnight) so I would say that if the spot is suitable, the plant will grow well.

That would indeed lead to an incredible industrial potential, but that's magic, so of course it is ^^ The restrictions, if you want to set some, would be more appropriate if they come from the side effects : meddling with mundane, jealousy > Can be seen as a miracle from your end, but pure witchcraft from another one, and if you do start flooding the regional market with high quality timber, dirt cheap... I can definitly see a demon enjoying this to spread some Diabolic taint over the region ^^

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35

Also something to keep in mind that magically created goods often runs afoul of the convention of magically created silver. The Order understands that magically creating too much of anything for introduction into the mundane market can and will cause problems for everyone. It's generally better to use magic to reduce your covenants actual costs - one favorite of our sagas has been a chest that creates charcoal with Moon duration - than trying to increase one's revenues.

It's probably better being as subtle as possible. Fell the big, valuable trees for sale - preferably when no one is looking - and immediately replace them with barely mature trees and let them grow up naturally. At least this way you could argue (in tribunal) that the 'value' of the tree was grown naturally, you merely got the tree established using magic, and you gain a small, steady income that doesn't draw attention. You also don't risk soil depletion.

The same spell can be used to raise productive orchards of fruit and nut trees quickly on land that's unsuitable for plowing. Only your closest neighbors might have any idea what sort of crops you're growing (and even then have a hazy idea at best) so you suddenly producing apples or walnuts for sale will attract a lot less attention than suddenly spewing out huge amounts of lumber. It only takes a decade or so to establish an orchard so only those most intimate with your lands have any real chance of noticing, so long as it's not in direct sight of a road or something.

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36

I don't agree, there was definitely an understanding at the time that growing things in soil depleted something (not necessarily nutrients. but some property of the soil). Crop rotation was a pretty universal practice (where at the simplest level the soil must be left fallow for half the year, that is an equal amount of time it is used for growing).

Not long after this period when woad production as a cash crop starts to ramp up we see laws explicitly restricting the practice because it renders the soil barren, so again this implies an understanding that overfarming a certain soil depletes and eventually permanently destroys some "fertileness" property.

So if growing a given plant in a given patch of soil depletes this property by a certain amount, supernaturally growing it faster will deplete it by the same amount.

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37

You don't need to remove the stumps. Coppicing is the usual way of harvesting forests in period, not clear felling.

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38

I would not have the magic used to grow the plants negatively impact the soil or water quality in the area. Its creo herbam magic and that means things like nutrient loss would not occur in my opinion.

39

I'm thinking we need to get a bit more medieval Europe. Creo makes it as close to those Greek philosophers perfect form. Is it shaded and thus it's growth will be stunted ? Is there enough nutrients in the soil? I perceive that as a bit of 21st century overthink, however, YMMV. I believe if it's a timber tree, it's big and ready for chopping down. If it's a fruit true, it's laden with fruit, etc.

There's a bunch of balance options if the story guide doesn't like it.

Many people before me have mentioned potential issues with the mundane authorities and OoH, so I won't repeat them.

A magic balance option, is that due to the extreme size of trees, the spell needs to be a very high level. Yes, the seed is small, however, if you want to make something grow to size +6 or more, which I'd think a large timber tree or fruit tree would be, that's a lot of magical energy.

40

If I'm not wrong, the High lvl spell can be easily avoided with the "circle" target, especialy for a spell like this one.