I'm sure this has been asked before but can't recall what the answer is.
A magus stands at the bottom of a tall pillar and wants to closely examine something at the top. Rather than fly up (which would attract unwanted attention), he decides to shift his viewpoint to the top of the pillar so that he is looking at it as if he were hovering by the top. He closes his eyes and casts...
What sort of effect, precisely?
His vision is the 'target' of the spell and augmenting one's vision magically is equal to a target of Boundary or +4 magnitudes. (ArM p 114)
But is it Rego or Muto? (Muto I think since people don't normally have eyestalks...) Corporem or Imaginem? Where would I find the base effect?
Rego Imaginem has guidelines for 'making an object appear to be other than where it is' but that seems to be thinking about general illusions rather than an individual skrying effect.
I think you can use Rego Imaginem to do this. You say it's an illusion, and it may be. You may be causing the object to appear to be someplace that it is not. But that doesn't mean that you can't use the illusion to your benefit, does it?
The spell Image From The Wizard Torn in the core book would do it, modified down to level 25 (only transmitting one sense, possibly your taste if you're being stealthy, but letting you see from that position)
But, IMO, you should be able to do it with Intellego Imaginem on its own (as the intellego requisite is what lets you do it with IftWT)
Level 1: Use one sense at a distance.
Distant Eyes InIm 5
Target: Ind; Range: Sight; Duration: Concentration
You see what would be visible from one point you can naturally see.
Base 1 +3 sight, +1 concentration
I'm not sure it would work exactly that way. All examples in the book of that guideline have Target:Room, and allow you to perceive anything in the target Room. It's not clear how this would translate to T:Ind.
I'm not certain either; but it fits with the wording of the baseline.
I'm treating it as T:Ind= the view from a single point, detecting the species that pass that point.
T:Room= the view from everywhere within a room. (including looking out any open doors or windows, your ability to see isn't suddenly blocked at those edges; you're detecting the species within the room, not the objects within it)
Prying eyes would be useless with T:Ind (it would let you see from your hand, so if touching the wall to a room you'd see the wall)
Summoning the distant image is weird in a lot of ways. I mean, you can only see the target if they're indoors in a small enough room?
The target for this sort of intellego imagonem spell can not be individual, unless you want to only examine a single target. "To see as through a plethron distant" from magi of Hermes p.101 and "View from the Mannequin" from Legends of Hermes p.113 more or less do what you describe (as does Fingers for Eyes in Hermetic Projects p.84 although it was the general consensus that this spell was wrong about magic resistance).
I suppose that you could rego imagonem to move the images from the top of the tower down to where you could see them or rego corpus target part to move your eyes t the to of the tower (although this could be harder than flying).
The problem with this approach is that you would be targetting somethng you cannot percieve - you know it is there, but cannot percieve it, which is the whole point. Intelligo is the way to go.
I like this interpretation. Since the intellego spell is being used to perceive species, I think it would be awful if you had to make it group or room to view every single object. InIm is about being a passive observer. Prying eyes and summon the distant image would let you move your perception around a room, ind targets would give you a fixed viewpoint, so you couldn't turn you head so to speak. Plus you would have to be able to see the spot you were trying to observe from making it more disadvantageous than seeing everything withing a room from any angle.
Here's a thought through optimization of Image from the Wizard Torn [ArM5, p. 147] from our current campaign:
Re(In)Im30 Discorporate Essence of the Wizard (R: Per, D: Ring, T: Ind)
While in the Ring, the caster can project his voice, sight and hearing just like with Image from the Wizard Torn, or along¬side an arcane connection to himself.
(Base 15, +2 Ring, +1 Intellego requisite)
One of it's main purposes is moving the point of view or hearing of the caster. But it also allows the caster to lambast grogs on guard duty that he found asleep, to chide an apprentice who tried to exploit the absence of his master, or to advise a companion negotiating on behalf of the covenant (with a very soft voice in his ear).
Ah, right! Intellego Imaginem isn't the place I'd have thought to look but now someone points it out it's obvious.
I think the Target still has to be the wizard's vision which is slightly harder than Room and that takes it up above level five if it has Concentration duration....
You can probably do it that way "Stone Watchmen" on page 44 of Hermetic projects is sort of similar. A magical sense spell (one with a target like vision) gives the target magical information through their normal senses, "what I'd see if my eyes were up yonder"is arguably magical information, but magical sense spells need to penetrate, this means that something with magic resistance on the top of the tower may be invisible to you. The spells that target an area do not suffer from this drawback.
If the magus/maga is standing at the foot of the tall pillar (as in the original post) he or she can see the tall pillar and therefore move its image. They'd have to move the whole thing not just the part that they couldn't see.
My impression was that there was something (other than the pillar) on top of the pillar itself. Which would not be part of the individual, and so not moved with a T: Ind ReIm spell, surely?
So you can see the corpse from the ground, only not in detail?
Eyes of the Eagle InIm25 Per/Sun/Vision (ArM5, page 145) You wiew details of objects no matter how distant they are as if only a foot away. That should give you more than enough gory details of a bloody, impaled corpse
Well you were vague about unwanted attention. Speaking Latin and making odd gestures will also attract attention. Being in a city makes it even more challenging with a divine aura if 3 or 4.