This post of Medusa inspired me to come up with the following new Virtue. It can also be useful to non-necromancers, of course, so the name could be adapted.
Necromancer (Minor, Hermetic)
You have been trained to view the Forms of Corpus and Mentem as connected. Whenever you gain experience from a source dedicated to one of these Arts, you gain half the Source Quality (rounded up) in experience points in the other.
During character creation, assign all your experience points in Arts. Then assign half the experience points assigned to each of the two Forms to the other Form. Do not actually add these experience points to the Form in question until you have finished calculating all the bonus experience points.
In addition, if a spell with one of these Forms as its primary Form has the other as a requisite, you use the primary Form to calculate totals, even if the requisite is lower.
You may only take the virtue Affinity with Art once.
This is basically the virtue Elemental Magic, but with only two forms. Mechanically, it is very close to Affinity with Art, which is why I counted it as taking one of the two "Affinity slots". Elemental Magic takes up your Major Hermetic Virtue, so that seems fair.
The only problem I see is that taking e.g. Affinity with Corpus incentivizes studying only Corpus to get the benefit from both Virtues. However, Elemental Magic also allows that, so maybe it's not a problem.
As discussed in the other thread, i thibk that i would make the elementalist equivalent for a necromancer, i would put togther An, Co, Me and Vi, as mentionned in the here (Nature Wizard from Mythic Locations - #3 by SEE).
Just with Vi instead of He, to reflect the focus on the supernatural beeing (a ReVi warding circle seems like a good thing to have for a summoner of the angry dead), rather than a vampire willow tree.
I think Elemental Magic has a strong concept behind it. I'm not a big fan of having a dozen variations of it, also for reasons of game balance. In my opinion, Co, Me, and Vi are the strongest Forms.
The two-Form Necromancer could also be interesting because it doesn't take the Major Hermetic Virtue slot.
My main criticism against this is this is effectively twice as good as Affinity with (Art), already one of the strong virtues in the game. I'd be fine with a quarter applied.
You're right, I had made a mistake there. A quarter would be better.
I just realized that Elemental Magic is a lot better than I had thought. It's equivalent to 12 Affinities? All the more reason not to allow variations of it.
