I think you actually understood my concerns quite well, given that you went back to them (and solved them ) two paragraphs below,
Then fine with me. I'd just remove the "single fragment" stuff from the spell description, because to avoid someone else thinking "oh I can clone the treasure books in Durenmar!"
In fact that's why I suggested also a R: Arc, so you can actually cast the spell on a tiny, broken, burn fragment of the book, and still get the whole book restored.
I know that's adding 4 magnitudes, but to be honest it would be nonsensical to go for a 60 level spell. I would even agree to trade them with the extra complexity magnitudes, (Base 5, +2 treated animal product, +1 complexity, +4 Arcane). The justification of these was quite nice, but again this is repairing, not healing, and these came from a healing analogy, where the point of the process is handling (and keeping) something or someone alive. Given that you are working with dead materials I'm thinking the analogy with the "casting a healing spell on a cut finger" should be casting a repair spell on a cut finger, and getting its former corpse repaired.
You said it, most. Still there are priceless books (or ashes of books) out there.
Actually no I still do not understand your concerns. Healing, or Repair as you want to say, should never be able to create duplicates of something. In all of the games I have played in, I have never run into someone who thought they could use a repair spell to create a duplicate. The fact that some here seem to think your can, as well as mixing up healing/repair spells and crafting spells, is actually a little mind blowing to me.
I get that the "you can do it from a tiny remain of the original book" is written as to make clear that the ritual is powerful. I also get, from later explanations, that you should collect all the remains, to make clear that the ritual requires a lot of work. I just find them contradictory, or leading to a player thinking about cloning stuff. So everything is really either a matter of further detailing the spell to make clear what its requirements are (all remains of the book must be get), its power (if only a tiny bit remains, it's ok, the spell works) and its limitation (no cloning books allowed). Or to do the drop in complexity and R: Arc extension, so it could work from a single bit, gather all other bits around and rebuild the original book. Either way the spell is perfectly valid for me.
Do ether. I wrote the spell out with only about 30 minutes of work and a few hours of thought on it. Filling out the details so that people feel the spell cannot be abused is something that should be done. I just stated my disagreements with some of the suggestions, where I felt they did not make sense.
I do actually like the image of taking a part that draws all the other parts into a small swirling windstorm and rebuilds the book. That just has a nice visual.
The tricky thing about repairing a lacunary text by "healing a book" is the following (ArM5 p.77):
Any magus can create bread or cloth, but in order to create an elaborate mosaic depicting the foundation of the Order of Hermes the caster would need to know what it should depict. If he was wrong, the mosaic would also be wrong. Similar considerations apply to repairing artificial things.
So this implies, that you can only fill in the gaps of a text by a spell "healing a book" if you know them already. Otherwise you get at best approximations and at worst gibberish to fill the gaps.
If you happen to know all the text, and just need to put it together again, the situation is of course quite different.
To repeat the precise wording: "... the caster would need to know what it should depict. If he was wrong, the mosaic would also be wrong."
'Somewhat familiar' is indeed a terrible position to be in for reconstructing a text.
Repeat it all you want, I still disagree with you. The example you are leaning on is creating something from scratch, from which no history of its original form could be drawn. At worst it would require an Intellego requisite.
I'd agree with the assessment that a magus need not know the contents of the text to repair a book, my thoughts are basically:
If the book is basically complete, but degraded in some way - e.g. chopped up, moldy or brittle with age - it seems reasonable that a familiarity with books in general is enough to restore it to a large degree.
If the book is bascially complete, but transmuted - e.g. burnt, dissolved or converted into a palimpsest - I could argue that an intellego component is required and that the general complexity is increased.
If the book is incomplete, but treat it as transmuted with the additional restriction that unless the material is magical or otherwise improved, the usual limitations on the duration of arcane connections apply. That is, the remains of the book must be identified and collected by the spell. This would probably prevent the majority of destroyed books to be recovered after more than a year to so.
I agree with this: you just magically repair the material basis.
This is less clear. Converted into a palimpsest is just the previous case and should work. The same if the book was damaged by fire, but the pages not burnt to ashes.
But a fully burnt or dissolved book has no letters or signs which could be made readable again. Intellego in general does not help, because the book has no mind to read. So this requires either Intellego very specific to the incurred damage to retrieve most of the text, or it doesn't work.
An incomplete book is no AC to its previous complete text, and cannot serve to restore that text from out of nowhere. Or do I misunderstand you here?
I believe the Ac refers to the piece of the book serving as an AC to the rest of the book.
But keep in mind that even those will fade with time. So after a while, unless someone cast a spell to increase the strength of the AC, the Ac would have faded. So no using it to restore burnt books from the Alexandria Library.
So let me try to rework it, taking into account the suggestions by Ouroboros and Peter. I tried to keep it at level 40, though levels of Complexity could be added if someone thinks a level 40 ritual is not high enough level. I also added a cosmetic effect, though that can easily be dropped or changed.
Restore the Tome from Ashes
Cr(In)An 40
R: Arc, D: Mom, T: Ind, Ritual
When this spell is cast all the remains of the touched book are drawn into a small swirling ball of wind and light, reforming it to the condition it had when newly written. The effect is powerful enough to affect even books that have been burned to ashes. If enough time has passed for the Arcane Connection to fade, the spell fails unless the majority of the remains are gathered before casting (SG call).
Casting requisites of appropriate Forms for the target book are required. Common requisite Arts include Herbam (for cover boards and some inks) and Terram (some inks, corner caps, and clasp), though others might be required for more exotic materials.
(Base 5 [one hide], +2 treated animal product [parchment], +1 Intellego, +4 Arc)
EDIT: And yes I did specifically include a SG limitation in it, since many were worried that it could be abused. That limitation adds an element of danger to the spell, in that it could be cast (at 8 pawns of vis) and fail. Of course, the SG could warn that it will fail before casting if they do not want the players to waste the vis.
At a first glance I'd say this looks reasonable except that I'd probably add one or two magnitudes for complexity. I'd probably rule that the spell fails even if all the material is present if enough time has passed since the arcane connections in my mind also represents where each fragment fits into the book.
Also, if several books have been burnt to ashes and mixed, it might be hard to target a particular book. Just though this might be an interesting obstacle to point out.
Do you really feel that it needs to be level 45 or 50? At level 40 it is already a more powerful spell then, for example, creating a magical tower from nothing.
And yes, if several books were burned together then targeting a specific one would be difficult. You would require a few spells to get enough of the one you specifically want.
Well, in the case of Conjuring the Mystic Tower it actually includes +3 magnitudes for elaborate design and the base level is 3.
Adjusting the base level to 5 would put CtMT at level 45 and I think that restoring a book can be considered a more complex task even if a magical tower might require more "brute magical force".
The Complexity was dropped for AC, though it could just as easily be switched back to Range Touch with +3 Complexity. The only reason I switched was based on a suggestion of using AC to make up for Complexity, without that then there is very little to no reason to use AC at all.
) two paragraphs below,