You find it also in HoH:TL where books of various levels is one of the kinds of support a magus can expect from the house. Level and quality is still left to troupe decision, but it stands to reason that they should be good enough to matter to most magi. I would not expect to get the 56 tractatus needed to advance to 40 in Aquam of course.
I disagree. A good enough scribe, is worth giving a longevity potion too. That's an incredibly compelling reward for a mundane.
Also, what is the purpose in the medieval age for a scholar? It's suggested magic is quite secretive. An opportunity to study what most people don't get near. Another compelling selling point.
Any covenant past Spring, probably has better heating, lighting, sewerage, than the best university. I don't think we can truly appreciate how awesome the benefits of what we consider basic amenities are. A good hot bath, not being lice ridden, medical care when one gets ill. A developed covenant can offer those kind of things.
You argue as if the characters have read the rules as well as players do, while in fact, real people cope with the world as they see it. A longevity potion is too good to be true, and ordinary sensible people should assume that that is exactly what it is. Heating and sewerage would be appreciated once you have stayed for a year or two and experienced the effect, but how much do you really know about the amenities when a companion turns up in town to recruit people for the mysterious scholars in the tower?
Recruiting people is more about trust than it is about offering the right boons. Once you have a sizeable crew you may earn a reputation which helps you recruit more, over decades, but you still face a bootstrap problem.
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here ar formulas online today which promise to extend your lifespan and improve your quality of life. Would you move to another city and take a job with an outfit you have never heard of based on the promise of the same? Now imagine they are instead offering a position in a moderate sized commune...
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I'm toying with the idea of requiring a unique subject to write a compelling tractactus interesting enough that it will work for xp. So it needs to have a stated subject, come from a project, research and/or experimentation. Just throwing out tractatus after tractatus "just because" doesn't make sense to enrich the understanding of someone who already knows most there is to know about the art from summae.
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While I agree that the offer of a Longevity Potion falls into the 'too good to be believed' category, the promise of steady, long term employment for someone of the scribal profession is an attractive offer. A covenant is basically a job for life.
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That's supposed to be the narrative already, or maybe I have that from 4ed, but I am not sure it is playable. I see players bending backwards to shoehorn a project into their writing ambition, and an SG which is reluctant to spoil it but yet out of good and constructive ideas. Interestingly, 4ed required art tractatus had to be written on a mastered spell. I am not sure that's the way to go, but it is certainly less boring than «up to score/5».
I believe it was dumbed down in 5e to just that a character may only write a total number of tractatus equal to half her score in an Ability or one fifth of her score in an Art.
No other limitations, and very little else on the topic of producing them (probably somewhere in other books, but this is RAW in Core).
At the minimum, some narrative limitations make sense - but I like the idea of requiring something more costly unique than just a topic idea.
Maybe simply that the mage experiment at least once while inventing a spell, without failure using an Art, would be worth one tractatus (on top of the limit of one per 5 level of Art). Because it is hard to believe that after close to 500 years of existence, somebody with a 5 or even a 10 in one Art have something meaningful to contribute to the knowledge corpus of one art... At least, with some mildly successful experimentation, the mage could justify having gained some new insights, even at low level.
I've wondered about replacing the "one tractatus per 5 ranks" limit with a requirement to have gained at least N experience from practice, vis and adventure since you last wrote a tractatus. That would mean that writing a tractatus was a difficult process requiring you to spend several seasons on inefficient or dangerous advancement methods, only really worth doing if you really need the book - or if you're a high end magus who's read all the books on his art and is advancing using those methods anyway.
Possibly, I might also apply a modifier to the quality of the tractatus based on the art/ability level of the author. This would prevent a high communication + good teacher magus from cranking out dozens of "best corpus tractatus ever"s for profit, unless they were actually one of the world leaders on corpus. Still weighing things up though.
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Yet, in real life, doctoral candidates do present something new and interesting on Plato and Aristotle even after 2500 years, and I reckon they are comparable to an art score of 10, i.e. a reasonable top score in their specialty at gauntlet.
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... because they did Original research, which requires the equivalent of experimentation ? (just arguing for the sake of it, I won't die on this hill 
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LIke conjuring up the ghosts of Plato or Aristotle in the secret backroom of the university, where the real stuff is done? 
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... with the help of dried leaves from carefully home-grown plants of c. sativa variety... If this not Experimentation, I don't know what it is 
. It probably would not qualify for high safety lab score , but maybe good Warping score.
It certainly turns philology to something new. To philokannaby?
Not to mention that while, yes, the Order has been around a long time, about a third of them are very secretive on principle and the rest treat knowledge as something to be bartered for goods and services... yeah, any comparisons to the irl scientific and other academic communities don't really hold. Your insight also doesn't have to be thoroughly original to be useful in the context of such a disfunctional learning environment.
Also also: magic in Ars is an extremely broad field! It's worse than "engineering" or "biology" as catch-all terms. In reality, an expert is only going to be an expert in a very narrow area, and even in mechanical terms we have a total of 50 combinations of Techniques and Forms for magi to specialise in (ignoring magical foci, mystery cults, integrating traditions, etc). Of course people will come up with new insights, probably pretty regularly.
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Experimental philosophy? A rare endeavour for modern doctorates. More importantly, I think, they need three years to write their tractatus, not just three months.
So, i know that i am late to the party, but here are my views on the topic:
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Setting up a scriptorium would be quite easy: the universities are creating more clercs than the church can absorb, so having a well spoken companion go to Paris to recruit fresh graduates would be quite simple and successful, especially since they could then start teaching to the children of the Covenfolk and then require little to no new input as the system is self sustaining.
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The implication is that either this is doable and then some magi would have done it and Mythic Europe must be flush with hermetic literature. Or it isn't for some reason or another.
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My preferred explanation for this is not that the non player members of the order a bunch of idiot NPCs who just T pose unmoving until the PCs enter the room is that this is not possible because only Gifted individuals can learn MT, and therefore the scribing is done mostly by apprentices. This would be especially common in the vis poor Roman tribunal, where big libraries exist as a way for rhe masters to increase their yearly vis and done in tandem with the Mercere Donus Magna which would act as an intermediary for the distribution of either lending or copying of the litterature.
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I agree that it is much better to have a solution that doesn't make all previous magi incompetent until the PCs come along.
I'd love to see some numbers on this in the real world. I'm slightly embarrassed to say that I don't have any idea how many underemployed literate people there are bumping around in Europe in the 12th and 13th centuries.
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I cannot give you a number, but it got to a point where there were gangs of unemployed clerks getting ip to trouble and using their tonsure to shield themselves from the consequences of their misdeeds and going to the much more lenient canonical courts.
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