Having an example of an object helps with Creo magic; for Rego Craft magic you’d need an example of the process.
Creo magic duplicates an object: you need to be familiar with the object. Rego Craft magic duplicates a process: you need to be familiar with the process. (Rego Craft magic can “do anything a mundane artist could do with tools.”)
I think part of the question for development of new techniques would be where “somewhere” is. Japanese sword smiths knowing how to fold metal for a steel katana aren’t likely to impact a wizard in England. Crucible steel was known in Sri Lanka in the first Millenium BCE, but wasn’t known in England until the 18th century. Ingots from Sri Lanka however made their way to Spain where they became the foundation of Damascus steel. Cast iron production in Europe began in the 14th century but again was already in use in China, but even more significantly only required that smith’s forges be brought up to the temperatures already used for glassblowing, requiring the use of certain clays in the construction to reflect heat inwards. As such the fundamental tool was in the region of Europe, but due to rules about guild secrecy were not used for iron production for centuries. So can a wizard in northern Italy make cast iron (which is much faster than pounding an object out at a forge?) and use that as a basis for production?
My thought is that while as written they could ( a mundane craftsman could do it) it is equally clear that they do not (in part because writers of Ars Magica are not required to be experts on all aspects of medieval life), and the description should probably realistically read would rather than could do.
Are you operating from the Definitive (pp.306-308) version of those rules? The thread you linked is effectively an early draft of the Definitive version.
I grant that this would be a reasonable way for rego craft magic to work, but I haven’t seen anything in the books that would indicate the magus needs to know anything beyond a (potentially even somewhat vague) idea of the final thing he wants to make. If knowing the process was required I’d expect this to be pointed out in clear terms. (And IMO is even contradicted by the possibility of making something if you have never seen it but have an arcane connection to it.) But maybe this is how rego craft is described in the Definitive Edition?
I don’t! I only realized this existed yesterday. I pre-ordered it, but I guess you only get the pdf early if you backed early? EDIT the email with the pdfs just took a bit longer
Good points! The fact that technological advancement is uneven geographically basically makes it logically necessary that a rego craft spell can not tap into the global set of similes. (Similes are related to the realm of forms and are described in the box Finesse Bonuses and Penalties for Familiarity in HoH:S.)
So I guess you need to expand or update the simile you have available to be able to make/create something if that thing is not covered by the simile you have access to presently. Judging from the HoH:S box just mentioned, the difference between impossible (automatic failure, not covered by the simile you can tap into because you cannot imagine it) and possible but hard (-3 familiarity bonus, simile contains / covers the object) is having seen the object and “distinctly recall” having seen it, or having seen “skilled art depicting the object” (w/ Free Expression virtue), or having an arcane connection to the object.
Damascus steel in Mythic Europe would probably be modeled by using a Reagent formula to make it. Same for Greek fire, clear glass, and I think one of the supplements has a Reagent formula for cuir bouilli (Cordoban leather?). As such it should be a quantitatively different thing than just “steel” or “glass” or whatever.
In principal though even the philosophical lab results can be replicated through craft magic, so that really doesn’t change the nature of the discussion.
For Rego Craft magic the requirements to duplicate a formula’s effects are a bit different; I believe that you have to know the formula to duplicate it.*
For Creo magic you’re using a different simile for “steel” vs “Damascus steel”, so if you’ve heard stories of Damascus steel but have no experience with it you may not be able to Creo it any more than you could Creo up an elephant you’d read about but never encountered.
* Forgot I had the pdf available: A&A p70. “The magus must have the formula (written or learned) for the reagent or theriac he wishes to make“. Also, the ease factor is calculated differently.
Of course damascus steel in AM is also different from Damascus steel (and woot) in real life. The first is more of a mythic steel, where real life woot (and Damascus steel) was just high quality steel which could be produced by actually melting and mixing the carbon into the iron (a trivial task, by comparison, for a wizard who just Muto’s iron to water and carbon to alcohol, or the other way around, and then mixs them together). But of course that would require a modern understanding of what steel actually is, which could be obtained easily through magic (either direct Intelligo or Muto to convert Iron to air and see what remains in the steel) so long as you don’t mind collapsing game conventions like “using medieval technology”
Which is where the real issues come in and the game mechanics collide headlong into the design philosophy with the frequency of a crash test dummy.
This might be my interpretation, since I can’t pull specific rules references (coffee break at work, no books)
I think the best evidence of the ‘process’ is the numbers, even if it is not explicitly stated, I think it’s well implied. It’s not just ‘more difficult with magic’, it also gets easier when the wizard doing the Rego crafting is familiar with the craft. The fact that ReTe smithing is easier with smithing knowledge seems to imply (to me at least) that what your doing is smithying. You’re not transmuting a pile of iron into horseshoes (that would be MUTO), you’re instead doing a time-lapse of blacksmithing without the need for tools.
I interpret the reason for the EF being harder for lack of knowledge is because the caster has to improvise - “I need to forge a horseshoe, and I know there’s a process of heating the metal to make it malleable, let’s just fast-forwards that -” But someone who actually smiths would know more of what’s being done. I interperet the increased EF for skipping seasons to be a similar example of the fact you’re fast-forwarding rather than skipping to the end - there’s little difference between grape juice and 50-year-wine, but fermenting takes time.
The implications of the RAW seems to me to be that crafted objects retain some kind of imprint of information about how they were made. So a mage who has seen a cast iron kettle would be able to use that to magically re-create casting a kettle, while one who has only seen cookware of wrought iron can replicate the process without studying it, but they would not be able to make cast iron.
The platonic ideal fits that concept. You could see CrTe as bringing it to “life”.
Covenants p49: “Rego craft magic works by rearranging existing material, and requires a Finesse roll to control this rearrangement. (Creo magic draws on the realm of Forms to produce things, which are always at least roughly right.)”
HoH:S p60: “Magi can use Rego magic to do anything a mundane artist could do with tools.”
ArMDE p307: “Rego magic is the most straightforward. The spell rearranges the target materials in the same way as a craftsman, making a new item. Nothing is created or destroyed (without appropriate requisites), and the final product must be stable by itself.”
Hooray for actual references!
This is arguably a prettier picture than “magic just doing the thing very fast” ... But I think the fact that you get a benefit from just having seen a picture or having an AC suggests (to me at least) it’s not the process, it’s the final outcome that you need to know. Under this interpretation, the benefit from having the skill is that you have seen more examples of the thing and can recall more details, so you are somehow better connected to the simile.
In fact I’d rule you can change a pile of iron ingots into horseshoes, because iron can be in the state of being an ingot and in the state of being a horseshoe. So (in my mind) rego craft magic is more like “make a tree blossom out of season” rather than The Unseen Porter.
I agree, though I’d like to square that with the rule that one needs to know a formula to make something like a theriac. Similarly, I’d also prefer if there was a good explanation for why you can’t just grab a bit of special steel, gunpowder, clear glass, etc., and make it yourself without ever having been near the people who know the secrets of how to make it.
And though the idea of the Verditius Maga sensing the “disturbance in the force .. of rego craft” is cool/funny, being entirely removed from newly invented process improvements (muto-based or other) feels like it should prevent you from getting an advantage. In particular if you unknowingly come across the resulting object which might be outwardly (or completely) identical to the result of the conventional process.
So, here is my attempt to give a RAW consistent account of what is available to be made with rego craft and why (I couldn’t sleep last night..). I feel like I need two things:
To achieve this, my approach is to answer the open question of which mundane craftsmen define the potential and limits of rego craft in a particular way, and also interpret the limitations already given in a particular way.
I'd say:
What does that mean in practice? For example
The in-game justification for this is based on expanding the concept of the simile and the realm of forms a bit. The box on HoH:S p62 says:
The pattern underlying the range of variance in the shape, color, and structure of a class of objects is called the “simile” of that class of objects. The simile differs from the form. The form of an apple allows a magus to make an idealized apple. The simile of apples allows a magus to make apples that look natural, and vary from the ideal within the natural range. The more familiar a character is with an object’s simile, the easier it is to recreate the object convincingly.
I picture a "simile of similes" that contains every possible intermediate between the raw materials and the final product. At every step of a crafting process, the piece of work is similar to what it was a moment before, e.g. it changes only one hammer strike at a time. There is an infinity of possible hammer strikes and each strike can be subdivided infinitely, so there are infinitely many overlapping similes.
What you do with Finesse is to jump from one point in this Realm of Similes to the next; to chart a path from raw material to the product. (The realm is an infinite dimensional space of which the Realm of Forms is only a tiny subset, a hyperplane if you will. Hermetic magi might think of infinite stacked regiones on top of the realm of forms.)
It’s harder to navigate to where you want to go in the Realm of Similes (The Simile Magnum? Simile Mundus?) if you have to make big jumps and know little about the route (i.e. the crafting process) or know only of directions that lead to winding routes (that correspond to inefficient processes).
It is easier if your target is a big “cloud” of similar products that you know and have seen many times. In that case even a half-blind magus can stay on the broad path leading from the raw materials to the products (no or low familiarity with the process, as you prefer for your saga). The simile in his mind is similar to that of people like him, at least in the vicinity of this well traveled path and his magic can follow these metaphysical grooves.
But there are many ways to craft a shoddy product, and only few to craft a good one, so their similes differ in “size” dramatically. It's hard to end up close to the good products.
There are also infinitely more ways to arrange materials senselessly than usefully; each step in a crafting process can go wrong in infinite ways. This is why failed rego craft magic ends up with an unusable mess.
Creo on the other hand allows you to go directly to the “thin golden membrane” in the space of the Realm of Similes that corresponds to the realm of forms (the hyperplane). This might give you a helpful landmark to try and find again with rego (using something you creo’d as a model, if you want to allow that in your saga).
If your target is too vague, like "steel that is somehow better", you have no hope of finding it in the vast expanse of the Realm of Similes.
Even if you know exactly where you want to go and have seen quite a number of examples, e.g. you bought heaps of clear Venetian class and you know what it's made of and what raw materials go into it, it still requires hard, real-world knowledge and experimentation to find the path (i.e. the formula).
It's in some sense the "specificity" of the set of few people who know the secret process from here to there that makes it impossible for rego craft magic to make the jump from your simile to theirs in order to use their path, as it is in some sense an infinitely small target in the sea of similar people without the secret knowledge.
With muto you can carve entirely new and surprising shortcuts. Some are like combining existing and well travelled pathways (marble to clay) in impossible ways, others are more like the secret pathways of advanced technologies few people like you know about (large scale aquam cement brutalism), so they require knowing a formula as well.
Best explanation I have for the whole philosophical sciences issue (and definitely non canon) is that there are too many intermediary states.
For example you need to mix oil of vitriol with a particular salt, but getting oil of vitriol first requires finding vitriol (a glass looking mineral co-located in certain ore mines) and refining it through several steps. so the ReTe to the final state is not like chunk of iron ingot into sword shaped iron, but transforming from one substance into another into another. Each individual step and transformation is simple and natural but only “points” back to oil of vitriol, not the vitriol amorphous crystals.
Best guess based on my personal research, not even certain what parma I would claim for this one…
I like this a lot. This scratches the part of my brain that wants magic to feel like magic. This description is also comparable to Arcadian or Magic Realm Travel, and thus fits into established ways the world works (without strictly needing to have more mechanics tacked onto it.)