An interesting conundrum has, once again, arisen amongst our merry troupe.
The spell description for Leap of the Homecoming says "Transports you to any place to which you have an Arcane Connection." The Rego Corpus guideline for Level 35 says "Transport the target instantly to a place to which you have an Arcane Connection."
Does the fact that both passages use the word "place" inherently prohibit you from using either LotH or an equivalent spell to teleport to a person for which you have an Arcane Connection?
For example, our covenant's cursor ran from Autun to Harco. Would our magus be able to use Leap of the Homecoming to teleport to her side (assuming we have a valid AC)? Why or why not?
First: I dont know.. but interesting question! Such a Ars Magica question too...
Since this is not a Terrem spell (i.e. somehow targeting the earth), I would make the argument that it does not matter what your targeting (place, person, animal), just that it brings you into its presence and in Contact with them/it. Though I might require a Finesse Roll depending on the targeted location.
I guess I just don't see why it would need to be a place, other than the rules text...
AFAIK, Arcane Connections to places are usually actually Arcane Connections to things at a place. For example, a "brick" is an Arcane Connection to the "city wall", in the unlikely event that the "city wall" relocates, then the Arcane Connection should follow to the new location.
So, I believe an Arcane Connection to a person should allow you to use Leap etc to teleport to the place that the person is at without any problems.
In my Toulouse game, it was quite normal to use a flying familiar to scout out an area, and then for the wizard to teleport in, using the familiar as an Arcane Connection to the place.
An interesting follow-up question is: what happens if the Arcane Connection is an Arcane Connection to two different things in two different places? In 4th edition nothing could be an Arcane Connection to more than one thing; but in 5th edition not only this principle is no longer stated explicitly, it's explicitly violated e.g. by Library Indices (see Covenants).
(Arcane Connections connect to one thing only in our saga. It prevents a lot of problems and is essentially the only "4th edition" house rule we have.)
I'd imagine that in that case, you'd have to select the one you want from it. It acts like the control panel on an elevator: You point at your preferred thing from the list of available choices, and say to the magic, "This one. I desire to be brought to this one."
IMS we used to use sticks. We'd break one in half and half would go with the scout who would fly ahead, the other half would stay with the teleporters who would teleport to him later on.
In our last saga we used ghosts. We had a nice Mentem specialist specialized in ghosts (no mind jedi tricks, since they break the saga for us) that did send weak ghosts to check stuff. The advantage is that they can report back, even if they tended to be extremely soap opera-ish, so sometimes the report was the best part of the scene :mrgreen:
We have also used familiars, until they started to die. The horror of the mages at their loved ones being killed randomly was too great for them (and while OOC the sentence "I just spent two freakin' years enchanting that damned [dead] kentucky chicken!!!" [read: roasted hawk] is still mythic in our troupe).
After the ratio of dead familiars rose, normal animals were used more commonly. ReAn + InAn made the trick, but it was spell intensive and the Animal dude was not usually around to pull it since it was my magus and I tend to be alpha SG. Ghosts are a premium since you can do the scouting at arcane range before you travel to the location
I'm playing with the concept of an archer mage who uses the combination of a Talisman bow (which can land arrows anywhere within sight) and an Arcane Connection to each of his arrows, so that he can shoot a "teleport beacon" to anywhere he can see.
This concept comes entirely from the fact that I replayed Portal recently.
You can do what you want, perfectly satisfactorily, with conventional Hermetic magic. The "teleport beacon bow/talisman" is a nice simple idea. I'd save your Virtues for something different.
Tethering Magic is cool, but not really appropriate to this one - having read it, I see it more as something you can use for the "alchemist mage", who brews strange potions and philters, and sells them to adventurers for use on their adventures. This isn't that, so much as finding a neat way to plant Arcane Connections at distant places and then use them.
The neat thing about Leaping to a distant Arcane Connection, of course, is that you can then pick it up and recover it. No need to waste arrows.
Question for the group regarding Leap of Homecoming, then - what would it do, functionally, were the duration to be increased? Would it give you a period of time during which you could move around freely between Arcane Connections? Would it just move you more slowly?
Hmm... never thought about that. I think I would go the other way around. You cast the spell with ONE AC in mind. So you will follow the AC wherever it goes. You will be in fact unable to leave the room where the AC is. But if tyou teleport the AC to another place (shoot it again) you would auto-teleport again to the location of the arrow. In fact it is a fairly cool travel method. You keep shooting the arrow and teleporting over and over again to its location.