Picturing Viola saying this is disturbingly reminiscent of a Star Trek episode. "Poseidon and Neptune, at Tanais!"
Stupid star faring culture that can't even figure out verbs. That never made any sense to me.
I'll be heading on another road trip, and will be semi-afk until Feb 20th. If you happen to be attending Capricon (Feb 10th weekend, Chicago, IL) or Wicked Faire (Feb 17th weekend, Somerset, NJ) you should come find me!
You lost me. Verbs? As in non-use thereof, or what?
Scott
Star Trek: TNG episode. The Enterprise encounters a race whose language is completely devoid of adjectives or verbs. The language is entirely historic references. "Agath and Jinub, at Tanagra! Garthon, on the sea!"
It was a rather heavy handed moral play about how in order to understand a people, you have to understand their history.
Ohhhh...OK. 
Scott
I've been trying to make sure I understamd the rules for Arcadian travel.
From what I can tell from HoH: MC, getting into Arcadia and getting out of it are two separate things. For doing either, you have to make two separate rolls:
- A roll to make a charm. The ease factor is 12 for a mundane place, 15 for a regio level and 18 if the destination is part of Arcadia. Rolls to make the charm are Characteristic + Charm Ability + die (probably simple).
- An Arcadian Travel roll. This is ease factor:
- Travelling to a Regio level: destination level x 3
- Leaving a Regio Level: current level x 3
- Travelling to Arcadia: (13 - current aura modifier) x 3
- Travelling from Arcadia: (13 - destination aura modifier) x3
Possessing an arcane connection to the destination subtracts 6 from the ease factor. Rolls to travel are Per + Charm Ability + Aura modifier + stress die.
It's not possible to travel to a mundane place without first travelling to a regio level above it. My interpretation of that is that it is not possible:
- To open a trod directly from one mundane place to another.
- To travel from the regio located in Tanais directly to a non-regio in Alexandria (say).
- To travel directly from Arcadia to a non-regio place (?) (Ease factor need not be absolutely prohibitive if there's still a strong aura).
- To travel to a non-regio place that doesn't have a faerie regio above it (?).
It's not entirely clear whether you can travel from a regio in Tanais to one in Alexandria without going through Arcadia, although my inclination is to say you can't (or, frankly, I don't see much reason to go into Arcadia). Whilst it's not actually explicit, I'd also be inclined to rule that you can only use it to get in and out of Faerie regios, not other types.
This has also got the slightly funny result that by the time you're in a Faerie aura of 7, it's easier to go to Arcadia than it is to go to a regio above you (since regios must have a higher aura than the base level).
RoP: F have some slightly different rules for how getting into Arcadia (and Arcadia only, not Faerie regios). You make a charm as normal, and then gain your Arcadian Travel roll (Per + Charm Ability + Aura + Stress die) in "threshold points". You need (13 - current aura modifier) x 3 threshold points to enter Arcadia (which is consistent with the Ease Factor given in the Arcadian Travel virtue). However, you can also get additional threshold points from a variety of sources, including crossing boundaries, various special times such as equinoxes and solstices, and having faerie virtues. The net effect is to make it easier to get into Arcadia (or other aspects of the Faerie Realm). Leaving Arcadia is unchanged from the Arcadian Travel write-up.
Is there anything I've got wrong/important I've missed?
As far as I can tell, the really tricky part is going to be making the charms. What ability does Viola use - Dex + Craft: Illumination? I'm not actually quite sure what's meant by Illumination in this context. Com + Latin (for poetry)? Both only seem to have a total score of 2, which would make charms difficult.
Basically, Arcadian Travel is a hand-wave, since you don't expect actually to play out the trip through Arcadia, and this results in the inconsistencies you've noted. If you want to reconcile them in our house rules, we can do that. I hadn't actually noticed them before, but the one that troubles me most is that it's harder to get to a mundane place than to a regio, and yet you have to go through a regio to get to a mundane place--and that, frankly, doesn't seem to make a great deal of sense. Let me look at the text later tonight and see if I can glean anything from it that you missed.
It may require repetitive effort, but charms don't take that long to make, and time is the only penalty for failure.
Illumination is the Craft Ability used to illuminate books--painting, basically--and yes, that's the one she uses. What you missed is her Free Expression Virtue, which gives her an effective score of 5 for new works of Arts. Adding that to her Per of +2 gives her a base of 7 before the die roll, which makes mundane destinations, at least, very doable. (I think it's Per, but you might be right that it's Dex.)
Scott
I think it's Perception for the Arcadian travel roll, but any appropriate charactertistic for the roll to make the charm. Dex is the obvious characteristic for drawing/painting to me (and the one used in Art & Academe), unless you've got a good counter-argument?
Edit: But yes, you're right, I had missed the Free Expression.
Nope, that's the math as I understand it. However, as this is Mythic Dark Ages, there IS a faerie or magic regio above every part of the world, it just may not have any boundaries you can cross.
I believe terrain type is connected to terrain type. A regio of caves connects to other cave regios, whereas forests connect to forests.
So, a path looks like this:
Arcadia -> any faerie regiones
Mundane world -> the faerie regiones version of it
Regio -> any similar regiones, an adjacent terrain regiones, the mundane level, or Arcadia.
By the first set of rules, it is ludicriously easy to get to Lost Arcadia from any regio with aura 3+, and merely stupidly easy to get there from any other regio, while it is incredibly hard to move near to the real world.
I did the character before that book came out, and Per seemed more appropriate (being able to paint well seems, in my experience, to have more to do with knowing how to reproduce what you want to see, than with manual dexterity--there are certainly examples of good artists who were nearly crippled), but if Dex is canonical, fine. Note that I used Illumination because there wasn't much of a tradition of painting during the period historically, except frescoes and the like.
As for the travel rules themselves, I went back and had a look, and the difficulty seems to arise from the name of the mystery--although it includes "Arcadian", I think it's pretty clear from the mechanics that faerie trods are not a part of Arcadia proper (though, yes, they do connect only regiones, meaning there has to be a regio present, presumably at both ends, though the book only mentions the destination end explicitly), and, if that's the case, the mechanics make a lot more sense, with the exception of the weirdness that it's easier to travel to the mundane level below a regio, by going through the regio, than to the regio itself.
I think that the way to resolve the seeming contradiction is to rule that, if you haven't been to the regio above a mundane location, or at least have a description of it (though, of course, you have to know it exists), then you have to use the mundane location as the destination; if are familiar with the regio itself, presumably you can choose either it or the mundane level as the destination, though if you choose the regio, you have to exit it the normal way.
Scott
I don't think there's anything in canon that would indicate that's the case.
Scott
I'm away from my books for the next several weeks and unable to provide references. My understanding is that Faerie and Magic exist pretty much everywhere that Dominion does not.
It's not completely explicit how much of the world has some sort of supernatural aura; however, page 183 of the main book says "Many areas of the world have no realm affiliation, and therefore no aura", so there are certainly at least some places that don't (and my interpretation has always been that a lack of an aura is more the rule than the presence, as there need to be specific conditions met for an aura to form).
That said, where there are towns and other large gatherings of people for a while, there usually is an aura - dominion if appropriate, otherwise faerie (and, of course, the odd place with magic or infernal aura).
Religious icons? Given the Jerbiton (and orthodox Christianity in general) history, they've clearly been a major thing for a while (although granted probably not really Viola's thing).
I think you're probably losing the brackets here? It's (13 - aura) x 3, not 13 - aura x3.
Yeah, that's not what is in my copy.
I have to say, I'm amused by your timing here.
Thought I'd move discussion here to keep the other thread clear.
From what I can tell, this post was the last on the covenant development: Intellego and Warping .
Under that schedule, a Blacksmiths and Carpenters would have been finished by the beginning of 1228. I'm still not completely sure when Fray's arriving (although my best guess is the end of 1228?), but under the proposed schedule we'd have a new infirmary (freeing up another "store-room" in the caves system to be a lab), a mason's workshop and a barracks, but wouldn't have got to building above ground sancta for magi yet. Of course, if magi start arriving and filling up the cave system labs, that'll add to the pressure to get new labs built.
The other point is that I think we have labs automatically set up for the ones that were in existence when Portia cast her rituals, but for any others the standard 2 seasons will need to be put into setting them up.
Does that sound about right?
On a different issue:
Just to check, did Tasia bring these up with her?
OK.
Right. Someone would have to be assigned to set up at least one visitor lab, probably two. Viola can do one of them if you like.
Yes. This being a covenant devoted to hosting visitors, that would be done without question.
Scott
Work overload. I'm going to be only keeping track of the threads I know I'm involved in for a bit. Feel free to PM me if my response time is getting too slow.
The next several weekends, in particular, I'll likely be offline.
Out of town and offline until Tuesday.