Muto magic

Games Discussion Ars Magica
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Hello

I have a question that I need of your thoughts on. If my magus turnes pices of stone that where recently a part of a mountain into water with muto magic. And then pour it into a mould, what would happed when the spell wore off. Will it turn back into pices of stone or would it form into a solid block of stone. The question is some what related to the essential nature of the stone and how it relates to muto magic. Muto magic can´t after all make some lasting changes without the use of raw vis.

Either result would give interesting opportunities for a crafty magus or maga (read Verditius magus). If the pices of stone turnes into a solid block then the spell could be used to create exelent quality building blocks for a covenants house building or for sale, thus increasing the covenants profits.

If the stone turnes back into its original shape a remains as pices of stone then they could be used in mining. Use perdo magic to create a long thin hole and pour some liquid stone into it. When the water turns back into stone the mountain whould crack. The effect would be the same a the traditional mining method of heating with fire and cooling fast so the stone cracks. With this incresed speed mining method the covenant would rapidly increase it profits, less cost for fuel and less risks.

Awaiting your thoughts

/Max

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Here are a few thoughts from the last time that this came up.

https://forum.atlas-games.com/t/when-a-muto-effect-ends/468/1

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We use this in our saga.

The covenant operates a small tin mine. We take the stone that is usually discard as waste and liquefy it and pour it into a wooden mould. The mould holds it until it turns back to stone at which point we have large blocks of solid stone. These are then used in the covenants building projects (currently a large stone curtain wall).

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The answer is : whatever best serves the story. Ars Magica is story-driven, not rules driven.

If it makes a more interesting story for the rocks to somehow retain the essence of the mountain, then they should do so. Perhaps the form is that of the mould, but the spirit of the rock is still tied to the mountain from which it came? Part of your answer could lie in the skill of the magus performing the operation. Are the Terram and Aquam arts up to the task of transforming the rock in the manner you describe? Does the magus have any skill with moulds, stonework, or crafting? Was any vis used at all? Were the stones supernatural in some way?

It is up to the storyguide to come up with a creative and perhaps surprising response, not for the rules to decide. Different sagas could conceivably have wildly differing results to the work you describe.

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It's true that Ars Magica is a story driven game. But some parts of it are very rule mechanical. Like the rules for income and welth. This question has some story implications, like what is the eccence of a rock. But the part if it could generate income gets more mechanical.

Thanks for the insight

Max

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I agree with the rules bit, but not the income relation.

It is almost trivial to generate arbitrary amounts of mundane income with magic anyhow: the trick lies in generating the income in a manner that doesn't violate the letter or the spirit of the code, doesn't take too much time from the magi, doesn't arouse suspicion, and last but not least, isn't sinful. I am under the impression that the sin issue is mostly an effort/profit imbalance: if a trinket does all the work, you should not make much profit. However, interestingly enough, profiting from the work of other people seems ok. ,-)

(Creating value in any form magically, be it rocks to build with, superior cloth, medical assistance, golem labor, or whatever, should IMO be subject to same restrictions as creating silver: even if precedent doesn't exist, a Quesitor will probably get interested eventually. Since you would not be flaunting the letter of the Peripheral Code the penalty would probably be nominal, though.)

Back to manually working things under the influence of Muto:

I would say that the end-result is as-if similar motions were gone though with the original material, since Muto effects are fundamentally unnatural and impermanent: so stone transformed to clay could be shaped, and would retain its new form, but gravel would not be fused. Maybe a rule of thumb "if Rego could do it, then doing it by hand to the transformed form is permanent"?

Transforming one-to-many would cause (on expiry) a random individual of the "many" to revert to the original "one", while the rest would disappear. If the "many" had been manually altered then I would transform the full set of alterations back to the original as analogously as possible. Transforming many-to-one would cause the original "many" to reappear on expiry, with manual transformations applied as analogously as feasible.

I think I would allow a Perdo requisite for permanentizing the one-to-many, and Creo for permanentizing the many-to-one, though, so MuTe(Cr, Aq) could turn gravel into water that fuses into a single block of stone when the spell expires.

I don't think I can provide proper justification (with reference to canonical rules) for any of the above, though...

Cheers,

--d

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The rules (Arm5, p. 78) say it is okay (mechanically, not ethically of course) to turn a man into a fish and watch him suffocate. These changes are not undone when the spell ends. :confused:

But doesn't this make Mu kind of really powerful?
It can be used instead of:
-creo: creating something out of thin air is muto - or out of water, dirt, whatever...
Attack spells: MuAu - air into poison gas (which existed in the Middle Ages - read books on mining), or air into heat (suffocate + grill) or terram into poison gas (as long as the magus concentrates, saves burial costs)

  • You can recreate many intellego effects by changing say the loudness of a voice, the sharpness of an eye, the size of a far-away scene, the intensity of a smell. Or: why not turn the rock you wan to talk to into sth that is better at conversing (talking rocks are not silly: they are the key to the past because they make good witnesses)?

  • you can recreate many Perdo effects by changing something into thin air (or poison gas for that matter) and the rest by changing sth into sth vulnerable (knight to flower instead of knight to nil) and hurting it non-magically or magically (burning/trampling/ripping apart the flower, feeding some of it to a nearby cow - which may or may not explode when the spell ends!!!).

  • rego spells that shape things are easily mimicked - you want a block of wood to become a statue - change it into water and put it in a mould or change it into an apple and then into a statue: the only problem is: it's not permanent.
    And why would anyone want to move an object from A to B if he can change the old object into water and create a new object out of thin air?

  • the main province of muto is there on top: taking new shapes (for spying, fighting, traveling...), and tricking others

Is this munchkinism or real potential? I'm asking because I think Muto magic can feel very magical when used spontaneously.

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having played both muto and Perdo specialists I can tell you that Muto is powerful, but not overly so. The in game feel is that Muto has less hurt per score point potential the perdo does.

I would argue that the stone to water spell turns the stone to water, and while it is as water it acts as water would, so when poured into a mould it would take the form of the mould when the spell ends, the stone would reform as stone in it's new shape. For example if a spell turned a stone statue to sand, the stone statue would not move or alter unless some other force acted upon it. If the was no force then it would simply reform back into stone at spell end. If the wind blew the sand hither and fro, then where these changed specks of sand land, they would become stone again at the spells end.

Muto, may be powerful when used in clever ways, but muto has always struck me as quite 'tricksy' magic and such thought could be rewarded.

The spell guidelines for muto also make them higher then perdo.

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Throwing my two cents into the ring here, I feel like Muto should sorta work as follows:

Muto changes something in an unnatural way, such as turning a man into stone or gravel into water.

If you were to turn a single rock into water (equal size not mass), which you collect into a bucket, then pour the rock into a mold, these are all mundane processes akin to shaping clay or lighting a fire. The stone would fill the mold and then when the spell ends turn back into stone, whatever water was missed would turn back into some portion of the stone (of equal size to its time as water) outside the mold in its new shape. If the stone was turned into water and evaporated, you would be left with basically dust or sand as the stone cannot put itself back together. If you left the stone-turned-water as a puddle, unacted upon by any force (aka gravity, wind, etc) and a single whole, it would turn back into a stone in its current shape. This is how the spell that turns rock into clay would work. If you scooped off a chunk of clay, it would not magically move back onto the original rock.

But what if we changed something a bit more complex, such as a knight? A knights essential nature is that of a human, with a certain configuration and body plan and gender (bleh) and such. If I cast a spell to turn a human into stone (MuCo(Te)) in the shape of a pebble, this is violating his essential nature when the spell ends. Just like being a frog or mouse, he would turn back into a human, suffering wounds anytime the pebble was chipped or cracked. If I turned him into a stone statue in his likeness though, his shape has been untouched by magic. If I then broke off his arm, and then ended the spell, he'd be missing an arm, plain and simple. Muto has not affected his form, just like the viscid clay spell does not affect the rocks shape. If I were to turn him into a puddle of water and then separate a portion, that portion taken is akin to a wound, and while, unlike stone which has no specific shape it wants to return to, he could potentially turn back into a man (one laying in a weird position) from puddleification, that separated part would translate to a lost arm or a major gut wound or something. If I evaporated the puddle, Id get human mist.

So what of multiple to one or vice versa? Gravel poured in a bucket would mingle as gravel, and when you turn it into water the crushed stones would mingle terribly. Give the bucket a shake and undo, bam, a rock in a bucket. Turning a man into a pile of nametags though would likely require a creo requisite I feel, maybe a finesse roll. If said notecards were all taken home at the end of the day, they would reshape into neat little knight chunks (they would inflate and change shape because each nametag is an apporximation of a larger mass of flesh)

A whole kept together stays whole, a whole broken apart stays parts, the many turned into one stay together (if you mold clay together it becomes one hunk, why not water) (Verditius mages basically do this with their crafting from my understanding and it sticks around despite taking normally impossible shapes), the one turned many stays split apart unless still touching all parts.

This is all to say, turning a man into sand is a horrifying way to murder someone, and while a grog just dies when you shift about the sand and blend his human form, a magi should get some kinda resistance roll because they are magical, and because its more interesting and requires you to skip the easy way. So, keep being a good sodales, dont forget parma magica, and hope you arent murdered in one of a number of increasingly terrifying ways such as mixing you and another magi into a puddle and watching the resulting monstrosity form (or watching it turn back into two men hugging).

Opinions and suggestions welcome.

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There are a few things I could see being clarified, like whether a man becomes an equal amount of something or a similar shape of something. A rock turned into equal mass of water becomes much larger and would shrink down as the spell ends into a smaller size (but equal mass) of stone

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As I understand it, changing the shape of an object with Muto magic is always impermanent, because you are changing it's qualities in ways it can't change naturally. The same goes for alterations to substance, for example altering malleability, or density, but what you do while the substance is altered is permanent, so a stone turned as dense as flame would rise into the sphere of fire if the spell lasted long enough, then fall naturally, and if you turn someone into clay, you could mold their flesh and they would stay like that when they turned back, though they might heal eventually. Or die immediately because they no longer have veins.

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This one is an interesting question.
Say we turn a human into clay and have an expert artist take away and sculpt some stomach fat to give washboard abs, and use the extra clay/flesh to give them an extra inch in height.

Is their essential nature strong enough, that as the clay is a mostly human shape, when it transforms back the person has connected muscles, tissues, etc, or do they have a bleeding gut wound and flesh which will rot and die attached to the legs?

I don't believe there is a canonical answer. I'm happy to be corrected though. I haven't read all published 5E material. It is up to the SG.

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This honestly is the most fun way to perform plastic surgery I can think of, and while it would require two people, could be used to make genuinely real disguises which would be fun. Alas, IDK how far this would stretch beyond minor alterations like an inch or two of height or washboard abs.

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I think that the most robust way to rule on this is to say that the person turns back into the fat, short, healthy person he was before, regardless of how the clay has been manipulated (at least if most of the clay is together when the spell ends). This prevents a lot of abuse, and is consistent both with the nature of Muto as impermanent change orthogonal to both Creo and Perdo, and with spells like Transform to Water (ArM5 pp.131-132).

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I consider Transform to Water, as part of the spell description is the target maintains coherence, that is part of the spell, so it is a little different. Even with that original caveat, I consider the best interpretation is the one you've suggested. If most of the original transformed material is close enough, essential nature, and the nature of magic, means at the end of the spell, the target conforms as close as reasonable to the essential nature of the target.

As you mentioned, the abuse would be high.
Someone has a horrible wound. Turn person to clay, patch up everything. A Muto corpus (admittedly level 40) spell has achieved a CrCo effect that would cost 6 vis.
It would also allow the correction of in game flaws.
Lost a limb? Do a a binge eating run. Build up the extra weight needed. Clay sculpt an arm from the excess flesh, fixed.

It would be entertaining though, to allow the other interpretation. I am certain a magi would become a finesse master and learn a bunch of Muto Corpus and sell their skills. Large parts of the order of Hermes look like Adonis and Aphrodite. :slight_smile:

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Now that I think about it, there is a balance issue with the ruling above. Suppose you turn a healthy grog into a bear, then have it fight for you and get wounded in the process. The wounds suffered by the bear should not be healed when the shapeshifting magic ends.

Hmm. So intuitively, I'd want the target of Muto magics to retain at least some changes wrought onto it even after the Muto expires. But I'd still not want a man turned briefly into water by D:Mom spell, to collapse under his own weight and immediately reform into a puddle of blood and flesh.

Hmmm again. I guess I'd say a bit handwavingly that when you change a target into a new form with Muto, actions taken onto it should "map" in some mythically appropriate way on the old form once the magic expires. By and large, forms very susceptible to alteration such as water or sand will see virtually all change done to them undone when the magic expires, because such change is nothing to them. Clay can be "massaged" into a new shape easily, so any change wrought that way will be undone when the magic expires.. But if you change a man to stone or glass, and then shatter it, the reformed man will stay shattered.

Hmmm yet again. This is a tricky issue.

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When I have to handle Muto spells, I look at the end-goal of the spell to assign the base level.
For example, a spell that would turn a person into a puddle of water, with Mom duration, with the intent to kill the person would be handled like a Pe(Mu) Co(Aq), selecting the highest base level between killing a person (base 30) and turning a man into water (base 30), which just happened to be the same, then add +1 for the requisit (Pe), no addition for Aquam requisit since it is part of the guideline, +1 touch, Ind, Mom. For a final Pe(Mu)Co(Aq) 40 - Washing away my Enemy.
And to make the comparison with a spell that would not have the Perdo requisit, yet with Mom duration, such spell could allow to dodge an incoming attack or quickly sneak under a door since Momentary duration can last up to a round. Or could allow to strip naked a target from his cloth: his body turns into water, slides out of his clothes/armor, dropping whatever was held in his hand, then reforms a few seconds later, disoriented from the change and temporarily disarmed and without any protection. Both spells have their uses.

If a Muto spell would be used to improve somebody conditions, like make it stronger, more handsome, I will then use again the Creo Corpus guideline to improve stat, add the +1 modifier for Muto requisit and will allow the spell to not only improve the characteristic of the target, but also change his/her appearance as long as he/she can still be recognized. Changing permanently his appearance would be altering his nature, so such change would not be permanent.

In general, Formulaic spells are designed with a very specific intend in mind and do not allow much variation in their use, so a spell used to turn somebody into water so they can sneak around unnoticed cannot become suddenly a instant-kill spell: it has not be designed with this intent. Sure, one can see how turning somebody into water could/should be lethal, but only as long as it has been designed with this intent. Once the intent is clarified, it becomes easier to assign proper base level and add, if necessary, requisit.

The issue that can arise with such Muto spell is what happen if the body-turned-into-another-element is no more complete: I will assign a wound depending on how much mass is missing, or how far are the missing bits, which could possibly lead to death.
So if a spell is used to turn a target into water (to allow sneaking away), but people take special actions to collect this water body and keep it into several separated jars, yes, the target will likely die. Not because of the spell itself but because of the action taken to "kill water". The same way, a grog turned into bear and killed in bear-form will remain dead.

That's the way I found convenient (= easy to adjudicate spell level) and consistent with my reading of the rules.

And you will notice that I say "my reading of the rules", and not "how it was intentionally written", as I don't want to speak on behalf of the authors nor pretend to have a better understanding of the rules or the authors' intents.

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I disagree with your interpretation of how this would work. I wasn't necessarily talking about turning someone into clay, but giving their flesh the malleability of it, though turning it into clay would be one way to do so. And if you do turn someone into clay and mold the edges together, the wound wouldn't be healed, the flesh would be fused incorrectly and mangled, if you take fat from elsewhere on the body and sculpt it into an arm, congratulations, you have an arm made of fat, no muscle or bone or skin. Carve an overweight person washboard abs, you're cutting the outer layers of the body away, leaving something in the shape of abs in place.

It would take either extreme skill with sculpting, or very high finesse to accomplish the task with magic, without making a mess of the veins and the organs and what goes where. The spell to turn them into clay would likely need to make either parts of the body into other things, or at least different colors of clay, so you could differentiate between skin and bone and muscle. Either way, while this could aid the healing of a wound, it would still take medical skill, or craft magic, and I can only imagine how much time it would take to construct an anatomically accurate model of a living human being to scale out of clay, without mixing the different parts of the clay up horribly.

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As an evil-minded SG I might ask - "Does the human get turned into a pile of undifferentiated clay, or does the clay retain the shape of the original human external and internal? Just as the clay portrays individual eyelashes and skin pores, are there not hollows for lungs and stomach and what not, and density patterns matching bone structure and arteries? Do you really want to mess with that?"

EDIT: At this point you let the PCs have a metagaming confab and see if they can come up with a scheme that gets around that. If so, more power to them.

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Given that the effect level of Muto effects that target human beings is so high, spells that turn people into rocks or water are basically of the level that instantly kills people. So turning someone into a clay statue, smoothing them flat (manually), and when the spell ends you've got a human corpse pancake. It's a suboptimal way of killing people.

So turning rock into water, filling a form and having stone blocks at the end of it should work just fine - unless you design the spell to do otherwise (returning to original form when it ends).

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