Extradimensional Spaces

I'm thinking about rules for making extra spaces - backpacks that hold far more than they should, and I wanted the community to sound off on them.

It boils down to adding a new guideline for Muto, for An, He, and Te at level 15 - create a space of 1 cubic foot. Items within a space weigh nothing, nor do their Forms interact with the medium, distinguishing it from a shrinking spell. The other Forms could be modified, but they don't seem to make sense, so I ruled them out.

This would typically be used to make a container, and would get the standard +5 shape bonus for "create or transform within." With a +4 size modification, we get to 10,000 cubic feet, or a size +3 lab.

Lab in a Box. Pen 0, Constant Effect MuHe 49 (15, R: Per, D: Sun T: Ind, +4 size, +1 2/day, +3 environmental condition: sunrise/sunset) This trunk provides stairs down into a large wooden-paneled room. Note that you are continuously under a mystical effect, which has a +1 Warping and may add the Degenerative flaw, and needs all the equipping and can be customized per Covenants rules.

I structured the basic cost and effect so that having a mobile lab would be about a level 50 effect. I'm not sure how to rule on living creatures inside this once the lid is closed. It doesn't fit into the medieval paradigm well, but it's a key part of fantasy. It makes travelling easier, in that we can ferry more goods around. Should we allow enchanting a person, so that his body has more interior space?

Comments? How big of a Breakthrough is this?

This is literally making a tiny Regio. I wouldn't allow it without a Major or Hermetic breakthrough.

I see it as at least a Hermetic Breakthrough - because it's at odds with everything else in hermetic magic.
It's a foreign*, anachronistic thought.

That said, take a look at Glamours (HoH: MC, p. 101-102), which appear to allow you to do just that.

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As Tellus points out, you could go the Glamour route. That was done in Magi of Hermes.

But if you're not a Merinita, why bother? You could surely do something related much more easily. A few ideas:

  1. Shrink everything that gets placed inside, letting the spell end when it gets removed. (I know you wanted to avoid that one.)
  2. Use the container as a teleportation device to a vault (sealed space inside a block of stone, for example) elsewhere. For a lab, I'd go this way. Now it's just an entrance and you can avoid warping the lab itself.
  3. If you just need weightless, not space, how about a Rego effect to hold and move the container so that magic handles its weight?
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You could try to get the larger inside with a particularly weird Criamon magus playing with the MuTe 4 - "Make something grow to eight times its previous volume" guideline, using a T:Part to only affect the "inside" dimensions. :unamused:

or 4) use Perdo to remove the "weight" attribute of the object (as shown in HoH: S)

Not sure I'd buy that one as SG/Troupe.

I love this one.

One of my characters has a backpack that turns stuff into teeth, and changes them back when tipped out. It effectively has more space

Much easier, with Hermetic Magic.

Ok, this looks like what I'm after. If I have a wardrobe, and use the MuTe 4 guideline, then I have:

The Vault that is a Wardrobe MuTe(He) 39 (Base 4, R: Pers, D: Sun, T: Part, +4 Size, +1 2/day, +3 environment trigger Sunrise/Sunset) This beautiful wooden wardrobe is large enough for a size 0 person to walk comfortably inside. Inside is a vast room, empty.

The lab that could be inside this is Mobile and Unstable. We could make it an Invested Item, and have a second effect hold everything rigid while the door is closed.

The problem is that dimensions are part of the space your target is into, not part of the target itself. The first metaphor that I can come with is that in chess each squate is part of the board, not of the piece that could be lying over it.

What Tellus said: Glamour. The only solution Hermetic Magic has found around dealing with space is through a house mistery, altering materialized illusions. Other than that Hermetic Magic lacks both the machinery (what Form is space?) and the frame (no Descartes yet to start painting axis representing space).

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I think you are applying a modern mindset to a medieval paradigm - there is no concept of space as a thing in itself. Ironically there would be at this time in Eastern philosophy (specifically Daoism, which defined the value of many objects by their emptiness or nothingness within), but for a European, a spell to enlarge something cast on the part of the inside should be perfectly legitimate. Oddly miraculous, but this is magic we are talking about. Also obviously contrary to its essential nature, but as a temporary effect with Mu that isn't a problem...

Even to the educated like magi? Really?

From en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_th ... al_atomism

Or you can look at the entry on Democritus: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democritus

As for timeframe, that I don't know as well. But I did find some relevant information here: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_th ... al_atomism

Our safety effect: Careful storage Pe(Re) Te(An/He) 50 ( Base 10, R: Touch, D: Conc, T: Room, +1 Re Requisite, +5 Item Maintains concentration, +10 Unlimited Uses) Whenever the doors of the wardrobe are closed, the contents of the room are locked in place until opened, and made nearly weightless. I'm treating the negation of weight as a base 10 effect, which is true for some Forms, but not an animal or human. Corpus is explicitly not covered, so that someone inside can get out.

So, the wardrobe must be put on a solid foundation, such as a stone block, before the doors can be opened, or it will sink, with the weight of a full lab inside of it. The doors need to be open a fair bit of the time, to prevent warping.

I don't see that line in teh article you site. I see that atomism believes that everything is made up of atoms, nothing about void. The article about Democritus brings up the concept of void, but as something to be ridiculed because void is nothing, and being nothing could not exist. Which is rather the opposite of recognize the existence of space at its own concept. Pluss these are obscure references in a philosophy that was fundamentally rejected by Christianity, to the point they had to be rediscovered from Muslims at the start of the renaissance. While it could be house ruled any which way, I see it as a fairly strong case for space not being a conceptual component of hermetic magic, supported as well by the simple proposition that if it were it would have its own form.

Sorry, got all those links mixed around when posting:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomism

Sure. I wasn't saying it was overly prevalent, was I? Rather, I was disputing "there is no concept of space as a thing in itself" because that isn't really true. It may not have been widely accepted, nor widely understood, but the concept most certainly did exist. Yes, the concept had been presented by the Greeks and had been re-introduced into Europe. But since the concept has been re-introduced to Europe, if a given player wants their magus to be interested in the concept, it need not be anachronistic.

They may well be interested in the subject, but as for my part I would not expect anything to come of the research into what is essentially a modern idea very vaguely conceived of by obscure philosophers. The question is how natural philosophy of mythic Europe works, not what can someone have their character conceive of.

The latter is the main argument here - especially as DI p.9ff The End of Time confirms (p.39) Aetheric Magic as an Hermetic Breakthrough giving access to the Form of Aether.

For atomism you do not have to go back all the way to Democrit, though. Epicurus' teaching was present, but not exactly popular, in the Middle Ages.

Cheers

Epicurianism was all but dead, the philosophical theory of atomism was an obscure part of a nearly dead philosophy.

I'm not sure what DI refers to, but it does not appear to be a core sourcebook, since the form of Aether is not something that is a thing in the vast majority of references. In fact I'm not sure if you are trying to make an argument for or against the point I was making...

Agreed. There is no concept of space into the medieval paradigm. So hermetic magic, which dwells into that paradigm, can't manipulate space, because to start that would require a paradigm shift.

Probably just the idea of bending, reshaping and manipulating space are the actual applications of modern mindsets into the paradigm! (but I'm afraid we do that all the time (and that not doing it at all would be more a nightmare than a game)).

And that's why Merinitae (or some of them) can actually do that. Their paradigm is just odd. Who knows what can it include.