Expanding the limits of the gift of vigor

I think the fatigue issue is also referenced in the Amazon section of Rival Magic, with something about Viea stealing Bonisagus' notes on the subject.

Serf's parma, but one could try this.

Use the patient spell to delay a spell's relase
Cast the Gift of Vigor, which is then delayed
Use the spells in... Legend of Hermes (Hermanus Lab) to transfer the Gift of Vigor to a nearby grog.
Release the Patient Spell

Now, I don't think this would work, because, IIRC, the LoH spell only give control, they don't change who is the caster, but I may be wrong.
Still, an appropriate Muto Vim effect could maybe change that.

And at worst, this could be used as a pathway to Original Research.

Whether or not this would work, you just made me wonder whether it was possible to use Muto / Rego Vim to spend fatigue now and collect it later, at an appropriate time.

I don't see how. The transfer is not part of casting the spell, but the effect of the spell. The effects don't happen until the spell goes off. So no Fatigue is transferred from you to the target until after the delay has ended.

An analogy would be a teleport, where the spell moves an object rather than Fatigue from one place to another rather than from one person to another. If you delay a teleport, do you cease to exist until the delay is over and then appear when the delay ends? Or does the spell just cause its effect once the delay ends?

You could, though, possibly spend the Fatigue on casting the spell now, delay it to later, recover that Fatigue, and then transfer what Fatigue you have once the delay is over. But this is just the standardly-available option of casting a spell in advance and delaying it until after you've rested.

Hm.

If body energy/vigor is a transferrable substance, can it be transferred to a storage device? A magus could store up their own energy to draw on later.

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The text is clear that Hermetic magic can only transfer it out of the caster, not into the caster. Meanwhile, nonliving things (and some living things) don't have Fatigue levels. So you'd need to transfer the Fatigue to something that has Fatigue levels and that has the ability to transfer them back.

Does this work as a basic idea? Sure. Mage A transfers Fatigue to Mage B using this spell and then rests. Some time later Mage A casts a bunch of spells and Mage B transfers Fatigue back to Mage A using the same spell. But is this any more effective than Mage B simply having rested and using the spell to give Mage A some Fatigue?

I do see a convoluted loophole whose majority of abuse can easily be closed. Enchant an item with Gift of Vigor. It's currently useless, but if it had Fatigue, it could give that Fatigue to you. Give the item a second effect to turn it into an animal (MuTe(An) core book guideline). Now the item has Fatigue levels and can transfer them to you after you've used up some Fatigue... And then the real abuse... The item ceases to be an animal. It no longer has Fatigue levels, just being a regular enchanted item. Repeat the process, as the old animal does not exist and has no bearing on anything new. Now this item can restore everyone's Fatigue very quickly. (This can be circumvented by saying the item essentially retains its Fatigue level unless recovered as an animal, or something similar to that. It's a rather BS answer to a rather obvious abuse, so it should be fair.)

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Therefore, the vigor is stored in the caster. Possibly in fat.

I think the text is not so clean @callen . I read the Limit of Energy and the Gift of Vigor. I think it means that you can cast "in" and "out" vigor - the spell essentially swaps the caster's and the Target's Fatigue Levels. So you can trasfer vigor into the caster: you need to aim your spell for a Target which one has higher Fatigue Level than yours. (Basically means you have to be exhausted a little bit at the minimum.)

@TimOB : I think the "storage" is your grog or grogs. You can invent a GoV like spell with R:AC and use your collection of AC for your grogs. Or you can cast 2 spells: 1 Intangible Tunnel to your grog using your collection of ACs and 1 classic Gov through the tunnel to essentially switch your Fatigue level for the grog's.

The way it works is that you can transfer Fatigue Levels from the caster to someone else. Transfers in the other direction would be Big News and a major gamechanger for the Order. If it was possible to transfer vigor from someone else into the caster, a lot of other things in the game would have been written differently.

While it ought to be possible to restore the caster's own Fatigue or transfer vigor from someone else to the caster, nobody has figured out yet how to do that. Managing that would require Original Research and/or integration of some hedge tradition that does know how to restore fatigue - like the Folk Witches or the Amazons.

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Look at the spell:

Magi have long looked for a way to restore their energy in order to cast more spells. This is the closest they’ve come.

Proof by contradiction: Assume magi can suck Fatigue from someone else. If they can suck Fatigue from someone else, then they have come closer than this spell to restoring their Fatigue. This contradicts what is stated in the spell. Thus this assumption is false. Original research could certainly allow it, though.

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What does everyone think about such an enchantement into familiar cords, perhaps both ways, so that the magi can transfer fatigue from himself into the familiar, and vice versa? This to me seems more plausible than a convoluted way used to suck fatigue from a random animal.

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This actually used to be a RAW possibility pre 5th.

In older versions of AM, there was something called Bond Qualities which would enchant powers and effects into the familiar bond. In 4th one of those was called "Transfer Fatigue" that allows the transfer of a point of fatigue with a limit that a point could not again be transferred in that direction until the transferred point was recovered.

That limitation wasn't much of an issue though. If the familiar was resting so it could serve as a 'Fatigue Battery' it would recover that lost point every 2 minutes and could make a Stamina 9+ roll to recover the point in a minute.

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This is one of the special benefits with a Faerie Familiar. I don't like to give away such benefits cheaply.

Also, the bond is the "item," not the familiar. And the "item" is the caster, not the being who activates the item.

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If the rule is that Fatigue can only be given, not taken (a very moral position for an effect) develop an effect that gives a person the ability to transfer vigor. They can then nominally choose to grant their life energy.

Come to think of it, isn't this basically Gift of Vigor with a Touch range?
(Rereads GoV.)
OK, so no it isn't, but there's a line of thinking here.

That was the idea behind my reasonning earlier, and one of the reasons why I think that, although it doesn't work, it would make a nice avenue of original research.

It does sound very much like something a researcher into true Fatigue transfer would try as part of an inspiration, so the end result would be probably less than ideal. Such is research :slight_smile:

If there is any efficient way to transfer fatigue, it is a significant change to the way magi interact with the world.

I've always liked the effort put in by Ars Majica designers to have a world that is somewhat logical. When designing the AM world there's some logical questions which come up.

Why is Feudalism still in place instead of a Magiocracy?
The social penalty of the Gift solves that.

As the gift social penalty exists how do we have a coherent magical society?
Parma magica solves that.

Do we want a bunch of sacrificial peasants having their life energy sucked out to power magic?
No, so put it as a magic limitation.

It is definitely a hermetic breakthrough option, however, if it becomes standardised through the order (such as the aegis, or Vim effecting not just the magic realm) be prepared for someone somewhere to be using peasants as magic fuel.

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I, for one, welcome the magical peasant-draining overlordship of magi.

(ahem) It isn't so much that I'm in favor of that (although it has interesting story possibilities) as it seems an obvious and clear thumb-on-the-scale restriction.

It's also a have-and-eat cake. The designers want magi to give up fatigue but not get it, and you can't work around suchway, but this case is allowed and that isn't and ... just say that it doesn't work, period.

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