@BronzeTongue I understand that the system as it stands is usable. But could you not call making interesting things that are powerful loophole abuse please. Also prodigies are literal garbage except for that one usage of aura hiding the path of Enchantment is better in every way.
Loophole abuse is stuff like infinite arcana sharing one token, or making daisy chained ones to support hijinks. It's not so much making interesting things as the ones that get silly that I was talking about there.
As to the bit on prodigies; I disagree. I was originally in the same camp as you, but after looking things over I've come around to them.
White wolf has no good canon crafting systems; they all have issues and can easily result in stupid stuff, or else include so many layers of requirements that actually doing anything is barely possible right up to the point where you break the game. Ultimately it comes down to coming up with a compromise with the GM of a particular game about how you're going to modify things to be playable.
Prodigies formalize that requirement and avoid the endless skill tree problem by pining price against the utility of a particular item. So by RaW we can make a minor time machine, glasses to see magic, impossible weapons, and whatever else right out of the box without breaking the game in an unfun way.
It doesn't give an item building checklist like splendors have, which I find annoying, and there are some aspects of how pricing is done that I'd change, but calling it bad because it didn't come with an extensive catalog of prebuilt items and example effects is silly.
Especially since they're explicitly the exalted cheat for normal magic crafting, so if we find something balanced as a wonder we can probably work out something to do a similar job, but with prodigy balancing/pricing. Depending on how DP rules on particular items like that anyway.
They don't. One tells you to look at a specific rite for creating fetishes on page 213, which is limited to weak spirits. One refers to the general rules for fetishes on page 221, which doesn't include the limitation.
I think you're reading too much into the charm. Banes aren't exactly high power, so you're banking on devil not being a defined strength level to allow for something of any strength to be used.
