This ability allows the character to summon magical animals over long distance. To use this ability, the character must concentrate over a magical animal that he already encountered and wants to summon. A character can't summon an animal he never encountered. He must then make a presence + Summon magical beasts roll against an ease factor of 9. If successful, the beast arrives within one hour, two minutes with a ease factor of 12, and in a single round with an ease factor of 15. The distance between the character and the animal is not important, but the roll needs to penetrate the might of the summoned animal. The might of the animal must be inferior or equal to 5 x Summon magical beasts, and only one animal can be summoned at once.
The character has no way to determine if the beast he summons will be friendly afterward, and he'll have to bargain with it, if possible (unless they're already friends).
A big problem with the hermetic magic, is the impossibility to summon magical animals without a ritual. Even calling a magic wolf would need a 55 level ritual (base 35 + 4 arcane connection). You can summon ghosts, daimon, faeries, mundane animals, elementals, demons, angels... but not magical animals without high level rituals.
I hoped to find something about this in Hermetic projects, but no...
So I propose this virtue, based on the virtue Summon animals, for an Ex Miscellanea tradition, for hedgies, or as a mystery for a tradition close to the animal world (like the Bjornaers or the Diedne). I hope you'll find this virtue interesting, if it didn't exist already.
Where do you get your 35 from?
Are you simply using the analogue from ReCo?
what Arts are you using?
Why must a material being be easily summoned compared to an immaterial one (ghosts & spirits)?
EDIT:
If you simply wish to use ReAn to cause the animal to move to your location (running or flying, not teleporting), you can do so much more easily.
This makes sense to me. Magical animals are material and so bound by the rules of the material world - to violate these (teleportation) should be hard, compared to sommuning an immaterial being which is not bound by the laws of the material world.
I based this new virtue on "Summon animals". If you can summon a mundane animal, you should be able to summon a magical one as well. The rules of the material world are the same for both, the only difference is the magic might.
The fancy thing about Summon Animals is that they do so without Arts.
It is fundamentally non-Hermetic.
As I recall, the animals still have to arrieve non-magically.
A similar virtue could presumably (as above) summon magical animals, but it would presumably again be a supernatural ability, unrelated to hermetic magic.
The reference to hermetic magic (above) was what foxed me.
So, yes, you need to penetrate, so this ability is not too much powerful. If you have an arcane connection and a good score in penetration and in this ability, to summon a powerful beast like a dragon is not impossible.
Of course, how to get an arcane connection from a dragon is another problem !
That's what I was thinking. I didn't think that summoning involved teleporting.
If you did want to teleport you could research your teleport spell at range touch then cast it with Opening the Intangible Tunnel or Minute of Reckoning (the same spell with duration diameter instead of concentration)
If you are a normal hermetic magus, sure. But even if you have the hermetic arts, it can be useful if you have a deficiency in vim, or unstructured caster or any other flaw which limits your summoning magic.
And if you don't have an arcane connection ?
This virtue can allow you to summon a magic animal without an arcane connection, which can be useful. For Opening the intangible tunnel, you need it. Not with this virtue. With it, a sympathetic connection would do, to get penetration (if you need, because for a minor magical animal, basic penetration would be good enough).
And for an hedge wizard, this virtue could have some flavor in a saga, where the weak hedgie summons suddenly a powerful beast...
It's true that I never think to use Opening the intangible Tunnel to summon an animal.
Since you're right, and I'm wrong, I have to change a little this virtue to make it interesting for an Ex Miscellanea tradition.
New virtue : Summon magical beasts.
This ability allows the character to summon magical animals over long distance. To use this ability, the character must concentrate over some magical animals that he wants to summon. He must then make a presence + Summon magical beasts roll against an ease factor of 9. If successful, the beast(s) arrives within one hour, two minutes with an ease factor of 12, and in a single round with an ease factor of 15. The distance between the character and the animal is not important, but the roll needs to penetrate the might of the summoned animals. The combined might of the summoned animals must be inferior or equal to 5 x Summon magical beasts, and several animals can be summoned at once (for example, a character with this ability at 8 can summon up to eight animals with a magic might of 5, or two animals with a magic might of 20). The character doesn't need to know the beast, or even to have encountered it, but he needs to know that this beast exists. A magic lore roll to determine if the character has ever heard about the beast can be necessary.
The character has no way to determine if the beasts he'll summon will be friendly afterward, and he'll have to bargain with them, if possible (unless they're already friends).
With this, the character doesn't need to have an arcane connection, or even to have encountered the animal, he can summon it right away.
...and this I for one would never allow in my sagas, but YSMV
Also, it just struck me, this is a limited version of summoning, isn't it?
Or am I mixing summoning up with that trick from the 4th edition Hedge Magic book? I know they could summon material magical beings.
I don't think it's powerful. I had a player with summon animals, who summoned several hundred millions of ants in a town... just before coming back immediatly in his sanctum.
