Power Over Life, unlimited?

[Cain Loup-Noir]

On the v20 description it is said that the vampire can summon anything as long as he's familiar with it. A very familiar thing will lower the difficulty while working from a pics or his imagination will increase the difficulty. The only limit is that it cannot be bigger than the caster (no cars, no bikes, no nuke bomb...)

"Power over life" allow to summon for a whole week a false living creature, as long as it is not bigger than the caster, but does that allows the Thaumaturge to summon a Garou in human or lupus form? Could he summon something else like a little dragon, spirits, or something the pc has completely invented? Or just a clone of himself?
And what would be the stat of a completely new creature? The book is just saying it need 10 blood point to create a false living being but nothing about their stats. I know that if the caster re-create an already living animals or person it will have the same stats, but as this path allow to create things with the imagination there's not enough informations

He could roll something involving Intelligence + anything appropriate to create new things or new being that doesn't exist and need to be correctly invented to work/live once summoned but does that allows the caster to get anything he want or is there some missing informations in the book that limit this path?

[Vilenecromancer]

Theoretically yes, by RAW at least. The limit is the familiarity with the thing they're attempting to conjure. The interesting thing about Path of Conjuration is, the thing conjured would be generic AND be flawless. So, say you summon a human form Garou. It would be the most basic example of a Garou that looks like a flawless version of one Garou you know. Good luck getting an ST to let you do this, however.

Side note BTW, Path of Conjuration can make nukes. There are modern nuclear weapons the size of, if not smaller than, an average human. Good luck sleeping tonight in World of Darkness!

[Thoth]

Path of Conjuring fun uses:

1. Make a mortal clone of yourself, use Dominate Possession to control it. This is basically Altered Carbon sleeve technology. Your choice of daylight shenanigans or suicide combat runs. Alternatively, you can clone other people for public interactions and induce hilarious collateral damage.

2. Making something like a functional clone body means that things like viruses or prions are not "alive" enough to be restricted. Nukes aren't the only WMDs that are human sized or smaller. Also, the natural reproduction rate means all the originals would be long dead by the end of the week, leaving the non-magical generations alive and well.

3. Buy a $100 gift card for a given store, you should be able to duplicate the card with its full $100 worth on the magnetic strip, endlessly.

4. Insurance fraud for fun and profit, you can duplicate all the antiques and art that you want, only to destroy the duplicates.

The rules regarding the Path of Conjuration seem to require a degree of familiarity with the item, which means you can't invent something with it or create impossible things. Though if you take a trip into the deep umbra and meet a dragon, then yeah you could probably make a human sized dragon.

[Cain Loup-Noir]

Well i took the familiarity as "you must know how it work" to successfully summon it.
The rule say that you may roll something to successfully summon complex thing, so you have to understand what you're trying to get. If you want to summon a Garou you must understand what trigger the transformation and the spiritual energy they have, seeing one is not enough to understand

If a 1000 years old tremere awake in the modern age and see a photo of nuke bombe on the internet he could not just summon it, right? What he saw is just a big piece of metal with the description "blow up entire cities", that's not enough to summon a working nuke bomb, he's a summoner not the Aladdin's Genie

[monteparnas]

As I see it the limitations are reasonably strict. If the ST has reasonable doubt that the character is familiar with the thing, the ST may call for a roll. So you can't just make something out of your dreams, it must be reasonably possible within your understandings.

Familiarity can be read in many ways to help keep things reasonable. A virus or príon would at the very least be impossible without deep understanding of the science behind them, and even then the ST could just declare that since you can't actually see them you can't ever manage the necessary familiarity to make them with Conjuration, they're always known only as an abstraction (for the record it must be added that Electron Microscopes produce a model instead of actually showing hoe those things look like, viruses and príons are too small to be seen by humans with any optical equipment whatsoever, except for Mega-Viruses that are completely harmless).

Even radioactive materials are fairly complex. What it means to be familiar with a nuke? What the most basic and perfect sample of a nuclear core even looks like? As an interesting example, most enriched uranium in the world has less than 5% of radioactive isotopes, U-235, while most of it is U-238, harmless unless inhaled (because it causes heavy metal poisoning regardless). Natural uranium has usually less than 1% of U-235 and is mostly safe to handle (in fact you can handle 5% U-235 uranium without gloves if you don't do so too frequently or for too long, too long being several hours at a time). So, what baseline uranium created is composed off? The ST may decide that it will inevitably be 100% U-238, that is stable, so it is basically bad steel and less radioactive than a fruit.

But all that aside, what would be the problem? Resources 5 is far easier to get and is enough to put your hands on one of the almost 24 hundred nukes the US alone keeps in understaffed and barely protected silos across the country that are even more numerous and easier to steal in the WoD. With less risk of it going off in the instant you conjure it. Why would any of the other proposed uses be more dangerous than acquiring any of those things through other means (all of them feasible, even a Werewolf friend or puppet), and having any other power to do your supernatural stuff?