Covenant Information
--------------------

Your Covenant once resided within the walls of Novgorod the Great, where
you posed as a guild of alchemists. Though you were generally distrusted,
you managed to make enough money to pay your taxes. Unfortunately, your
experiments, both alchemical and magical, had the tendency to result in
explosions. Novgorod, as a city made of highly flammable wood, did not
look favorably upon this. Recently, the Novgorod veche (the main city
council) voted to insist that you move your place of business outside
the city walls.

Being relatively enlightened where matters of profits were concerned,
the veche offered to grant the Master of your Guild the title to some 
land not too far from the city. You are being taxed extremely heavily,
in return for this favor, but it grants you both privacy and better
control over your affairs.

The plot of land is some twelve miles from the city, just within the
third perimeter of defenses. It consists of a single manor house, and
its associated peasant village. It's fairly pathetic, even as peasant
villages go; like most of the peasants nearby, these peasants grow
rye, but they just don't seem to be good at it, and their crops,
you discover, have failed miserably, on a regular basis. There's
not much there; the village has its own smithy, and the only stone
building is a small church.

As you settle in, you find a rather pleasant surprise. The area of
the manor house itself seems to have an extroardinarily strong magical
aura. (It's a +6 aura, for reasons which you will eventually discover.)

The manor house isn't really large enough to house everyone, and still
leave room for spacious laboratories. Your equipment, thanks to your
pose as alchemists, is quite good, but the rooms which are suitable
for magical experimentation are not large enough to be more than
adequate. (No bonuses or penalties imposed.)

Furthermore, when you cast your Aegis of the Hearth, you discovered
that you were unable to increase the strength of the Aegis to the
level that you believed should have been possible. (It's only +10.)

As far as you can tell, you have no uncontested sources of vis. 
However, with the aura here as high as it is, you suspect that
exploration might reveal _something_.

Initially, you have no Grogs. Technically, you are now the overlords
of the peasants in the village, but none of them have been trained for
fighting. The peasants provide you a steady source of income, though
you can extort from them if you need more money. Nonetheless, due to
the heavy taxes that you are currently paying, you don't have much 
in the way of spare cash.

Thanks to the isolation from the rest of the Order, your arcane library
is quite poor. There might be a way to get better books, but it'll
involve negotiations with neighboring Covenants.

Cr	3		An	3		Ig	2
In 	5		Aq	9		Im	2
Mu	3		Au	9		Me	2
Pe	3		Co	7		Te	6
Re	5		He	4		Vi	2

However, you are fortunate enough to have a reasonably good selection
of useful spells in the Covenant's spellbooks (100 levels worth).

InAq 25   Voice of the Lake
CrMe 20   Return of Mental Lucidity
InVi 15   Scales of Magical Weight
MuVi 15   Gather the Essence of the Beast
ReVi 10   Aegis of the Hearth
ReVi 15   The Watching Ward

Your mundane library is a jumble of books that you've managed to pick
up along the way, and, though it's quite extensive, it is in several 
different languages.

Church Knowledge	3	(written in Church Slavonic)
Church Lore		3	(written in Church Slavonic)
Area (Novgorod) Lore	5	(written in Greek)
Faerie Lore		2	(written in Greek)
Humanities		4	(written in Greek)
Legend Lore		2	(written in Greek)
Occult Lore		3	(written in Latin)

All in all, it's not too bad a place, for a Spring Covenant.