Hi there!
In our manx saga we have finally reached an agreement with a hersir, and will be settling in his lands. Or the magi will. The main "covenant" site will be a merchantile house in Peel, but the magi want a more quiet location, so are settling in the field.
The problem is "where do we live?" and "how many people lives with us?"
In previous sagas this had been defaulted and we had fairly large covenants (50-100 persons in the covenant). However, this time we want to keep a low population in the covenant, sicne it will contain only 2 magi and we want to prevent angering the local powers with huge displays of human resources. Thery are used to magic though, so they can accept a mystic tower.
However, looking at the spell (amazingly we have never used it yet) we have seen that it would be extrmeely TINNY as a covenant. Stretching it, we could manage to get 8 floors on it (2 of them underground or at ground level). That sounds very small AND the situation would not be particularly comfortable for the inhabitants, we guess.
A floor of a Mystic tower can be seen in the Sanctum map of the Covenants supplement.
Now, the more or less minimal staff of a covenant as we see it would be something like that:
- Steward + clerk. The steweard doubles as cellarer (keep the covenant supplied) and general supervisor of the house
- Cook + 2 skullery maids
- Housekeeper + 2 maids
- stableboy
- Librarian + scribe
- 6 guards
That is 17 persons + the 2 magi. And we are not taking into account the actual PRODUCTIVE staff. Maybe we are overstretching ther "essential staff" for a covenant but we think this is already low-ish for a typical covenant. A mystic tower looks too small to accomodate so many people.
Do people use mystic towers as their covenant building? If they do, is it the only building or is it part of a larger complex (or a series of towers)? We are slightly at a loss here since this is the first (non urban) covenant we are creating since we started to play ArM.
Cheers,
Xavi