Ask Luna #109

From: Byron

Hi Mage Vesta!
Did you ever learn at the apprentice program about what exactly happened during the Gate Rune War and why it happened?
P.S you are my favourite person ever, so cool

Thanks!

Yeah, we had a course on it. It was pretty complicated. There were several Dark and neutral factions involved, and then the Council was split on how to deal with things. I think it was only after a few years that everyone settled what side they were on, and once they did the casualties were really high.

From: Dave

Hello Mage Vesta,

I know you tend to get a lot of questions about the odd aspects of magical history, but I had a few about the economy and creation of items I hoped you might be well positioned to answer since you run the Arcana Emporium now.

1. To a prior question you mentioned that while mages can make foci, adepts tend to make most of them due to sheer numbers. Given the fact that adepts tend to be less involved with the magical community, do they tend to use a favor based economy or a money when creating and selling foci and one shot devices?

2. Related to the above question, is item creation primarily still done in the craftsman model, or are there groups that aim to use more of a workshop or factory model to produce a lot of enchanted items?

3. Are there certain types of effects that simply don’t work well for foci or one shots? I notice that the examples in the books tend to be elemental, are effects like healing, shapeshifting, or divination assisted code-breaking not able to be placed in an object or are they simply too troublesome to use to be worth it?

Thank you for your time reading and hopefully answering these questions.

1. Depends on how established and tied in to the magical world they are. The hobbyists and the newbies work for cash, the ones who’ve been at it for longer are more likely to be interested in favours and trades. They still pretty much all use money to some degree, though – I don’t know of any adepts who just skip over the cash economy completely the way mages do.

2. It’s more the craftsman model. It pretty much takes one crafter to produce one item, so there’s not much benefit in trying a factory setup. Some groups do use workshops though.

3. Generally, the more complicated a spell and the more active direction it needs, the less well it’s going to work in item form. The easiest ones to craft are the ones that just go off in an area, like those condensers Alex uses. Break the glass, mist comes out. Very simple. Something like a healing salve is harder, and anything that needs decisions is really hard. The problem is that the person using the spell can’t actually use that type of magic themselves, which means they can’t control it, which means that anything more complicated than ‘point and pull the trigger’ probably isn’t going to work. So there’s no way you’re going to get a one-shot item for shapeshifting or domination, because spells like that have to be adapted to the subject on the fly. If you tried it would probably either do nothing or fail in some really spectacular way.

From: Kotomine

If Alex were to summon a Servant for a Grail War, which one do you think he’d get?

Archer, I would have thought. Seems to fit his personality.

From: Intana

Dear Luna,
What exactly are the abilities of rakshasas? Are they able to cast spells or are they just inherently magical like other creatures?

Illusion, shapeshifting, some kinds of mind control. They were supposed to be pretty dangerous physically too. A lot of the information about them is out of date now, though – it’s not like the Council gets to interview them to find out.