Obsessed Specialist: Likely Candidate?

A real might 70 creature also has a lot of powers, and could pose a challenge to a lot of magi, depending upon its underlying physical characteristics. A good analog would be Genoskwa in the latest Dresden Files book, Skin Game. Harry's magic couldn't touch it, so he had to out think it. And it was really big and bad, and if it caught Harry it would have popped Harry's head off and drunk his blood from his corpse like a bottle of pop...

Order of Reason 75* CrMe

  • R: Touch, D: Momentary, T: Group, Ritual
  • Base 55, Touch +1, Target +3
  • Increase the Intelligence of 100 people by +1, to a maximum of +5
    Include multicast and you've got a quick rise to power thanks to the book permitting a bunch of Mastery; especially if there's another book for a different characteristic.

I guess I'm having trouble with the segue. Is this in the context of your original premise of some unknown resource?

I'm not sure that granting every member of the covenant a boost of intelligence is all that valuable. What's the goal, to provide something that really boosts power? Are any of your players playing Creo or Mentem specialists than can get to a LT of 75? And if so, doesn't this really play to one individual character's strengths, and not the covenant as a whole?

It's a "throw ideas at the wall" approach, and a segue I don't consider a problem as the whole butterfly thing was already a tangent from the original point. A spell like this would affect more than just a covenant, as it could readily be applied to a bunch of magi for less than a pawn of vis apiece. Main reason I'm looking at this sort of stuff is because a majority of this thread has been suggesting stuff like Lancea Magica and other groundbreaking research, so I'm looking at options that don't break Hermetic Theory but would have major political capital.

Which is why I was saying, albeit indirectly, I wasn't following the segue, unless it was under the premise of the OP.

Well, a lot of it depends on the game you are playing, which we don't have enough information about. I shot down the create magical butterflies idea, because it turns the game into an exercise of printing money, and that's bad for any game, IMO.

Stat boosting, as a means of generating revenue, I guess it's fine, but again, there really isn't enough information on it to offer a good opinion. One could not that it might interfere with House Mercere, canonically, especially if you restrict these spells to this House and the Cult of Mercury. I have a general view that others have invented them, and may even be at Durenmar, but they aren't really "available" to just anyone, while players are free to invent these spells from first principles, without the benefit of a lab text (which makes them huge time sinks). Are any of your players playing Merceris magi? Will it step on their toes? Were these texts from a Merceris magus, and might his descendants claim that these belong to House Mercere when/if they find out. To me, those are the interesting questions, and the Unknown resource isn't really the text, but developing a good relationship with House Mercere (which is a fabulous resource).

Some people believe that you can master any ritual with a score of 1 and obviate all botch dice. The RAW is murky, at best, and contradictory, at worst. If your interpretation of RAW is similar to my opening statement, you don't need a lot of high quality summae and tractatus to get the score up. If you believe that rituals are always stressful and mastery score only mitigates risk of botch by reducing total botch dice, you still have a ritual that is going to have a good chance at botch. Magi will know this, and will avoid such a risky ritual. Being part of a botched Creo Mentem ritual is not something on any magus's wish list. Certainly elder magi who might experience extended Twilight episodes are going to be cautious, even with someone who has a high mastery ability score. You're starting with 16 botch dice (1 + 1/pawn of vis). If you are Mercurian you can cut the risk of botch in half. If you have Cautious sorcerer, you can remove 3 botch dice. Mastery removes 1 botch die per point of score, so it is possible that a Mercurian with Cautious Sorcerer and some mastery ability can cast this spell without a risk of botch, but a magus who only has the mastery ability is going to have a huge risk of botch that. Keep in mind that by creating this resource, you're also creating the person who made it, he was driven to negotiate with a daimon to get this power to write well, so it suggests that he had already invented this spell, and had mastered the heck out of it to write about it. By RAW, the summa is half his ability score, but it would make some sense that the daimon instead gave him the ability to write to, or closer to, his ability score, rather than half. That makes this a resource that is hiding in plain sight, the books the players find aren't the resource, the daimon is, if you can convince him to boost your writing limit, that is. Suddenly all kinds of magi start coming to visit the covenant, bringing in lots of vis (to pay for a stay), but the PCs can't figure out why...

I keep seeing this mentioned. That seems like a really fundamental rule to leave unresolved for at least a decade.

Well, have you seen the Aegis must penetrate debate?

I will say that those who believe Mastery score of 1 obviates botch risk have something of a point, that in the game world, a lot of magi would accumulate warping/risk Twilight from botched Aegis rituals. Of course, I use that as a benchmark that saying Aegis 30 is the largest reasonable Aegis that would be cast safely and regularly.

Magical Might 70 is near the upper end of the range for beings like the Twelve Titans. What "extremely exploitable weaknesses" are you expecting a being like Cronus to have, exactly?

You're the wizard making this thing, so why not give it a glaring weakness? Granted, even that shouldn't be a concern, because I've yet to see a citation saying that you need to penetrate this thing's magic resistance to have it behave as desired in the spell.

To make getting 140 pawns of vis meaningful?

Unless this is a Tytalus magus, I highly doubt they'd go out of their way to make things difficult while designing this spell.

Restating it then. This wouldn't feel like a meaningful reward for discovering the Unknown Resource to me.

This reminds me:
When creating a being with Might, using ritual Creo, do you have to penetrate, like when you summon spirits?
Why? Why not?

I don't see why you would. The being with Might doesn't exist until you're bringing it to being, so its resistance can't apply until after it enters the world, by which point it's too late to stop its inception. The same logic applies to any Rego control incorporated into the spell.

About the lvll 70 ritual to create massive magical entities to harvest uis.
I think there are some troubles, like:

  1. You cant create more vis than the invested vis, your butterflies dont need earn 14 pounds of vis just for be great magical beings
  2. You cant create something that dont exist, you must be familiarized with this extrange magical butterfly to summon it. In other case, you can summon a swarm of magical butterfly, like magic might 5, and then use another ritual to boost the power, if possible. In other hand, you are doing 2 things with the same spell: conjuring the animal, and boosting the animal.
  3. You create the butterflies, ok, but they must act in his natural form.
  4. How can the butterflies kill each other?

there are a lot of But.
sorry about grammar and orthography.

Other than house rules, where does it say that?

Again, where in the rules does it say this? Creating magical beings is a base 55 spell, so you're pretty much guaranteed to be making Might scores outside of any extant stat block in the game.

The rules explicitly state you can control their behavior with a Rego requisite, so they do what you made them to do. Since they exist to commit suicide, I'm certain they either have the capability to snap their own necks or just plain have a Seppuku power.

And thus we go right back around to my Essential Nature-based argument, which is that just because you can think of something doesn't mean you can permanently create that something, any more than you can use CrTe to permanently make steel-tough weightless rock.

Again, care to cite the rule that tells us one way or the other? If it's part of the Essential Nature of that boulder to be weightless and made of steel, then it will exist independently, and it is because that's what you made. I've not seen any indication that permanently making ANY magical creature is verboten, because that is what your logic leads to.

Do we need to make this butterfly part of the Faerie Realm? Because the nature of fae means it exists solely because you imagine it.

How about this?
Evoking Atlas and His Blood
(Rego Vim)
Range: Arcane Connection. Duration: Year. Target: Boundary.
A lost ritual, following the rules for Mercurian Rituals, infuses the area with the power of the Titans. Upon completion a titan is compelled to extend its Might over the target area to produce a Magic Aura.
(Ease Factor: 78)

Not necessarily correct. A faerie can be born from an act of imagination, but not every act of imagination creates a faerie and it's not clear that every faerie (or even any faerie) is actually created by legend.

Furthermore, faeries don't take on roles where they are supposed to be harvested for vis. That annihilates the faerie in a way that killing it doesn't.