Students of the sanctums

(First post, not sure if there’s a better place for this.)

I was reading up on sanctum’s and their associated followers, the apprentices and normal men who study there. Came to the part about students leaving and new ones taking their place, and had a few questions.

Question the First: Does every student make the proficiency throw at the same time, or is the 1d6 months individual for each student?

Question the Second: Really, 1d6 months? That seems rather low for magical training. Priestesses take two years.

Question the Third: New students arrive each year, with an upper limit of 12 students at a time. Is it intentional that this limit will never be filled after the initial batch of students (and even then only if 12 were rolled), since each student either leaves or becomes an apprentice in half a year at most, so only 1-6 will ever be present at one time after the first “class?”

Thanks in advance.

  1. We’ve always rolled the time per individual.

  2. It was long enough that we only ever had like one guy finish wizard school…

  3. The extra slots could be used to train up high-int L0 henchmen of the rest of the party into something other than fighters. The players in my last game were known to sponsor 18Int / 18Wis L0 henchmen to go to a sanctum or seminary. It was slow and you only got 1st-level guys out of it, but it’s not every henchman who comes with an 18 in their prime req.

  1. Does every student make the proficiency throw at the same time, or is the 1d6 months individual for each student?

It’s individual to the student.

  1. 1d6 months? That seems rather low for magical training. Priestesses take two years.

You can (a) consider this to be simulating the differences between organized institutional teaching compared to the ability of gifted students to quickly master subject matter in informal learning environments or (b) change the rules to something you like better.

  1. New students arrive each year, with an upper limit of 12 students at a time. Is it intentional that this limit will never be filled after the initial batch of students (and even then only if 12 were rolled), since each student either leaves or becomes an apprentice in half a year at most, so only 1-6 will ever be present at one time after the first “class?”

Yes, it’s intentional.

Thanks for the answers, Alex. I’ll keep the rules as is, just wanted some insight.

Wouldn’t the student slots start filling once the wizard reaches six apprentices, or would even the “high-potential” students get discouraged in that case? My thought was that once the wizard’s apprentice slots filled, the students would remain until a slot opened (through apprentices leveling or dying), at which point the most senior student would become an apprentice.

Well, learning a spell only takes a week, and a level 1 mage is going to know, at most, 4 spells. A newly trained apprentice doesn’t learn a whole lot else, either; as far as I know they don’t get any free proficiency or anything. It seems about right that a student who really gets magic could complete his or her training in about a month, while most students require several times that amount of time, but not astronomically more.

Think of it like magic boot camp: basic training for new recruits. Even once they “graduate,” they may very well continue to be apprentices for years thereafter.

As far as priestesses go, I figure the amount of time they spend training has to do with the rigorous lifestyle requirements that being a priestess entails. In order to avoid screwing up and losing their powers, they need to to (ideally) internalize their code of conduct to the point that it’s second nature to them.

A real-world comparison might be the amount of time it takes to train to be a Marine vs. the amount of time it takes for a woman to become a Roman Catholic nun. According to Wikipedia, marine recruits in the United states undergo a 12-week program of basic training, after which infantry marines train for an additional 59 days at the Infantry Training Battalion before being assigned to their first unit.

A nun, on the other hand, begins by undergoing a period of postulency that lasts from six months to a year, during which she is observed and tested by her order. If they agree that she may have a vocation to the life of a nun, she undertakes the novitiate, a period lasting one to two years during which she lives according to the rules of the order without yet taking vows. At the end of this period she may take temporary vows to the order. After no less than three years but no more than six of living under these temporary vows, the sister may petition to take permanent, solemn vows in the order.

… so anyway, I did have a question: would it be possible for a mage to actively seek out new students over and above the 1d6 that they attract each year, or is that a hard limit on how many are available?