Muto and flexibility in spell design

Games Discussion Ars Magica
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I posted this question awhile ago at the end of a thread about restricting targets for spells, but since this has now come up in actual play and because it's not quite the same topic as that thread I'm posting it again here.

Consider the following spells:

  • Hare to Hawk
  • Boar to Bird
  • Bird to Boar
  • Beast to Bird

Are these all the same level? Are they even all allowed? Are there any logical restrictions on the second through fourth (like requiring an appropriate feather)? For the two open options (x to bird), does it matter whether the specific bird is chosen by the caster or if it is determined by the target's nature (or picked at random, as with mists of change)?

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Based on "Transformation of the Ravenous Beast to the Torpid Toad" (core rulebook, p 119) the initial target is open ended (any beast) but the final result is fixed (a toad.)

You'd either need a different spell for each animal result, or a modifier for flexibility. So your spells don't need to be as defined in target, but do need to be defined in result.

As to needing a feather, I believe that is only necessary if you want the caster or target of spell to be able to end it before duration lapses.

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All examples of MuAn spells known to me have the resulting animal limited to a single specific type at spell design time: it is (ArM5 p.119) "Turns any animal into a toad", not "turns any animal into any type of creepy crawly". Also the results of other MuAn are pretty specific: wings to a horse, not to any type of mammal (see level 35 guideline).
So turning any animal into a raven is OK, but choosing the resulting bird at casting time is not.

Allowing more variance of the result in a single spell would quickly become saga specific.

IIRC the (ArM5 p.131) "small cape of raven feathers" to change into a raven is just there to allow the spell recipient to change back at will. It is not there to substitute the cape with robin feathers in the same spell to change into a robin instead.

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I think that "being defined in result" should instead be "not under control of the caster".

For example, I do think it would be ok to have a spell that changes any person into the land animal he has the greatest affinity for. A glutton might become a pig, a sly one a cat, someone humble and lacking initiative a sheep. Similarly, I do think it's ok to have the target become a random animal, as in Mists of Change.

That said, and for what it's worth, note that ArM5 Muto Corpus/Animal guidelines are almost identical to those of ArM4. And in ArM4 - specifically in the Mysteries, p.144 - there was a section with higher guidelines that allowed greater flexibility. So ... maybe one might resort to those?

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A few thoughts.

While there isn't any posted evidence that you can add magnitudes of flexibility to be able to change the final shape, there's some examples of it in other spells - usually creation spells (or craft spells). Personally, I don't see a problem with some level of flexibility with added magnitudes (To any canine, to any predator, to any Big Dumb Herd Beast). I don't like 'to any animal'.

With regards to the 'held item' to change end the spell prematurely, the examples are all in Muto Corpus, and the rules explaining why it works are also tied to Muto Corpus. It doesn't explicitly state that it has to be bound there, and there's a good implication that it could also be applied to Muto Animal to Animal. Seems fine. However, I think that you need to decide if you're going to use that rule as part of the spell design. If you have a formulaic spell to transform a human into a shark, and you cast it on your enemy on dry land, they'll have the same 'end early' options that your friend who's swimming will have. You shouldn't be able to change that on the fly.

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Extra complexity for flexibility in what the target is transformed into feels appropriate to me, although it would be nice for the guidelines to be clearer about that being a requirement.

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Does anyone have thoughts on the first example, where the base animal is also limited? Being able to narrowly target spells would be surprisingly useful on occasion.

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I don’t think targeting particular animals should be an issue and there is no reason to make is add magnitudes. For instance my canine-focused maga could create a spell to turn any other animal into a bird but would not get her focus when inventing it so she can limit it to work on dogs and wolves and now she does. I don’t think there is anything controversial about that.

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The question "Can I develop a spell that turns hares, and only hares, into hawks" has implications well beyond Muto spells. Ultimately, it's a question about whether one can in general create a supernatural effect that's more selective than what the guidelines and examples suggest. For example, a CrCO spell that only heals women, or a PeVi spell that (within a certain Realm) harms Chthonic spirits but no others.

A blanket "no" feels very restrictive, and creates problems for magi who want to take advantage of a narrow focus in developing spells and other magics, as nullsettings suggests. At the same time, a blanket "yes" creates a cheap way to detect stuff that should be hard to detect: cast a very low-level "pink dot" spell at a target and check for the dot - vastly extending the problem that already exists with demon-detection-via-demon's-eternal-oblivion.

This saw significant debate within my troupe. The consensus is that the rough general answer is: "Yes, you can restrict the target of a spell, but only if it provides only Limited Extra Discrimination (LED) barring some Intellego requisite". We tried various definitions of what constitutes LED, but it's hard to pin down precisely in a way that both is consistent and prevents problems. "Any simple, immediately perceivable property of the target (something that someone with 1xp in the appropriate skill(s) could perceive, if capable of perceiving the target)" seems a good starting point for LED. So, yes, you can have a spell that turns a hare into a hawk; but probably not something that turns a gyrfalcon between 2 and 3 years old into a hare.

There are still several problems though. First, there is the occasional Focus that is sufficiently specialized to provide more than LED, under any reasonable definition of LED. Almost every astrological Focus has this problem in some situations, for example. In this case, we decided that the lesser evil was simply to NOT allow effects restricted to such a Focus. So yes, either your Focus is simple, or often you won't be able to benefit from the Focus in the lab.

Another very problematic issue is: what if the potential target is extremely well-disguised as another, normally easy-to-detect target type? Say, a woman disguised as a man? Again, if you allow the simplest "pink-dot" magic to pierce the disguise, you are (somewhat) unbalancing the game and devaluing Intellego. But should you allow effective disguise to shift the applicability of magic? Well, we decided that the lesser evil was indeed to allow a sufficiently well-disguised woman to be targeted by Corpus spells restricted to men (before you cry "Essential Nature!" please note that a man who's been MuCoed into a cat can be affected by Animal spells, as per the Bjornaer chapter of HoH:MC).

I have to stress that in neither case the choice we finally made is completely satisfactory (or, in fact, completely clear - there are borderline cases in which it's still hard to make a ruling). But from our point of view it's the best that we could come up with. I would be very happy to hear others' opinions on this.

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Since core you have been able to restrict things a little or much further than the guidelines require with Muto. Look at these:

  • Growth of Creeping Things: The target can handle notably bigger Sizes than the listed -9 to which it is restricted. But the guidelines only says "a beast."
  • The Beast Remade: The guideline says "an animal" and this is restricted to "one land beast."
  • Steed of Vengeance: The guideline says "an animal" and this is restricted to "a horse."
  • Steed of Vesuvius (HP p.15): The guideline says "an animal" and this is restricted to "a horse."

The last two of these is particularly revealing. The spells only work on horses. That's a lot of restriction. Meanwhile, the one before them shows you can be somewhat but not nearly that restrictive. So things like limiting a spell to canines seem perfectly fitting.

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I don’t think there is any “detection” aspect to DEO. A room or structure variant merely harms what is there they are in no way required to reveal themselves or even react when it affects them. I might agree with you on the pink dot detection method you bring up but that is a whole other spell which is a way to detect demons if it is allowed but there it is a visual effect that uses said pink dot specifically to get around that Hermetic limit. They are also different in that the capital T Target as in RDT in DEO is the actual demon and the capital T Target for the pink dot is the species of the pink dot and not the demon.

EDIT: I’d have an issue with a Pillum of Fire that can only affect humans as well as the human is not the capital T Target of the spell.

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Since both spells result in specific types of horses, this is just a way of limiting the single designed spell by its result.

This may well be, because the animal's 'mind' needs to be able to get used to its new form.

EDIT:

Increasing the Size characteristic by 1 doubles the animal's weight (ArM5 p.39 box Size Examples), so causing an animal to grow to "four times its normal size" results in roughly 64 times its initial weight. That is not precisely a Size increase from -9 to +1 (the maximum size of an An individual) - but likely as as close as Hermetic magic comes to medieval computations.

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Even if it were actually turning it into a new animal rather than giving it some new qualities (which is what it says), it would be to turn a horse into such a special horse rather than any animal into a special horse, so we're still seeing that restriction on the Target.

It's the same guideline to do this for a fish or a bird.

First, what is that reference of yours? The "Size Examples" box is on p.192 for me, and it says nothing about doubling weight. But right below the box in mine it does say "An increase or decrease of three points of Size is approximately equivalent to a factor of ten change in size," under "Size."

Second, your math is way off. Each +1 Size is roughly x10^(1/3) mass, rounded to be nice as a repeating x2, x2.5, x2 pattern. So each +3 Size is roughly x10 mass. x64 weight would be between x50 and x100 weight, right? That would be about +6 to Size. Even if we use your x2, that's exactly +6 to Size. -9+6=1 is incorrect, not really even close.

Third, you're assuming this multiplier on "size" is one-dimensional length, which most favors your argument and still falls well short of your claim. But it could be the mass is multiplied by that much, which is closer to what we see in other growth without extra magnitudes thrown in. In the real world, when we say one person or animal is twice the size of another, which of those is our standard interpretation?

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What I am saying is that, in theory, Hermetic magic should not be able to detect demons.
But if you cast a sufficiently powerful DEO at what you suspect is a demon, and destroy it, you have effectively learnt it was a demon.

I view that as something of a problem, in that you are learning a property of your target not through Intellego, but by seeing if it's affected by a spell with a completely different effect - even for a target on which Intellego does not work! This is related to Ovarwa's proposal on the "occlusion of realm identity" - if you can't selectively destroy demons, and instead your PeVi magics equally affect demons, angels, faeries etc., then the identity of demons is truly concealed from Hermetic investigation.

Allowing one to create a "pink dot" spell that's restricted to an arbitrarily narrow type of target ("people who want to harm my Covenant") produces the same problem. Of course, probably no one would come up with such a spell, but you can see that there's a continuum there from implausably informative targets to hares. At some point you'll have to draw a line, and stuff immediately on either side of the line will be problematic.

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The ArM5 p.119 spell Steed of Vengeance is based on the p.118 box level 15 guideline "change an animal in a major unnatural way (for example give horse claws, fangs and scaly armored skin)". So for this guideline the spell target is a specific animal (here a horse) already, and the guideline demands to change something specific from that horse - just as the spell does.

The ArM5 p.118 box level 10 guideline does not specify, though, that the animal really can adapt to the change performed, The spell (ArM5 p.119) however, states, that "the beast is disoriented for a while before it becomes used to its new body." That is unlikely to work for a fish, and might well fail with a bird.

The source is indeed not ArM5 p.39 box Size Examples, but HoH:MC p.39 box Size Examples. Sorry. So your table is off HoH:MC Size Examples somewhat, and the spell's computation is off again - but roughly in the ballpark. More you can't expect from a rough "four times its normal size".

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So an invisible/spiritual demon is in a space with an item that casts a room or structure PeVi spell that only affects "demons" (whatever we decide that to mean in this saga where the division of realms is occluded) it is completely destroyed by one casting or repeated ones and no longer exists. You jave learned nothing. Not even that it was there.

A demon in physical form is in a similar space, is affected, does not react except it chooses to leave. You have learned nothing.

The only way you learn anything, and at this point the Demon can't "lie" anymore, is if it is both physical and visible and destroyed. In which case you see it disappear. But the real reason for room and structure DEOs is for invisible/spiritual beings which you have trouble targeting.

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"Horse" is available for many of those guidelines that state "an animal." It should also be noted that guidelines that use "horse" for an example also have example spells that target animals generally, so we know such an example is definitely not a requirement of the guideline. The ones that don't list "horse" simply don't list anything. To read that that means "horse" cannot be used for "an animal" in the other (roughly) half of the guidelines doesn't not follow logically in the slightest.

So what guideline would you use to change a bird (an animal) into a human? The book certainly implies this guideline works with any animals since it applies to "an animal" without a stated restriction like there are in other spots and because it uses this as a general suggestion to change any animal Familiar into human form.

You might want to read it again. There is a typo with "a 1-point" v. "a 3-point" that I haven't checked to see if it has been fixed in the errata. But the pattern and the example show that that is what the typo is. That box says the pattern is x2, x5, x10, ... which is x2, x2x2.5, x2x2.5x2 that I was mentioning. So "my table" (really the core book's table) actually doesn't disagree. I think you're probably looking at the examples and confusing things falling in a certain range as forcing a different multiplier. Look at p.49 of RoP:F; that shows the range part of it more clearly. There you can also see the cube root of 10 more clearly, like in the cap going from 10 lb to 22 lb to 100 lb to 215 lb to 416 lb to 1000 lb... You don't have to just believe me; pull out a calculator and start trying 10^(1), 10^(4/3), 10^(5/3), ... and rounding them off.

Roughly in the ballpark? Really? You're saying x64 (which might only be x4) is roughly in the ballpark of x2000. We can't expect better than that? We see better than that repeatedly with size calculations in spells and with animals.

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Yes! That's what I have been saying all along. You cannot ascertain whether a being you encounter is a demon, or not, by Intellego. But you can do it by throwing a sufficiently powerful DEO at it.

I have never mentioned room and structure DEOs in this thread!

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But only if you kill it.

EDIT: So the DEO tells tou nothing, its death does and only if it is visible. This is an important distinction to me.

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Or if you throw at your damsel in distress something sufficient to annihilate Lucifer and she seductively bats her eyelashes at you :slight_smile: But let's not debate this further.

I hope my point was clear: I find it inelegant to allow a magus to learn if a target satisfies a certain condition (that might be hard or impossible to check through Intellego) by trying to affect said target with some other, unrelated magic, but one restricted to targets satisfying that condition.

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