So I am going to be playing a herbam maga soon, and I might want to create seeds that can grow into plants by magic. Obviously this needs a ritual but can I split the process into two spells?
I'm thinking a sun duration "create a seed spell" which might need a finesse roll, Then once I have made sure I have the desired seed, cast a separate ritual to make the seeds permanant. The idea is to avoid making separate rituals for each seed type.
Has anyone any ideas as to if this is feasible/game breaking in a bad way?
You should be able to get the first part easily enough using Spontaneous Magic. The second spell is tricky - most rituals to make permanent things have momentary duration, which isn't going to work if the ritual is trying to sustain magic, as that's not a natural thing so needs a duration or it'll just stop again immediately.
You do have a few options, though:
Use Duration: Ring. This is easy to set up, but the plant will disappear if the ring is broken or if the plant moves outside the ring (moving its produce outside the ring will probably also mean that disappears), so it's some way off truly permanent.
Use an item with Maintaining the Demanding Spell at Sun duration and an environmental trigger of sunrise/sunset. The need to make an item means this isn't much of an improvement over inventing ritual spells, although you might be able to get one item to work on multiple plants, depending on how you build it. Obviously the item needs to be kept safe.
Use non-standard hermetic magic. Possible approaches are Spell Binding (page 27 of The Mysteries: Revised Edition), which enables you to get spirits to sustain a spell for you (requires a spirit at least equal in might to the spell to be sustained and a thematic link to it, as well as the casting of a ritual), or if you're a Merinita possibly the Aura duration given by the Perpetuity mystery (page 102 of Houses of Hermes: Mystery Cults) - that requires the plant to be in and stay in an Aura, but that's less of a restiction for a plant than it would be for a lot of other things, especially as any kind of aura will work.
How about you make a ritual to create seeds and add a magnitude for flexibility and need a 'Starter seed of the appropriate type', which also leads to stories of hunting the flowering wheat seed from the mountains, to draw seeds from the Creo realm? That would be an easy enough 'no need for multiple rituals' seed generation technique? Off the top of my head I can't see any good reason not to allow such a spell.
edit:
For the growing part, clever use of encircled farming plots and throwing various CeHe circle spells to ensure good growth etc. Or the 'grow tree to full size in X' type effect. Or circles wirth MuHe(An) to transform the growing seeds into tiny snakes rooted in the soil to study snakegrass...
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You should be able to get the first part easily enough using Spontaneous Magic. The second spell is tricky - most rituals to make permanent things have momentary duration, which isn't going to work if the ritual is trying to sustain magic, as that's not a natural thing so needs a duration or it'll just stop again immediately.
I was thinking that the ritual would be instantaneous (just add Vis!) to make it permanant!
That only works for things that are natural. So you could instantaneously create a seed, because a seed's existence is a natural thing. But you can't instantaneously create a spell to make another spell permanent, because that's not a natural thing. It comes down to the Limit of Essential Nature (page 79 of the main book) - things that violate essential nature have to be actively maintained, and using vis doesn't get round that.
I was seeing he first sun durartion spell as creating a natural thing - the seed - but not permanently because it had no vis. The ritual would not be acting on the spell, but on the object created by the spell.
Ok second thought: If I created a sun/moon duration seed, matured it over a diameter in soil. Then rego'd it to draw nutrients from the soil to produce seeds (all in a short ammount of time) and harvested seeds from it, would they hang around after the original sun/moon duration spell expired in the same way that the heat from burning conjoured logs remains after they are burnt?
Why start with magically created natural seeds that last only shortly in the first place, instead of with just plain seeds? What does your maga really wish to achieve?
If you try to push the limits of what 'natural seeds' are, you will just have lots of discussions with your troupe.
If this is the problem, you can read with your troupe
So reducing the amount of seeds to 100 cubic paces in volume leads to a ritual which allows the caster to specify at casting time the seeds she creates. Best discuss eventual remaining limits with your troupe.
I don't see what such a ritual would actually be doing - I can't think of any way to make a temporary thing permanent by changing the thing itself rather than the magic underpinning its existence.
Maybe. There's some support for this approach in the description of what happens to a horse magically created for a year after the spell wears off (it leaves a mundane corpse if fed on mundane food over that year - page 77 of the main book), but whether it works in this case would be something that needed to be discussed with your troupe (is a Moon long enough? Does magically accelerating its growth mean it doesn't count as mundanely fed? Does it keel over dead at the end of the spell like the horse did?)
One of the other direct ritual approaches suggested by other people should be a surer bet - as long as your maga is familiar with the seeds she's trying to create (and you don't botch), there shouldn't be a problem getting the wrong type of seed. The alternative is for her to go on an adventure back to her homeland to gather the seeds she wants. How many different varieties is she trying to create?