A&A Worms questions

Games Discussion Ars Magica
1

What is not mentioned in the text, is whether the medium is consumed by the creation of the vermin. Is there less water in the pond after I create a thousand frogs in it? If I create Scorpions from hot, dry dirt, is there a hole where the scorpion came from? Possible consequences would include the following spell.

Pit of the venomous scorpions
ReTe 30
R:V, D:M, T:G
Turn an area of dirt 6 paces wide by 9ft deep into a hole filled with Scorpions. These 9000 scorpions will be completely mundane and bypass parma magica.
Base 5, +2 voice, +2 group, +1 size

It does not mention in the text whether the created worms must be native to the area. Therefore a knowledgeable magus could use a simple ignem spell to dry out a patch of land in france, and then create scorpions from it.

Do worms appear in magically created mediums? If you create a pool of water with a month duration, can you use rego to cause frogs to appear.

Does this worms process use the standard creo rule for creating things you have knowledge of. This means that you can only create worms that you could create using creo magics or does it mean that if someone informs you that water generates frogs, you can cause it to generate the frogs - even if you have never seen a frog before.

A variant on worms is stagnation - everyone knows that water left alone will become undrinkable and smell.
Example spell:
Curse of Stagnation
ReAq
R:Sight, D:Mom, T:Group
The well, pond or pool you target stagnates to become undrinkable and give off noxious fumes that can cause diseases. This spell was created by Nortilaus of Jerbiton to surepticiously help beseiging troups.

Are mushrooms and weeds considered as worms? Mushrooms appear overnight anywhere it is dark and damp, Weeds appear everywhere no-matter how well you examined your soil.

Example spell:
Grow in the Dark
ReTe
R:V, D:Mom, T:P
Causes a carpet of mushrooms to generate at the desired location. The mushrooms only appear from damp earth and are each a few inches wide. Ten cubic paces of damp earth generate 1000 mushrooms.

2

Sources are not clear, but I think not. The worms just crawl from the earth, leaving earth behind. Same with frogs - else you'd only ever see frogs sitting in mud rather than water.

I would say no. Magically-created water (without a ritual) will not quench your thirst, so it is qualitatively different from normal water.

I'm not sure about this one. My default position would be that the spell is designed to create vermin that you are aware of.

It wouldn't need to be Group duration. However, Rego magic can stagnate water, sure. I imagine it would be easier with Perdo however.

No, these are not worms, and do not come under spontaneous generation. Worms are specifically animals.

Mark

3

I already disagreed about vinegar and will reiterate it here: that's even more clearly a degradation and thus falls under Perdo and not Rego.

4

I'd go the other way: nothing is created from nothing, and so when wasps are created from the bodies of horses, or whatever, then that's an effect of their decay. Similarly, fleas come from dust, but who misses a grain of dust? So, sure, worms come from the earth, but not -much- earth.

5

Yup. Ars5 goes a long way towards clarifying things and giving eack technique its own specificity, and, as such, making water "worse" is clearly perdo

6

I would argue that if stagnation in the circumstances was a natural change, then Rego would be perfectly valid if water becoming Brackish is as likely as Ice melting....

otherwise it's definately Perdo

A

7

And as I mentioned in the thread about vinegar, becoming older is also a "natural" change, in the modern sense of the term. So if you follow that line of thought, you can make someone grow older with Rego. Same with making air go stale.

But the rules states that it is Perdo in both cases.

In Mythic Europe, aging is clearly a degradation, a non-natural, a metaphysical evil (choose the one you prefer).

The "natural change" argument threatens to make Rego the "do it all" Technique, much like Muto was in previous editions. I claim that if there is the least doubt as to whether an effect should be Rego or some other Technique (beside trying to achieve the same result through different means, Ã la "more than one way to skin a cat"), then it is that other Technique that should be used. Or, heck, make it a Requisite.

Word.