The Tower's Environment

The following enchantments are used to make life within the Great Tower safer and easier.

The Traveling Laboratory

This laboratory is designed so that it can be taken down and reassembled in another room. It is specialized to enchant entire rooms, including items and devices installed into rooms; rather than having the thing to be enchanted contained within the laboratory, the laboratory exists within the target device. The laboratory is flexible enough that rooms, corridors, and cloisters can be enchanted, the shape of the laboratory adapting to its target. Any space that meets the minimum size for an Hermetic laboratory can be enchanted.

The central feature of this laboratory is the scaffolding that is assembled along each wall of the target room. This is configured to allow the magus to inspect every part of every wall, and both the floor and ceiling without causing disruption to any part of them. All of the tools, equipment, and materials are suspended on large boards, strung from the scaffolding. To the untutored eye, the laboratory looks like the scaffolding used by artists when painting large frescoes on chapel walls and ceilings.

Designing the laboratory is the work

of a number of seasons but the end result is a laboratory with the following statistics, Virtues & Flaws, and specializations.

Virtues and Flaws: Greater Feature, Highly Organized, Mobile; Elementary, Greater Focus

Characteristics: Size –3 (0), Refinement 0, General Quality –3, Upkeep –3, Safety 0, Warping 0, Health –3, Aesthetics 2

Specializations: +1 Experimentation, +7 Rooms

The Greater Feature and Focus are responsible for the room specialization, while Mobile allows the laboratory to be easily packed up and moved from room to room. The Elementary flaw represents the limited features that the laboratory provides. The laboratory does have the Highly Organized virtue, which it needs to work around some of its limitations.

The laboratory room specialization applies to all things that generally make up a room, such as the entire room itself, the floor, ceiling, doors, and windows. Things that could be found in a room, such as chairs, tables, or beds, are not covered by the specialization merely by being within a room; in fact, usually the room must be cleared of all such clutter for the laboratory to be assembled. Devices designed to be installed into a location, such as an enchanted circle or magical window, are covered by this specialization. The General Quality of –3 is applied to all lab activities, including those concerning rooms. This makes a net +4 bonus to effects enchanted into rooms.

Wall Crawler

This device is modeled after a spider of huge proportions, clinging to the outside wall of the Great Tower. Its body is fitted with mechanical, articulated legs and it pulls a carriage slung below it. The crawlers are used to take passengers up, down, and around the tower, coming to rest at special balconies dotted about the walls.

Note, the actual design of the carriage and its spider-like means of locomotion is essentially cosmetic, and the device is not truly mechanical. Once animated through the Rego enchantment, it takes on the appearance of an automaton, but no such mysteries are at work.

The size of the device means that it would be costly to prepare for enchantment. So instead, the magic is enchanted into a small copper spider embedded into the larger mechanical. An alternative is to enchant the mechanical spider itself as a lesser enchanted device, though this still requires a large laboratory.

The Spider's Gift

ReTe 34

Pen: +0, Constant Effect

R: Touch, D: Sun, T: Individual

This is the effect that allows the Wall Crawler both to cling to the wall with no danger of falling, and to move itself under direction from the occupants of the carriage trailing behind the great iron spider.

(Base 3, +1 Touch, +2 Sun, +2 Metal, +2 Size; +1 for 2/day, +3 triggered at sunrise and sunset)

Required Lab Total: 1 season (68), 2 seasons (51), 3 seasons (46), 4 seasons (43)

The shape of the spider provides a bonus of +5 to effects concerning climbing.

The Distant Council Chamber

Magi living in the Great Tower may not necessarily spend their time together as magi in other covenants do, but they must still come together for councils to decide covenant and tower business. To facilitate this, each magus in the tower can create an enchanted wooden circle that is set into the floor of his sanctum or another chamber of his choosing. This forms part of the floor but is well defined through an outer ring.

The wooden ring has an arcane connection to a further remote iron ring set into the floor of the council chamber, which could be anywhere within the tower. When the magus enters the circle set into his chambers, his image and the image of everything else within that circle is displayed in the remote, central circle. In addition, everything visible within that remote circle is also copied and made visible to the magus. In this way, as magi join the council, they become visible to those already in session.

It is likely that covenants using such a device will use a large circle in each chamber, with each circle containing identical trappings. For instance, members of the covenant may each have a copy of the council room table within their circles, and each magus may have an appointed place around that table.

To secure the arcane connection to the central council circle, a season is first spent magically forging a piece of that central iron circle into an iron nail. This takes the magus a season and a pawn of