I'm not saying your opinion is wrong, but I will say your point of argument is pretty bad. MuHe to make a tree able to move clearly doesn't make the tree teleport back to its original spot or undo injury and damage the moving tree did; There's no Muto effect in the tree's location or the damage done to others. It's all circumstantial or tangential.
Now, if your example is MuHe(Co) to turn a tree into a person, if you chop off their arms, do they turn back to branches when the spell ends? If I MuHe(An) a shrubbery into sheep, can I shear the wool off them and keep the wool after the spell ends? That's a much more relevant question to answer.
I'm not going to get into the Immortal Soul question of it, as that's entirely your troupe deciding if you can 'create' a soulless human with magic-sex.
The thing is, in the platonician ideal of forms (if I understand correctly), the wool is still part of the sheep. But an infant born is no longer part of his father nor mother.
The question would better be : if you use the wool to make a jacket, then the spell end, does the jacket revert to bushes ? Since the idea of "jacket" exist in perfection, and this incarnation is an exemple of it, maybe it is, after all, a jacket, with nothing to do with the wool from the sheep.
I dont see why it would be soulless. If this magic works, the child has a soul, because it is not born of magic directly !
Yes, it does. Muto has very little to do with the Platonic "perfection" (that is the realm of Creo magic). Muto cannot induce permanent change to the nature of the item it transforms.
So the wool isn't really wool. It is part of a transformed shrub. When the Muto spell ends, it reverts to its true nature, meaning a piece of shrub.
actually both are relevant- if the wool remains wool then the woman can stop being a man, but if only the jacket survives then she must remain a man until the "jacket" (i.e. child) is complete.
However I recall, but don't know where, that a person transformed into a cow and milked produces milk which remains after the cow reverts to human, which suggests that the answer is that the semen remains semen.
You may be thinking of the Creo section of ArM5 p.77 (emphasis mine):
Magically created things last for the duration of the spell, but their effects last indefinitely. Thus, the footprints of a magically created horse do not vanish, nor does its dung, if it was fed on mundane food. If a magically created horse was fed on mundane food for a year, it would leave a mundane corpse when the spell expired, as the mundane food has been converted into mundane body.
Taking into consideration the bunch of similar spells that turn you into a mist, water, etc. I would say that unless you are having severe damage caused to the main body of your new form, nothing permanent would be sustained when you revert back to human form. Now, if someone tossed a ball of abysmal flame, multicasted, to that tree...well the consequences might be more unforgiving.
About the sheep & wool example, I would not let that happen, unless you somehow spend raw Vis for the spell, of course, not for any other reason in particular than just to discourage infinite loops.
So, maybe if the woman turn into a man for some time, ingesting food and water, her male semen would be real and thus able to impregnate another woman ?
My exemple of wool was not perfect. A child is not a part of a transformed semen like the wool is a transformed shrub, especially if the child is born. Or is it ?
Yes, magi mutating thing for instant harvest seems stupid. I can totally agree if the "Muto" woman to man turn to be a Mu(Cr)Co ritual with vis requisit.
So the most important question is, “How important to your player is this; and, how much time and effort in the story do they want to devote to it?”
If it’s something that they want to make a major character goal out of, then a breakthrough might be reasonable. (Or you could encourage them to find some faerie or something that can help.)
But if this is just a side thing so that they can have children conveniently while pursuing other goals, just allow them to cast a Muto spell that lasts long enough for a child to be conceived and move on. Don’t linger on something the player doesn’t find super important.
Now, a lot of people on the forum like to talk weird philosophy, which is fun, but I also find lots of people want to make every little thing incredibly difficult. I’m not sure why, but most questions about how to do things end up drifting in a direction of:
“No you cant,” or “It’s going to require a breakthrough/high finesse/etc,” or “Here’s how to monkey’s paw this in a really unpleasant way.”
If you as the storyguide are interested in putting forward some complications, consider having a faerie or two show up to try and encourage the maga’s children to become heroes. After all, a “person of two women born,” is an unusual enough heritage in time period as to attract the attention of hero creating faeries.
It’s like Heimdall, but smaller.
This still means there’s complications, but not in a way that feels like a punishment for trying.
This came up in my game, I ruled that changing genders via magic rendered you infertile, due to the limit of essential nature. The PCs solved a quest by creating a ring that changed a transvestite male-to-female into a true woman.
There are many ways to argue this, as we are seeing.
Based on that level 70 CrCo ritual for creating a human, and its predecessors in earlier editions, I suspect that if someone tried this in a saga run by the original AM authors, you would indeed induce fertility of a sort and manage to create a human, after adding whatever magnitudes were needed for spell complexity, etc:
The child would indeed be human, from the perspective of Corpus, but would be a soulless thing! Hermetic Magi cannot force God to ensoul their vainglorious creations. Magi cannot ensoul anything on their own. Worse, magi have no way to detect a soul. And worst of all, clearly the most fun thing to do is have these children seem normal, at least at first, while mysterious bad events accumulate into utter calamity. Because that's what always happens, and a good GM tries to give players the kind of rousing story they are begging for.
And if they wouldn't do it (though I'm pretty darned sure they would), I certainly would, after warning the players that other magi have tried but none have boasted about their success, and that this corner of magic has a way of getting out of hand.
Yeah, I know, story matters first ! If im here, it is because of some nerdy curiosity of what you think on the subject. Since I (im not the SG, im just the-guy-who-know-the-rule-and-read-english-and-posses-nearly-all-the-books, so, in the end, im not in charge of the actual story and problem who arise) dont want this "child thing" to take too much space, it will be a "yes you can" or "no you cannot"...maybe my SG will think of some nice consequences after, but we are already in many things, so...
I totally agree. AM is a game of power. Magic can change the world, destroy realms, wreak havoc and you can breach the limit of magic every half century... A troupe and a SG can slow the advance, but ultimately, you dont play AM to be a level 1 adventurer threatened by goblins. It is a total metagame, for you play with the boundaries of the game while playing it.
I went under the assumption that your biological gender is part of your true nature. Transformations aren't permanent, so the man's true nature wasn't changed. Men don't naturally have babies, so if transformed into a woman can't have babies. And vica versa, a woman transformed into a man can't father children.
My group felt that was fair and it met our needs at the table. (No one had a philosophy background.)
If you aren't too picky, demons are souls that would be perfectly willing to inhabit that living body you have just made...
or you can appeal to a saint for a miracle...
Interestingly, The Girdle of Change (Mythic Locations, p.108) uses the same guideline as The Succubus's Trick and The Incubus's Trick, and none of the three say they actually change the sex of the person. The latter two cause the "caster to adopt male [or female] physical characteristics." The former one only "changes the apparent sex" of the target. While this doesn't say anything specifically, it does seem to suggest the sex doesn't actually change, which would have implications here.
Meanwhile, look what Persona (HoH:S p.89) says: "These changes are total, proof even to the most intimate mundane scrutiny, but do not change the character’s essential nature. Consequently, all Characteristic scores remain unchanged, Virtues and Flaws are transferred to all new forms, and a male character cannot become pregnant when adopting the persona of a woman."
So canon does specify that due to essential nature a male cannot become pregnant even with a total change into a woman. I have seen no such solid statement the other way around, that a woman cannot impregnate just because she's shifted into a male body. However, I would not assume that would work considering the statement about a male character.
You might well be able to pull off a succubus/incubus thing using Hermetic magic, though.
cannon definition of Muto also indicates that somethings essential nature cannot be changed, but can be masked by adding new temporary essential traits. Now whether "can bear children" or "can engender children" is a trait that can be added or not- it feels like it might be excluded, specifically because these are things that require a breakthrough to accomplish directly through creo magic. rego is less explicit...
My point with the statement in Persona is that the rules are saying that even a perfect masking of gender is insufficient to allow pregnancy if it hasn't changed essential nature. The rules specifically state this is a consequence of the essential nature not being changed. Meanwhile, the rules also specifically say Hermetic magic cannot change essential nature. So we know for sure that Hermetic magic cannot change a man into a woman and allow that person to become pregnant, even if the spell lasts plenty long enough to give birth.
That's a fair assumption.
Altough Persona is not Hermatical Muto, but supernatural Virtue. Then, since Muto can add or remove temporary essential traits, "can bear children" or "can engender children" could still be possible with muto and not persona.
The more I think of the question, the less I can decide
