I may be missing something here - The rules in covenants for taking over a lab says that you can use a laboratory without having to spend time making it your own if it is designed as a transient lab, and gives the shared labs at Durenmar as an example. Covenants doesn't give any further info I can find about shared labs, in terms of what having a lab be a 'Transient' lab does to the design.
I've checked both the HoH:TL book and the Guardians of the Forest book (being places where lots of Durenmar stuff is explored) and there is nothing there either that I can find - also searched the forum and found very little about this. The lack of questions on the forum makes me thing there are rules about communal labs I am missing - can someone point me to them?
I'd have thought there would be some limits to how developed they might be with features / limits to features etc - but so far as I can tell any lab can be transient with no restrictions on how it can be built up, and so all labs probably should be, to allow apprentices to work in them with the increased bonuses they can give, so you could rent highly specialised labs to people who would otherwise never have access to them, etc? There are cannon reasons not to do this (sanctums etc) but I can also see a market for someone having a really high CrCo lab specialised in LRs they rent out to people.
I feel like I am missing something here - are there rules I have overlooked? If not do people have any house rules for this?
Standard labs are the starting basic lab? If that was the case where transient labs can't have refinement etc it would make sense
But if you look at the example labs in covenant's the 4 labs in the tower of bonisagus are explicitly for visitors to use, and are not standard but have several virtues and flaws?
Covenants p.123 describes these labs as "designed for visitors to the library to invent spells with the aid of its lab texts." Looks like clever Bonisagi cut a few corners and designed labs for visitors, who all pursue the same narrow purpose. Right?
There are tmk no specific rules for such labs. But if you look at their design, you find them pretty generic but for Refinement, Upkeep, Aesthetics and Site of Legend - all maintained by Durenmar and fitting for them.
I agree. This is an annoying omission by the authors.
The basic rule is simple IIRC. If the refinement is zero, you can take over the lab with no penalty. If the lab has been refined, you need a season to acquaint yourself therewith.
How you can make transient labs with non-zero refinement is never stated. If you twist my arm and demand a solution tonight, I would suggest that transient lab is a major virtue, thus draining excess space and taking two seasons to install. Narratively this probably amounts to excess space to make it easier to get an overview, as well as wall boards explaining the outline and the safety procedures, and additional user manuals.
Yeah. I’d probably limit it to “no refinement” which the Durenmar Labs have, but also primarily limited to free or minor lab virtues and flaws. Things like Superior equipment/tools or the ingredients VFs would be fine as would structural things that may take space like Spacious or Auspicious Shape or dependent on location like subterranean or mountaintop or dedicated building. I don’t think there is a good hard and fast rule around this other than “no refinement” which the one example we have breaks. Outside of that I think it’s up to the troupe to decide which things are part of the lab no matter the routine and which are dependent on the magus to somehow utilize. I’d generally put Features and Focuses into the second camp (how does a maga utilize a throne in their lab work?).
Had a similar problem recently. Covenants p118 has the solution
If such a lab has a Refinement score of zero or less, or if the lab has a positive Refinement but was designed for transient use (as the spare labs at Durenmar are, for example), then the new owner may simply move in and begin work straight away.
Hence it’s all about the intent of the lab design. Would be great is the spell “ The Laboratory of Bonisagus” could create a lab already refined. Maybe a high finesse roll?
That's a liberal reading. It is not obvious that intent suffices, with no drawback whatsoever, and I would argue that that just makes another tempting route to power gaming, something which Ars Magica does not need more of.
If transient use is a free virtue, it means that a covenant can easily set up specialised labs for different recurring purposes, for everybody to use. A familiar specialisation is brilliant.