Cribbing from the Aedelbert thread a season for this without needing Grace's assistance
13 seasons left
Cribbing wildly from HoH: Societates Andreva makes invents this in a season (without the assistance of Grace)
Now cribbing from the core book she and grace get this out in 2 seasons. the level calculation is a bit weird because it relates to the spell in the core book, not a guideline.
As a familiar bond enchantment this does not cause warping.
Grace develops a like for sparring and Andreva a taste for oats
I'll pause for a bit for feedback, really Arcane Tunnels Revealed and A Stab Across Europe are the ones I have uncertainty about.
10 seasons left
Just nitpicking...but that's Terram right? Not Vim? I don't think I'd like my apprentice to cast Perdo VIm inside my lab...
Yes, those are terram , I miss typed
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
That's a very interesting observation.
I'll have to think about this. A lot.
I believe a crossbow bolt to the back from a shield grog he had threatened earlier did for him in one of CJs sagas. Not having any form of Terram ward and not habitually wearing armour makes you vulnerable to this sort of thing, especially with the combat grogs players create. Still, murdering someone through their familiar has all the hallmarks of a great Ars Magica murder mystery that will baffle quaesitors so you should develop this.
Andreva faces a problem in dealing with an Arcane tunnel spell directed at her. She has a deficiency in perdo and neither her perdo score nor her vim score is particularly impressive, so dispelling a tunnel is impractical. She does however have a solid rego score (18) so she can at least, in theory, shut down a tunnel.
I looked at the spell to do this in Hermetic Projects (Arcane Seal on p 81) and saw that it only could target the caster’s own spells. A spell to close someone else’s tunnel would need to use a different guideline. “Sustain or suppress a spell cast by another with level less than or equal to half the (level + 5 magnitudes) of the Vim spell”.
That’s hard, but still easier for Andreva than going the perdo route.
(Edit: it's easier than I thought. There is a guideline in HoH: Societates that is art specific and does not require doubling of the spell level. I decided to stick with the original guideline, because it allowed her to target any spell, and also I'm really kind of lazy)
She’ll spend a season opening up more space in her talisman (16 more pawns because why not?, it uses all of her pawns per year available but I could schedule things to make this practical)
In doing so she’ll open the attunement +5 clairvoyance on her talisman
Her Rego vim lab total with the talisman bonus, bonus for other spells in the talisman, 5 points from her apprentice, and the shape bonus for block a single attack is 80. Thus if she spends two seasons working she can create a level 54 effect.
In Enchanting this she will open the attunement +4 Aquam on her talisman. Her talisman now has 10 pawns open for enchantment
I added the bit about being able to target the effect (and therefore dispel it), this wasn't in Arcane Seal but I think it probably should have been.
Six seasons left (and four things on her to do list, she might make it)
"True Friend" is another version of the "True Love (PC)" virtue - see the last sentence of that virtue's description.
It feels like a mind-control effect to make a familiar kill their master would run a strong risk of running into the "if any enchantment keeps you from your true love's side, the power of your devotion can probably break it" clause in that virtue - even if this particular approach isn't explicitly forbidden, it's not something I'd want to rely on working.
In fact reading further I find the statement "no magic can make you ... truly betray him." well then, I guess that scraps my idea. I can't use a familiar to attack their magi, at least not with a direct Rego Mentem effect.
I was wondering how I'd missed that - turns out it's written in the flaw version of True Love, but not the virtue.
Well dang it the lab chapter specifically calls out the virtue, in that case I've already accounted for the +3 to the silver cord roll and everything is as I worked out above.
Unless they should get their loyal personality trait and a further +3 for their true friend virtue, in which case rego mentem would pretty much never work on anything except a botch. ( OK, you probably could suppress both the loyalty and the familiar's confidence with perdo mentem spells, and then make it work, but Andreva is not going to do that.)
Anyone care to venture an opinion on if the loyal personality trait should be added to the silver cord roll to break a mentem effect in addition to the bonus from true friend? With a bonus from the virtue it seems less clear that we should be adding personality traits to this. The description of personality on page 18 doesn't really support their inclusion. Looking back a few pages in this thread a year and a half ago I apparently found the statement "added to appropriate rolls" but as I'm looking right now I can't find where I read that.
Have any of the other characters done anything with poison protection? If there are lab notes for something functional that Bausas made to heal folks or Janus made for the red caps I'd give them a look.
I'll take a break from what Andreva perceives as the depressing and distasteful work of dealing with violence and present something for the desert sailing boat/
The size for sand would be 10,000 cubic paces, stone is 1000 cubic paces, I chose to keep the maximum size for stone rather than make it variable depending upon target, would it be better if it changed?
I made the wand somewhat difficult to weaponize because of my sense of taste. Is that out of line? Would it be a better item if it was designed to also be able to easily drop 20 tons of gravel on a moving target?
5 seasons left
Nothing that would work specifically against poisons, sorry.
Andreva is going to make a spell to protect against poisons.
One thought would be a creo corpus spell that gives her a bonus on stamina rolls to resist poison similar to the bonuses that creo corpus can give to recovery rolls.
There is no resistance roll guideline to work from here, base 10 gives a +15 bonus to recovery rolls. Adapting that, Andreva can produce this in a season
This seems very powerful as poisons (per core book page 180) can have a maximum ease factor of 15. I could lower the bonus or perhaps making a body resistant to poison is an unnatural change rather than a perfection of the body.
“Make a body more resistant to damage” is a guideline for Muto Corpus, it’s just that it is always tied to soak not to poison resistance. Ease factors are generally incremented by 3 for each increasing difficulty. I ‘ll start with a +3 bonus at base 5 and increase it by 3 per magnitude.
Andeva’s strongest technique is Rego. I could have her make a ward against poisons
Looking at the form bonuses I see that there certainly Terram, Animal, and Herbam poisons. She’ll stick to those 3 forms for her spell. If there are some weird Auram or imagonem poisons then she might regret not being more cautious but it would also make a cool way for a PC to get the upper hand on her.
Here are some relevant guidelines
Level 15: Ward someone against mundane plant products.
Level 2: Protect the target from animal attacks (only affects animals without mystical abilities).
Level 5: Keep all dirt away from your body, or ward a target against dirt.
If you raise the terram guideline two magnitudes to cover poisons that are metallic in nature then it comes to the same level as the herbam guideline. Animal is curiously much much easier to do. These guidelines are appropriate to ward the target against everything in their realm. Andreva wants to be warded against poison, the guidelines would ward her against clubs, bec de corbin’s and sabertoothed tigers as well. It’s overkill. Making it more specific is a sloppy exercise in spit balling appropriate guidelines and I really dislike all on / all off wards any way. [strike]so I’m not going to post a rego candidate spell.[/strike]
Some other issues are: Does the spell need an intellego requisite to know what to ward and what not to? Does this qualify as a spell that thinks and is therefore not possible?
I’m most fond of the Muto corpus spell.
your thoughts?
Seconded. I'll support MuCo here.
Seeing as we're discussing poisons, may I ask how you feel about transforming poisons in the body using MuAq?
From magioftom.wordpress.com/2016/04 ... se-arelie/
New spell: transformation of the venom. Base 5, transform a liquid into a venom causing an incapacitating wound, range personal, duration diameter, target individual, total 10. The guidelines on ArM p123 say “you cannot transform liquids within someone’s body unless the spell is designed that way (and has a corpus or animal requisite)”. Therefore, you can affect venom glands of an animal by using MuAq(An). A Bjornaer who is venomous should be able to use personal range to transform the venom inside their own venom glands. For duration, I suggest diameter is enough to transform it, attack shortly afterwards and have it take effect and do damage before vanishing. You would need to fast-cast to create it as you attacked. (Would instant duration, that is no more than 1 round, be enough to injure someone if created as you attacked and lasted for a couple of heartbeats after being injected into the victim? I would argue it isn’t).
The other point is what is the difficulty level to resist – if you transformed water, it would be base 3. The base difficulty of an adder’s venom is 6 – would this carry over when transformed? The argument for yes would be that Muto is enhancing the natural toxicity of the venom, the argument against is that Muto is completely transforming the substance into something else magically and only the potency of the magic counts. If the latter, it does create the interesting possibility of a fast-cast defense against poison – “dilute the venom” MuAq(Co) 5 – base 2 “transform a liquid into a poison causing a light wound”, +1 touch, +2 duration sun – when poisoned (whether through ingestion or being bitten/stung) you fast-cast on the poison touching you, and have to make a Stamina roll ease 3+ or take a light wound – instead of whatever the original damage would have been. You then have until sunrise/sundown to make sure the poison is purged from your body when it returns.
I was debating using Aquam as the target for all of the poisons. I think that in the form where it's deadly, Arsenic is a white powder also the form bonuses for poisons are in Animal, herbam, and terram. These things made me hesitate before using aquam.
Your spell looks good to me (other than possibly missing some solid or gaseous poisons which isn't the end of the world). As a protection spell, I don't even see an issue with transforming the poison into healthy blood. You'd later have to find a way to get the magical blood out of your system so it doesn't kill you when the transformation spell expires, probably using something like Division According to Blood from projects page 88. (Hermetic Tony Stark has to wear a glowing amulet on his chest to keep the blood in his veins from transforming into poison)
Despite your cool idea, I'm going keep Pearl Touched Blood for Andreva. She's concerned about Wizard's war where she'll keep her defensive spells up for a whole month and where spending a turn or two to solve a problem instead of attack has the real possibility of being deadly. However for normal life, being able to fix poisoning where and when you find it rather than make poison less dangerous for you personally during the duration of your spell is much wiser choice.
With four seasons left she’ll want to get a way to collect Arcane connections and find some way to deal with invisible opponents. It looks like she’ll have no time for a range sight arcane tunnel effect in her talisman that I spoke of earlier nor a non-cheesy "teleport a rock over the target's head" spell that I brought up last year (I didn't really have a solid idea for that one anyway).
AC's first
Andreva’s total for an Intelego Corpus effect in her Talisman is 63 and with a few more points from apprentice she invested this effect, based on Sight of the molting Magus from HoH: True Lineages.
She’ll open +5 to conjure or control occult entities as an attunement
Then using her apprentice the early riser schedule she enchants this
She’ll open +3 to block single attack as an attunement. She has two pawns of unfilled space left of the 31 pawns she has opened in her talisman.
Her lab total for inventing InCo spells with aid from her apprentice is over 50 so she will invent
The Whole from the Part InCo20 from HoH: True Lineages p 72 to allow her to identify to whom an AC connects and this spell adapted from Sense of the Loadstone (Hermetic Projects p84)
That leaves her one season to develop a spell to better handle invisible opponents.