So one of my players has been digging around to discover a hermetic method to identifying arcane connections and stumbled onto the description of Faerie Sight. Naturally he started asking if there are guidelines to change his eyes to a faerie's.
Glancing at the core guidelines for muto corpus, I'm not convinced that faerie eyes counts as a "minor" for "Change someone to give them a minor ability".
I am limitedly aware that there are magic that grants virtues, enriched items of virtue and some non-hermetic traditions. I'm asking the collective knowledge of the forum if there is a more direct example of hermetic magic granting supernatural virtues. Or, if there's some argument for making a troup call that such changes like faerie eyes might need a new muto corpus guideline, or even simply use the Baseline level 2 with some magnitudes for a supernatural effect.
I believe if you change into a dragon, you're big and scaly, but need to add in an extra +1 magnitude Ingem requisite if you want to breathe fire. However, at the end of the day, you ARE able to breathe fire, even though doing so is considered a magical attack by the dragon. (Unlike flying, which is perfectly natural.)
That being said, this is one of the many places in which the 5th ed rules are a mite vague. I'm away from my books ATM, though. I'd need to check that one to confirm it.
Non-hermetic magical traditions like Learned Magicians (HMRE p.79ff) can bestow Virtues like Faerie Sight: see Succurro Fortunam (HMRE p.90 box) and Succurro Magicam (HMRE p.92 box). So this is possible to do with magic.
But look up:
This let's one conclude, that just transforming into a being with Faerie Sight by Hermetic Muto magic will not grant the full Virtue: a magical effect like HMRE p.53 Eyes for the Prince, which just duplicates an effect of Faerie Sight, requires a 45 point Breakthrough.
In thinking about it a bit more, I'd rule the following:
If the ability is a legitimate (in the medieval physiological sense) consequence of having the body part in question, then it's just standard base 3. So...eyes of the cat, legs of the ram, ears of the dog, etc.
If it's explicitly a supernatural ability, then you need to figure out the general magnitude of the effect; that's the minimum level that your MuCo(An) spell needs to be. For example, "Mouth of the dragon" would require at least the same magnitude as a Voice-ranged pilum of flame would have (CrIg 20?). You'd also need the appropriate requisite - so, it would end up being MuCo(AnIg), +1 magnitude, minimum lvl 25. That's a pretty hefty transformation spell, for the ability to breathe fire.
So, the theoretical "eyes of the Farie" (looking up "Farie Sight" - RoP:F, pg 50) - ah. Well, that's currently beyond my undersanding of Hermetic Magic - to use an AC, it has to be In your possession. (So you can't design a sight-based spell to test to see if something is an AC - you have to be physically holding it). And determining the magical properties of an item is a lab-based activity, so "is this object an AC, but I'm not going to cast something with it to find out" is probably a lab activity as well.
With that in mind: I would say that you probably can't get there from here. If someone has a "ID AC" effect that is doable in Hermetic magic though, I'm fine with being wrong.
If the effect is not reproducible using Hermetic Theory, you probably can't reproduce it using MuCo magic. Although finding something like that would be a good Integration project.
Indeed. With the right Arcadian Mystery Virtue, HoH:MC p.92f Becoming, you can become a Faerie in all respects. Handri's spell, certainly not quite Hermetic either, may be just the teaser.
Giving it a second thought and considering that it's a Merinita spell, I gave it a second thought.
I'm a bit obsessed with the subject and thus seeing it everywhere but a spell to turn a human or part of a human into faerie stuff may be required to be a Glamour Mistery spell. After all faeries are made of it.
So maybe this could be it:
Breaking the Shackles of Vulgar Perception, MuIm(Co) 25, R:Per, D:Sun, T:Part, Glamour. Turns the caster eyes into faerie eyes made of Glamour, which allows the him to perceive the world as faeries do, thus gaining the benefits of Faerie Sight. (Base 10, +2 Sun, +1 Part).
I like the spell if only because turning parts of your body into Glamour seem to be the promise of a quite daunting botch result someday.
I generally agree with what you write in this post but why do you think seeing ACs at a distance is beyond Hermetic Magic? As far as I know using In this way doesn't violate any explicit or even tacit Hermetic Limits.
Overall, the biggest problem with simulating Faerie Sight is the penetration issue. I'd also question whether glamour can be understood by those without Faerie connections.
There's a level 20 InCo spell "The Whole from the Part" on page 72 of HoH:TL which, if cast on an arcane connection to a human /human-like creature, gives you a mental image of its essential nature. It uses a Base 10 guideline which is, presumably, "Sense all useful information about a body". Creating a version with Target: Vision should give you an equivalent effect via sight (at a pretty high level), and then you'd have to add requisites/create other versions of the spell to get arcane connections that aren't Corpus.
I was thinking InVi, base perhaps 10 as equivalent to "Detect the traces of powerful magic" or "Detect the recent presence of weak magic". Probably this wouldn't reveal details about the person/place/thing that's connected to in the way a Form-specific spell might.
The issue I have (without the books in front of me) is that you use an AC by literally holding it in your hand. Is "whole from the part" written as an AC spell? If so, then you're really just using the AC as an AC, with AC range - that's completely fine.
As written, I'm pretty sure the base 10 effect is the base 10 "learn something about the person on the other side of the AC", not "learn something about the AC itself".
EDIT - to turn this into a vision spell, you'd need to have two separate Ranges involved: a Vision spell, and then the AC range InCo spell. To my knowledge, Hermetic magic doesn't work like that.
EDIT II - obviously though, Farie Sight itself does, as it explicitly says that it does. So, yeah - with Farie magic of a sort, I could imagine you could do it. But as it stands, there isn't any direct "detect AC" guideline". Rather, that's either an unstated lab activity, or else it's a "cast an AC range spell, and if it works then it was a live connection."
No, it's a Touch range spell that is explicit that it targets the arcane connection itself rather than the thing it's a connection to (and therefore doesn't generally need to worry about magic resistance).
shrug - OK, that sounds fine, then. Assuming that's the case, use that as a Vision effect (although you'd need at least 4 magnitudes of Forms to cover everything else - animal/herbam/terram/aquam), and it would probably work as described.
EDIT - I would say that the vim version would work on spells and enchanted items, rather than regular items. However, if the only thing you're looking for is "is it an AC", then I'd say you could mark it down 1 magnitude, as that's even easier than "what can I learn about this due to its AC nature".
This raises the question of what magi know, and how they learn it, about arcane connections without using some sort of In magic. Suppose your magus is given a shirt and told it comes from the Duke of Burgundy. Does he know that the connection is really to the Duke or does any magic he casts using the AC simply target whatever poor sap is the real source of the shirt? Does the magus even sense that there's an active AC at all, or not, if the shirt has been separated from its owner for too long. The game suggests that the magus at least knows the latter, since he can fix the connection in his laboratory, but how does he know this? Or is a season in the lab wasted if the magus tries to fix something that's already expired?
Well, you could go with the basic InCo spell, then add requisites with magnitudes to cover things other than Corpus. You may well be better off with several spells, maybe not 10 different ones, but more than a single one; maybe 5 spells each with 2 Forms for instance.
That seems excessive. An arcane connection seems like form Vim to me, and if the "other end" is a property of the connection itself, InVi should work. At least in my opinion. The comparison with the InCo spell might be along the lines of ReVi vs. ReForm to control spirits.
Hm. I understand the position, but this starts to sound like you're investigating the fundamental magical nature of an object - which is a lab activity, in Vim. That's why I was trying to avoid using it.
EDIT - also, InVi magic is pretty general - for example, the "detect the Gift" spells are restricted to only detecting the Gift not because the guideline is written that way, but because NOT restricting it would result in a Scrying violation if cast on a fellow magi. Thus, if InVi could detect AC's, then any sufficiently sensitive InVi spell would do so (unless explicitly designed to NOT detect it.) This would likely be something the InVi guidelines would mention somewhere: "Oh, yeah: at InVi base 15 and beyond, pretty much everything is going to light up, because most physical objects are AC's to something else." That really sounds relevant, if it were the case. Thus, I suspect that investigating the AC nature of an object is either a lab activity (in vim), or else a Form-specific activity.
That being said, I agree that it would be a USEFUL thing to have in InVi - and a minor breakthrough (perhaps by studying Faries) would result in a nice new guideline. But I'm not currently seeing it in there, right now.
Perhaps. But in that case how does the InCo spell from HoH:TL work outside the lab? It's range Touch, not range Arcane, and is targeted on a current arcane connection. Alternately, it could be targeted on the object that includes that connection, rather than the connection itself, but then the Corpus form doesn't work, because it can be any AC to a human, such as a piece of clothing, which may not be of form Corpus.
This suggests that a magus can perform investigation on arcane connections via Intellego, in the same way that InVi allows limited study of magical items.
AM5, pg. 158.
Moreover, the spell presumes that the magus can somehow sense the AC to begin with, since he cannot target anything without sensing it. How is this done? I don't think it's ever really explained.
It could be that the spell in HoH:TL is in error and violates limits or uses the wrong Form. This wouldn't be the only such spell in a HoH book. But I wouldn't assume that as a starting position.
