In the Covenants book they propose some labor saving devices that can get rid of the need for servants, such as a broom that sweeps on its own.
But when you think about it, that's not quite so easy to make. The broom has to detect the dirt (In Te), it has to then sweep it with a linked trigger (Re He to move the broom) and it probably has an extra magnitude or two (still a low level though) to properly mimic the brisk sweeping motions of the broom. It then sweeps all the dirt in a target Room or Structure to somewhere. How does the broom know where to take the dirt? How does it distinguish from inside and outside? How does the broom know to keep on sweeping? How does it go through closed doors?
Some options I thought of were that once the dirt is in a pile, the broom uses another effect of Perdo Terram to destroy the dirt. But in all honesty, if you're going to destroy the dirt, you might as well make that its primary effect, it doesn't sweep up dirt, just destroys it all then it could be a lesser invested device. You could also make the activation a trigger of sweeping with the broom, then the broom continues to move and sweep on its own by using a Re He effect with Concentration duration and the item concentrates for you, set the Target as Room and it will sweep all the dirt to a room. From there have an effect that is linked to the completion of the room being swept and it will detect the nearest route outside, which will trigger the last effect, to sweep the dirt outside. This broom would still require a touch of monitoring though.
The best way would for it be an animated automaton, but unfortunately there aren't rules for that yet. If it could be taught to mimic Profession: Servant (Sweeping) that would be all that's needed, the broom could then discern the most basic functions it needed to do to perform properly.
ReTe 4 The Unseen Broom
Base 1 (move dirt in a natural fashion), R: Touch (+1), D: Mom (+0), T: Room (+2)
The magus creates an invisible, inaudible, untouchable broom without taste, smell or shadow (a true Hermetic wonder!), puts it into a corner of a room, says the command word, and all the dust in the room is swept at once into that corner. Then the broom disappears without trace, needing neither stowing nor cleaning.
Are you sure you need to penetrate the Aegis to have a magical object activate ?
I don't think you need to. The penetration total of the effect might be affected with a penality of half of the level of the Aegis & I'm not even sure of that.
The Aegis affect the casting total. Objects only have a penetration total. the effect is assumed to always work & is not aura dependant(i.e your staff of fire ball will work in an infernal aura even if created in a magical aura).
Even if it were to affect magical object, I would rule that any person with a token can activate the broom without penality.
In our Campaign, A powerfull Autumn convenant had one of those spells that prevented the usage of magical devices. We still do ont know how exactly... The tribunals were often held there for that reason amongs others ofcourse.
While I enjoyed the Unseen Broom, this is one of the many reasons why my Magus took an APPRENTICE. When he isn't waxing on and waxing off the floor, he's cleaning glassware and dodgeing arrows.
The spell would work the best, primarily because it's guided by a wizard, however that's not an item.
'The Perfect dusting Servant' needs some refining, I'm not sure of the math you came up with there, nor the Me requisite, and it wouldn't likely be affected by the Aegis as it was constrcuted wihtin it. Adding a Mentem requisite wouldn't give the broom sentience if that was your intention. Perhaps adding a second effect of Cr Me might, but they haven't released rules for that yet, probably (I'm hoping) it will be included in Mystery Houses for Verditius.
Look at the humble servant in the CrIm spells in the core book. There is one wit a +6 Memtem rq to create dumb sentience which, I hope, can be applied to a broom.
Ah ha! "The Shadow of Human Life", OK I can see where you're going with this. That might be it, as it creates someone/something of stupid intelligence, but it can follow orders and possibly make decisions based on its orders. In this case, the item would need a Creo requisite also, or perhaps a separate effect of Cr Me with a linked trigger. OK, I think that may have done it.
OK, well this seems to be the basics of it right? Until I first started thinking of this issue I would have agreed, but now I have some issues. The main issue would be the Intelligence aspect. Without it, the broom could sweep, but not clean, ie it would sweep but have nowhere to go.
In this case I think there would need to be multiple effects, the least of which would be an InTe effect to detect the dirt. You did include the Intelligence factor as an extra magnitude, which is good, but doesn't go far enough IMO. For the spell in the book it required a CrMe effect and added an additional +6 magnitudes in order to make a very stupid illusion. That would be more than enough to sweep I'd think.
I was intrigued, so I looked it up. It's The Treacherous Spear (ReHe 25). The relevant guideline is:
ReHe 10: Make a plant or thing made of plant products move with purpose and intelligence, without requiring your constant control.
There isn't anything explicit in the ReTe guidelines like this, but as a rule of thumb, it seems to me that metal and wood are equally difficult to control. (Consider that warding versus plant products and metal are both level 15, etc.)
That makes sense to me. Of course, by analogy with The Treacherous Spear, the broom can only clean as well as the person who activated it. So, a covenant would generally ask their tidier mages to cast this spell.
My only question is whether this type of spell should be useful in more than one application. For instance, could you use different castings of the same spell to animate a broom to clean and a bucket to haul water? I'm not sure, but as the example spell (The Treacherous Spear) is limited to a single application (fighting its former wielder), I'd be inclined to suggest that a magnitude should be added to allow for the flexibility to switch applications on the fly.
I'm really sorry that I gave you such poor references...
Glad you found it! I have to stop writting references from memory
I would tend to say yes but the spell could only have the object do what it was intended to do but would mean that The Treacherous Spear can also make the broom cleen the tower which is alot more versatile than other spells.
I think that a conservative ruling would be that each effect requires its spell.
