Hello, all! I've been playing Ars Magica 5th Ed for several years now, mostly with my wife. We have a long-running saga, but I came up with a character concept that is burning in my mind but would not fit in our saga...
Here's my idea: a Tytalus (my first!) who is incapable of casting spontaneous magic. As a result, he has developed a Magical Memory and the idea that, in order to advance his power, he needs access to more Lab Texts...even if the owners don't necessarily want to part with them. He would utilize a lot of the concepts in the Intangible Assassin portion of Hermetic Projects. After stealing the Texts, he would replicate them with a Moon Duration spell and, after translating the book for himself...he would "gift" it to someone else, or trade for other considerations.
I think this would be a cool character and I look forward to the opportunity to play him!
Not sure if you'd rather I post here or over in my Stonehenge Saga recruitment thread, so I tossed a coin and wound up here.
Anyhoo.
Looking over the Magical Memory description (p. 45), I'm not sure it does what I think you think it does, if I'm reading your concept right. It doesn't let you read the text, memorize it, and then use it. It allows you to, if you've invented a spell or enchanted a device, to recreate that spell/enchantment without having to have the Lab Text to crib from. And if you use someone else's lab text to invent a spell/enchant an item, you don't have to have that lab text (or any other) to re-invent/re-create.
And I don't have access to Hermetic Projects, so I have no idea what an Intangible Assassin does. I think it allows you to do a lot more with Intangible Tunnel than was originally intended with the core-book description, but I'm not sure.
Right, but it also means I don't need lab texts of my own (less chance of retribution) and gives me an excuse to give lab texts away once I've broken a magus' code.