Recreating Lost Books?

Different people have different ideas of what is feasible. Comparing to Conjuring the Mystic Tower is a bit of a false comparison. It is much more powerful an effect to recreate a lost book than making a new tower. One possesses knowledge.
Doing it in my game would be harder than in yours, and would not be doable with a single spell. But it is doable.

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Granted Conjuring the Mystic Tower is a bad example since it is a horribly inefficient spell, considering that you might be able to actually produce a tower of the size it creates with only a level 30 spell. Worst case, that being a solid slab of stone of the dimensions of the tower, would use less than a third of the total stone possibly created. Actually working out the stone required for the size given (open spaces using no stone) results in something in the 11% of total possible range (just enough to require the additional point of size) with pace thick walls and not taking into account any stone freed up from windows and doors.

So in actuality a level 35 variant could produce a structure between 3 and 9 times the size of the common spell.

A level 40 version of it could produce something between 30 and 90 times the size, easily enough to produce a castle with curtain wall, gate house, keep, and towers.

At level 45 you are Conjuring the Monumental Fortress or Conjuring the Mystic City, some 300 to 900 times the size.

And at level 50, well, you are looking at Conjuring the Mystic Rome or Conjuring the Mystic Constantinople.

So a version of Restore the Tome from Ashes with +2 Complexity is closer in power to a spell that could magically create a city, possibly large enough to rival the greatest in the world. Without the added Complexity, it is in the same range as a spell that could create a castle instantly.

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This is great, and exactly what I was looking for. Given other commentary, I would rewrite mildly.

Restore the Tome from Ashes
Cr(In)An(AqHeTe) 50
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, +1 Form Requisites, +4 Arc, +1 Complexity)

I like the idea of being able to rescue a book, but be limited by the age of arcane connections. However, reading Faith and Flame, on page 140 has an interesting quote about Val-Negra:

The Grand Library
This is a great chamber filled with charred oak tables which once held many books, many of which were burned in the Diedne assault when one immolated herself here. The ashes, if reconstituted, may yield rare and powerful books. However, most that could be salvaged were taken when the covenant was abandoned.

So I become curious, between @Erik_Dahl, @Ben_McFarland, Mark Faulker, Lachie Hayes, or Christian Jensen Romer, what they believe it means to "reconstitute" a book from ash. :wink:

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So your version of the spell requires Aq, He, and Te? Even on books that have none of those? You can have a book made of leather, parchment, bone plates, and written with animal based inks. No He or Te at all. Aq makes zero sense when talking about dried ink, such as found in a book.

And why not add a Co requisite? You can make a book using human skin, tendons, gut, and bone. Add an animal based ink. Now it would be cast as a Cr(In)An(AqCoHeTe) 50 spell that actually only contains the An and Co forms, with Aq, He, and Te all just there "just because, that's why!".

Adding any casting requisite which completely varies based on the target, in which it might or might not be present, is not proper design. No published spell does it. They all include some variation of the line "Casting requisites appropriate to the target required", but do not list any of them in the arts.

Since everyone seems so determined to add complexity, then the idea of the reworked spell as Restore the Tome from Ashes using AC in place of complexity is a complete failure. There was no reason it should be required. I am going back to my original design.

Restore the Book from Fragments
Cr(In)An 40
R: Touch, D: Mom, T: Ind, Ritual
In a swirling vortex of wind and light, all the remains of a book are drawn in and rapidly rebuild into a whole. The spell repairs all the damage a book has sustained, as long as the majority of its fragments and ashes are gathered (SG call), restoring it to the condition when newly written.
Casting requisites of appropriate Forms for the target are required.
(Base 5 [one hide], +2 treated animal product [parchment], +3 complexity, +1 Touch, +1 Intellego Requiste)

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This is the important quote from F&F p.140. The messy arguments, just which books are damaged beyond magical repair, are left out.

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This is a big one, where, more than just about anything else, you should discuss to consensus with your troupe, because, in my mind, this has potential to change the nature of the Order when considering the idea of cutting books in half, and magically reconstituting them into effectively two new books.

With Ancient Magics and Alexandria, I am betting money the author saw the documentary where the archaeologists took blackened cylinders of parchment, carefully dismantled them, and then xray-d(?) them to reveal the text. Or the book Archimedes' Palimpsest, where they pulled the old manuscript out of the scraped parchment to resurrect a lost mathematics text. But in those cases, the text is still there, just hidden by the transformation of the book.

If you go with this as an option, and you don't utilize a finesse roll, and you don't require the caster to have read the book, and you only require a portion of the ash, and you treat the completed book as an essential object capable of being healed/created without inherent knowledge of the contents, then could you magically "heal" a cloak or a staff? Your troupe's answer matters there, but for mine, I think the answer is that while they could magically reassemble and rejuvenate existing fragments, they can't magically conjure text on to otherwise blank pages because that text is the product of imagination and critical thinking, and cannot be conjured out of thin air-- otherwise, I don't need to do spell research, I'll just CrAn the text of the best spell ever written about X, but that's not how this works.

But if all the parts are there, the magic can put them back together, in place, because the paper knows the order of the fragments and the fragments have the text on them. I need to go sleep, but that's the key for me. Pull together fragments and amplify the fragments so they're more legible? Sure. Put the text on those manufactured pages without ever having read the subject matter?...I n--yeah, I don't agree with that's really appropriate.

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My intent was never to allow something like tearing a book in half and healing/repairing each half into a complete copy of the book. They were also focused on restoring a book in which actual writing had been done, rather than magically adding some unknown text to blank pages out of thin air.

Then the end of your last paragraph throws everything up in the air and now I don't want to touch this subject anymore.

** Tears up all work and tosses it in the fire **

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I wouldn't toss all the work out. Please, don't, that wasn't my intention.

I apologize, I was practically dozing at my keyboard as I tried to post this last night and finally, as I paused from a string of about 39 "d"s, I finished my sentence and then let it go.

I think it's important to put this in context, what we're talking about is the chamber of Val Negra and what would be a fairly epic adventuring space, and now your group is looking to acquire some of the lost tomes from this magnificent library. As their SG, I don't want to overcomplicate their success but I also want it to be a little bit of a challenge, right? Let's make the treasure into a story, too if I can.

So in this case, I would let them identify the type of ashes (say all the parchment) probably pretty easily with the InIg 5 spell. Then, I probably reduce the complexity down to one, honestly, if that was what was necessary to get this spell out in a season, or two. If they were some kind of Creo Animal badass and I wanted to really accentuate the difficulty because, quite frankly, the dungeon was easier than I anticipated or something along those lines, or the troupe thought that it really merited complexity of two or more, then we would do that. I would probably make it require we still because we are restoring the condition of the books and depending on the agreement of the group I may or may not require a finesse role.

This would create the pile of restored parchment with the ink that was on it originally on it but without the cover or the thread or anything else, still requiring the books to be bound normally.

Then they'd be able to look at the pile of ash and see okay I still have books or I don't have books left to recover out of this and it becomes a little bit of a crapshoot what book do you recover from the ash with this casting of the spell how many books are you going to try and pull out of here because there's a lot of ash so a lot of books. It makes the room itself the treasure and it means guarding and protecting it because you don't want any of that ash to leave. You need it.

That takes not only the lab time and turns it into interesting treasure that they can do things with but creates a hook of a protected space or even a protected resource, if they collect all of the ash and say put it inside an alembic, but there's still a bunch of stories that get drawn out of that as well as they keep trying to find the right book. The intelligo ignem effect can't tell you what book you're touching only that the ashes you're touching are a book and the finesse helps give you an idea of how good a book you end up recovering, and perhaps how much time is necessary to restore the demand you script back to a complete and valid text. All of this is good for stories, and for character development, and so I would totally permit this kind of thing at my table, personally.

Plus it reminds me of the old scene in the movie Dragonslayer, where the wizard comes back after being transported across the country as a bag of ash, and that really hits some old nostalgia points for me so I'm personally inclined to go with it. :smiley:

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This goes back to what I feel 95% of the questions we ask in the forums could be answered with, "Check with your troupe."

But as one of my troupe members also points out to me, sometimes it's good to just take the mental space and hash out some of the math in front of other people for sanity reasons.

No worries, good idea here, imo. :slight_smile: Sometimes you just have to address the loophole. Make sure that you state things like "we would clear it with everyone that we can't duplicate books" and then proceed on that presumption. (And if you said that in here and I missed it, my sincere apologies it was late when I saw the note and took a look at this, so I may have missed it.)

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It's important to note that whenever the authors could leave something open as a potential hook-- and that's a potential hook-- we left it as a hook. There was an old Berklist adage about nailing down chamberpots...

With that in mind, your magi might discover old correspondence noting that a particular book the covenant needs was lent to Val Negra, but never returned after the Schism War and the Fall, and so now there's this hunt for the text in the old covenant, but if you can find that covenant. Then, when you do, can you find the Library? OH! You did, but! The books are trashed! But wait, there's still hope! We can possibly rebuild them, but it'll take time & vis...

Hell, walking through it like that, I'm putting it in my current saga notes as a possible arc just because going to Val Negra is mostly awesome, and the nice, big blank check of finding any book I need found is just too good. :slight_smile:

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My thoughts:

Re/In Ignem to sort the ashes into piles construed of only their own books.
InIg/An to create visions of the completed projects.
Creo An Heal spell to 'heal' the gathered framents to proper form, and perhaps even InAn the final product to seek imperfections.

Why make it a single giant spell, when you can make it a process.

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the only option I would think of, would be one where we consider a lot of panick options.

It's just more chances to botch with each spell, but much more achievable...it makes good sense! :slight_smile:

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Good sense?! This is a game, how on earth did good sense get into it?! :slight_smile:

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