I'm wanting to create a ring for one of my magi that tells him when he about to eat posionous food or drink. I'm wanting the ability to detect poisons based on animal, mineral, vegetable or liquid poisons.
This is what i've come up with so far. The effect is to be enchanted into a lead ring with a pearl set into it.
Poseidon’s Rejection of the Bitter Fare
InAq(He, An, Te)
The spell makes the pearl set into the ring glow softly if the hand the ring is worn on picks up anything poisonous. It functions continuously.
(Base 4, +1 touch, +1 conc)
2 uses per day +1
Item maintains concentration + 5
Environmental trigger (sun up/sun down) +3
Total = 19
On a related note, is a pearl a semi-precious gem or a precious gem?
I believe a pearl would be a precious gem, as at least in value.
From City and Guild, an amount of pearls of standard value is worth something like 40 times the amount of an equal weight in semiprecious stones.
I'm not sure how much the weight of a pearl compares to the weight of a semiprecious stone, though, so that may skew the comparison.
No, the target is neither the hand nor the poison. The target is the food and the range is thus the distance from the ring to the food which is why touch is only applicable if the ring touches the food.
presumably whether or not the poison naturally has a smell is irrelevant to the functioning of the range smell intellego spell because the spell is magically detecting poison and transferring the information to the target through their sense of smell, rather than actually smelling the poison.
not if you want to test the drink silently... 5e is explicit that the range of Voice effects is of the sound which triggers them. A device with Voice Range effects requires it wielder to speak the trigger, and the effect carries as far as the triggerer's voice.
I would go for Touch or Sight, OR change the target to Smell or Hearing, so that the sense of the poison is perceived to the wielder as a (user only) magical "scent" or "sound", but the range to the perceived target is as per the sense.
I think Taste , is being ignored as an option.
Most poisons are not skin contact neurotoxins.
You take a small sip of any drink , which you can spit out immediately.
Same with food , a morsel is placed on the tongue for testing first.
Any magical toxin has to overcome Parma , and in period ,
i don't think there are any poisons that can make you sick ,
let alone kill you , by only trying a small amount that you don't swallow.
It seems we are both wrong. What i was thinking of as the range should be the TARGET.
Pg 113
So we clearly want it to have a touch range if we want to grant the wearer of the ring the ability to detect poisons, and personal if the ring will detect it. And the TARGET is taste, touch, smell, hearing or vision.
Smell would be the best way as the range does not have to be great, since the wearer will be next to the food but we probly don't want to have the guy jamming the ring into everything he wants to eat. Smell is the quivalent of Group.
The fact that the poison doesn't give off a smell or is inside of something or baked into or disolved into is irrelevent. The recipient of the spell now has the ability to sniff out the poison due to magic. It's magic, thats why he can smell things that have no smell, otherwise he wouldn't need the magic to smell them.
Loaf of bread. In the center is an apple (yeah its ridiculous). The apple was poisoned by the old witch (remember her?). You use any sense like touch, taste or what not, you miss it...the poison is in the apple, not the bread...looking at or tasting the bread (well thats kind of stupid if the bread is poisoned) will miss it. The bread is fine, so it would not detect.
Yes looking at or tasteing the bread would miss the poison. But being able to hear or smell poison might not. I, for one, would allow hearing to detect it and allow an awareness roll for smelling it.
Think of it this way. A man is behind a door. By looking at the door and tasteing it you have no way of knowing he is there. But if he is screaming you know that he is there, and quite possibly if he hasn't bathed in a couple years you can smell him.
On a similar note, RARodger once cackled over the idea of taking a posion and muto'ing it into normal drink.. You wouldn't be able to detect it as poison. But depending on how your saga used parma once he ingested it it could turn back into the poison and kill you. It all depends on your interpretation of parma, but it's quite a devious plan.
This issue is quite old - and it was addresses by David Chart close to the time of publishing of 5th edition. In short it's been made quite clear that the Parma was never intended to dispel magic. If someone chooses to; fine - but in that case it is a house rule and not 'dogma'. And in a way the firm use of non-dispelling is also what gives us the pink dot loophole as a sort of lesser evil of the twins of dispel and pink dot parmas.
I really like the theme of the Target: Sense spells, but always had my trouble with the particularities of using them. To me, in continuation of Tarlynxeno's post, the point is that there need not be a sense impression (such as smell or sound) but only that if you imagined that an object gave off a smell or sound it would be detectable as far away as such a smell or sound would normally be detectable. This is also what explain the fitting allegory of the man behind the door.
But at the same time, and even if the Target of the spell is the sense enchanted, I still tend to think in terms of Indidvidual targets. In the sense that no you couldn't sense a man by sight through a door, but to me a loaf of bread is still an individual item so whatever is put within it will be picked up by any sense sensing the loaf, including the magical properties of any of these senses. In any case judging whether you can smell an apple inside a loaf of bread shouldn't stop a session to have to whole troupe venturing into the kitchen to spend the rest of the session
baking to prove their point.
I don't. I am positively thrilled how the magic is explained by either extending your power through your touch, eye contact, voice, or sight. It just seems.. right and very mythical.
I agree -and it also explains the odd mental pictures I refered to earlier- having to at least mumble to your food, and we all know from our beloved mothers not to toy with the food .
Basically I think the simplest way to do this would be to make it a R: Touch (the range to the wielder of the ring) and Target: Touch. Now the wielder of the ring will be able to 'feel' any poison. I know there is a special taste target, but I'd say that touching involves touch from both hands, lips and tongue (it is higher level than taste as well), so the wielder will have many opportunities to touch his food and drink before swallowing it. Which is line with Ravenscroft point that you do not necessarily die from a poison just from touching it (disregarding that poison can be absorbed through glands in the mouth...) or even tasting it.
If the magi, or whom else will get the ring, is really paranoid, several versions of the effect might be invested to do both Target Touch, Smell, Hearing and Vision..
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