Artisano also has 11 years of study
sticking with my previous work that gives him 110 xp
40 to bring magic theory to 8
10 to bring code of Hermes to 2
30 for Faerie lore at 3
20 to bring stealth to 4
10 to bring theology to 2
Also some time during this period Ranulf will use his casting tablet to bring his stamina to 5 then trade/give the tablet away to someone else.
So this is OK because of thoughts along the lines of "if it doesn't say you can't, and it makes some sense, hermetic magic should be allowed to do it"?
Effectively making a new perdo vim guideline:
anyone else want to chime in on whether or not this seems reasonable
affected*
But I'm not sure which you meant, my brain resets every time I try to read the sentence...
Rather than wind of mundane silence that dispels everything. or unraveling the fabric of (form) which dispels something specific a spell using this guideline will dispel everything except a certain type of magic.
Ranulf would use this guideline to create a wind of mundane silence type spell that would dispel all of the magic from creatures of might, exotic wizards, and the nearly any other source while leaving his own spells (and those of other hermetic magi and hermetic enchanted items ) intact.
Yeah, I feel that would require an Intellego requisite to tell the difference (as you speculated earlier). InVi can certainly tell the difference between Hermetic and non-Hermetic magic - in fact it's hard to have an InVi actually detect either kind. So if you made it a Pe(In)Vi spell with the +1 for the Intellego requisite, that seems doable....
Ok I'll drop the selective wind of mundane silence for now. This is something else that dispels magic. It was prompted by thoughts of how to combine Ranulf's strongest arts so, despite it being level 50, it only takes him a single season to create.
I wanted the spell to not replace perdo vim spells but still have a use.
There are some complications to this spell but I'm out of time for the moment.
Cool and awesome and I have no idea what to think of it rules-wise!
This spell gets weird when you consider how it works when you actually apply it to a given spell.
Some spells are obvious such as phantasm of the human form or ward against faeries of the mountains , but most spells, to the extent that they have a location, their location is within another object. Does a wall of protecting stone burn or is the amount of the spell accessible to the fire too small to allow it to be dispelled?
It is hard to imagine how Spells of Timber could be used to remove something like enslave the mortal mind or Curse of Circe. Assume that we change the cursed character into a rock, throw the rock into an enchanted fire and keep casting the transformation spell on him so there's always a spell around that hasn't yet been burnt up. That plan would work only if we assume both that consuming the surface of the spell is sufficient to dispel it and that an effect like enslave the mortal mind exists on the surface of the target.
I can live with these assumptions. A range touch perdo vim spell would work to dispel Enslave the Mortal Mind when the caster touches the Enslaved person so I'd conclude that having the spell present on the surface of the target is completely consistent with the game as it stands. the second one is more questionable, while I can create models of magic that are consistent with it, it is just me creating them. While I don't think that it makes Spells of Timber to powerful I'm hesitant to define magic for the sake of balancing a spell.
The whole stone wall, for sure! can just see the spectacle before me, with this stone wall being consumed by hungry flames - and mundanes fleeing in panic at the sight.
Again, I can so see the flames pouring out of the victms head, "burning" the enslavement out of him. Or the pig on fire, with a man stepping out of the remains.
So, does it damage the victim of the spell being transfromed, and how much?
good point.
While It would be convenient to say that spells function like bunnies instead of chairs, in that they fail after you burn off the surface, it is stretch.
One way or the other I'll keep the spell. Ranulf has a way to turn all sorts of things into fires so he could do that and let any spells on the objects burn up.
The spell allows a fire to burn magic. It doesn't prevent the fire from burning anything else. I suppose a fire would do as much as it would if this spell weren't cast on it.
Six seasons left and more than six seasons of things that Ranulf wants to do (even with the two extra seasons from skipping silencing wind of the order).
I looked at reworking the familiar bond but despite Ranulf's increased scores he could only raise the strength of one of their cords by a single point.
I had looked at a spell to turn other people into birds made of fire but the level was extreme. I instead went for muto animal spells
Ranulf spends one season inventing Cloak of Black Feathers and Shape of the Aquatic Predator (from Legends of Hermes, it changes the caster into a shark) using lab notes (using a nocturnal schedule for an additional +2 lab total).
Ranulf then spends a season learning Wizard's Reach (Corpus) at level 50 from lab notes so he use these spells on other people.
Seeing as Ranulf now knows Words with the Flickering Flame he is going to invent a spell to increase the usefulness of one of the few intelego spells that he can manage.
The base level for this is a bit of a guess there really are no good guides in Muto Ignem. Muto Animal 10 can give an animal a human mind temporarily. Base 25 can give an animal a supernatural ability such as breathing fire. Base 20 was what I went with considering that I'm giving the fire not just a more animal like mind but also more animal like perceptions.
Then, hoping to get more utility out of Cunning Flames he spends a season inventing Commanding the Harnessed Beast (either using lab notes and taking a very leisurely season or by using a nocturnal schedule for an additional +2 lab total again)
Love the spell. It's a great idea.
I think that it is fine for it to just affect spells contained within something else. Say, Lilith has Disguise of the New Visage cast on her to make her look like Eve. And then Ranulf casts Spells of Timber on a fiery brand and hits Lilith with the burning brand.
First, the Spells of Timber effect should need to penetrate Lilith's Magic Resistance. If it does, then the Disguise of the New Visage effect burns up, revealing that "Eve" is really Lilith. In addition, if Lilith is vulnerable to flame (which would be expected) she will take normal burning damage from the burning brand (if the Spells of Timber effect penetrates). She doesn't take additional damage due to the immolation of the Disguise of the New Visage effect. And if Lilith happened to be invulnerable to fire, then she would take no damage from the burning brand --- but the Disguise of the New Visage effect would still be burnt.
I don't think that you need to create a model of magic for this. The RAW is already pretty clear that if you touch a thing, you are also touching any effects upon them.
I realize it is just me, but I'm not a great fan on new, "on the fly" guidelines.
I think that it is great to have normal hermetic magic be unable to do some things, not because it's impossible, but just because no one knows how to do it. It makes Hermetic Magic more "real" and believable to me.
It also means that, instead of the (no disrespect here, but this is how I see it) cheap and easy solution ("here's a new guideline that allows me to do what I want"), players either have to work around the problem, which I find interesting and a challenge to their intellect, or... engage in original research to create a new guideline!
This, IMO, is also great, as it provides a background reason for the new guidelines being introduced in supplements (it's the result of original research, of course!), and can help the GM give more verisimilitude to his order, by allowing him to describe the changes being brought to hermetic magic over the years (like "no one could blanket dispell all magic, you had to be specific, until, in 1123 AD, Vasily Bonisagi's research brought it to the Order") instead of just saying "Ok, we've had centuries of research, and nothing happened", as it can certainly seem sometimes. Of course, it also allows players to leave their own mark in the OoH's history.
It's not just you.
I don't agree with you guys. I think the original wide flexibility of the Arts is a key feature of Hermetic Magic to me and I dislike many of the restrictions imposed in 5e to require additional virtues (Dream Magic for example).
But I think I may understand where The Fixer is coming from. Or at least I share some related feelings.
Art scores, and particularly effective Art scores taking into account foci and the like, get so high under the current rules that anything allowed by the guidelines becomes easy, often trivial, to achieve. Lab Texts, rather than being sources of wisdom and power, are usually just shortcuts to achieve developments that aren't hard to do anew. We focus so much on original research because anything else is just too simple to be a challenge.
In earlier editions, as least as I recall them, Arts were low enough that once could see a development of the Order's magic through development and circulation of individual spells, rather than new sets of guidelines as The Fixer suggests. Developing a spell of sufficient magnitude for the Archmagi Challenge was a major achievement and the text for such a spell would be in great demand. Now that feels just ho hum and we have to go outside the Hermetic Magic system to feel the excitement of the new.
I don't agree with any of you! 
Some guidelines should be the result of Original Research. I'd rather see that the canonical magus who takes advantage of some of these new guidelines have invented them through Original Research and either kept them secret or shared them, as the troupe desires. Some things make sense, and some don't, but that's a troupe decision, IMO. But that's not really an issue I have with the introduction of new guidelines, so much as the way they are introduced...
And as far as the sufficient magnitude for the Archmagi Challenge, it was never about just magnitude, it was about magnitude and utility. It's one aspect of the spell, which is one aspect of the overall challenge...
I love this spell, it gives a new meaning to "Cleansing Fire".
The spell is clearly formulated, the spell to dispel must be "engulfed" by flames. So I would say that the person who needs to be cleanse of any spells, ReMe included must becovered in fire to some extend.
The spell (Spells of Timber) will not do damage per say, but the fire affecting the target will. Now is the spell dissipated releasing additional fire, I do not know. If I had to suggest any form of damage, I would suggest the same amount than an Ignem spell of half the magnitude of the spell dispelled.
By the way, depending on how litteral you take the word "engulfed in flame", I could see where the tradition of walking on burning charcoal could come from 
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That would be a very interesting tool in a Initiation ritual or any form of ceremony to have a new initiate walking through a wall of flammes, jumping above a bonefire or walking on burning coal to make sure that he is not under the influence of any spell.
Just for the storytelling aspect of the spell, I would not require the target to be really burning, merely touching flames - and if part of an initiation rite, maybe get the flaw "Disfigured".
I don't share your tastes in this matter. I think that to restrict hermetic magic to the printed guidelines is less fun than restricting it the definitions of the techniques and forms (which is of course much more vague but that s a small burden).
I can easily imagine a player in my game wanting his or her character to create a spell that does something reasonable but not strictly within the printed guidelines such as make fire more aware of its surroundings for instance. I think saying to the player "go use the breakthrough rules" would be far less fun than "go do it". That isn't to say that I'd endorse any sort of a spell, for instance I'm not in favor of a perdo vim spell that dispels all other magics except magic from the caster (at least without an intellego requisite and very likely not even then).
I don't think that new guidelines introduced in supplements as a rule describe anything that I wouldn't let the characters do already.
There is absolutely no reason to not do this in any game regardless of how you interpret the restrictiveness of the spell guidelines. I do it in my games, it is a completely unrelated issue. (Or am I missing something?)
Very true.
For me atleast, it's because of how my head works.
If there are now rules and limits, I know for a fact that I will spin off in wild directions and loose connection with anything sensible in far too short a time.
Existing guidelines please - if I have to make them up myself I'll never touch the ground again.
If it's time to make up new guidelnes, let there at least be some work for my character and preferbly stories to come from them, before they are avaialable.
Besides, generally find it much more interesting to see if I can do the stuff I want within existing limits than simply throwing them away and making up new ones.
There is a world of difference between "no rules and limits" and the "guidelines presented in the rulebooks are exhaustive and there is no way to make a spell that isn't described by them without original research". There are (no books here to back myself up) several spells in the core rules that use guidelines not given in the rules. Do these upset you? (I suppose the question would be easier to answer if I provided examples).