Away from my books. Quick query:
Where can you cast the ritual "Conjure the Mytic Tower"?
I know that you can cast it on solid ground, be it dirt or stone. What about other solid surfaces?
You can cast it on whatever ground your Storyguide thinks should work.
The question is inspired in part by the Swamp Castle scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail
THe SG will certainly think about "with a foundation set 20 feet into the ground" and then consider, how a conjured tower lacking foundations might topple and collapse at the end of the Ritual. What kind of damage a collapsing tower might cause to magi casting it with R: Touch?
#1 looks fine
#2 looks fine, but I might require an Aquam requisite
#3 would be possible so long as the water isn't high enough to seriously hamper the ritual, although I'd probably question the sanity of a caster creating a doorway partly under water
I wouldn't allow #4 as the top of a tower cannot become the foundation for another mystic tower but I would allow another ritual to be devised in order to add additional stories to a mystic tower.
Lots of castles have "doorways" that are partially underwater, if they are designed to be resupplied by sea. Some of the coastal Scottish ones, for example, basically have a sort of artificial cave at the base. I'm vaguely thinking Fast Castle, but that could just be two wires in my brain crossing haphazardly.
Oh, and, yes, you can cast Conjuring the Mystic Tower in water. There's a complicated set of mathematics for what you can manage with what level of spell in "Transforming Mythic Europe".
Are all doorways at the base of a tower?
I thought there were real world towers with external steps (sometimes wooden) to the main door above head height
I would assume so too, and for the purpose of the spell, I would assume that the caster designs the castle, including entrance arrangement.
TMK that is actually the case for most belfrys of castles.
I would absolutely leave that up to the mage casting the spell. Whether they want a doorway on every floor, no door or anything in between.
I suppose allowing the caster to design where the windows and entrances are is consistent with the spell, including I suppose allowing it to create a tower with a main entrance 20 feet above the ground while the ground level is above the water level - I would totally allow window design as part of the ritual, there is also nothing in the spell that lets you create an external staircase to that door as part of the ritual. So at the very least, if you set your entrance above the ground level, it's I guess you may need to end up paddling your way to the door, having to lift yourself from the water with a rope, figure out flying with an entrance to the top, if you avoid the door on ground level kind of thing. Or perhaps part of your first floor is the inward staircase towards a second set of door, which limits the size of your occupied first floor. On the bright side, having the tower carved from a single block of stone means you're less worried about flooding than if it was masonry in all cases.
Or go and design those external steps and add them to the tower, but in my opinion, it sorts of defeat the purpose of a creo ritual to have to conduct additional manual masonry/carpentry work before using the tower.
To address this. Imagine the new tower with a 20-feet foundation digging into the first tower. What were you trying to achieve?
If that does not dissuade you, I think it is the case that tower walls usually slant inwards, making the top smaller than the base, simply because it makes the structure a lot stronger. However, when you stack such towers, they are not going to be so stable after all.
I would allow the spell to be cast, without making any further prediction before I see the die roll.
1 and 3 seem legit to me, 4 is pretty much impossible without a Muto requisite to merge the two towers design. I think 2 is a bit iffy. It might be possible in some cases, not on others. I wouldn't stick a tower in a floating piece of ice anyway, these things tend to melt when the Flambeau messes up while experimenting.
I don't see a problem with external steps if they are made out of stone. But this got me thinking:
It's a CrTe spell. Weren't tower and castle floors made of wood at the time (I'm not aware of any design completely made of stone)? Then, wouldn't you need either:
a) Herbam requisites for the floors; or
b) To add the wooden floors after conjuring?
Of course, magi have... magic. They should be capable of making a tower completely out of stone... But anyone attentive entering such a tower would realize that it wasn't built by human hand.
You already have to do that for the base spell. Unless you want to live in a tower with no doors and no windows. (not to mention furniture).
I do assume that the tower is filled with furniture made by hand rather than having the bed, chairs and tables all from the same stone block as the tower...
Real towers used wood, but I imagine that ideal towers did not, and CrTe should be able to conjure an ideal tower as they exist in World of Ideas deep in the Magic Realm. I follow Occam, and such an ideal tower is much easier than fiddling with requisites or carpenters.
Yes and no. An iceberg would have to be huge not to topple, and unless you use a polar icecap, I would expect it to travel to warmer areas before you have had the full value of your vis investment.
Glaciers I know a little more about, and as you say, they move. They flow downhill like any other river, and they aggregate snow from above and melt from the bottom. (Most glaciers anyway.) Thus your tower will float downhill and it will sink, a little every year. This process is slow though, so I imagine you can use your tower for years, probably decades, and maybe centuries, depending on the glacier.
I don't think it's an issue of real vs. ideal, but an issue of "is this possible with the architectural knowledge at the time"? After all, once the magic is done the tower must be capable of existing on it's own.
I assume they actually had the knowledge (the Tower of Pisa is 50 years old at the time, and to my knowledge it's all stone). But for a building with the size of Conjuring the Mystic Tower (much smaller, thinner walls, etc), while on paper the math works, the materials/processes at the time couldn't handle it without magical construction.
It does have +3 elaborate design. A bit of SG discretion on that. I'd allow stone benches, beds, etc attached to the wall, but not chairs and other somewhat thin things.
Add in a herbam and animal requisite and the level 45 spell could be fully furnished, stone cupboards with wooden doors, etc.
That consideration exceeds my level of narrative detail, and thus it is irrelevant to me. YSMV.
The tower is sometimes described as carved out of a single block, which I imagine architectural knowledge can handle but architectural practice possibly not.
Had it been ReTe I would have been more concerned.