And I wasn't saying anything different. In fact, the rest of the sentence you quoted, which you cut off but alluded to, suggests that the virtues and flaws should balance by the time they reach adulthood.
Obviously there is some inconsistency in approach between Apprentices and Ancient Magic. Apprentices wants PCs to be balanced at character generation, while Fertility magic wants it balanced at some point in the future (adulthood). Regardless, characters should generally have balanced virtues and flaws at some point in their lives.
Fertility Magic is of zero use to building potential PC characters if the Virtue/Flaw total must balance. By their very nature, PCs are built to specification already. Want a Gentle Gifted Creo Aquam specialist? Done and done.
That said, Fertility Magic (and all Ancient Magics, really) are supposed to be story goals for PCs. You could do a saga built around an NPC who has discovered one - for example, a covenant where all the PCs are magi descended from a Seeker who got Fertility Magic, but it hardly seems the intent.
I believe you're referring to the sentence starting out "If the child is a player character", which pretty strongly implies that it doesn't apply if the child is not a PC. I don't think it's a stretch to read this is supporting the idea of game balance among players, rather than detailing an intrinsic feature of Fertility Magic.
Personally I think if you are willing to play a maga who discovers and uses fertility magic, then the child made by that magic, through childhood and apprenticeship, the development arc of that much work into a character should justify any imbalances which might occur... but that would be very saga specific. My primary point is that there is no balancing mechanism in the ritual itself that you should worry about a GM assigning 'balancing' flaws arbitrarily.
Flaws only sort of balance Virtues anyways (for example, Story Flaws don't actually make a character weaker), and there are ways to get virtues without taking flaws (many Mystery Initiations), so 'balancing' isn't as necessary as one might think.
Although, there are benefits to Fertility Magic beyond guaranteeing yourself Gifted offspring - Hermetic prestige and the ability to 'sell' fertility rituals being the most obvious.
But the child is already used to the feeling of the gift when born. Why would it suddenly react badly to the gift after birth when it has already spent months where the gift is part of "life"?
Also, children will bond to parents especially in the first few days after birth, and that nearly always overlooks any "nonmystical" issues that any grown person might find offputting or repulsive, so why should the gift provide more problem here?
It takes the average person 15 years to get used to an individual's Gift. A child in the womb lacks most of the capacities of even a newborn until the latter part of the pregnancy, so I don't see how it's had either the time or mental faculties to become 'used' to the mother's Gift. If anything, I would expect a late term baby to struggle in the womb more than the average child as it starts to respond to its mother's Gift.
On the other hand the young and unborn are also more impressionable. Consider that including language in the first 5 years a child gains 120 points in abilities, or 24 per year, which is higher than even a wealthy non-magus generally manages. Also they have a much higher level of exposure when/if nursing at their mother's breast and sleeping next to her than the typical grog at a covenant has to the magi located there.
Children under 5 probably have 100% free time. The Practice rules alone would give a child 8xp/season in Language until you hit 5.
I'm not saying a child won't acclimatize to its mother quickly, I'm saying infants aren't born acclimatized, just as mothers aren't acclimatized to Gifted newborns.
So 72 points in native language in 9 seasons still leaves 48 points in the remaining 11 seasons, a bit higher than standard practice rules and at 16 points a year. Plus learning a host of non-ability things like walking...
Depends on if you think a person can practice at more than one thing and split their experience among the things. Everything goes as you describe, except one of those eleven seasons has one xp put into non-language skills and the other three go into making the language score a 5.
I don't know if this actually fits Mythic Paradigm, but I'm thinking babies are just assumed to know how to walk, while they are simply unable to until they develop physically. So if you hit a baby with an "age five years" spell, it might start walking almost immediately.
I can see both sides of that- in any games I run a child will be acclimated to their mother (nobody else, not even dad) by age 5, but I'll be sure to ask my troupe or storyteller before I assume that in anyone else's.
I thought those spells explicitly didn't affect (human) targets less than 16 years of age? As Perdo always weakens, and for children, that would mean making them younger, not older.
but surely only up to maturity, any further applications of Perdo would just send them back to childhood as they are still by their fundamental nature a child not an adult?
