Hi,
Training says the master may work at earning a living while training. If I am a magi, what does that mean? Can I train and extract vis, create an enchanted item, research a spell, etc?
Thanks.
No Hermetic Arts can be taught using training (ArM5 p. 164). People assisting in labs only get Exposure (ArM5, p. 103), which were all of your examples.
If you had some sort of Rego Craft magic item, say one that duplicated a page (Copyist Pussiant Quill, TME p. 100) and your trainer had one, I guess you could be trained in Finesse. But demonstrating how to resist spells (Parma Magica) or how to cast them more effectively (Penetration) would really fall under Teaching.
What about magic lore?
This is a sentence from the description of training on page 164. The magus isn't really earning a living with their work.
The intention of the rules seems to be to allow Profession (thing), and Craft (thing) skills to be trained without stopping the master from earning a living.
If this is about an apprentice, I'd set them to work translating lab texts, fixing arcane connections, and doing small tasks for you (adventures). At one season of teaching per year (also on page 164) it would take fairly poor communication and teaching score and a near absence of adventure experience to get as few xp through 15 years as a starting character.
Sorry, I meant magic theory
No, I'm not seeing Magic Theory being able to be "trained" It's an academic sort of knowledge, I wouldn't allow it.
We have allowed a magus increasing his lab's Refinement (Covenants p.110) to train his shield grog, who helped with the hauling involved, in Magic Theory at the same time.
Academic Abilities like Latin, Civil and Canon Law, Common Law and Medicine, or Arcane Abilities like Magic Theory, can be put to practical use over a season by a master. And during that season the master should be allowed to train an apprentice in them, too. In the middle ages, priests generally trained their altar boys in Latin, Church Lore, Church Law and Theology: first, to become their successors, and later, to prepare them for the cathedral schools.
Cheers
I don't see any problem allowing it.
Practicing will give you 4xp per season. Exposure gives you half that AND you can get it while doing lab work, implying that while you are doing that work you can get some insight, which can be about Magic Theory. But I can definetively see magi toying around and doing litte experiments looking precisely for that insight, freeing themselves of the actual activity of the season, the lab work, and thus practicing.
Associating it with academics actually reinforces my opinion: if you don't allow practicing on these skills, then where do they come from? God? Magic Theory as it is was originally invented by Bonisagus. But how did he do it? Did God taught him? I don't think so. I bet he just did a lot of practicing (and had an Affinity and a Puissancy and so on).
Let's go back to the academics. Eratosthenes is the rethorics master of reference and the legends of him practicing its arts with stones in his mouth and agains the noise of the waves are pretty well known. Euclides surely spent years and years drawing circles and lines in the sand, practicing Geometry before writting the Elements. And the astronomers probably practiced quite a lot of star gazing before creating astronomy, and so on.
And in game balance, they are just 4 xps per season. If you want a maga to abuse that, she'll spend pretty a lot of time devouring Magic Theory books and get a pretty decent score with ease, let's say 8. And then to get to 9 she would need 3 full years locked in her lab doing nothing but practicing. After these three years it's the least you can give to her for that time.
The subject isn't about practicing, it's about training. You can practice anything you like, and gain exposure in any activity you might be doing (even trying to figure out the vocabulary of dead proto-languages, as given in Ancient Magic).
Training has to be something the master can do to earn a living which an apprentice can follow. It explicitly forbids Hermetic Arts from being trained. It seems to be there to represent the vocational training of mundane abilities.
If your magus takes an apprentice, they must spend a season each year teaching their apprentice, there are no workarounds on this - if you don't teach you have failed in your duty as a master (see ArM5 and also HoH:TL p51)
If you want your apprentice to have more education, but don't have the time to spare, then hire a tutor to teach them to read Latin and assign them books from the covenant library, or buy suitable primers from other covenants.
The entry does not mention non-mages specifically, hence my confusion.
My question stems from a redcap who wishes to improve her knowledge of magic theory and has asked a mage to help with that. The mage was going to spend a season teaching the redcap but after working out the math, a season training her would give more experience points. That brought up a question about whether knowledge skills can be trained. And, with the rules stating that a master can earn a living using the skill being trained, I started wondering how that applies to a mage.
An adjunct scenario.
Two verditius magi get together for a season to discuss their cult. What would be the XPs earned? Would it qualify as practice since they could point/counterpoint each other? Or would it be simply exposure experience points?
I kind-a want it to be more than exposure so that it encourages magi getting together to discuss things. But that could be leaning too heavily on the rules and not on the environment.
The quality of training is the master's score in the ability +3. It's always better than practice. The quality for teaching a single student is communication + teaching ability +9.
In the case of magic theory I can imagine training being better than teaching for some older magi with poor communication scores. Also when the student gets taught by a familiar - who often have low communications and high magic theory scores.
There are no printed restrictions on what abilities can be raised by training. The statement with ambiguity is "the master may work at earning a living while training an apprentice". I don't think that any lab activity qualifies. But copying a set of lab texts probably would (to teach profession: scribe. Yet one of the biggest bonuses to having an apprentice is getting all of your copying work done by someone else. So except in cases of impoverishment I don't see this happening)
That sounds like practice to me, if you role played it you could call it adventure experience and set the quality where you wanted.
If your players are enterprising and well read in the rules they could write out correspondences with other cult members during the season and increase the quality of whatever source they get by one.
Basically the instructor can only earn exposure XP, and cannot train arts, and has to be able to put the ability in question to practical use. Divine lore could be tricky to train, but most lab work involves the practical use of magic theory, so would seem to apply.
For magic theory I can see how it would apply, practice makes perfect. However training your apprentice during the month in letting him fiddle, you explaining and showing the steps you are taking and why, ofc negates the apprentices bonus(help in lab) as I belive is stated somewhere in the Training rules, you dont get the benefit of the one your 'training on the job' that month?
Yes it does, but if you recruit a Int:3 apprentice at the age of 7 (-4 to stats) they have no lab bonus for you to use until they turn 8 and/or have a magic theory to use, so if you train them for 3 seasons you aren't losing anything but are gaining a jump in their magic theory bonus for the future.
Another common practice is to hire a tutor to teach them Latin, Artes Liberales and Profession scribe. You then open their arts and set them to work copying lab texts, copying casting tablets, and fixing arcane connections until their Magic theory score improves by exposure (and by your one season of instruction per year). Another option that has become more discussed since the mater of experience gain for familiars was made explicit is to have your familiar teach the apprentice while you're doing study.
Also there is the option of not taking on an apprentice who is only 7. 12-15 would be more convienient, you get a more competent apprentice for the entire apprenticeship and you don't give quite as much supernatural power to children and adolescents. As the custos with the good social skills always says: "The wizard likes you kid, in fact she's going to provide a bunch of money and resources to you and your family if you'd and they would agree to have you become her apprentice on midsummer in four years, or some time around there the specific date doesn't matter too much. On one hand you'll be destined to become powerful, respected and wealthy, on the other hand you'll have all of the wealth and power of the covenant supporting you and your family for as long as you work with us. If any other magician shows up before them you get a hold of me and I'll sort it out for everyone and ensure we do what's best for you "
Another common practice is to hire a tutor to teach them Latin, Artes Liberales and Profession scribe. You then open their arts and set them to work copying lab texts, copying casting tablets, and fixing arcane connections until their Magic theory score improves by exposure (and by your one season of instruction per year). Another option that has become more discussed since the mater of experience gain for familiars was made explicit is to have your familiar teach the apprentice while you're doing study.
Also there is the option of not taking on an apprentice who is only 7. 12-15 would be more convienient, you get a more competent apprentice for the entire apprenticeship and you don't give quite as much supernatural power to children and adolescents. As the custos with the good social skills always says: "The wizard likes you kid, in fact she's going to provide a bunch of money and resources to you and your family if you'd and they would agree to have you become her apprentice on midsummer in four years, or some time around there the specific date doesn't matter too much. On one hand you'll be destined to become powerful, respected and wealthy, on the other hand you'll have all of the wealth and power of the covenant supporting you and your family for as long as you work with us. If any other magician shows up before them you get a hold of me and I'll sort it out for everyone and ensure we do what's best for you "
Depends on your tribunal. If you find the kid at 7 and open him at 12 that's 5 years for someone else to grab them and open them as their own apprentice. And if the way you find them is by keeping an eye on other magi hiring tutors for kids... you want to strike early and get the kid claimed as your apprentice.
I agree with silveroak. I mean isn't the rule that whoever officially claims the Gifted child first gets the child?
So, you can't have claimed the child because you haven't taken the child to your sanctum with all reasonable haste and begun Hermetic initiation as soon as practicable. If the other magus does make such a claim, by the time you're warned about him expressing interest, your Gifted child could already be in his sanctum having his Arts opened.
The box "Blood Rights" on page 53 of HoH:TL sets forth a very similar situation, making clear that the law is on the side of the claiming magus, though equity may be on the side of the training maga. And, of course, in that hypothetical the training maga has possession of the child and has refused to give him up. If the claiming magus was able to simply spirit the boy away and start opening his Arts, I doubt the training maga would have a leg to stand on.
I should say that training a Gifted child without claiming them first is fraught with peril. And once you've claimed them, the clock is ticking. You might wait a few seasons before opening their Arts to get them some rudiments of Latin without being charged with a low crime. But anything more than that and you might be so charged (and could potentially lose the child, I'd imagine).
Of course things may vary by tribunal. Thebes is the obvious aberration where by tradition apprentices for the most part get to choose their masters, and the choosing only happens at tribunal meetings. There a child found far enough in advance of the tribunal meeting might have years of training in Greek, Artes Liberales, and who knows what else before becoming an apprentice.