Been toying with my favourite character concept, a combat magus of the School of Apromor, but continue to be frustrated by the major flaw of the school - size modifiers. And playing round with MuVi meta magic is an interesting exercise, it is still a headache (as not im sure if the errata actually removed the Wizards Boost for Size increases...)
So instead, I'd like people's opinions on the following example spell and guideline
Dreadful Lacerations PeCo20 R: Voice, D: Mom, T: Part
Destroy a part of a persons flesh, inflicting +5 Damage. Armour does not add to Soak against this spell.
(Base 5, +2 Voice, +1 Part)
So my thoughts and reasoning
meta-physics wise, it seems that by utilising the T: Part means you can just target a chunk of the victims body to hurt them, thereby not having to target the entire creature, avoiding the requirement of size
the base effect of 5 is the same level as other damaging guidelines, apart from CrIg, which still remains one magnitude more efficient. The ignore armour part matches PeIg example and seems to make sense.
My concern is using T: Part means scaling up the Target category then puts the guideline into an odd place, so can't decide whether to simply have the base guideline a magnitude higher and utilise Target: Individual???
But overall, this spell is 2 magnitude less efficient than CrIg, still making the Founder's School a more obvious choice for raw power. It solves the issue of size restrictions certain enemies being completely immune to your main spells, regardless of arcane connections, penetration bonuses etc.
Thoughts, comments, big gapping flaws, all welcome
Kal
I fear, that T: Part spells don't help you much with targets larger than the base individual. See:
So, just designing a spell for larger size targets achieves about the same with less discussions in the troupe.
The ArM5 p.42 Major Hermetic Virtue Flexible Formulaic Magic or the HoH:TL p.104 Minor Hermetic Virtue Boosted Magic might help an Apromor disciple.
Apromor (HoH:S p.10) and Priamitus (HoH:TL p.95) both encouraged rebuilding the Cult of Mercury, and that cooperation might even have led to a rare Mutantum/Flambeau with the HoH:TL p.107 Minor Hermetic Virtue Mutantum Magic.
If part can affect up to a base individual of size it can affect a base human sized chunk of flesh attatched to a giant should it not? By analogy if I wish to transform/shatter/etc part of a rock/stone //harming the rock// I need not have an indivdual magnitude modifier equal to the size of the mountain.
PeIg generally still has issues with Target Size. You're chilling a being (Target & target) enough to cause harm. This is distinctly different than the CrIg approach, where the fire is what is the Target, distinct from the target.
It does. But look at the PeCo T: Part spells from Apprentices p.45 The Cleric's Pate to ArM5 p.133 Twist of the Tongue: they all specify the affected body part, which grows proportional to the size of the target. This should carry over to a PeCo general direct damage spell with T: Part, unless you are verrry persuasive with your troupe. Getting medieval on a giant's pinkie might also rather infuriate than damage him.
This is also true, but does not help Kal very much.
True, but if a player said, "Okay, well its a Cyclopse, so I want to destroy its eye using PeCo. If I formulate it later, I am calling it No Man's Spear." I think we would all be cool with that, add magnitudes for Part, but even a cyclops eye is significantly smaller than a human's (unless you have described otherwise), so -1 for size. Damage would not be sever, but would give it the Flaw: Blind.
Of course used on a person, No Man's Spear only target's one eye!
Mmm good point abit;, however it still stands that the part in question can still be up to a base individual size, thats pretty big if your spell oh idk targets the hand or the head O_O
For a direct dmg sort of thing I envision something like ooh lets go with the fabled 'rot the flesh on a part for X dmg'; destroying and rotting tissue, thats alot of tissue even for a giant, giant would ofc be somewhat saved by its wound ranges and stamina a +5 dmg would probably net no more than a light wound for this dummy giant we talking about I would say its nothing wrong with the concept, but its not inline with what PeCo does as you say, it deals with parts abit differently; we got guidelines for inflicting light, med, heavy wounds and shattering limbs already that dosent have us rolling for dmg and even the 'rotting flesh' can be simulated with this. And by this if someone decided to make a 'Cripple limb' spell with target part and run the argument that say a giants arm is still less than a base individual in size and should thus be crippled... oh I can see it being no issue on a +2 "giant", or a +3 "giant"... but after that discussion on mass and sizes would probably overtake Fun! So ye... while PeCo direct damage seems like a nice flair and the part bit is ok it could easily get muddy abit much
PeCo 'Giants lost grip' B15+2voice+1 part=>30 the thumb on the affected hand is broken and crippled making it neigh impossible to use, heals as a medium wound. ...abit much work for a lvl30 but hey its gonna be a big big giant before it cant be used
I would allow a PeCo with target:Part, with a fixed +dam, with the following reasoning regarding size increase: the damage needs to be soaked, and damage (wound increment) is affected by size. So a PeCo doing 6 damages (after soak & cie) will inflict a medium wound to a size 0 opponent, but only a light wound to a size +1 (p171 core rule).
If the PeCo spell comes with some side effect (blinding the target, disabling a member), then it will do damage, but the side effect might not occur if there is too much of size difference between the intended target spell design and the effective target.
For example, a PeCo design to inflict +5 damage and blind the victim by hurting his eyes, will inflict +5 damage regardless of the target size, but if it a huge giant with eyes the size of a football ball (soccer for our american friends), it will not blind the creature.
A more general houserule (possibly a minor breakthrough?) that might solve the issue: For determining if you can affect a target, Flexible Formulaic Magic can also be used to adjust the 'Base Size of Target' parameter of Animal or Corpus magic.
This keeps the Forms internally consistent - otherwise non-Perdo routes get comparatively stronger if you allow the lack of size restrictions to carry on through the form. Consider a lot of offensive uses of Muto or Rego, for example.
You'd still need to design custom spells for the real-big Giants and supermonsters and such, but this should let you handle the occasional plus-sized (human) adversary. For a member of the school of Apromor though, I strongly recommend not limiting yourself to PeCo. Wizard's Icy Grip for example, is an all-star spell, and has the advantage of working on non-humanoid enemies (of which there are plenty!).
There's also the combination trick of inventing a strong MuCo/MuAn-type spell that will shrink big guys to the size necessary to make them eligible for your standard PeCo arsenal... and/or reduce their hit box range for standard damage dealers!
That's what I was going to say. If giants are bothering your PeCo specialist all she needs is this single spell:
SHRINK THE JOTUN
MuCo 30, R: Voice, D: Diameter, T: Ind.
Shrinks size to size -6. Works with humans and magical humans up to size +7.
(Base 3, +2 Voice, +1 Diameter, +2 Target size up to +7, +2 Size adjustment)
And the average giant of size +4 that is used to stomp grogs get down to the size of a child, and not only you can throw it all your specialist's PeCo tricks, but also his damage ranges will be comfortably reduced.
Just be careful, since many giants are actually Fae. If you really really need to shrink the joten often, Giant might be a better target indicator, then you can hit both Magical and Fairy giants (I think). Maybe even giant blooded.
We have some experience with giants, and if you know the trick to have them still while you draw the circle, please tell it to me!
Well, it's Corpus, so in fact it would affect any creature with that form, faerie or whatever. I just put "magic humans" because I had spent way too many time meddling with RoP:M in the last few months.
Hi! I think silveroak might be referring to using circles for Creo ability enhancement Rituals, rather than Giant slaying. In the Praesidium Orae Saga silveroak's running I noticed too late to matter that a magus I control could have Spontaneously shrunk a lot of the grogs so that more fit within a standard circle. It shames me to admit that such an obvious solution did not occur to me previously. Still very green in Ars tricks!
What about the PeAq spells Parching Wind and Curse of the Desert? The former specifies water and an Individual of Aquam is up to about 1000 cubic feet of water. The latter says fluid, so that might mean it might be stuck with 1/10th the volume instead, but that much volume should affect at least some larger creatures...
I would say its nothing wrong with the concept, but its not inline with what PeCo does as you say, it deals with parts abit differently; we got guidelines for inflicting light, med, heavy wounds and shattering limbs already that dosent have us rolling for dmg and even the 'rotting flesh' can be simulated with this. And by this if someone decided to make a 'Cripple limb' spell with target part and run the argument that say a giants arm is still less than a base individual in size and should thus be crippled... oh I can see it being no issue on a +2 "giant", or a +3 "giant"... but after that discussion on mass and sizes would probably overtake Fun! 
So ye... while PeCo direct damage seems like a nice flair and the part bit is ok it could easily get muddy abit much 