Here's my proposal for the construction on Eilean Chon.
[i]A square two story wooden cottage 11 paces per side, the walls of the cottage are ringed every three feet with long rectangular trenches filled with soil. These boxes have been filled with climbing roses, honeysuckle, and sweet peas.
The four main chambers all have a balcony, three paces wide and one pace deep, that overlooks the loch. (One of the labs can only be accessed by its balcony.)
The first floor has a large set of double doors, with 2' long shelves framing them to guide the climbing plants around the building's entrances. The double doors open into a cozy antechamber with four comfy cushioned chairs, a table, and a small fireplace. The antechamber leads into two laboratories; a small spiral staircase on the right leads into one of the upstairs laboratories, and all the way up onto the roof.
Each lab has a fireplace, and all five fireplaces in the building share a single common chimney.
The roof of the building is flat, with a 3' tall ring about it, and very narrow crennellations all around. (The roof is filled with soil, and the crennellations allow excess moisture to run off.) The rooftop garden has a narrow winding path through it, and has been planted with willow, gorse, wild cherry, and honeysuckle. The building's chimney extends high above the tree line, and it is covered in a network of thin metal trellis, around which grows sweet red grapes. Though grapes prefer a warmer climate than Scotland offers, the heat the chimney radiates makes the grapes grow healthy and sweet. There are not enough grapes for any kind of wine production, but plenty enough for impromptu snacking.
While the building itself is beautiful, the nature of its exterior is such that there is very poor natural lighting within; all the labs must be magically lit.[/i]
These sound quite nice. I have a question, one of the accoutrements that Aodhan will want to add will be a forge, needs it for his Mysteries and to keep his reputation as a Verditius (it's kind of like his Hanging Shingle to show he's in business).
The other would be an attached Studio, which is also pretty much a requirement. Do you see these two additional rooms/chambers fitting in the design that you presented? If not he'll have to design it elsewhere.
It's probably a bad idea to put a forge inside a wooden building, unless you enchant the walls to be heat and fire resistant. I don't think you'd have room for a studio, if anyone else besides you and me want labs on Eilean Chon.
I figured the dimensions as the common lab was presented as size +3, which is 1000 sq ft. That's about 32' x 32', which is where I got 11 paces per side. With the two stories split into four main chambers, that's only room for 4x labs that are size 0 (500 sq ft each).
If Trimalchio doesn't want a lab on the island, or if the council as a whole determines there's no need to keep a common lab, then Aodhan's sanctum could take up two stories, with the studio above and the lab below, in like a loft design so that the studio could also function as a teaching gallery. But either he would have to create the building out of brick or stone so that it could support a forge, or you'd have to enchant the wooden walls to be resilient against heat and flame.
We could try making a three story building, since the aura goes up 60', but I thought it would be a hard sell to get the Hippie Brigade to accede to a three story building, or one built out of anything besides wood, for that matter Halie's only covering the thing in plants to get the old farts to shut up.
All of the magi's sanctums/laboratories are wood enchanted with the Cabin of Earthen Wood spell, as is the Council Hall, the Common Lab, and the Revel Hall.
That was a miscalculation on my part. I've got the common lab statted up in the Covenant Description thread. It's actually size 1, about 675 square feet (half the length and half the width of the island, more or less centered on the island)
In that case, the equipment doesn't need to be split up, we can just make the building one pace larger on each side to get a square footage per floor of roughly 1300, and one side can be slightly larger than the other (675 isn't much bigger than 500).
So, I'd entirely forgotten about that restriction for specialization. But then I was thinking, it's a hot mess, and I kinda like it that way. It's like it had 10 different magi designing it. They don't know why it works that way, but it does.
It says it's a Creo Herbam ritual-- what does it do and how does it work?
It can't make the wood preternaturally resistant to flame and heat, because that would both need some kind of form requisites, and it couldn't be a Creo ritual because that would be Muto (and it wouldn't be permanent-- have I mentioned I really hate this Essential Nature crap?).
You're proposing 11 paces per side? That's 33 feet, right? Or 1089 sq.ft, and another 1089 sq. ft for the second story. I can't see how you get 4 +1 size labs in that spot.
I'm not sure what you're confused about. I'm not proposing dumping four labs into the same building as before, I'm proposing making a bigger building. Note that the original post was for fitting four size 0 buildings, but I then said we could make it slightly bigger around to accommodate size +1 labs instead.
When PB clarified that the common lab was not Size +3 but only Size +1, I assumed we'd have to make the building's footprint bigger as well (hence my earlier comment about maybe needing to handwave the moving of the existing building over a bit before the extra space is built on). And also said, to accommodate size +1
Assuming square buildings and ignoring wall thickness, for simplicity's sake:
675 sq ft is roughly 26'x26'.
If a 26'x26' square is about half the length and half the width of the island, then the island is approximately 52' across (though circular rather than square).
I'm proposing a two story building with room for two labs per floor. To make each story of the building large enough for two size +1 labs and a small antechamber, each floor has, let's say 1500 sq ft (675, 675, and 150). The footprint of the building would thus be sqrt1500 (or 39') on each side.
There should be no significant difficulty in erecting a 39'x39' building on an island with a 52' diameter.
It's basically an Herbam version of Conjuring the Mystic Tower or The Baroque Peasant Hut, which (according to my notes) "creates a finished wooden structure as hard as stone." It does have a Terram requisite (which, I notice, I forgot to put in the library listing, but I did remember in the spell descriptions I posted in the Magus Labs thread).
In effect, it creates a finished wooden structure (with walls and doors, if desired), but the wood has the properties of stone. It includes +3 magnitudes for size, so it should make anything up to 1,000 cubic paces. Theoretically, it should be extremely fire- and hack-resistant.
I was gonna say that it can't work under 5th ed rules-- but then I remembered wood can petrify naturally, so it can be a Creo ritual, and permanentable, as long as it works by creating petrified wood.
I have no idea how stone-like or fireproof real petrified wood is, but the Petrified Forest is gorgeous so if nothing else the buildings it makes should be gorgeous
Petrified wood=rock. It's rock that's accreted over time, accumulating within the structure of the tree as the wood decays only stone remains.
So if it's petrified wood, it's going to behave like rock. My grandparent's home had petrified wood (pieces) marking the separation of the 'yard' to the parking area.
Yeah, I think I'm going to make a new thread and shunt all the new lab discussion there.
Part of the confusion, I think, is that Lab size isn't a tenfold increase for each +1 like it is for spell magnitude. Size 0 is 500 square feet, +1 is 650 square feet.
The island is 15 paces by 20 (pace being, raw, three feet), and the leveled surface of the island is about four and a half feet above lake level. The lab building is 7½ by 10 paces, with about a pace of leveled surface out about a pace on all four sides (with two or three rose bushes on each side).
You could extend the lab to complete cover the leveled surface, which would make the lab area 1,026 square feet, or Size +3, or big enough for two Size 0. This would involve either moving the bushes onto the slope, off the island entirely, or destroying them; any of these options may or may not be good ideas.
Or you could ReTe to level the entire island, making the surface flat for the entire size (15x20) of the island. That would drop the surface to about three feet above lake level instead of four and a half. And even if you Rego'd the island to make a mesa above the water line, it still angles outward at about a 20° angle for a little bit until it drops off.
We can forcelessly cast very low level InHe on the bushes to ensure none of them have Might, before re-planting them. If the aura somehow depends on the bushes then they'll be magical.
Re: petrified wood- I agree that it's stone, but for medieval paradigm it may still be Herbam with Terram requisite (it still looks like trees).
Halie's only covering the thing in plants to get the old farts to shut up.
