In Lords of Men (LoM) there is a mention of foundation charms being placed in a lot of castles/manors. These foundation charms are small wards/curses that are unleashed under certain circumstances. Some of them are mentioned to be unleashed when a Gifted person enters the hall. I find this to be an extremely cool and folkloric thing that I would like to see IMS.
However, my problem is that after looking at the Hedge Magic supplement, I cannot see how this could be possible. Neither the witches nor the natural magicians (or their cunning folk equivalents) would be able to create such effects.[size=85] (This is one of my main issues with the witches, btw, since I think this should fall 100% within their area of activity...). [/size]
How would you create those effects in your saga? Do you think this can be done as per the RAW? Probably there is an ability somewhere that I have not thought about.
If forced to choose among the existing abilities, I would be inclinded to make it another use of the Folk Witch Curse ability, with a foundation charm being a variant of a "potion." Off the top of my head, that seems the closest mechanical analog.
That might be a good shot However, I have run into the same problem before for other "witchy effects". The problem with the witches is that Cursing ends up being the ability to do everything. Not very ars magica-ish for my liking....
I think it could be a Cunning folk thing... Cunning folk are natural magicians by another name (smallish differences in rules, but hey).
2 effects: 1 to detect that the creature entering is associated with the magic realm (InVi) and another to cast a curse (PeCo) on it. That might be feasible with a Sucurro magicam effect coupled with a vulnero salutem effect. The pronblem is that amulets cannot do 2 things AFAIK and that their charges are expended straight away one after the other, without you being able to stop the "shooting" of the effects instilled in the charged item. So once the amulet is turned "ON" the charges run FAST
As such, I still fail to see how this can be done.
I'd do this with folk magic, basically making faerie hedge wizards, from RoP: Faerie. Faerie hedge magic fills this role pretty well, being the magic of the common people rooted in folk legends and beliefs. Sounds like a pretty straightforward Woe effect to me, using one of the various conditional faerie magic Durations. To do this, your character would need Faerie Sympathy of some kind, and two Supernatural Abilities (which are actually Difficult Arts): a Power (Woe) and a Method (probably Evocation).
Ah! Hadn't thought about searching there. Thanks for the tip I do not use much the realm books (read: we do not use them IMS, even if we raid them for story seeds from time to time) so my knowledge of their content is sketchy. Will check it and see if that is what I was searching for
