Years ago I was thinking about wizard’s war and NPC’s. Philipus Niger in Guardians of the Forest is one of the most formidable magi published for fifth edition. How would you best him? It occurred to me that parma offers no resistance to effects generated by a magi’s familiar and his familiar was able to kill people by looking at them.
Andreva is going to try to make spells to exploit this avenue of attack. An applicable guideline is ReMe base 20 make the target carry out one instruction to the best of their ability. Basel 20 is going to make it tough for Andreva to get much penetration, but the reason to learn the spell in the first place was to find ways of getting around a magus’ parma so low penetration , while unfortunate, isn’t crippling.
The guideline is really broad, the spell will be useable for lots of other things than just setting a familiar on their magus. Yet I’m not going to try and find or create a more narrow guideline, “works like the level 20 guideline but only upon familiars” seems like a cheesy thing to do.
Andreva hates this spell and doesn’t advertise that she’s created it.
I've no good ideas on how to integrate her sigil
This could be used to do so much more than just exploit the weakness in a magi’s defenses presented by a familiar but I’m going to look at the chances of an attack through a familiar working.
The silver cord allows the familiar or magus to try an break any mentem effect on the other 1x per day on a roll of silver cord level verses an ease factor of 9. So initially this looks pretty formidable as silver cords, from what I’ve seen, tend to stay at lower levels than bronze cords or golden cords. However getting a familiar comes with the virtue true friend which, by granting a loyal personality trait, grants a +3 bonus to this roll. At least that’s my take on it, I found no true friend virtue listed in the virtues and flaws chapter just a description in the laboratory chapter on page 105. This +3 bonus means that, even with a strength 1 cord, the attack will fail 58% of the time, with a strength 2 cord 69% of the time, strength 3 79% (weird numbers are because I’m assuming a stress die with one botch die). But I also need to factor in confidence. By spending a confidence point the chance of this attack succeeding drops to “only if they botch”. But rather than give up immediately, Andreva with her flawless formulaic magic is going to earn to multicast it, which at least gives her a chance of draining the target’s confidence and then getting an attack to land. Also, taking into account of how powerful/ useful the spell is on normal people multi casting is pure gold.
An alternate and probably better tactic to use instead of multicasting and hoping the dice fall her way would be to develop a perdo mentem spell to inhibit the familiar’s capacity to feel loyalty and cast it first (or with an automatically triggered device similar to the School of the Founder’s Advocate (found here: catnip & garlic) . But Andreva is deficient in perdo while having flawless formulaic magic so I’m not taking her down that path and with her distaste for wizard’s wars I’ll probably never have her take the practical step of doing both.
With range touch she’ll need to do something about targeting more distant minds. In the long run but for now she knows Minute of Reckoning at level 40 which should suffice to bombard a familiar with commands in hopes that at least one of them is not broken. I’ll see if she has time to put an arcane tunnel effect at range sight into her talisman at the end of the period.
9 seasons left