In the core rulebook, there is a comment in the Muto Mentem definitions sidebox about granting supernatural senses to another. Does anyone wish to elaborate on that?
For example, the spell 'Thoughts Within Babble' is an intellego-based sensory spell, targeting hearing. The range is personal. If I wanted to change that to touch, is it simply a case of up-staging on the range (+1 mag), or do I have to throw in some MuMe requisites as well?
What about spells that let you see vis? Hear incoming wooden weapons? Sense (by touch) the strength and type of aura you're in?
Does it mean any Intellego spell effect you want to place on another needs to have a MuMe requisite as well as +1 mag (for a total of +3 magnitudes), or am I misreading this?
There is a bit of reasoning that needs to take place for some effects.
Take "Sense the Nature of Vis" as an example. The visual aspect is really superfluous because the real effect is you simple know what Art the vis is. If you want you can increase it by 1 magnitude to have range Voice or 2 for Sight, but that only affects the range to the target (Vis), so you'll cast the spell looking for Vis many times unless you know before hand what to target. Increasing to Group would allow you to figure out multiple Vis Sources. So for +3 Magnitudes (Lvl 20) you could have Voice range, Group target and get brief flashes of what is and is not Vis and it's Art, in a small area.
Now if you wanted to simply see Vis, you are putting "Discern the Nature of Vis" (lvl 4) effect into Sight. The target becomes Sight +3 (not Vis), you'd want it to last at least Diameter +1. So for lvl 20 you can See vis for 2 minutes. Much better than the first one. Since the Target is Sight, you can improve the Range to Touch for +1 and make a bunch of people see Vis.
Both posters so far seem to be thinking of Intellego spells as spells that deliver information about the Target to the caster. While some Intellego spells work like this, other Intellego spells directly target the senses of the Target (ArM5, pages 113-4). For example, Thoughts Within Babble is a Range: Personal spell (hence must be affecting the caster) with Target: Hearing. Therefore the spell gives the caster's hearing a magical enhancement. Perhaps more clearly, the ImHe spell Shriek of the Impending Shafts is Range: Personal and Target: Hearing, so it grants the Target (the caster in this case) the magical ability to hear incoming wooden objects. One could construct an InVi spell that allowed the caster to see vis (perhaps all vis looks like pygmy unicorns to the caster): base 1, Range: Personal, Duration: Concentration (+1), Target: Vision (+4), for a final spell level of 10.
For the first type of Intellego spell (one that conveys information about the Target to the caster), I don't think there is a way to adapt the spell so that the information goes to a third party. But for the second type of Intellego spell (one that grants magical senses to the Target), it's easy to make a version of the spell that affects other people. Bump the Range for Thoughts Within Babble or Shriek of the Impending Shafts from Personal to Touch, and you can affect someone else with it, giving them the magically enhanced hearing instead.
I see no problem at all up-stepping the spells to range Touch (or whatever) to grant the ability to another dude. I never thought about it, but granting shriek (and its metal equivalent) to your shield grog seems like a logical step if you predict incoming blows.
The way I read it, you take the relevant Intellego spell, make it into Muto instead, add 1 magnitude for this, as well as boosting range from Per to Touch. Thus Thoughts within Babble goes from InMe25 Per/Conc/Hearing to MuMe35 Touch/Conc/Hearing. If you use this power, you use Intellego so sense. If you grant it others, you just use Muto to change their mental abilities to detect whatever the spell covers. MHO this should also include an Intelelgo requisite, sinc eit it still a sensing spell.
This is most easy and logical fro Mentem spells, but what about Shriek of the Impending Shafts, The Invisible Eye Revealed etc. granted to others? If would be silly to just have MuMe cover them all, IMHO it still needs the Form of what you're sensing. And also still Intellego since you are still sensing. All these requisites don't add magnitudes, the spell is already harder than the basic In[Form] spell.
Take a look at the section on sensory targets, p.113-114 :
First, granting magical sense to another is simply a matter of changing the range from Personal to whatever you need ("The range of the spell is the range to the recipient"). But then it says:
"It is possible to grant magical senses to many persons at once, but this requires Muto Mentem magic, with Intelligo Form requisite."
I believe this is what the Muto Mentem guideline is about: if you want to modify a sensory spell to affect a number of persons at once, not just one, then you need to Make the spell Muto Mentem, with InFo requisites (which do not increase the level I think, since they are integral to the spell), and a guideline one magnitude higher. You need extra Range of course to affect the group of people, but the target remains the same sensory one.
Note that you only need to do this if trying to grant supernatural senses to multiple people at once. If you just want to give them to a shield grog - or one grog at a time - you can just change the Range from Personal to whatever is appropriate. The problem comes with multiple people in that this would normally be a T: Group spell, but the Target slot is already occupied with the Vision, or Hearing, or whatever Target. So you use Muto Mentem to change the perceptions of the targets, and this can take Target Group.
I thought you were only allowed to use the T:senses spells with personal Intellego magics? Wasn't the Bjornaer Mystery that you could use them for any spells?
The Bjornaer Mystery of Sensory Magic permits sensory species to deliver magical effects, and they are restricted to the caster only. So they affect everyone who sees the caster, everyone who hears the caster, everyone who smells the caster, etc. So a Bjornaer with this mystery can create a Perdo Corpus spell that inflicts a wound on any human that hears him howl, for example.
If the Target is a sense like Sight, then Range is the Range to the Sight. If target is Individual or Group, than the range is to what you are detecting or where you are throwing your senses if with Imaginem.
This clarification was really helpful, thank you. I see how the game mechanics require this shift from Intellego (Form) to Muto Mentem; however, it doesn't seem perfect to me that the same spell is a completely different Technique and Form if cast on two people at once.
My first thought is to house rule it: keep the Target as Vision or whatever, and then just add +2 magnitudes for the spell to affect a group instead of an individual. So The Turb That Wood Shrieks At would be a level 30 InHe spell (base 2, +1 Touch, +2 Sun, +3 Hearing, +2 to affect a group) with no Mu or Me requisites.
Aha! Thanks for the clarification! I missed that on my first read - and yes, the section on sensory magics is quite clear.
Am thinking aloud that future versions could benefit from a page cross-reference in the MuMe section - but that's one for Mr. Chart, should the next edition work in the same or a similar way.
This is not correct by the rules. If you are using one of the Magical Senses Targets, the Range is the distance to the recipient of the spell's effects. So an InVi with R: Sight & T: Vision allows you to grant someone within R: Sight the ability to see magic.
Magical senses do not use T: Ind or T: Group; they are magical senses because they use the specific targets of Taste, Touch, Smell, Hearing, or Vision.
Throwing your senses with Imaginem is a whole different ball-game, this allows you to use your normal senses remotely, not grant you magical senses.
I have been stumped about this part of the rules for a while now. I was working myself up to asking some questions about it here in this forum. The core rule book states what is going on clearly, but why it states it is not clear at all.
I am in complete agreement with this opinion.
If something works one way on one target, then to me it has to work the same way on multiple targets. The part about the target of a spell being (Standard Sense) for Intellego (Form) and being unable to use a target of Group without going to Muto Mentem seems very unusual.
What about allowing multiple target types to be listed (T: Vision, Group) and simply charging extra magnitudes in the design?
I guess the point is that: allowing one to see is creating a magical effect which does, concretly, a procedural though process X to allow the mind of a person A to use this new sens.
If doing so for another person, you do the same magical effect, which does X': almost same thing but different procedural though process since persons are different and use their sense/perceive differently even if all have the same.
When doing for multiple persons you have 2 points to take into consideration:
such spell has a sense target. Adding a group target is, by design, strange but that construction is easy to understand.
since the spell cannot have effects X, X' to X''''''', it can only have effect X. But that would only work for one of the people of the groupe (because it is how that would work for them). You then add MuMe requisite (which is the requisite of which is not really relevant) so that the though process of everyone of the group target use their sense in the same way as everyone , so that effect X (procedural use of the sense?) works too.
That make sense.
I understand why this information is listed in Muto mentem, but IMO it should have been enough to state that in the "sensory magic" introductory paragraph. (Which it seems it does.) Doing so in MuMe guidelines too is a bit overkill and doesn't have any relation to MuMe guideline.
Edit: yes threadomancy. That's a good thing, everyone should do so to avoid multiplying topics about 1 topic.
