Hi all,
I was chatting with my SG and we were coming up with nasty things to do with Rego which were pulled from the legends of old. I'm sure there was a guideline somwhere for turning milk into butter using Rego, but I can't find it. This is a similar spell to that, so permanent. I know there is a muto spell which sort of does this, but it only lasts a day.
Dyonysis scorn
ReAq
R:T, D:M, T:S
All of the alcoholic drinks within the target structure are turned bad, into unusable vinegar.
That's the last time that barmen will serve me the inferior stuff.
It's a natural change, not a destruction, and thus falls under the auspices of Rego. Rego converts wine to vinegar; Perdo converts wine to noxious, mildly poisonous sludge or nothing.
By that reasoning, you could use Rego to make people grow older or make things rot. I second the use of Perdo here. It isn't "a natural change", it is clearly a degradation. We're not talking about modern chemistry here.
To make things rot, definitely Perdo. To turn wine to vinegar, however, I'd say is Rego since vinegar is not merely bad wine, but wine stored and converted to vinegar.
Not quite. Vinegar is wine (or cider or ale or ...) which has been aged carefully under controlled conditions to allow gradual oxidation. Wine which has gone bad does taste vinegary, this is true, but it's not quite the same. Grapes will ferment if left alone long enough, but that doesn't produce wine, nor will cabbage spontaneously form saurkraut.
PeHe gives you a sour. acidic swill. ReHe gives you (with a decent finesse roll) a reasonable quality of vinegar, suitable for preserves and cooking.
In the presence of oxygen and acetobacter, ethanol is fermented into acetic acid.
I don't have A&A yet, but it would seem like a lateral move by brewers/vinyards since it yields a saleable product useful as a disinfectant, condiment, preservative etc. Fermentation of wine into vinegar no more destroys the wine than making wine destroys the grape juice.
I would rule that making vinegar from wine should be a Rego effect possibily with a 9+ Finesse roll to prevent contamination with other microbes (which could yield anything from acetone to botulism tainted sludge). The description is out of paradigm, but the effects are not.
OTOH though, Vinegar is derived from Vin Aigre (fr. Sour Wine) and the description of the proposed spell specifically says "unusable vinegar". Therefore, unless Brutus (and his SG) consider vinegar generally useless, we can assume that the resulting substance is unusable AS vinegar in which case Perdo Aquam (Herbam) would be a suitable guideline.
If you plan to create "proper" vinegar, however, I recommend the Rego Hebam guidelines to "Treat and Process items made of plant products" in Covenants, pg 51. Such as spell is two magnitudes higher than that to cause generic spoilage of wine, but since it also gives the character the ability to create usable vinegar it is also more useful.
The purpose of the spell is to turn the wine into undrinkable mush. It was my understanding that most wines will go bad if left sealed too long, or left open. Therefore I considered it turning bad a natural change, hence rego.
The general consensus is that this would have to be a perdo spell as it is making the wine less perfect.
