Infernal Assistance House Rules Addition

Games Discussion Ars Magica
1

The infernal book is great, but I was disappointed in how little there was for Hermetic Magi to vet from infernal meddling. As written I did not feel like there was much temptation toward imperialism. The following ideas are half baked but are the start of my thoughts toward a more tempting infernal power.

Goals: Retain supremacy of hermetic magic, while making infernal temptation really tempting.

Would grant the following as Infernal Abilities to selected Demons:

Grant Infernal Art Affinitiy: (By Form, 2 pts), The demon grants the target a False Affinity to a Form Art, immediately recalculate the previous experience and use that new value for that Art. The art is now Corrupted and appears infernal to magic senses/intellectual, and has some aspects that appear more dark. The demon is now an Arcane Connection to the magus. The power has duration: Host, (or whatever that its called, sorry no books on me) and lasts till the Magi tales communion, confession or other sacrament. Demons can only boost forms that match their own form.

Grant Infernal Puienssance of Form (by Form, 1pt) Simular to the above but only grants a plus three bonus.

Grant Infernal Abilities (Corpus or Mentem, 1 or 2 pts): similar powers as above for Abilities including supernatural abilities. A given on would need a power for each ability.

Grant Infernal Alignment (Vim, Varies 1-5) The demon may Grant the magus a temporary alignment to the Infernal Realm, she may use the Infernal Realm Aura bonuses up to 1/2 The value, as if it was a fairy aura. Same duration as above. The demon is similarly aligned to the Magic Realm. Cost equal to the maximum aura bonus that can be used.

False Mastery (B Form, 1-3 points) Grants 1 to 3 Matery abilities for a spell that matches the form of the demon. Same limitations s above.mastery abilities are chosen by magus player.

The Power of Vis (Vim, 2 pts) The Magus may add +3 when using infernal vis for a spell . Far vis causes a -1 penalty and magic vis only offers a +1 bonus.

These powers will produce demons that Magi will want to deal with and will corrupt the order. Obviously they ave to penetrate which requires trust.... which will be interesting. Presidents costs the demon extracts for these powers should be in proportion. Also since they can be canceled by the demon or the Magus' s actions they should be ongoing costs. Taking covenant during those demons should be a significant challenge.

On another note, I think that far and infernal vis should be more prevalent, offering a +1 bonus each or normal bonus with additional botch dice. College ting infernal vis should be morally dangerous. Likewise, using this vis in other auras (magic s in far aura, infernal vis in magic aura etc) should do something... perhaps something the Criamon mental demons. That trouble I'm aura at a later time. So that covenants that are using Infernal Vis or Fairy vis should have strange happenings. Or is using it to push through. the Divine will leave behind weak demons and fae things (and magic things) that will cause problems them to deal with I'm a year or so.

2

The main thing infernalism has to offer magi is false virtues, via diablre. Cthonic Magic when combined with the Malifica offers some majorly powerful options. Similar benefits with goetic arts. Since those abilities/arts can be replaced with Hermetic Arts a Hermetic Magi can access the full range of the Malifica and Goetica with little investment in experience. These offer some major power boosts. No aging, no warping (infernal might), easy ability boosts, easy virtues etc. In fact these power boosts could quickly get out of hand! The problem is that magi cannot easily learn the abilities themselves. There are a few ways around this:

  1. A house rule that learning supernatural abilities is NOT penalized by supernatural abilities from other realms.
  2. Mystery Cults: A demon might have a high score in Infernal Cult Lore.
  3. Get em' young. A magi who has decent anti-demon precautions will prevent this from happening obviously, but a demon would likely have little trouble penetrating a apprentices magic resistance, or might even be able to blow through the penalty of 15. This may be overt, but it could be covert. The apprentice just appears to have a cooler Gift than most, but he is really using soul corrupting Infernal Powers. Even better if the future magus passes it on to future apprentices.
  4. Get them to lower their Parma. Only a stupid magi would go for this. Any smart demon would (if possible) alter memories, emotions and thoughts to make repentance unlikely.

Their is also significant advantage to be gained from the "flaw" corrupted arts/abilities/spells. So long as you act like an ass (not illegal per Hermetic Law) you can rack up huge experience gains and gain a significant bonus to just about everything. A demon would offer these instead of any sort of virtue to boost an ability. They're better anyway. Plus the demon might be able to pull it off without the magi noticing and in turn corrupt any writings. Could even spread through the Order like a virus/meme, until good magi are weak and evil magi are strong. The whole Order corrupted with one demonic contact, who might not even have realized it.

The call of sin to power both Vis and Confidence is pretty attractive as well.

3

I like it. Especially the Affinity one, which is super-tempting.

Your'e still left with only specific demons that can tempt magi, but that's cool.

Cthonic Magic itself is still pretty tempting, however. Especially with its ability to mimic the Goetic Arts.

One Infernal gift I think would be invaluable is immunity to Intellego or Mentem magic. Having all your plots and actions a short Intellego Mentem spell away is scary, even if you're not into anything Infernal ("Now, what was your Mystery Cult's initiation script, again?..."). Obscuring your mind should, in my opinion, be a key Power demons can offer cultists, including Hermetic ones.

Yair

4

Immunity to Intellego should come standard from all mystery cults. I'm sure you can find a mystagogue to offer it to you. I'm also sure the mystagogue will claim not to be a demon.

5

That's too much IMO. An Intellego spell will not be attempted by most in the first place for fear of breaking the law. If the culprit is not in the Order that's a different story. But to just get blanket resistance to an entire Technique (or Tech+Form combo) is asking for a lot. To keep it in game balance you'd probably need to look at other examples of MR presented, such as what they have for Hedge traditions. Another would be a Mystery of similar power (and cost) as the Bjornaer Mystery that cuts you off from your name. Finally, the easiest IMO would be that you have a demon that protects you from Intellego spells, or a demonic item or something. When the wearer is under the question the demonic lie superimposes itself over the truth, just as demons can't be compelled to tell the truth nor their lies detected through magic. Design an Infernal spell that prevents lies from being detected with the caveat that it's from the demon, not the person (so Range is at least Touch for example).

It's not foolproof, but nothing is, especially when it's infernal. For example in this case if the demon's spell always tells the same lie but it appears to Intellego as the truth, ask a different question, one that you know is a lie and if the spell makes it seem like the truth, then the interrogators know that the person has found a way to hide their lies from magic.

6

Looks like you didn't get Lamech's very special kind of humour. :slight_smile:

or did you?

Cheers

7

Ah...yes...yes I did. Let's go with that.

<Where's the edit button?!>

8

Goetia is the basis for a full character design,, it is too expensive for a magus to really use it in addition to hermetic magic, and of course it is less powerful when compared to the easy to learn, no witch hunt Hermetic Arts. If you could merge one of the forms or techniques into hermetic y that would be different.

Cthonic Magic is useful, but it does not produce a lasting relationship with a demon, and a need to keep them around. Again, it is a short cut, but of limited shortedness.... I know, not a word.

Yeah all my ideas above would be a specific demon, who might only have one or two, but would make demons attractive for full Magi.

(Edited because I cant type)

9

My thoughts regarding Ars Goetia is that a hermetic magus needn't really have a high score - the ability to enslave a few low Might demons can be useful in its own right especially as the magus' Hierarchy begins to increase. Granted, Ablating and Binding are somewhat less useful to such a character, but outside of dedicated infernalists, I would assume such powers are typically used in an opportunistic manner anyway...

10

Goetic arts + hermetic magic, means using Rego for the goetic art (infernalist should focus on rego art!) and vim instead of (realm) lore (they should also focus on vim!).

Being able to use labotals of 80+ is possible for goetic magi... not for goetic practitionner.

Enslave a demon, then use ablating. Each day, its demon, and take Xps, immortality, insight... as you need. Then after some years, you certainly will have learnt (use commanding if not ablating!) the maleficia and have respectable scores.

Take some children, enslaved. Teach 12 of them in ceremony. The others can expose to your lab to gain magic theory.

With the 12, form a group. Boost their ceremony to 10 as well as your (you should use ablating to boost yours in fact, never learn!). Then use your maleficium to give the group of children the gift and virtues (apt student, etc.). Teach them in magic theory (let's say they reach 3 in 2 seasons with their apt student and your good teacher, com 6). Ask some of them to set up 13 labs in vis extraction, then open the gift of the others. At the end, 13 labs with a nice +5~+10 in vis extraction, 12 gifted children with their giftopened, extracting vis for you (let's say you also used the maleficia to give them all +5 in intelligence). You infernal aura certainly is bothering them, so you should initiate them in chthonic magic also. Infernal aura of 5 or more, then enjoy 4 seasons of extraction vis (labtotal of 20+ x4 x12 per year), increasing quickly.
Ask each of the 12 to open the gift after some years of 12, which means 144 new apprentices.
Restart.

Ablating is too powerful, you could ablate all the demons in the world, which is, of course, what they would want you to believe.

Then God sends an archangel, and your plot fails. But it was fun.

(That was actually what a NPC did in a saga, I stopped because the math became absurd.)

11

But that is not how it has been really shown in the back story. (granted there is little detail on the "known" diabolists, and for all I know many of the infernalism (not even discussing Diedne here) charges were bunk. But still, I want to see infernalism be a temptation to power and one that might be hard to discover or notice. In addition to the more overt Infernalism that has been mentioned above. There is no reason that it should all look the same.

Also, it was mentioned above that you can ask a demon and know if it is lying... but they can tell the truth when their lives depend on it.

12

Yeah as Exar points out things spiral out of control quite quickly. Ceremony in particular screw stuff up. Start kids off with Ceremony 2~3 (incant). Then it becomes fairly easy to grant false virtues. Sheesh from the kids along you should be netting +30ish. Grant them puissant ceremony. Now you can grant permanent long term virtues. Careful consumption/incantation come to mind as essential. Now you grant yourself the remainder of the malefica. Now use the stat stealing powers to boost the kids even higher. They will end up granting totals of 120ish. Plus what ever you have. Might as well enslave ALL THE DEMONS. Then ablate ALL THE DEMONS. Then God uses smite, and you die, but still. Point is the malefica cycle completely out of control if Ceremony is used. (Its actually worse for the Divine and Faerie version. You have a whole town backing you up? Better add +50 to the effect!)

Also don't forget you should have the "flaw" tainted abilities (all of my malefica). Was your roll to cast the power a couple short? Well the +3 saves the day AND grants xp!

13

Also keep in mind that you cannot raise abilities above what the demon has, and if the demon doesn't have them then you can't raise them. A good part of your time might be spent finding the demons who have the skills you want to improve... aside from some obvious ones like infernal lore. But how many demons even have skills in hermetic arts?
Realistically this is the major point the ROP:I is missing- a way to learn from demons, especially abilities the demons don't use themselves. I'm guessing the method would have to involve stealing abilities from other humans somehow... either through the incantation/consumption under maleficia or through a demonic power of some kind (some demonic version of the faerie instructor? stealing or bargaining for one person's abilities to grant to someone else, as part of another bargain...) there is the virtue of demonic instruction, but nothing really about during play... aside from the hypothetical ability of demons to have significantly high teaching skills. On the other hand, if you consider books treasures, then there are a large number of demons able to locate or produce (or re-locate) some very valuable books on whatever you might wish to learn...

14

I suppose its also possible there are some demons out their with extremely high abilities. "Why yes, I spent the last 7 centuries teaching mortals the dark arts. I do have very high teaching scores. Who wants me to get them 50xp a season?" What they probably need is a power to grant straight XP. Take a page out of the daimons in mysteries reviled, and have powers that rapidly teach people.