To become powerful in a short time

[DIREWOLF75]

6. Abusing the Mystery Cult script invention/adaptation rules. Start with good presence and intelligence, modify the scripts of your cult to change the flaws from the ones you don't want to the ones you can live with when you're on the way up, and once you're at a decent level invent your own rituals. Start with ones for Great Presence, Great Intelligence and Puissant (mystery cult lore). Then proceed to give yourself every minor virtue you've ever wanted. Given enough years, you can give yourself multiple major virtues which can get extremely silly.

IIRC, you can loose a Virtue to pay for gaining another, so get your scripts well enough that you can easily gain one single simple Minor Virtue, then use that very Virtue as "sacrifice" for all other initiations.

And then there´s 7, once you have some power, make sure to get or invent Stat-boosting rituals, even if they´re just to give you up to +0, that still means you can have a character start out with the stats best for the character at +3 or so, while all the -3 ones can be relatively quickly fixed once you have the ritual. Not a huge bonus but still helps.

2. Have a "ninja" grog/companion who is a stealthy, unobtrusive master of disguise who can get you arcane connections to whatever you need while you draw up horoscopes, have statues of your enemies carved, etc. Requires very little magical power on your part other than NOT taking the flaws of Short-ranged magic or Weak Magic.

OR you can use such a character to steal the books you need/want...

1. The "writers circle" - every magus in your covenant takes book study and good teacher virtues. All your books are +3 quality, all of you get +3 to study from books. You can easily write all your areas of knowledge up for each other, so you can all become obscene at techniques reasonably quickly.

Add a few scribes to that to allow you to sell all books several times and get additional ones.
Further, you can trade a copy of what each of "your" magi has written to each other covenant, in return for a single higher quality book in return. Meaning that if each of your magi writes one season a year and you have 5 of them, then by having them copied you can offer other covenants 5 books in return for 1 considerably better one, and you can do it to ALL covenants willing to trade with you. Whichpotentially is a LOT of them.

Also, having a magi or two with high Teaching score and for example the highest MT(or Finesse, Penetration, PM, Concentration, Teaching, or of course Leadership for use in the cooperative Lab ) around, well Abilities have no restrictions for teaching like Arts do...

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More than 90 years to get an Art to 65, and then fight on who will write the L23q21 summa.

Not to mention the level 32 summae...

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While in practise you never actually pull off the perfect writing circle as people's interests won't match, people won't all minmax their communication, spells will overlap, people will spend time writing spells and binding familiars etc., you can make up for this by taking some of the tractatus you've read and don't plan on keeping and trading them to other covenants.

As long as you have 4 or more magi participating at least somewhat, you can make it work. And IF you can manage to have a larger covenant where most characters take part most of the time, and you focus on perhaps 4-6 of the Arts, you can get very high.

And read above for how to treat trading those books...

[maine75man]

@Vespasian

@maine75man

Can't Djinn provide ridiculous amounts of x.p. teaching (equal to their might).

Source? Because the only one I can remember was 3*Magnitude of Might (from HoH: S), and that looked like each Djinn could teach each magus only once.

I don't remember if tC&tC has different rules though

Mea Culpa. Misremembered that rule, it's still exploitable IMO. 60% of might is still nothing to sneeze at.

Another methods for quick power is the Twilight Express. Build a character optimized for twilight comprehension. Give them a personal version of enigmas gift and they can rack up several years worth of advancement in a long afternoon. (At the price of a century's worth of warping, but hey, in a short to mid length saga it's all but free.)