Arcane Sanctum?

[Aagon]

I've been looking around trying to find an explanation for how arcane sanctum works.  There's another thread that discussed workplaces but I don't feel that arcane sanctum was sufficiently explained.  The relevant text:

Your home may have, for free, a single library, lab, workshop, or arcane library or sanctum of a quality equal to two steps lower than your Resources. As described in Scholarship (see page 142), the quality of a workplace determines the highest possible difficulty of a “question” or project that you can pursue there.

(YS, p 140)

Provided you are willing to spend time researching (and that the answer can be found), the only questions are how long it will take you and how good a workspace you have access to (usually a library for book things, a laboratory for experimental research, etc.) to discover the answer.

  (YS, p 142)

Academic research requires a library (page 140), while research through experimentation requires a laboratory. The quality of these workspaces determines the hardest possible question you can answer within them (so a question of Good difficulty requires a Good library or better). 

(YS p 142)

This seems to be saying that if you have Good resources, for example, the best you can get is a Fair sanctum, which means that anything you make can't have any strength higher than fair, unless you have connections that let's you cast magic elsewhere.  I don't think that's right as there's no indication of such a limit elsewhere.  Am I completely missing something?

[Deadmanwalking]

Personally, I think that Arcane Sanctum is a holdover from a previous version of the rules, and should generally be ignored. That said, an official answer would be nice.

[KOFFEYKID]

I have no idea what a sanctum does either, but I can make something useful for a sanctum to do. How about this:

Arcane Sanctums
An arcane sanctum is a practitioners clean space. The place where he will do most of his most complicated spell weaving. Of course, certain preparations must be made to make such a place more suitable for the task. Wizards are fond of using special incense known to drive away malign entities, many sanctums include circles of protection and very powerful wards.

For every three ranks a Arcane Sanctum has, you may give it a scene aspect, which you may tag freely for any use of magic. For example:

Heather uses her arcane sanctum as a place to work her powerful divination spells. Her sanctum is a basement with soft lighting, and especially clean floors, it has a rating of 6. She has put a scrying pool in the center of the room, shaped as a perfect circle, and filled it with clear, pure spring water from a jug she keeps on the shelf (Aspect: Crystal Clean Scrying Pool). She has also set up wards which (unlike conventional wards, which purpose is to keep things out) draw in magic from the outside (which is then purified by the ward), and pool it into the room (Aspect: Magically Charged Environment).

[Ala Alba]

The problem is, how do you decide how many "ranks" an arcane sanctum gets? The book links those things to the Resources skill, which doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I don't really think you need to be a millionaire to get a good or great sanctum, after all.

Or does it make sense?

Edit: Nevermind, I looked it up in the book, and it actually does talk about how to get a better workshop/sanctum.

[KOFFEYKID]

Plus you can roll for it (resources) and spend fate points to up the roll. The book only lists your sanctums starting rank as resources -2. You can roll and buy a higher rank easily. You might argue that you can use lore to compliment your resources (you know what is a fraud, and what is not, and what is just as good as the expensive stuff, only cheaper). Also, a nice trick is to use a contact to pay for something, if they owe you a favor, you can get them to roll a resources for you to cancel the debt, that seems reasonable.

[Bubba Amon Hotep]

Okay this looks like a good place to ask this . . .

Was building an NPC who had a facility he maintained and updated, that people could use for a price.

Resources : Great (+4)

Stunt: High Quality Workspace - An "automatic" personal workspace of quality equal to resources (+4)

Stunt: High Quality Workspace - The workspace is able to fulfill two workspace functions. (Academic & Arcane Research)

Stunt: High Quality Workspace - The workspace is able to fulfill two additional workspace functions. (Arcane Spellwork & Arcane Rituals)

So . . . a wizard with no resources, pays the NPC in a favor, and copies of private arcane research, so that he can use the Sanctum.

The wizard would have a (+4) workspace for hashing out his next ritual, or discovering the weakness of the monster that attacked him?

yes / no ?

[Archmage_Cowl]

i would say yes.

[Falar]

And then after that, the GM proceeds to use that favor to maniacal laughter inducing ends.