If you use the Intellego Mentem guidlines you can make a spell that lets you know all of the information in a persons mind.
What does all that entail? Do your get their attrubutes and art scores? Gaining all of their experiences from their entire life would surely have to affect your personality/sanity some how.
Could their be a Magus in a covenant that acted as the chronicler for the covenant and copied the minds of every mage in the covenant before they died to grant them a sort of immortality?
That guidline seems really OP what are the real extents of it?
As for the impact, this is magic after all - so I'd just roleplay it (a mind reader unconsciously takes over some mannerisms of the target for a few moments/hours/days.
As for mind archives:
Would you want to have your mind recorded, complete with all your sinful aspirations, memories of unlawful deeds etc? No way! The thought makes me shudder.
There is House Criamon's library of ghost(s) as a post-mortem source of memory.
The wording of the guidline strongly implies that you have unlimited acess to their mind and can selectivly take any information.
It makes sense that you could get it all, it makes sense that you could copy their scores, it even makes sense that it would be a permanent gain, But that's SOOOOOOO broken.
It took the spell's target a lifetime to acquire everything they know. That's quite a difficult duration to master. Knowing the command word for an item is trivial to learn. Knowing the general process of creating an item, such that finding the lab records is easy and perhaps getting a bonus to translating them, would seem to me to be an evenings work. Learning everything, such that you have a lab-text in your head, would to me seem a waste of a season.
What's the duration of this spell? Because I can barely hold a number 5 digits long in my memory let alone EVERYTHING someone knows. Those memories fade fast. I also think you're going to be ramming into some Hermetic Limits, and the way hermetic magic works (knowing how YOU know a spell does not equate to me knowing a spell, according to the way the rules work).
Thus, I think the guideline is there and is an impractical one to use for a mundane mind, but it exists to let you know where to aim for effect that need to mess with a large portion of someone's memory.
Yes thats what i meant. That you CAN selectively pick up any wanted information.
But that you do NOT automatically get ALL of it just because you can.
Yup. Totally. Thats why i prefer my above version. Then you cant simply vacuum someones head for everything they know, but you CAN get any answer or specific, discrete piece of knowledge that you can come up with to "look" for for the duration of the spell.
Exactly. You've turned someone's mind into a database. You could maybe get answers to any knowledge based questions as if that person were answering the questions, but it's not, IMO, you running around with the entirety of their skill set internalized.
Now that would be an interesting idea for a spell... Not quite sure how to pull it off / if it's even possible, but still. I mean for example, what if you gave such a spell a duration greater than momentary and pulled all of the.. say 'Single Weapon' knowledge from someone's head?
It's in the Jerbiton section. Short version: you should be able to copy Abilities, but can't. No-one knows why. Try some Original Research. You can get some things which are Ability-like but are not Abilites, like the steps to a dance, the words to a song, or the ability to fight as a trained group, but that's as far as Hermetic Magic has yet gone.
OOC? It's for game balance: otherwise the Tremere would just photocopy the minds of their enemies with Rituals at Arcane Range.