Light is not species. All physical things (which are not invisible) continuously shed species of sight. Light is a medium which permits sight species to travel; without light, all things still shed sight species, but the species cannot travel any distance from their origin.
So a R:Touch D:Ring T:Ind CrIg light spell creates light within the ring. The question, then, is whether that light spreads normally, or whether it is confined to the ring. To extend the question beyond Ring spells: Lamp Without Flame illuminates an area about ten paces across with light as bright as a cloudy day. Does that light cease abruptly at the edge of the effect, or does it taper off (several paces as bright as torchlight, several more as bright as candlelight, several more as bright as moonlight)? If the former, a Ring/Ind CrIg light source would only illuminate the ring. If the latter, it would generate light that tapered off normally across the surrounding area.
You're right, you're right, light is lux and lumen and its the lux of the source that lets you see it, not the species, and lumen is what falls on other things and lets their species travel.
I'd go with light can go past the ring, but I'd have to think on Lamp Without Flame. If it stops dead at the 10 pace mark then you can't see the light source at a distance, right? So someone 20 paces away just can't see anything over there where the mage is hanging out. I think I would go with "the light travels further, diminishing as it goes" so a mage on a hill with Lamp Without Flame can be seen at a distance on a dark night, but I'm not super attached to it and wouldn't feel bad if the troupe decided it didn't extend at all beyond the 10 paces.
If the light can't leave the ring, can the species of things inside the ring? Or do they all stop dead at the ring as the light allowing them to move stops? If there is another, dimmer light source outside the ring, are the things inside the ring seen as if lit by the bright light from inside the ring, or the dimmer light from outside? I suspect the latter.
If the light cannot leave the ring then to do permanent light could be to do a CrIg Touch/Ring/Ind flame because the flame is magical, but the light generated by it is not, I think? I'm pretty sure you can see a Pilum of Fire even if it doesn't penetrate your magic resistance. ReIg to make a natural flame burn slower could work too?
Yeah, that'd work, though I'd also look into a MuIg Ring to make the fire burn very unnaturally (no heat, can't spread or ignite anything else) for fire safety.
Lamp Without Flame is clearly an error that needs to be corrected by errata. A base Ignem individual is about 1 pace in size (a large camp fire or hearth fire), while the light produced by that spell is a sourceless 10 pace circle.
It is not coming from a single point out to 10 paces, it fills that 10 paces. That makes it equal to between 10 and 100 base individuals, depending on if you take height into account (there are several places where the rules specifically ignore height, such as dealing with rooms).
Why not just light or heat has a base individual of 10 paces? Similar to Terram but only light or non damaging heat is up to 10 paces, this fits with how the Terram materials scale.
That is fine if you are talking about a HR, but if you want that to be RAW then the RAW needs to be changed. As it currently stands, Lamp Without Flame does not match the guidelines or line up with other spells.
It could be that the Moonbeam spell is 1 pace, but Lamp Without Flame is 10 paces because Cloudy Day light is brighter and extends further than the dimmer Moonlight.
Either way, it does look like something needs to be added, either Group or a note saying why it doesn't.
The light does not extend out 10 paces from the target, it is a 10 pace "sourceless" light. Meaning that within those 10 paces the light is coming from every direction. How much it illuminates outside those 10 paces could be argued, but the actual light producing source is far to big for a single base individual of Ignem.
Sorry but your suggestion is not a "Fix", it is a change to the RAW.
I was suggesting bringing the spell in line with the rules as they are currently written, which only requires changing the one spell in error.
You were suggesting changing the rules to allow the spell to function as written, which has a knock-on effect of having to change the rules and errata all other spells/effects which use them.
Don't take what I am saying the wrong way. I have no problem with expanding the base guidelines, to include the addition of a creation hierarchy in all of the Forms. In fact including things of the sort was part of my post when David initially asked about things we would like to see. Heck my own group specifically has a HR related to Creo Light/Heat (allowing them specifically to be used with Room/Structure).
What I am against is using a spell which has an error in it under current rules as the basis for anything. The spell is wrong. If it was corrected to be in line with other spells/effects (both in Core and other books) it would be worthless in this argument.
The error in the spell is causing further confusion, since people are now mixing up how far the illumination covers (which the spell does not detail) with how large the light source is (which the spell actually details).
The light has no apparent source, but illuminates an area about ten paces across, centered on a point indicated by the caster.
This means that there is no point of light that you can look at and be dazzled, but the illumination covers a ten pace diameter area, roughly. This certainly strikes me as within the area that a large campfire would illuminate, so this spell does not produce any more light than a base Ignem Individual would.
I'm not sure that this is actually an error.
We could certainly add a note that a base Individual of light is light illuminating the area that a campfire or the fire in a great hall would illuminate, though. That might well be useful. Not exactly errata, but it has similar scope.
There are other spells that have much smaller restrictions on the amount of light. Either this spell is wrong or a bunch of the others are. That's what people have been pointing out.
A base individual of Ignem to produce light would be awesome. As for wrong spells, I think there's not a lot that will exceed the guidelines, and there is nothing wrong with designing a spell that illuminatess less than the max at the magnitude.
The problem is that a bunch of spells wouldn't just not exceed some guidelines, but rather that they would apparently need extra magnitudes for size to just reach the guidelines.
If I remember our earlier conversations on light spells (but perhaps it was with someone else), we disagreed on whether such spells made sense at their current magnitudes. Can I suggest we wait until Mr Chart provides us with a proposed base individual of light before we look up whether existing spells and effects would need to be errata'd?