Selling enchanted items

Games Discussion Ars Magica
21

Of course, the real money maker is saffron (as implied by YR7, on the first page of this discussion), which is made "merely" by plucking the stigma of the saffron plant. Which means that making a big pile of the stuff is a lvl 1 CrHe effect.

Depending on how you interpret the Size rules of Herbam, the base target is either a 1x1x1 pace bush, or else a 1x1x1 pace block of solid plant matter. Regardless, this is probably at least 100 pounds of plant matter in that. In finding this oddly-specific website (aqua-calc.com/calculate/food ... -to-weight), it looks like a cubic meter of saffron weighs in at 143 kilograms, so it looks like I'm in the ballpark.

According to the article, saffron cost 128 pennies/pound. So 143kg = ~314 pounds
128 pennies/pound * 314 pounds = 40,192 pennies, or just over 400 mp.

(EDIT - or I could just look at another table, where they tell me that it cost 400 pennies/kg in London in 1438)

Of course, creating only a cubic meter of saffron is a (base 1 + 1 touch + 4 permanent) = 10 effect... which is too low for a ritual. Add on 2 magnitudes for size, and you've got your lvl 20 ritual, and enough saffron to crash the European spice market. If you could sell it at market value, that would be 400 mp x 10 x 10, or 40,000 mp.

Certainly you wouldn't have to sell it all at once. Have some sort of Circle-based "keep my plant matter fresh" ReHe effect, and you can simply store the remainder, and sell a hundred kilos or so of the stuff every year (descretely, of course, to various spice merchants all over Europe), and fund your covenant like that.

22

Or you could go with the non-ritual, moon-duration style of spices - they taste just the same, but don't last as long. That's just a (base 1 + touch 1 + Moon 3) = lvl 5 effect. As long as your customers understand that they HAVE to use it within a few weeks after buying it, you can make as much as you want. Although warp would come in to play for someone who consistently ate the stuff. (Also assumes the user isn't taking the spice for long-term medicinal benefits).

23

Wouldn't you need T: Group to make a big pile of ... well, flavoured dust?
Besides, that's kinda irrelevant, as it's still momentary Creo, thus Ritual and thus has a minimum level of 20.
The great advantage of the salt extraction process is that does not use momentary Creo but rather Perdo/Rego and thus can be done without the need for Vis.

Very true - we've done something similar. Though with D: Moon, you have a much smaller marked available (unless your covenant is in Constantinople or somewhere like that.)

24

That's just the base - the point I was making is that saffron is petty much just a dried part of a plant, without any additional processing. Thus, it falls under the "create plant product" category. I talk about turning it into a ritual later.

And in reading through the CrHe effects, .... you have a point. Covenents, pg. 96 - "The Apple That Etches", creates 100,000 oak galls - which I believe are individual pieces of wood. And in looking at the size modifiers, they have Group (x10), and 4 magnitudes of Size, for an additional x10,000. So you are correct.

Huh. So the Saffron math wouldn't work very well - each stigma would count as a separate piece, and it takes 250,000 stems to make a kilo of saffron. So, no go. The math still works (sort of) for Cinnamon, though - that's the bark of a fairly large tree, so you could probably get away with a pretty decent ritual that created a good amount of bark.

Yep - mainly I was doing the math for other "spices" because of the idea of taxation, and not wanting to run afoul of monopolies, and diversifying the covenant's portfolio. If you assume that a Tribunal will extend the Silver rules to any magically-created product, (ie, 2 mp per category per magi per Tribunal per year), then you're going to need to have something other than just salt and silver. And because spices are easier to transport, they're easier to sell in other tribunals, thus making the enterprise more diverse.

In the saga my magi is currently in, he got a Discovery roll while attempting to put a levitation effect on his wooden shield Talisman. So, instead of a Levitation effect, he got a long-term effect that moves wood around at 1 league/second. He built it into a flying cart, and now the covenant grogs have a thriving smuggling business. So selling spices and salt and whatnot to all the major cities in nearby tribunals is a reasonable thing to do, at least in theory.

25

Technically, you still (using group) create mass equivalent to (up to) 10 individuals, so a level 20 ritual creates a LOT of saffron. Do try to go through the math for that effect someday, remembering that you might as well get to level 20, because that's the minimum level for a ritual.
With R: Touch, the main reason we don't use that ritual to create grain, is we have nowhere to put all that grain.

26

No it works, Group makes a Group of things up to the mass of 10 Form Individuals. If you are making something small like saffron, then a Group of saffron is up to however many millions of saffron stamen weigh the same as 10 cubic paces of wood (10 base He Individuals). So about 10 tonnes of saffron.

Also, note that with spices you have to be careful not to overstate the difficultly of selling reasonably big lots, if you are in the right place. Sure, spices are expensive and are rarely available in some places. But in cities where a spice is traded, then it will be available in bulk. If you are sellling cinamon, for example, you don't really want to drip it out in dozens of cities where it is rare. You want to sell in bulk in one or two cities where it is common. If a city has a cinamon trade, for example, that doesn't mean that there are two or three merchants arguing about the distribution of a few kgs of cinamon. If there is a cinamon trade at all in a city, then that means there will be many merchants trading multi-barrel lots of the stuff. Another merchant showing up with hundreds of kgs of cinamon isn't going to blow everyone's mind, and is more than sufficient to make a decent amount of money for a covenant. As long, as the covenant's merchant joins the local guild and pays whatever city taxes and guild duties are required, and is careful not to undercut the existing merchants, then likely no one will bat an eyelid.

You are only going to get into unavoidable trouble if you try to sell something in much larger quantities than whatever the local merchants are doing.

27

Ah - so the only thing I had to do was replace one of the size increments with Group... which multiplies by the same amount as I had originally. So the math is now (Base 1 + Touch 1 + Permanent +4 + Group 1 + Increase Size +1) = (Individual + Group x10 + Size x10) = Individual x100 = 143kg x100 = ~14.3 tonnes of saffron.

28

+4 Permanent is a houserule. Direwolf's I believe?
Group is +2, not +1.
RAW would be closer to Base 1, +1 touch, +2 group, +4 size (to get to level 20).
Which would ofcourse be 100 000 times the mass of an individual (assumed above to be 143) meaning about 14 300 tons of the stuff.
At this point, you will be destroying your own market, de-valueing safron radically. For comparison, in the modern world, about 300 tons are created annually, meaning you'd be creating almost 47 times as much as is currently grown annually.
Please see my above comment about making grain.

29

Ah, good point. (AM5, pg. 112) "Ritual Creo spells with Momentary duration create things that lasts as any other thing of that type. The magic is gone in a moment and cannot be dispelled. This also applies to ritual healing spells."

Hm. Yeah, that's a lot of saffron.

I suppose you could destroy most of it with a PeHe spell, or else create the entire flower, and then use ReHe to pick all of stamens (that would cut it down by a couple orders of magnitude).

Alternately, you could else use the wiggle room used by the Creo Herbam description to create more than one type of spice: (AM5, 136) "A single spell generally only creates a single type of plant product." That implies to me that a +1 magnitude of complexity can add in another plant product. So add in three other plant types (Nutmeg, Cinnamon, Ginger, and saffron), And you'll get (Base 1 + 3 complexity + 1 touch + 2 Group +1 Size x10) = a buttload of spice, but a lot more manageable than than the Everest-sized pile the original gave out.

That assumes the "more types of plants = more complexity" rule holds up, of course.

30

Or you could just create less than the theoretical maximum.

31

You could also borrow a page from the Terram guidelines, where a base Individual changes depending on the material involved. Thus a base Individual might just be a handful for spices.

I would also note that spices should probably count as treated Herbam product, adding one magnitude.

32

Yep. The practical thing is just to make a spell that fills up a sack, or chest, or similar.

Alternatively, make the whole 14,300 tonnes, fill up a sack to sell in the Constantinople market, and drop the rest down a big pit.

33

My group has also found the CrHe Base 15 guideline as 'Bring a plant to maturity in a single day or night' to ensure the Covenant's food production.

In our saga the main theme for the Covenant was to Hide. The local lords and church wasn't even aware these is a small village is the middle of the King's Forrest. And the Covenants's Imaginem magic was effectively hiding the small castle carved into the hill's side. Relatively small covenant folk 30+ grogs (all of them freshly recruited and settled refugees / bandits / highwaymen), 4 Mages 4 Companions.

Good soil is effectively minimal in the area and the question was how to produce enough food?
Circle of Iðunn, CrHe 40 Base 15, +1 Touch, +2 Ring, +2 Room
Whatever you sow during the day grows to full during the night and you can harvest the following day. Harvest in the morning, plant in the afternoon, and it grows in the night.

Why Room instead of Circle? Room description contains Courtyard by definition.
Circle as definition only effects whatever is within the Circle when you cast the spell... meaning after every day the grog has finished the daily activity you have to cast again and again.

It went well until a grog left an apple-core from his lunch in the area. :laughing:
After some furious discussion PeHe 25 (Base 5, +1 Touch, +2 Room, +1 Effecting living wood) was designed and put to a magical item to clear the field every day.

The fun I had when I saw the look on their face when they first heard about the apple tree.
(Iðunn is the goddess of apples.)

34

I'll be stealing this idea, thank you.

35

How do you deal to not spoil the soil?

As i said before IMS, if we do that, afterwards we have to perform a CrTe ritual to regenerate the soil and not waste it.

Anti-easysollutions storyguides

36

I suppose what you COULD do is wander around, and find a number of fields (or at least open meadows), and then use the effect once per year - essentially allowing it to lay fallow for the rest of the time, and thus rejuvenating the soil naturally. This would be the Hermetic equivalent of crop rotation.

37

Or you could just Mu(Re)Te(Au) 25 (Base 3, +1 Touch, +1 Part, +1 Conc, +1 Rego requisite, +2 size, no Au requisite increase in the magnitude) your way changing the soil to a cloud/fog and moving to it's new place. It does have it's advantages if you can gathering the fresh fertile soil and thus removing the a nearby village peacefully and move it home with you,1000 cubic pace tends to be enough.

Also we agreed this spell does not work during the winter, as you cannot change the essential nature and crops do not grow in winter, a hermetic limit in other words.
Hydroponic farming and huge greenhouse farming breaks what I am ready to accept in ArM. :wink:

38

Well, there îs an official greenhouse in the setting (in Durenmar), so you could start there if you wanted.

But in any case I agree that the magi can overcome the issues of soil and other stuff easily. However, more than soil things, I would point out that eating crops grown by magic all the time might have some side effects on the eater (read: warping). This is a bigger issue than just the soil getting tired. It generates nice things and stories, so it for me it is a boon (as a SG: it is a story hook) since it prevents total isolation.

39

No, a Mythic Pound is 240 Mythic Pennies, IMO. Noble's Parma.

40

You'd need to be very discreet, because there is only one source of saffron in Europe, and its harvest and distribution is completely and fanatically controlled by the Venetian Empire, through a system of fleet convoying which means that most of the powerful men in the Empire have a direct financial loss if their monopoly fails.

Given that -all- saffron comes from Venice, you can expect them to be even more killcrazy about it than their alum monopoly, which has previously led them into Crusades, wars with the pope and the genocidal destruction of a city unlucky enough to discover it had an alum mine nearby.

Estimates place production in Mythic Europe at between 1.5 and 2.5 Imperial tons. A hundred kilos is, therefore, 10% of the global production in some years. You only get three stamens per flower. You're courting death in a big way, here (and given that its worth its weight in gold, and gold is worth ten times what silver is worth, what exactly do you need the equivalent of metric ton of silver a year for anyway?)