Suppose you have a magus with Communication 5, Great Teacher…and all the experience of someone just out of Gauntlet. Technically, the minimum to write a tractatus in an Art is 5, and that anyone can benefit from it. Even an archmage reading a tyro’s work.
Getting back to the titular question, what knowledge can such a prodigy contribute to the Order?
Writing as many tractatii as possible. They can probably make good Vis profit from it right away as tractatus are not dependent on the difference in arts or abilities.
Long term, they can pick up points in teaching and run classes to apprentices in Dunremar or simply produce excellent apprentices who will have a lot more xp than they peers.
Yep. One Tractatus for every Art they are competent in, two for the ones you’re good at, one or two in Magic Theory… It adds up.
Instead of payment in Vis, consider asking for Tractatus or Summae in exchange, and build a library that helps you and your sodales improve rapidly. A competent scribe with a little Magic Theory will be a great help here (but they can learn enough Magic Theory by reading your Tractatus!).
My opinion is that even with these virtues, writing Summae is something to do in late career, in your best Arts and Abilities. In most campaigns the Order doesn't need more middling Summae. But doing a new Root and a Q14/L14 companion make a great legacy.
Consider tractati on Magic Theory, which are in high demand by individuals seeking to use large quantity of vis in the lab for longevity rituals or opening those diamond-studded talismans.
But your question might be more about narrative than mechanics. That is, “what could such a young magus possibly write about that others do not already know?” And the answer is all about writing style and organization. Perhaps he conveys basic facts in a new and unusually illuminating way. Suppose, for example, that he writes books which are not only educational but at the same time funny. So you learn while laughing. Or perhaps he teaches while including stories that illustrate his point with memorable examples. Perhaps his books have excellent graphic design, tables of contents, indexes, sidebars and tables, all of which help the reader to navigate the book and find things quickly.
Yes! That’s exactly what I was asking.
Yours is one answer. Any others, everyone?
Ah sorry! A Tractatus could be written based on any personal experience. If you research a spell in the lab, writing up what happened could make a Tractatus in Magic Theory or any Art used. If you found an interesting site with a Regio, describing it and your theories about it could be a work on Magic Lore. Etc.
Potentially, a metacommentary that summarizes other works on a subject (eg, Aquam). I tend to imagine many Summae as being long, rambly things that have nuggets usueful to whatever you’re learning only occasionally. Combing through books to find the useful nuggets and laying them out in an elegant way, with a bit of commentary, is the sort of thing Grad Students do all the time, and they’re at the same age (and theoretically the same stats).
So, a lot of “In The Way of Water, Kameron ex Tytalus suggests Aquam as a base universal force of unchangeability. [relevant quote, copied with page reference] This is corroborated, perhaps accidentally, in How Rædwulf Ruined The Scriptorium, where a faerie court discusses the use of water as a fulcrum of the self. [relevant quote, copied with page reference]. From this we can conclude…” etc etc.
An Archmagus might not glean that many new functional insights, but they would have a way to quickly reference works on a subject and learn more. They might also cast with more certainty - sure, they technically know that Kameron ex Tytalus and Richard ex Merinita, and a bunch of others, all agree on some academic theory from having read all those books, but perhaps never thought about how many times the same thing has been proven until now - it goes from a thing people agree on to a likely universal truth.
OOh! And the Archmage thing is relevant here - an Archmange is potentially 60-100 years older than this freshly Gauntletted Tyro of yours. There may have been a number of new developments over the centuries that they’re unaware of, due to having been doing things the old way for a century, where the Tyro has learned elegant methods, modern philosophy, and minor breakthroughs.
An Archmage might not be that interested in learning the new thing - their formulaic spells contain what might be called “workarounds” for some of the flaws in Bonisagus’ theory, and each workaround is at least four complicated steps (convert the rune to a sound and then the sound into a stone and pulverize the stone before mixing that silt into paint). Modern magic came up with a better workaround twenty years ago, more efficient at only three complicated steps, but no one was able to communicate the utility of it to the Archmage until Tyro set it down in a clean, simple way for his elders. Like being able to finally explain to your grandpa how to use email.
An herbam tractus, as an example, could be a commentary about your observations of a particular plant that happens to have caught your interest and attention. The world is full of minutia that tractatus could be written about, and given the way books were written in period, conjectured about.
Short answer. Game mechanics are always approximations. I suggest not overthinking.
Longer answer. Summae are more problematic if we want to unpack it. Let us looks at a strong end summae Q 12, level 20. 210XP to get to level 20. That is 4 years studying 1 Summae. I appreciate arguably, it is a collection of books, but 4 years, one author. That is longer than a normal uni degree. Who would dream of using one primary source for 4 years of study.
The whole thing with tractatus is they look at a niche subject. A person who studies the colours of butterflies to improve their imaginem images writes a tractatus on the insights. There are more tractatus the magi could do in muto and animal regarding the butterfly study. A magi studies the evaporation of water, and writes a tractatus on either perdo or aquam.
And when I say study, we can say the apprentice lived near a place that farmed salt via evaporation, or a place that had a lot of butterflies, etc.
I’d definitely lean into the idea that this person is a great communicator but, by virtue of their age and lack of experience, not highly knowledgeable. So they are either going to be writing about something obscure or prosaic and making it meaningful to the average mage or they are coming up with new examples and analogies that can help even a more experienced magus see a topic in a new light. Emphasis on being a teacher and explaining things well.
Thanks for giving me a little character thought that will never see the light of day. A new mage in a peripheral tribunal who has mostly been isolated working with just their master and a very small covenant. They get to their first real contact with the broader mage world only to find that others already have heard of them because their student writings were so good that their master has already published a collection (giving full credit or not depending on how you want the drama to go).
A point on that is that if the student writes that well and the teacher is knowledgeable enough they will probably want to give credit to the student in order to get a better price- they may have published a summae at high level but everyone knows they don’t write that well.
Note that any starting mage with an Art at 5, even one with just average communication skills, can write a Tractatus from which an Archmage can learn. I do not see this as unrealistic: in the real world every year thousands of PhD students write articles - sometimes entirely on their own - that teach something even to tenured professors.
If anything, what's unrealistic is the notion (common to many games) that knowledge of a field can be captured by a single number, and can only pass "down" from someone with a higher value to someone with a lower value.
While mostly true, it is not 100% true. Someone teaching can use their 2 exposure XP points in to the subject they are teaching, thus learning a little.
But yes, this again goes back to any game system is an abstraction, and it is never too good to try to go deep realism. As no matter how far one goes, there will always be a step further one can go.
If one learns to swim, clearly that would improve cardio, which is a component of running, so should they get some XP in athletics. Wait, athletics? Someone can be an elite runner, but no good at climbing, they need to be separated. Wait. The skills to say climb the rigging on a boat, is very different to climbing a rock face. We need natural climbing, and assisted climbing…..
If your tyro has Flawless Magic then writing tractatii on Mastered Spells might have an audience.
In my campaign more than a few Flambeau NPCs seek to master Pilum of Flame to all 6 levels of Mastery that the Founder mader for his signature spell.
But Flambeau parents rarely teach all 6 levels of Mastery to their apprentices, leaving it as an exercise to the student. So Mastery Tractatii on PoF have a certain value in my campaign