I've been afk about a week too and will have a busy work week next week too, so available but slow to respond.
It was a good time for a slow down. I was away at the beach for American Memorial Day this past week and wasn't online much.
Perhaps I am confused but I thought we were putting the Covenant site near Kouvola and not Turku. They are quite far apart.
I thought we were going to be near* Turku. But I could be wrong.
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- And by "near" I understand that's only a relative term. My understanding is that we're still fairly far away from any city or town.
I see 5 people agree on Kouvola about page 10. We started the discussion of location around page 9 I think both areas as well as Kotla were mentioned as possibilities. If the inn switches to Kotla then it works.
It's entirely possible that I grabbed the wrong end of the stick. I have no strong feelings as to what the closests town or city is.
Jonathan - are we allowed to take a grog who is a failed apprentice? It's a real advantage to any magus who has such a grog as an assistant. Won't we all want one?
I guess it's the case of remembering the first, most discussed city rather than the second. At least, that's my story. I did double check the thread, and Trogdor was the last one to mention Turku, so we can also blame him. 
I'll switch it sometime today, after I get caught up on the thread (after 6pm EDT).
I was waiting for someone to drop the Failed Apprentice. I'm going to appropriate the Failed Apprentice (FA) for my own purposes, and there will only be one of these at the covenant. I'm going to rework her a bit from what was presented, and may even make her a companion level character, but it is going to be an NPC, and not affiliated with any specific magus.
So, how it will work, is that the FA is an NPC, and I control her and her projects. I can be overruled on this by a majority of the covenant's magi deciding to assign her to a specific project. As she is part of the covenfolk, she's essentially working two seasons and free two seasons, which means she can only assist on 2 projects per year that aren't running simultaneously. She can be convinced to work on more than two projects, for a price, but the council can't force her to work on 3 projects in a year, anything above 2 projects she's going to get paid. How she's going to be paid is to be determined.
Now that FA is an NPC I'll redo my BPs to drop / alter the grog. Would have been handy to know in advance. We discussed the lab assistants needing the gift and I did circulate the lab assistant being in my BPs from a long way back.
Umm, you wrote out the grog, so I didn't think it came from BPs. IMO grogs from BPs are NPCs, so it's something of a distinction without a difference. And whether it's a player controlled character or an NPC, it's still going to be a limitation of two seasons per year of assistance, without an inducement for the character to be paid. My assumption is that eventually the resources that came from the BPs would be shared, anyway? And, I don't recall the discussion we had, but Failed Apprentice is the only virtue that allows someone without the gift to assist in the lab.
The intention of the BPs was to have a teacher available for training of apprentice npcs - particularly the apprentice I intend to have shortly, and also other covenfolk as needs (learning the loca language, other apprentice npcs, simple scribe services, etc) . The lab Assistant was a logical extension of that which is why I added F.A. I'm happy to drop F.A from the grog. I also thought that BPs were needed for any "specialised" or "highly skilled" grog, such as a teacher. There is also 3x teachers in the BPs now, which looks like a lot of overkill in our covenant, so I'll alter the 10 BPs and pick something else.
And yes, I know all NPCs are essentially shared.
Yeah, I'd say mixing a Failed Apprentice and Teacher into one person is probably not a great idea, as there's probably always something to teach and some project to assist, and with only two seasons...
Still, I think the covenant can use a Failed Apprentice, so feel free to take those BPs back, and I'll introduce the character later on.
@JL can you post what we know about the plague of the Gifted in a place we can find it?
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So, I had every intention of posting on Monday, but we had some issues at work. Namely a massive leak of a pipe in my server closet. Thankfully, our backups were good, and the damage was limited to only two servers, but they were the two primary servers. I still had network/internet access and email is on a separate server. I've probably put in 50 hours at work since I posted last. New servers arrived yesterday, and I've been busy building and restoring data, since. That explains my silence this week. I'm on vacation starting this afternoon until 7/5, so my silence will continue a bit longer. It's a road trip and I'll be in parts of the US that, last I was there, didn't always have great cell service.
You know that you don't know anything about it. It has shown no pattern of infection. There have been cases where an apprentice becomes infected, but the master is fine. Entire covenants become infected, but some have remained whole. Normandy and Roman Tribunals are probably the hardest hit, but getting reliable census data is challenging.
Just to clarify, what structures currently exist at the covenant site? I'm assuming we picked somewhere that had some extant structures as a start (e.g., a manor house and some out buildings). Or am I wrong and are we starting with nothing?
My impressions were that there were some kind of ruins at the site, but nothing elaborate. Essentially the basis for the Manor House free site boon.
My thoughts as well. Remember there was a magical disaster here and something that caused the Tremere to scout out the area.
Just got back from vacation. I'm pretty exhausted, but I caught Trogdor's question, but wasn't able to answer before now. I'm fine if there's a newly constructed manor house at the site, it's cocneivable, given the socuting that's gone on and the planning involved that you could have had it built. It's a, as I recall, a free virtue, so you should be able to have it without any significant investment.
As the most recent happenings show, we might need a small guest house near the gate to house guests who we don't want in the main house. I propose the following alteration while we're still early enough that we can change things around:
KEY:
- Manor House
- Kitchen
- Kitchen Garden
- Bailey
- River Tower
- Lake Tower
- East Longhouse
- West Longhouse
- Cabins
- Cattle Barn
- Sheep Barn
- Smithy
- Stable
- Mill
- Granary
- Smoke House
- Well House
- Ice House
- Guest House
- Boat House and Dock