Covenants Chapter Eight: Sanctum

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Sanctum

Hermetic magi require personal space in which to pursue their Arts and interests. The Code allows for this by recognizing that a magus may have a sanctum, a place of contemplation where he cannot be disturbed. The covenant is the magus’s home, but the sanctum comprises the private place where the magus can act without censure.

The Code makes several provisions regarding sancta. The owner may slay a magus trespassing in a sanctum without penalty. A sanctum must be clearly marked with a design of square, circle, and diagonal lines, and with the name of the magus who claims it. A magus may have only one sanctum at a time, and in some Tribunals may not change his sanctum more than a certain number of times per year.

Common Types of Sancta

The simplest sanctum, found in Spring covenants, is a bedroom, with space for keepsakes and treasure. Even at this simple level of development, many covenants provide a separate building for each magus. Wooden cottages are common. As covenants develop, it is usual for each magus to acquire a personal laboratory, and to replace his wooden buildings with stone.

Many Summer covenants contain sancta in their mural towers. Commonly, the lowest and highest levels are given over to crossbowmen, and the middle two levels are set aside for a laboratory and a bedroom. The magus’s familiar shares his bedroom, in many cases. The apprentice might rest in either space. Many magi have a meeting room placed just outside their sanctum, so that they can greet and entertain visitors without bringing them inside. The magus’s chief servant sleeps in this room. This might be a shield grog, but is often a favored domestic attendant.

Autumn covenants, and particularly sumptuous Summer ones, cultivate larger sanctums as the magi develop idiosyncratic requirements, and find wealth to indulge them. Magi with large familiars draw their friends’ lodgings into their sancta, so stables, mews, kennels, and even portions of the moat are sometimes added to the suite. Methods for the familiar, or the shapeshifted magus, to enter and leave the building are added, if required.

Public facilities are often duplicated for each magus, although some magi choose not to add these new elements of their suite to the legal sanctum. A maga’s bathing room or scriptorium might be in her sanctum, since each requires only the apprentice as a laborer, but a personal kitchen, with its many scullions and cooks, usually lies near the guest room, outside the legally-defined sanctum. This cluster of rooms for servants and guests is called the maga’s antechambers.

Defending the Sanctum

Many magi have protective enchantments of their sancta. Most have a ward that prevents casual visits by those who might accidentally damage the magus’s experiments, for example curious covenfolk. Many others have spells that kill intruders. Seen objectively, these are often excessive. Any intruder facing these enchantments must already have passed through the covenant’s fortifications and Aegis of the Hearth. The person most likely to be killed by complicated sanctum defenses is the magus’s own apprentice. Traps are, however, common in those covenants where amicability within the council of magi has broken down. Some magi employ them in the defense of their keep, their place of final refuge in siege.

Mundane Defenses

Most sancta have doors, bolts, locks, and the other accouterments of mundane security. The only function of these is to cause mundane intruders to make sufficient noise, chopping through the door with an axe, that a guard notices. Any intruder dependent on mundane tools would not be able to cross even the simplest of wards, so the door is an alternative to the sort of ward that many apprentices could create. The door does, however, have a legal use: it defines where in a passageway the sanctum begins.

Some members of the Order use mundane traps to secure their sanctums. There are two advantages offered by nonmagical devices: they cannot be resisted using the Parma Magica, and they are invisible to spells that detect enchantments. Spells that repel mundane weapons make mundane traps of little use against an experienced, prepared magus.

Ring and Circle Wards

The most popular type of sanctum defense is the ring and circle ward. Wards against mundane things, like people, pests and fire, are easy to create and cost no vis. Circle wards at entrances, unlike spells cast on the Room Targets, do not warp the residents of the warded space. Defacing the circle can destroy ring and circle wards, so durable circles are carved into stone, or made of metal fastened to other surfaces.

Magic Items

Sanctum items are highly individual, since they derive from the array of Arts and magical foci that Hermetic magi possess. Many magi, who assume their sancta will be intruded into only rarely, purchase charged items from discreet Verditius magi to use as traps. This has the advantage that an intruder who has taken special precautions against the Forms in which the magus is strong is likely to be surprised.

Other magi make their own items. These usually have small effects, but tremendous Penetration bonuses. Their makers assume that a creature or person who has penetrated the covenant’s Aegis of the Hearth, the curtain walls, the mundane bars to entry, and the sanctum’s wards is likely to have formidable Magical Resistance. These items can often be taken from the sanctum and used to defend the walls during sieges.

Many magi layer their effects, so that they minimize the harm caused to intruders. A typical layered sanctum has minor wards to keep out mundane servants, a second spell that immobilizes or transforms, and finally a fatal spell. The immobilizing spell allows the magus to capture and question an intruder, perhaps giving him to the Quaesitores. There is no requirement in Hermetic law that intruders should, by preference, be captured, but many magi want to interrogate those who have trespassed in their sancta.

Ring and Circle Ward Examples Ward Against the Curious Scullion ReCo 10 R: Touch, D: Ring, T: Circle This spell creates a circle that humans lacking Magic Resistance cannot cross. The spell gently pushes the target away from the ring. It is used to bar entry in many Hermetic sancta. This spell has an alternate name, Tytalus’s Prison, which comes from a story, possibly apocryphal, from the life of the Founder Tytalus. It suggests that in the early years of the Order, he cast down a wizard living as a feudal lord in the Rhineland, in part by trapping his mustered army inside a ring placed about the army camp. Members of House Tremere claim a similar feat for one of their early archimagi. Their story seems more likely because he was a vallationist, a builder of magical walls, which explains why the army was not able to deface the ring and escape. It is possible that this is a trick of Guorna the Fetid’s, which both magi knew. The second name also hints at an alternative use of the spell in a magus’s sanctum: to imprison an apprentice inside. (Base 3 [move “away”], +1 Touch, +2 Ring) Ward Against Flame ReIg 15 R: Touch, D: Ring, T: Circle This spell creates a circle that mundane fires cannot cross. It is used, in many laboratories, around heat sources that could tip or spill. It is also popular around grain stores. The fine dust that is found wherever people store flour is highly flammable, and many magi use this spell to quarantine areas in mills and granaries from the fires that are used in other parts of the buildings. Hermetic librarians use this spell far more than is necessary: in one covenant, for example, the drip catcher on every candleholder has a circle for this spell etched into its surface. This spell sometimes encloses an entire laboratory, but is of limited usefulness in that application. The fires caused by laboratory accidents are often magically powerful enough to overcome this ward, or hot enough to burn through the wooden boards used as floors and ceilings in many covenants. The spell does keep fires bottled, but this makes them more intense, until they burn through their supply of fuel and air. (Base 4, +1 Touch, +2 Ring) Ward Against Mundane Intrusions Rego Ignem 35 Req: Corpus, Animal, Aquam, Herbam R: Touch, D: Ring, T: Circle This spell conglomerates other wards into a single working. It holds at bay many of the things likely to damage Hermetic sancta: flame, excessive light, thieves, pests, moisture, and mildew. (As Ward Against Flame, +4 requisites)

Apprentices: A Security Problem The pass methods for magical traps are less secure if known by an apprentice, so many magi find ways for the apprentice to avoid triggering the wards without any conscious effort. Some magi, for example, key their effects to a distinguishing physical feature that both share. A few have their apprentices carry an object at all times, but do not tell them what it is about the object that prevents the activation of the wards, or even that this is the object’s function. Some alter the apprentice in a minor way, and then destroy the memory of that alteration. One archmagus was deeply concerned to find a small tattoo on his scalp, exposed by receding hair, and was only mollified when he discovered similar tattoos on the heads of the other magi who had shared the same master. Some magi cannot be bothered with all of this, and refuse to allow their apprentices to cross their wards except in their presence. Familiars and spouses create similar security problems, which are typically solved in many of the same ways.

Standard Hermetic Laboratory & Sanctum

F Fireplace

L Light Source

P Pillar

1 Stair

2 Privy

3 Meeting Room

4 Sanctum Marker

5 Bedroom

6 Stores

7 Water Basin

8 Ornaments and Secimens

9 Mirror

10 Spell Circle

11 Bookshelf

12 Writing Desk

13 Bookstand

14 Observatory

15 Orb

16 Astrolabe

17 Astronomical Charts

18 Wax Tablet

19 Cauldron

20 Balance

21 Ingredients

22 Refuse Tip

Attribution

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