If a spell creates, for instance, an illusion of a bear using sight, sound and touch, and the bear's paw strikes a grog, does the touch part of the illusion inflict imaginary damage? Or dropping an illusory anvil on someone's head. Would they feel the pain, even though it wouldn't actually hurt them? How do you handle this in your games?
Thanks!
In the games I have played, the Species would overwhelm your Sensory Organs, and cause a knock-out effect; you'd faint and be out for some time, but no physical hurt occur. The mental/emotional scarring of being mauled by a bear and then wake up physically okay, is a whole other thing...
Hi,
IIRC, RAW it should not work at all, and the rules are clear. To knock someone out requires a Perdo requisite.
You cannot use CrIm as a PeCo effect.
Anyway,
Ken
Then use CrIm (Pe) ?
For pure Imaginem spells, I would require a Stamina or a Character roll not to be scared and to keep composure. Depending on the results, the GM interprets if the target runs away, is momentary stun, remains unfazed or (in case of botch) faints.
For other effects, a Mentem or a Corpus requisit would be required.
As a side note, Imaginem can effect all five senses, however there is no guideline/explanation on how to interpret a Imaginem spell affecting the sense of Touch and convincing the target that he feels a wall is blocking him or he feels that he is bound (supported by the adequate visual illusion).
In my opinion and illusionary wall that also targets touch would, to the touch, feel solid, and unless the person touching has reason to believe otherwise his body would react to the sensory stimuli, so his fingers would spread out and and not force themselves to go through the wall (which they of course could).
Hi,
Touching a fake wall yields the sensation of touching the wall even as fingers go right through it, and the person feels the movement of his hand. Disconcerting, but the illusion does not have substance. It cannot block anything, in the same way an illusory fire cannot burn anything. Neither exists.
That illusory fire will feel hot when I touch it, but it cannot create debilitating pain, because directly inflicting pain is the realm of PeCo, and creating any real heat is purely the realm of CrIg. So it will create the sensation of something very hot that can be endured.
Similarly, I cannot blind someone with an illusion of a searing bright light.
The core rules are quite clear about what Imaginem can and cannot do in this regard.
What is not clear is the effect of startling someone in this way. How does a person react to the weird wall? To the very hot fire that is oddly not agonizing?
Imaginem remains a problematic Art, I think. It would be simpler not to have the Form. But since we do have it, the odd rules governing it make more sense than the alternative. Because once the fake lava can inflict the pain of real lava without MR because the species are real, then magically created lava will also have this effect, because it too emits species, which are similarly not resisted.
Anyway,
Ken
ArM5 doesn't have concept of illusionary damage. CrIm of a bear creates species (HoH:S p.61ff) of a bear, in your case sight, sound and touch. It doesn't make the illusionary bear's victim feel wounds.
So I would have the grog roll his Brave, and have him act accordingly. A botched Brave roll might have him play dead, and a failed one run in surprised panic (Run!! I can still run??), or whatever fits grog and situation. Also a bear without smell would make that Brave roll quite easy.
Now can a CrIm make someone feel wounds? You can check on HoH:S p.61 that the feeling of a wound is not species, so the plausible and playable answer is: No. Making someone feel wounds is indeed PeCo. See
Cheers
I agree that the wall is of course not real. But how do we react to information in the real world? If a chair is in front of us, we go around. If we bump into it, we feel it. Now if a person is thrown against an Imaginem wall, he would go straight through, but if he delicately touched it, I would say that his senses would tell him to expect the coarse, rough texture and the firmness of the wall, thus adjusting his body and touch to the fact that there should be resistance. Would this mean his sense of touch is automatically fooled by the wall - no but I would probably have the player roll some Per, to see to what degree his senses accept the species and how his body reacts.
The Glamour Mystery of House Merinita is what is needed to give illusions some degree of "reality" IIRC.
HoH:S p68 has An Enemy Awash in the Pure Sigil of the Magus, CrIm15. This spell can blind the target for 2+ minutes, without Perdo. Granted it is not always effective beyond one combat round.
So canonically overloading a sensory organ to the point of failure is very plausible.
At level 15 for a Range: Sight spell it is also significantly better than Perdo Corpus which is many magnitudes higher.
A version of that spell to overload many senses of one target, or the visual sense of a group of targets could be darn effective. And easy to learn for many Magi.
And now that I think of it a CrIm blindfold around the targets head is even easier. It's not technically harming the target but it is a significant combative disadvantage to the target.
Actually it seems Imaginem is very generous when it comes to Vision, and awful when it comes to Touch...
The bear can't actually hurt you. To explain why, let's work through the history of how illusions have worked in Ars Magica, and why this was selected as a game design thing, and then the in world excuse for that design decision, OK?
In an early edition of Ars, illusions could create the illusion of pain, and could create illusiary consequences like illusions of wounds. If you illusion-died, you fell unconscious. Now, in that edition, to create an illusion required Cr, Im, and a requisite for the thing, so, a bear, for example, required An. In practice this meant that itr was often easier to learn the arts required to make a thing than to make the illusion of that thing, and pure Im was useless, as even lights, for example, needed a requisite.
People thought this was counter-intuitive: surely an illusionary bear should be easier to make than a bear? The problem with the change that was made (dropping the requisite) was that it meant that an illusionist could, effectively, be better at the core Arts of specialist magus in many, even most, TeFo pairs. Let me give you an example: say Ball of Abysmal Flame is level X, and an illusionary Ball of Abysmal Flame is X-10. Now, you may say "Ah, but the illusion just knocks people out. It doesn't kill them!" to which the answer is "So what? If all of your enemies are asleep, then your grogs can just knife them in the throats. Defeat in combat is defeat in combat." So we had this odd situation where Jerbitons were effectively better at using fire in battle than Flambeau magi. In the bear example, it means that if you are a Bjornaer and can turn into a bear, there are a ton of Jerbitons who can just make mock-bears which are as effective as you in combat, in essence, because asleep enemies are dead enemies, really.
So, now, Im doesn't make illusions, it makes species, specifically so that it doesn't make these complex, reactive things like a mock-bear. The reactiveness is hard, and best handled by a human brain. The bear can't give the sensation of pain, to wreck the combat effectiveness of illusions. Instead you need to be clever. Lure people into pits. Trick them into attacking each other. THat sort of thing. It's to break this problem of "Illusions need to be easier than X, but need to not be basically as good at X in overcoming obstacles."
Now, our excuse in the game now is that although pain travels through the body, and may even be triggered by haptic species, theoretically, the things the species would need to strike are within the body, and so the level would be ridiculously high. That is, your pain sensors are under the surface of your skin, so to target them you need to do a Lungs of the Fish sort of spell that gets inside the body. And even if you do that, it arguably doesn't work. Clearly, no-one has got it to work yet.
So, that's why things work as they work: we've tried everything that's simpler, and they just wreck the game a bit.
The next step, I'd argue, might be making illusions a lesser form of creation, so to create an illusionary bear, you CrAn, at a level, say 10 below that of a bear. That's what I'd do. I've thought about it a bit for a faerie game.
The bear can't actually hurt you. To explain why, let's work through the history of how illusions have worked in Ars Magica, and why this was selected as a game design thing, and then the in world excuse for that design decision, OK?
In an early edition of Ars, illusions could create the illusion of pain, and could create illusiary consequences like illusions of wounds. If you illusion-died, you fell unconscious. Now, in that edition, to create an illusion required Cr, Im, and a requisite for the thing, so, a bear, for example, required An. In practice this meant that itr was often easier to learn the arts required to make a thing than to make the illusion of that thing, and pure Im was useless, as even lights, for example, needed a requisite.
People thought this was counter-intuitive: surely an illusionary bear should be easier to make than a bear? The problem with the change that was made (dropping the requisite) was that it meant that an illusionist could, effectively, be better at the core Arts of specialist magus in many, even most, TeFo pairs. Let me give you an example: say Ball of Abysmal Flame is level X, and an illusionary Ball of Abysmal Flame is X-10. Now, you may say "Ah, but the illusion just knocks people out. It doesn't kill them!" to which the answer is "So what? If all of your enemies are asleep, then your grogs can just knife them in the throats. Defeat in combat is defeat in combat." So we had this odd situation where Jerbitons were effectively better at using fire in battle than Flambeau magi. In the bear example, it means that if you are a Bjornaer and can turn into a bear, there are a ton of Jerbitons who can just make mock-bears which are as effective as you in combat, in essence, because asleep enemies are dead enemies, really.
So, now, Im doesn't make illusions, it makes species, specifically so that it doesn't make these complex, reactive things like a mock-bear. The reactiveness is hard, and best handled by a human brain. The bear can't give the sensation of pain, to wreck the combat effectiveness of illusions. Instead you need to be clever. Lure people into pits. Trick them into attacking each other. THat sort of thing. It's to break this problem of "Illusions need to be easier than X, but need to not be basically as good at X in overcoming obstacles."
Now, our excuse in the game now is that although pain travels through the body, and may even be triggered by haptic species, theoretically, the things the species would need to strike are within the body, and so the level would be ridiculously high. That is, your pain sensors are under the surface of your skin, so to target them you need to do a Lungs of the Fish sort of spell that gets inside the body. And even if you do that, it arguably doesn't work. Clearly, no-one has got it to work yet.
So, that's why things work as they work: we've tried everything that's simpler, and they just wreck the game a bit.
The next step, I'd argue, might be making illusions a lesser form of creation, so to create an illusionary bear, you CrAn, at a level, say 10 below that of a bear. That's what I'd do. I've thought about it a bit for a faerie game.
This is where I would go with the Illusions. Although the touch illusions like ABoF would not work, Stench of Twenty Corpses would work and would be cheaper since Im spell is creating the species. As would the other spells that use Im to overwhelm senses like sight or sound.
Hi,
My preferred version of this is to hold that, in a sense, any bear created with CrAn is an illusionary bear. This is why MR works against it. (God's bears might also work this way, but good luck with MR...)
Then, Imaginem goes away.
Of course, that idea needs work: Is an intangible bear less difficult because you're not trying to achieve the full bear effect, or is it more difficult because you're tweaking the base, natural effect of Bear? And what if I just want to create a big bear growl?
Anyway,
Ken
These spells are very efficient especially, because there is no Magic Resistance against them. They just create normal species.
Just like PeIm invisibility spells, which just destroy normal species, do not interact with the Magic Resistance of onlookers.
So the well rounded maga needs to have not only a variant of InHe Shriek of the Impending Shafts (ArM5 p.136) to protect against mundane missiles and Vilano school Flambeau (HoH:S p.29f), but also a decent level InIm Discern the Images of Truth and Falsehood (ArM5 p.144) to protect against Imaginem shenanigans. And both spells should be up when she enters battle.
Cheers
EDIT: Lady Flintstone Monica Ierne (AtD p.30ff), Legata of House Tremere, apparently does not have any of these defenses. So it looks like she will have to use her Leap of Homecoming more often than she would like.
Hi,
It doesn't quite blind them, so much as create an overwhelming visual distraction, which I suppose Imaginem can do, sort of the way PeIg can create a zone in which all light is extinguished, thereby also blinding someone inside without recourse to MR. (CrAu can create a fog, etc)
Anyway,
Ken
Of course ironboundtome's suggestion doesn't in medical terms blind the victim: it just applies a tight blindfold. Which is often all you need to turn the tables against pesky creatures, including overconfident and unprepared magi.
Cheers
I would like to add to the debate of illusions used to attack....
I've had discussions with my players about illusion magic, and i've made my research, in the end glamour or illusory magic might be fluffy but it's absolutely not the most effective in combat.
Yet I wonder, what if we had a illusionnist making fake attack spells (like the pilum of non-fire with CrIm) of course they would have no effect, would not be resisted etc, but is it possible to imagine a MuVi effect (there's a guideline to change Te or Fo in MuVi) rendering that spell real. of course it would make a spell hard (one illusion + MuVi to make a fireball..... a simple pilum is way more effective but for the sake of fun let's say it is useful).