For an upcoming saga, I'd like to get a better idea of the Hermetic population of the Rhine Tribunal. There's a lot of information in GotF, but also a few blanks to fill out.
Let's start with what we know. We have 85 magi in 10 covenants who are mentioned in GotF, plus 5 magi in Colleom Leonis from TtA:
Triamore: 3
Durenmar: 15
Dankmar: 4
Waddenzee: 4
Oculus Septentrionalis: 7
Fengheld: 23
Heorot: 3 (I'm counting it as part of the Rhine Tribunal)
Crintera: 6
Inrencillia: 10
Roznov: 7
Collem Leonis: 5
Peregrinatores: 3 (Tabanus filius Jart of Guernicus, Felicia of Bonisagus, Caprea of Bjornaer)
So we know of 90 magi out of around 130. Oculus Septentrionalis has room for one or two more, so let's make that 92.
What do we know about the others?
GotF says that 1-6 additional covenants can be devised.
Around a sixth of the magi (~22) are peregrinatores (GotF, p. 20). I'll put that number at 23, so we have 112 magi accounted for (including 20 new peregrinatores). About 18 magi live at covenants that have not yet been named.
Around a dozen archmages live in the Rhine tribunal, but only seven of them are named in GotF. So five more need to be drawn up and put into the new covenants (maybe an odd one is a peregrinator, but most aren't).
At least ten Redcaps live in each tribunal (HoH:TL, p. 78). Let's make that twelve, since the Rhine tribunal is not a small tribunal. Two have been mentioned by name in GotF (Boris in Oculus and Horst in Fengheld), so we need ten more.
The two favored tribunals of the Rustic Magi (one of the larger Ex Misc traditions) are the Rhine and Provencal tribunals (HoH:S, p. 130). No Rustic Magi are mentioned in GotF. We only have eight Ex Misc mentioned in GotF (three each in Dankmar and Roznov, one each in Oculus and Fengheld), although Ex Misc is by far the largest House (about 14,5% of all magi are Ex Misc.)
So for the 40 new magi:
2 live at Oculus (that's a choice I made)
18 live at new covenants
20 are peregrinatores
Five of them are archmages
Almost all of the others will be Journeymen (my guess is that around 2/3 will be Journeymen, and we already have many Masters)
Ten are Redcaps (presumably all of them peregrinatores, as we already have two Mercer Houses)
A few will be Rusticani
For the rest, I'll have to choose Hermetic societies, Mystery Cults, and Ex Misc traditions I want to have in the tribunal and add them.
14.5% of 130 magi comes out to 18.5 Ex Misc magi; with only 8 mentioned. That leaves approximately 10 or 11 Ex Misc left to account for.
92 magi in 11 named covenants is ~8.2 magi per covenant. The 18 new mages in new covenants is two or three new covenants, each with at least one Arch-Mage.
The ex Misc Magi are not homogeneously distributed throughout the order: they are likely more present on the fringes (eg. Loch Legan) than in the hermetic heartland.
If anything, I would expect the Rusticani to all be grouped in a single Covenant and that's it.
Regarding adding extra Covenants, that is just extending the to do list for new magi to establish themselves, which is why I have chosen to add chapter houses rather than full Covenants.
Rusticani explicitly prefer to live apart from each other, so they are most unlikely to all be in the same covenant - assuming there even is more than one of them in the tribunal.
It is noted that there are very few of them in the Order - even if it should be one of the larger traditions in Ex Misc, it is not large.
If there are more than three of them in the Rhine tribunal I would be very surprised. But there may well be fewer.
So 40 new mages; 10 are Mercere, and 10 are Ex Misc (including 3 Rusticani). That leaves 20 split among the other houses – what is the current breakdown among the described mages in the Rhine tribunal? Do some of the remaining magi need to be assigned to particular houses to even out representation, or to shore up the dominance of one house?
How do you think the five as-yet unaccounted for archmagi would be distributed?
Thanks to everyone for your input. I was planning to accomodate the players' wishes who their character's parens should be and how they imagine the covenant of their PC's apprenticeship. I don't want to just add a few generic covenants. The goal here was to establish the "boundary conditions" that limit the choices. I will stay with the 130 mages that live in the Rhine tribunal according to the book. They won't meet all of them, but I'd like to have a rough idea what the Tribunal looks like.
10 additional Redcaps and 10 additional Ex Misc is also what I calculated. I even had three Rusticani marked up, following a simiar train of thought as ErikT.
The current list by House is
11 Bjornaer
17 Bonisagus
4 Criamon
18 Ex Misc (including the 10 additional magi)
6 Flambeau
p. 61 says that Winfrida and Tabanus are among the very few (perhaps even the only two) Guernicus magi in the Rhine Tribunal.
8 Jerbiton (one additional at Oculus)
13 Mercere (including 10 additional Redcaps)
10 Merinita
9 Tremere
There are only two Tytalus, Eric Ribecus of Waddenzee and an unnamed Tytalus in Roznov.
3 Verditius
That leaves 27 magi of unclear House (seven magi from Fengheld and one from Durenmar were mentioned in the book without a House). It seems like we need more Criamon, Flambeau, Jerbiton, Tytalus, and Verditius.
I don't think we need to match the average distribution in the order, as there will be regional variations. It's more important to cover the traditions/cults I want to see (not sure yet which those are).
The seven archmagi mentioned in the book are: two Bonisagus, and one each from Flambeau, Tremere, Bjornaer, Merinita, and Ex Miscellanea (possibly the only Ex Misc archmage).
I was thinking about a third Bonisagus, a Jerbiton, another Flambeau, a Tytalus, and maybe another Bonisagus or Tytalus.
Bjornaer (would be at Crintera), Criamon (don't care about titles), Ex Misc, Guernicus (weak presence in the Rhine tribunal), Mercere (Xavier is the only one), Tremere (would hold his own sigil) are not options for me.
The Tytallus Archmage could be Ballack's (see Hibernia) Parens, just to tie them on with the rest of the world. There is another immigrant from the Rhine in Hibernia (Tagh or something) from house Criamon, who is fairly young, so they could have a Master parens in the same Covenant, somewhere in the Black Forest?
If you are not running the Rhine Gorge specifically, you can put some Covenant there.