Indeed. Though one thing that I don't think is clear from the core book is how much you can learn about those people - it refers to detecting if there are people behind a wall, but not whether you can detect what they look like, what they are carrying, etc. Perhaps this is possible but adds a magnitude... perhaps it is not possible at all...
EDIT: There is "sense a specific piece of information about a body" guideline, p.131, which is what I was using for the magic mirror's effect, but it isn't clear whether that applies to a target sensed at a distance. Or I guess, it's not clear what the limits on it are - as in, whether it can apply to everyone in a boundary. If we assume it can, it does seem like the original spell I suggested achieves Inexorable Search without arcane connection - although I have just realised, the base is 2 mags higher than "locate a person with an arcane connection", so when you add another 2 to 4 (or more) mags to cover a large boundary, you end up with a level 45+ spell, compared to the level 20 Inexorable Search.
if Intellego Corpus can detect whether or not there are bodies (the substance of corpus in truth) behind a wall then why shouldn't Intellego Imaginem be able to detect what species those bodies emit (i.e. what they look like)?
The InIm approach of course doesn't directly allow the magic to detect what the bodies look like, you still require a human observer to convert the detected species into knowledge about the appearance of the things that created the species. But that is a rather academic distinction that would not really matter to the case at hand.
Yes - but also, as I realised per my edit above, InCo at base 5 may be able to get information on whether they match a description. If that is valid, this could be a valid spell:
Mirror of the Jealous Queen
InCo 65 (Requisites: Cr, Im)
R: Touch D: Conc(Mom?) T: Boundary, Ritual
Cast this while looking into a mirror and saying "Mirror, mirror, on the wall, who is the fairest of them all?" The spell locates the fairest of them all (the person closest to a perfect example of a human) within the county boundary, then shows that person's image in the mirror. (Base 5, +1 Touch, +1 Conc (maybe not needed), +4 Boundary, +4 size, +1 Imaginem requisite & +1 Creo requisite to show image)
This spell does not seem to target the person, so it gets round that problem, but in that sense it also fails to replicate the magic mirror from Snow White exactly, because that one says the person's name, which would need a targeted InMe. And of course this is a spell, not an item, because of the ritual target, and a Hermetic breakthrough or non-Hermetic magic would be needed to instil it into a mirror. Perhaps the Wicked Queen just churned through huge amounts of vis and cast this every day...
No. If nothing else, that would make The Intangible Tunnel irrelevant.
This is similar to how magical enhancements to your voice doesn't extend you Voice range (ArM5, p. 112)
That thing is so clearly a faerie, not an enchanted item.
My guess is, it simply detects the 'fairest one of all' inside the faerie aura to which it is attuned.
Prying Eyes is Case 2, and works without AC, at touch range.
Note that Prying Eyes will not tell you whether John Doe is in the room. If you see him, you are certain. If you don't, he could still be hiding in the closet, or somewhere less obvious so that you do not think of looking.
The difference is in complexity. You have to add magnitudes for very detailed descriptions, which might still not be detailed enough to be unique. Except if you are searching for a specific target, which you then need an AC to, unless you already sense him and do not need the spell. That's how I read it, anyway.
I agree, however, that you can do what you suggest, analogously to smelling for silver or whatever; you search for a category rather than for an instance, so it is just a matter of magnitudes for complexity,.
A CrIm effect, copying the image of the person. Is that what you have in mind from MoH. It makes sense that you cannot cast magic through the image.
Non-sense Intellego magic, such as Prying Eyes (no reason why a boundary version can't be made). This allows you to actually sense what is out of sight. I think you can then cast spells at voice range, if they can hear through the wall. Clearly, you cannot use sight range, because the target is out of sight.
Magical sense spells (souch as eyes of the Eagle). This should be trivial. You do actually see. The target is within sight. In principke the target could be sensed without the spell, even though it could not be singled out.
You wish to affect something by using a description of it. Hermetic magic has no way to find or target "the biggest guy in the room", "the fairest maiden in the land", "the man closest to the wall" or such without an intelligent being processing information and making decisions.
Yes, ritual Intellego magic can tell you, whether there is silver within a T: Boundary, or whether there are women within. Hermetic magic can also affect the silver or the women within T: Boundary. But Hermetic magic appears to have no means to zoom in with a description of an individual, and to then localize it.
"Tell me where the Pope is right now!" doesn't work without an AC and quite some Penetration, just by having Hermetic magic sift through the Vatican.
Something coming pretty close is a T: Vision spell like ArM5 p.153 The Miner's Keen Eye with its "+1 see through intervening material": send your Vision through the walls of the Vatican, penetrate the Pope's magic resistance to see him, and hope that you then recognize him on sight.
Snow White being a literal faerie tale, I'd assume the magic mirror was just a faerie and it was messing with the queen's head. Though she did ask the wrong question - "the fairest" can be interpreted as the most beautiful or the literally palest (fair skinned), and she wasn't called Snow White for nothing.
If she had asked who the most desirable in the kingdom was, she might have gotten an answer more to her liking. Snow White had these tiny little eyes set six inches apart and all the curves of a hat rack.
Why don't you think InCo can tell you who the biggest guy in the room is using guideline 5: "sense a specific fact about a body"? I don't see how any intelligence is involved in this other than the magus' own - the magic is simply finding something matching the parameters it is given, as Intelligo always does.
Yes, but if it can do this, why can't it find and affect everyone over 6 feet high? Or everyone with black hair? Or 6 foot high people with large noses, black hair and 43-years of age? As Ioke pointed out above, this seems to be a matter of degree of detail you want to detect rather than any clear division between individual and group descriptions. If my descriptors happen to match one person only, there seems to be no reason why I can't detect them if I can detect anyone at all.
So we agree about (1) not working. (2) would violate the requirement for Hermetic targeting without AC, that you need to sense the target, not an Hermetically created image of it. If the magus of (3) uses Eyes of the Eagle only to identify the target of his next spell, and can single it out afterwards by normal sight, that spell would work.
Have a look at TMRE p.94f New Range Line: "The advantage of Line Range is that it extends as far as Sight but does not require that the magus can see the target. However, he must be able to sense it in some other fashion: Hermetic magic cannot in general affect an unsensed target. For instance, the magus may hear someone talking on the other side of the wall." So if the guy seen with Prying Eyes talks and can thus be heard, the Hermetic Geometer can affect him with a R: Line spell, after he made his computations right.
But the spell explicitly says you can see the target, and the Intelligo Imaginem guidelines say "use a sense at a distance," so you are sensing the target, unless they made a huge error in RAW and used the wrong terms.
The Line Range stuff is very interesting - hadn't come across that.
EDIT: In fact, according the Intelligo Imaginem guidelines, it seems that it is possible to see any point in a boundary, in the same way you can see into a room, and then target the person you see.
Yes, a caster can sense the size of all the men in the T: Boundary with a ritual and successful Penetration rolls. He can then also derive the biggest man of these. But he cannot target that man then just as "the biggest man". See the qoute of TMRE p.94f New Range: Lineabove.
Ah, so if I am reading you correctly a spell such as Mirror of the Jealous Queen that I posted above would work - in that it is identifying a person based on a feature, then showing an image of that person? Or perhaps you think the second part is not possible, but it seems to me that if you can sense the man, there seems no reason not to be able to also sense what he looks like, with appropriate magic.
You are not representing the guideline for InCo very well here. Because when you sense "the biggest man" you are not sensing just a single fact about one person.
Your spell kind of has 2 steps to it:
Step 1: You are asking the spell to figure out the size of all the men inside the boundary (I assume its a boundary spell) and
Step 2: tell you which one of the men is the biggest.
You could absolutely get a spell to determine the size of a man, even a man that you cannot see as long as you can target him in some other way, such as by a boundary target. and following that logic you also can determine the sizes of a group of men, such as all the men in a boundary.
Usually hermetic magic is pretty bad at figuring stuff out, such as "which one of the men is biggest". You could have the spell generate a list and then analyze the list yourself.
the guideline according to your citation is: "sense a specific fact about a body" and I trust your citation but i very much dont agree that sensing a specific fact about a body multiple times must allow the spell to compare the facts too.
But of course the magic mirror in your example seems to have a mind that would allow such analysis. But then again if the mirror has a mind, is a thing of magic, a faerie spirit or whatever else, then it does not have to conform to the guidelines for how hermetic magic works.
Prying Eyes allows you to magically see into the room. That is not seeing with your own eyes: you can also check this with HP p.84 Fíngers for Eyes, which explicitly allows even a blind magus to see this way.
A magus has to 'sense' the target with his own senses, not some magically acquired ones, when targeting without an AC. This is the prevailing interpretation of ArM5 p.80 The Limit of Arcane Connections: "Intellego can determine whether, for example, there are any people behind a wall the magus can see, but Perdo Corpus magic cannot affect those people until the magus is aware of them."
The "then showing ..." would have to be done by another spell. How could that other spell show the correct, specific image of that single person, and not just a crowd of persons, without the magus targeting that person? And how would he target that person without an AC?
worth noting that there are several ways to read the original faerie tales which suggest that the Queens magic mirror would have in fact been of faerie rather than magic, especially if it was related to the Goblin's mirror...
If you read the actual Hermetic limit, it says «Hermetic magic cannot affect an unsensed
target without an Arcane Connection. » There is no suggestion, in core, that you need to see with your own eyes. You need to sense the target, one way or another.
This is what Prying Eyes does. It does not create an image, it allows you to see the real image that exist behind the wall.
Ah, I see. But to me, it seems that if I am made aware of the size of all men in the boundary, I must be aware of the largest man too. I suppose this is down to how the information is given to me - if the spell gives it all to me at once I am suddenly aware of the height of everyone and can pick out the largest (and his location, perhaps with a bump in level, but we know Intelligo can detect locations of things, so the spell could allow me to know the size and location of every man in the boundary). I had assumed if the spell imparted that information, the magus would know it instantaneously, and so be able to immediately pick out the tallest man (in this case, the spell wouldn't, he would, because he now knows the height of all men and where they are). But you seem to be saying that the spell would take time to impart information depending on the extent of it, so the magus might see a list or shapes of the men, thousands of items long, and have to sit and sift through it (maintaining the spell?) to find one he wanted.
Also, whether the spell can do it is an interesting question. It seems like a basic sorting operation to me, which I would have thought was possible... i.e., the spell detects sizes, orders them from large to small (and if it can detect things based on size that means it is somehow 'perceiving' size, so ordering based on size should be possible), then it produces an image of the first in the sequence (the largest).
I had interpreted that line to mean: Intelligo can sense things that aren't yet sensed, other magic cannot - it can only target what you sense. But then the logical consequence of that is that if you sense it with Intelligo, you can now target it. I haven't seen anywhere in ArM5 it make a distinction between magically sensing something and sensing it naturally - is it in ArM5 somewhere or is it clarified explicitly in a later book?
EDIT: I now see Ioke has just made a very similar point above:
Why would it have to be done by another spell and not a requisite effect of the base spell? The base spell obtains the information, the requisite effect translates it into an image. It then comes down to what information the basic spell obtains - which is related to what Euphemism says above. If the spell identifies the individual, then I would have thought it could communicate that via an Imaginem requisite. If it can only obtain information on a large, group scale, then an image of one person may not be possible, but I guess the mirror could show them all...
Oh, and thanks to those pointing out the mirror could have been a faerie - I like that idea. But my objective was to figure out how to make the mirror as a magic item to use as an interesting example, not to figure out the "truth" of what it was.