But of course it does. The nature of CM is precisely reflected by AL+Ph, getting the correspondences, horoscopes, musical intonation, etc all correct. CM is a reasonable specialization of AL, just as a Verditius could reasonably take his magic as a specialization of Ph.
I would allow the 2nd spell to be Mom., restoring a memory that then fades like normal. I'd also suggest Group, to allow all memories associated with a particular time to be recalled (the scent of her perfume, the words she said, the shape of the assassin's shadow, stuff you totally forgot you knew...) Or maybe conc to remember a period of time equal to the time concentrated?
I've looked at Art and Academe and the structure of the mind (pages 31 and 32 for those who want to follow this discussion). I would describe what looking glass mind does as altering the common sense so that the common sense does less "combining perceptions into a common mental picture" therefore large amounts of raw information rather than smaller quantities of processed information is passed to the imagination.
The imagination can not long retain this much information so much of it is forgotten quickly. What recall images of the looking glass does is recreate the entirety of the original unprocessed information in the imagination from the fragments of it that are retained. This recreated information can then be analyzed by the cognition. This retrieving a long text from the spell would be so difficult and (note to Ovarwa) is also why recall images of the looking glass would be so much weaker as a duration momentary spell.
A long text could not be retrieved by this spell, though, unless the whole thing was visible in the memory retrieved. (That sort of thing is why I suggested conc to represent replaying time as well, and group to recover everything.)
I'm a bit unsure about the whole sensory overload thing though. The spell would restore the imagination to as it was, representing what is actually perceived, but not to more than was actually perceived. This would allow for lingering over details, but not for perceiving details too minute to be perceived the first time. Perhaps this is what is intended, and recapitulating the memory makes it harder to act in the present.
That is how I understood you too. But does it have any side effects? Would there have to be a troupe decision on them? After all, imagination is not used to take that many raw data. Could the recipient even go mad?
From where is the rest of the data taken? From a Platonic storage cloud?
What about a simple spell (with the idea from HoH:S p.70) instead? Transforming an own memory - more precisely, A&A images directly from common sense - into a glass marble is a Muto Mentem (Terram) base level 5. Speeding up the acquisition of the species might be +1 complexity. And giving the effect Sun Duration adds +2 magnitudes. So it is a MuMe(Te) 20. Adelbert can recall the memory when holding a marble he thus created - no second spell is needed.
To learn this spell from his master, Muto 5, Mentem 5, Terram 5 instead of current Mentem 8, Vim 4 would do for him. This would save him one xp (which could be used for Vim 1), and would still allow him to learn Whispers Through the Black Gate (InCo(Me) 15)
The Inexorable Search (InCo 20)
Frosty Breath of the Spoken Lie (InMe 20)
Posing the Silent Question (InMe 20)
Invisible Sling of Vilano (ReTe 10)
before his gauntlet from his master. It would also leave him 15 levels of spells to learn still. Bitter Taste of Betrayal (InVi 15)?
thank you for your thoughts One Shot, civil debate is fun.
I think that doing this without habitual over use of the spell would be screwing over the character for no immediately obvious reason. Many muto spells have the theoretical ability to cause problems. Will changing into a scent hound with amuto corpus (animal) spell overload the character's still human imagination with vastly increased scent information? Will casting The Blessing of Starkad (the spell to give a target an extra set of arms) cause chronic back problems? I guess it could. Why would you choose to do this?
The broken memory is repaired. It is the same process as we have in the Good witness from HoH:True Lineages. The rest of the memory comes from the same place that the rest of a limb created by the severed limb made whole comes from (or where the limb comes from in a non-ritual duration diameter version of the severed limb made whole, just to make it clear that it doesn't come from the vis).
Maybe I misunderstood the title's "Magi of Hermes style". To me this means, that Adelbert should be usable as a standard NPC, and not have traits, spells etc. that can cause trouble. I am not IYC, so I would of course not choose to require Adelbert going mad.
But cramming lots of completely unprocessed sensory data into the imagination, where they do not fit and are soon discarded, appears to me more dangerous than processing sensory input from changed bodies - which indeed (ArRM5 p.132 box) "can have subtle permanent effects" on their targets, including them "losing their human identity altogether". I also don't see a standard NPC messing with his own mind in such a dangerous way, without having a story caused by it.
I can argue that that 'broken memory' never existed as a whole, so 'repairing' it is not really possible, and also would have no space in the imagination to restore it in. So The Good Witness is not really a good example for this spell.
Would unprocessed sensory input hence - without ever having been completely in the target's imagination - have some kind of ideal form like the human body? For the spell of a MoH NPC I would not believe that.
For some SG NPC in a specific campaign, I would not bother at all.
To me, it seems usage of Looking Glass Mind would create a complete record, albeit a nightmarish one to endure. The Cr effect of Recall Images should be able to repair any details that have been forgotten; The Good Witness seems like a clear example of that capacity.
What strikes me is that it seems like it isn't necessarily true that the reconstructed memories are any more coherent or organized than they were when recorded; the human mind specializes in filtering information down to what you need and Looking Glass short circuits that completely. Would Recall Images be selective enough to pull back just the pages of the book you flipped through, or would you be under the negative penalties of sensory overload while trying to process it out of the maelstrom?
Yeah, at the very least you'd need a Concentration roll to make head or tail of that recalled overload.
Now if you assume memories are atomic entities* and that the common sense removes the unwanted "atoms", you could rewrite the concept this way:
spell A (PeMe?) deactivate common sense and feeds everything directly to memory,
spell B (Cr(Re)Me) refreshes the whole set and feeds it back to common sense, where it can be filtered normally and become a real memory.
id est, a memory is a set of transformed species. Your eye received a table species, the common sense combines it with other species to create a common mental picture. In modern term, a memory is like a vector graphic that can be decomposed back into its atomic elements, in opposition to bitmaps that destroy the original elements.
The request for magi of Hermes was to do things that haven't been done before. Now original is not at all the same as rules questionable, but there is commonly overlap between what hasn't been done and what is not well defined. I'm trying to find a consensus from the board, if people have legitimate concerns I'll change the spell (and I'm more or less sure that this one will be). But the purpose of having a message board discussion is to have a discussion. My hope is that I'll post lots of borderline stuff That causes discussion and we'll all be enlightened by the discussion and come to a consensus in each case that pleases absolutely everyone.
I wouldn't say that they don't fit. the imagination holds all of the sensory memories of a lifetime. I doubt that a few minutes of extreme input would fill it up.
The example on page 132 "can have subtle permanent effects. Someone who spends a month or more as an animal begins to act and think like one...Someone turned into a rabbit might keep a fondness or carrots or retain supernaturally large ears" the section is talking about transforming into an entirely different creature for a month not having merely different perceptions for a minute or two.
I haven't yet been convinced that the imagination has any space issues. I could see an argument that since the perceptions are unstructured they do not make a coherent memory that can be repaired ( I think that this is what Tugdal is getting at).
Once again I don't see why it doesn't fit within the imagination.
Looking at the intellego Imaginem guidelines I see
Level 1: Memorize or perfect your memory about an image you have encountered.
This makes me think that Adelbert’s mentor can accomplish the goal of turning his apprentice into a recording device by teaching him two InIm spells rather than a creo mentem and a Muto mentem. Specifically, The mentor can teach one spell to memorize images and one spell to perfect his memory of the images.
The first question is in relation to what it means to memorize an image and spell duration. My take on this is the more lenient one. That memorizing an image is like rego magic in that it magically accomplishes a mundane task. It is not like muto magic where the target reverts itself after the spell is over. A memory created with intellego magic will fade naturally after the end of the spell duration not immediately when there is no longer magic supporting it.
Then of course there is the weirdness with the target. I’ve written up the two spells below with the target as the individual who has the sensory memories not with the target as the memories themselves.
Do you think that this one needs to have additional magnitudes for each of the senses? Level 3 seems too low but requiring additional magnitudes for additional senses doesn’t seem right. Perhaps the target should be different.
That make sense to me as the target would have memories of the created memory, so to speak. It can't be cleanly removed from their mind the way, say, a magically created vase could just disappear from a table because perfectly natural memories have been created that link to it and, to some degree or another, reflect it.
Sort of like a magically created pebble will disappear but the ripples in the pond it just landed in would still be rebounding about. In this case, those ripples contain a record of what the original event was like and the mind could recreate the vanished memory in a perfectly natural reflection from their data.
A few days with no additional comments so I'll make some decisions and go on.
I'm going to go with the In Im version as the recording device in that it puts the images clearly within the caster's mind without having to deal with the concerns that plagued the MuMe version. It also fits better with Adelbert's intellego focus rather than just being mentem. I'm still not too happy with the target fell free to continue to present counter arguments and alternatives.
I'm going with Recall images of the looking glass, the Creo mentem spell (although I've now changed the name). the spell more clearly functions with intellego Imaginem than with MuMe and it flows directly from the good witness ( you could make an argument that the +1 magnitude for extreme detail isn't appropriate, but I think you could make a stronger one that it isn't necessary).
I used the extra five spell levels of Eyes of the Cat (because he is a afraid of the dark and has a cyclic magic penalty at night). I also (embarrassingly) did play with his attributes to dump improved attributes and get puissant magic theory because it gets around an issue I had later on and I figure as a whole things will get harder rather than easier with feedback and having two more points of lab total would make lots of reworks easier.