I agree that we should coordinate on how to spend build points. We won't have that much available, so overlap would be bad. And since we can assume that the characters will have written to each other, at least, then some coordination would have been possible.
So far, the following have been declared. If I am missing anything, or if things change, let me know and I'll post an updated list.
For my part, Batholomeus will probably have gathered a number of skilled workers in the last period of his advancement, mostly outcasts and people hitting a rough spot in life. I will also go for a summa (since we can only get one for each magus) and a few tractatus, although the subjects are still undecided.
Am I correct in assuming that grogs and non-specialists workers do not cost build points? Do we want to build companions as well as magi? That might help fill some of the more important mundane roles in the covenant.
I notice on that post that you spent vis from your Personal Vis Source during advancement. Did you catch the post where Jonathan ruled that if we do so, the source will no longer provide vis once play begins?
Of course, with the most moderate of advancement, a PVS is still plenty valuable, even if all it does is provide vis during character generation. Longer advancement just means that it's even more valuable. Consider that Calpurnia's PVS would give her 120 pawns of vis during character generation (assuming 3 pawns a year). That's a lot of vis and almost certainly worth spending a Virtue point on. It over doubles the amount of Vis she has available. And any excess stays around when the saga starts. What's not to like?
Agnarr's BP spend is in his character thread. It's a work in progress at present as I am adding spells and item lab texts.
I have really liked the vis and book limitation in this character generation as it makes me consider other options.
It can be a pain to have to look up at all the character threads to locate the build points, then summarize everything together. I may resort to doing that anyway, but please notify me if you change anything there.
Summae are probably the most important to coordinate. Tractatus are probably not required. Other things we may want to coordinate are lab texts, vis sources and specialists. Having duplicates provide little added benefits.
I may start putting together a spreadsheet for that. Later, probably tomorrow.
I will add those for Bartholomeus as soon as I have decided them. Do I understand correctly that the "Spells" tab is for spells that are known by each magus (as opposed to actual lab texts purchsed with BPs)? And that the "By Category" is a summary of the covenant's resources purchased by BPs?
Well, any of us with personal lab texts would have to scribe them for them to be useful to the rest of the covenant anyway. So this list of spells is only in the potential right now.
I don't think any of the magi will have their personal lab texts scribed in a way that others could use. We will all have to take the time to scribe them down if we want to make them available to the others -- unless we spend some seasons doing exactly that during advancement.
The goal of the list is to make sure that we don't use our build points to purchase lab texts for spells that we can easily scribe collectively.
I was thinking that if we all agreed to spend a season (or two) scribing spells at the start, we'd go a long way toward filling in the covenant's library. Obviously we'd scribe the spells other people want first.
Our covenant in Finland has a couple of challenges that I'm not sure how we overcome:
Lack of a mundane-friendly magus. I don't think any of us has the Gentle Gift, and Calpurnia would be a disaster in any negotiation. Even if we are stuck with purely gifted people, it would help if one of us could function outside of a lab.
Lack of a An or He expert. We are going to be dependent on covenfolk to provide food. Although hunting is pretty easy for us, we all have some lab work to do, we need farmers to produce food.
Are there other things I've missed? Suggestions would be welcome.