I’ve recently become obsessed with elementals from RoP:M as part of creating a Verditius with a specialty in them. I’ve discovered several quite interesting interactions and ideas and wanted to share my thoughts.
Firstly, before we talk about why to create elementals, let’s talk about how. All magi with enough skill in Creo and any of the elemental Forms can rarefy elementals from base matter associated with those forms: it’s just a level 30 ritual for the basic 15 Might, Size 0 elemental. Adding magnitudes for Size gives you more power as well, +1 magnitude equals +3 to Size and +5 to Might. Let’s stick with the basic one for now.
A level 30 ritual will cost us 6 pawns of vis, which isn’t that efficient for the prize of a Might 15 creature that’s not even under our control. Hermetically speaking, this could be made more efficient by a magus with some combination of Mercurian Magic and Imbued with the Spirit of (Form), although it’s important to remember to ward beforehand if doing the latter since it’ll likely want to kill you. With both virtues, elementals can be produced effectively vislessly with three days to rest in between castings. This, however, is still not as efficient as we can be.
The gold standard is, as it so often is, found in an insert secreted away as an aside in a sourcebook. TSE p. 67 has an insert which discusses the Terrae Cult, or cult of the earth, a mystery cult largely but not entirely within House Guernicus that guards various earth-related secrets (the italicized portions will be important later). Among the virtues imparted by this cult is a variant of the Summoning virtue which applies exclusively to creatures with Magic Might aligned to Terram, which is not Infernally tainted. The most tantalizing bit is at the end, where it is explained that magi with this variant of the virtue can use the scouring mechanic inherent to Summoning to create earth elementals de novo.
Without spending a single pawn of vis, mind. Even with Summoning having the issues inherent with a supernatural virtue for hermetic magi, this is effectively a way to produce as many elementals as you like, although of course only aligned to Terram. So now we have an army of burly earth elementals ready to be commanded: but what are they good for?
There is, of course, the easy and obvious answer of a somewhat dimwitted, but easy to command turb that can have as many buffing spells as you like applied without worrying about warping. They can even appear to be men with a little Imaginem. The best use for elementals, however, is as batteries.
Spell Binding from TMRE allows us to use elementals to sustain other spells of their form. Obviously with the Summoning variant here, this is limited entirely to earth elementals, but Terram is an extremely rich form in terms of effects, especially once you can open up effectively permanent MuTe effects maintained by your captive elementals. Of course, this is also a Ritual effect, which is why Mercurian Magic remains a good choice even if you have Summoning. There is also the hilarious recursion of using captive elementals to fuel spells of control on other elementals.
Where this really opens up, though, is if you have access to the Bind Magical Creatures Major Mystery from House Verditius. This virtue allows you to do two things. The first is to bind the power of a magical creature to your Gift, allowing you to use it at will, which is nice enough. The second, which is much more relevant to our purposes here, is that it allows you to drain Might from a creature and use it in place of vis when enchanting a device. For every point of Rego Vim Lab Total above the creature’s Might, you can convert a point of Might to a pawn of non-aligned vis usable in an enchantment of any TeFo combination. Effectively, those piddly 15 Might elementals are now worth 15 pawns of any type of vis. The implications of a Verditius using this are somewhat breathtaking, to be honest, and somewhat crush the vis economy.
Remember those italics from earlier? Let’s then take the example of a Verditius initiated into the Terrae Cult using this mystery. With Summoning, said Verditius is effectively capable of producing packages of 15 pawns of vis infinitely: only usable by himself, of course, and only in device production, but without limit or cost, except perhaps morally (and politically, as others in the House are sure to hate you for this).
Now the question is: am I going to use this horrific combination? No, probably not. It’s not that fun to be entirely broken. But it is fun to theorize.