A simple, one-part object such as a small coin or a piece of paper is complexity 1, with things going up from there. Typical handheld weapons and things with one or two moving parts can be conjured around a complexity of 3. Larger, more complicated things and minor animate things—such as a frog that hops around and ribbits—are a 5. (These items still look “a little off ” or “unreal.”) Quantity and size add +2 for each identifiable factor. Creating a (nonfunctioning) car would be about a 7, starting at 5 and getting a
+2 due to its size; creating enough faux frogs to overrun a city park could be 11 or more—5 for the basic frog, +2 several times over for quantity.
So, a car-sized object (complexity not included) is +2. Enough objects to fill a city park is +6. I used the exact shifts from the examples.
Sure! You can conjure a sword, using thaumaturgy. But…why? It’ll take you at least a few minutes to conjure the thing, since this is thaumaturgy in action, and unless you toss some extra power into it to outlast the sunrise, it’ll dissolve in less than a day
So, conjurations last till sunrise, not 1 scene. Generally, most thaumaturgies have that duration, unless a shorter duration is mentioned. So, several human lifetimes IS +13 shifts of power.
I would rule that your entire fortune is trivial to dispel, can't cross thresholds, and may get shorted out the first time it rains on your money bin.
There are rules for thresholds and dispelling.
1) To dispel a spell, you need to summon
as many shifts of power as were used to cast it. It is as big a ritual to dispel the fortune as it is to make it. Besides, once you put the money in a bank or exchange them for foreign currency or buy something, them being dispelled won't hurt you.
2) Thresholds -and water is a threshold too- don't automatically stop magic; they diminish the effect of the spell by a number of shifts. Even a legendary threshold such as a major holy Cathedral or bathing in an ocean will only dimisish the spell's power by 8 shifts. So, say the spell's duration and believability are reduced by 4 shifts each; the money will still last a month inside the threshold and still be hard enough to recognize as unreal that only experts would manage it.
Besides, a wizard can become very, very wealthy without the need to conjure money;
1) Thaumaturgy divination, to predict the moves of the stock market in the day. That would be solving a problem with the contacts or resources or scholarship skill. Even the most skilled mortals in financial science in the world would get a base of superb +5 plus +2 from a stunt in this. A wizard using divination could easily get a complexity of 10 with a two-minute ritual. Fancy getting the maximum benefit of the stock market every day? 20% rate of interest per day would be about the best possible. In ten days you'd have 6 TIMES the money you started with. In one month you could start with $4.000 and end up with $ 1 million.
2) Thaumaturgy divination, to search for minerals - gold, oil, gems. Similarly to the above use, even the weakest wizard could get better results in minutes than world-class prospectors could get in days or months of searching.
3) How about buying and selling land? A wizard could influence the weather or conjure attacks by vermin with only minor complexity or even do power outages and the like to really drop property values. Then he'd buy the land for a ridiculous price and sell some months later at a much higher price.
4) Invest in a company then destroy the company's competitors. You don't really need black magic or any direct spells; any modern company can be destroyed by simply hexing it. Even better, manipulate the stock market like that.
5) Steal a bank. Hex the bank at night, sneak in under a thaumaturgy veil, put the guards to sleep, melt the vault door and grab the money. Even better, use summoned creatures to steal the money for you. No Laws broken whatsoever and the police will have no evidence at all; no modern security can resist hexing and any trace evidence left by summoned creatures melts away in minutes (and isn't human to begin with.
Or, you can do it faster by opening a Gate from the Nevernever directly into the bank vault.
6) Insurance fraud. Lots of insurance fraud. Fires, power failure, equipment failure, wizards can do it untraceably and seemingly naturally.
7) Arms Dealing. How much would an assassin or a terrorist pay for an invisibility potion? How about a mercenary for an invulnerability potion or a healing potion? Any kind of armed forces for a grenade-like potion that does 8 shifts of hexing in one zone, destroying every kind of technological item from alarms to firearms and mines to armored vehicles? How about lasting thaumaturgy veils for secret facilities and bunkers? And NONE of the above violate the Laws of Magic.
