Need help with Imaginem spell design

Games Discussion Ars Magica
1

Hi there,

We are currently playing a very low level Ars Magica (very early ages) so the mages are doing their best to create small magnitude spells to overcome the difficulties.

One of them wants to be able to look at a point in his vision range and be able to see all details like he would be there, to the point he would recognize faces, read a document, …

So I though a base 1 (use one sense at distance), range: sight, target: Ind would be enough (overall InIm 5 in concentration)

But is the target correct. We are asking this because the arcane version (summoning the distant image) is using a room target … So with an target individual, would that mean that he would see his target and its surrounding or that he would be able to use his sense like he would be sitting at this target point and be able to turn around / move at a slow pace.

Any help / suggestion / critic is welcome.

Thxs in advance

2

Look up Eyes of the Eagle, or Summoning the Distant Image, both ImIg 25, in the main book. They’re similar to what you’re asking about.

3

Indeed but none of those spells fit the need.

Eye of the eagle is enhancing the sense to see very clearly very far. It doesn t change your point of view and is too high level.

Summoning the distant image was our original idea but the room target makes it impossible to use in open space.

4

Your spell is correct. However, it will only allow you to use one sense (my guess would be sight) and you still need to be able to see at least part of the target. Moreover, if there is not enough light, the spell will only allow you to see as the target is illuminated.

5

The guideline is “Use one sense at a distance.” The Target in this case is the sense, not the thing being sensed.

This is a common problem of confusion with Target which is a spell parameter telling you what the magic is affecting, and target which is what people usually call the thing that the spell is pointed at. The spell is affecting where the Target sense is collecting its sensory species; it doesn’t matter one whit what those sensory species are being emmitted from. If he wants to see a distant person he’s not casting a spell on that person (and doesn’t need to Penetrate any Magic Resistance they have); he’s casting a spell on his sense of sight to move it to where that person is at.

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6

I disagree with the “easy” interpretation. It makes T:Vision meaningless.

  • If you T:Ind, you can only see the Target.
  • It works for T:Room because the Target includes all its content.
  • There’s no way to see the surroundings without +4 Vision, and even then you can only see what you can see.

If you want to go another direction, make obstacles invisible using MuTe10 A Window Of Singular Direction from HoH:TL p 141.

7

Target: Vision is there for the reason that the Magical Senses description says: to “grant magical senses to a person.” Range for a Magical Sense is the range to the Target whose sense is being affected.

Limiting the “Use X senses at a distance” guidelines to only using the Magical Senses Target makes most of them useful: what happens when you use 4 senses at a distance with the Taste Target?

8

You see, hear, smell, and taste the target of your spell. Whether it’s a book, a cat, or a cobbler.

9

Thanks for those feedbacks. But if I need to use a target Vision to use my sight at distance, why is the “summoning the distant image” uses a target Room and not Vision?

10

Because the only thing you see is your target. When you T:Room, you see the entirety of the room, including its content.

If there is no enclosed space and you have time to prepare, you could use T:Circle / D:Ring to get a "container" and spy whatever happens inside later on. As long as nobody damages the ring, that is.

11

Looking at “prying Eye”, the magi touches a wall of a room and can see inside because of target room. Make the range sight, and remove room, same level.

I can see the appeal of the spell. Say there is a hill, the magi can put their vision at the top off the hill and see further. The reading a document, if the document is within sight range, great. Good for espionage.

Unlike prying eye, I think the sight location would be fixed at time of casting. Target ind, not room. I would consider a magi would need a rego requisite and an extra level to be able to move where the eyesight is relocated to during the spell. Obviously one could just recast. It is level 5 after all.

12

No, that is not how Sensory Targets work. The only sense affected would is the targeted sense – Taste, in this case. So, you would taste what can be seen, heard, tasted, etc at a distance. The book, cat, or cobbler is not the spell’s Target – your sense of Taste is the target. It’s synesthesia magic per HoH:S.

If you have to use Target: Vision if you want to scry something at Sight range then it makes scrying inexplicably weird. If you want to eavesdrop on people that you can see having a conversation but who are out of hearing range you’d need to “use Hearing at a distance” + Target: Vision… and you wouldn’t hear what they are saying, you would see it. In some freaky synesthetic visual interpretation of the words. Adding additional senses at a distance only makes it weirder – all the information is coming through your Targeted Sense.

Furthermore, it requires odd workarounds to scry at an Arcane Connection range. Arc Range + Target Vision gives a magical vision sense to someone that you have an Arcane Connection to; it doesn’t allow you to scry something that you have an Arcane Connection to. You’d need an Intangible Tunnel, or one of the oddball Intellego guidelines like InAq 2 “get an image of water within range.”

13

That wasn't my answer. I'm sorry if I was too zen-like in my poetic subtlety.

Q: If you don't use Sensory target, "what happens when you use 4 senses at a distance"?
A: You see, hear, smell, and taste the target of your spell. Whether it’s a book, a cat, or a cobbler.

By using strike-through, I was trying to show how "Use X senses at a distance" works without duplicating Magical Senses.

14

Which is also incorrect. The Target of a “use X senses at a distance” spell is your senses. They’re Imaginem spells; they affect sensory species, not books, cats, or cobblers. If you “use Sight at a distance” to see a cat, you don’t have to Penetrate the cat’s Magic Resistance to see it – it’s not the Target of your spell… which is moving your perspective, not doing anything to the cat.

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15

Can you find spells that support your interpretation?

Serf's Parma, but all I see in the ArMDE are T:Room and T:Vision.

16

Hermetic magi seem weirdly obsessed about seeing around corners into rooms they’re not in. However, I have to admit that the few non-Sense Target InIm spells I can find target a thing and not the caster’s senses. One hesitates to use MoH examples so looking at The Brushstrokes Revealed from HoH:S targets the species within a Circle that you draw… and doesn’t memorize/perfect your memory or discern your own false images so it has to be using the InIm 1 “use a sense at a distance” guideline.

Traveler’s Foresight (MoH) is Road Range + Ind Target and apparently targets the nearest person on the road you’re on… which would imply that Sight R + Ind T allows you to see a person (and only that Ind) that you can see. And to see a distant location that you can see… you couldn’t, unless it’s enclosed enough to be a Room or you want a Boundary ritual. Sight of the Blossom, Ears of the Oak (MoH) seems to try to get around that by using Group Target to “see and hear what’s happening” but, eh, it’s MoH.

17

Pretty much my experience.

Gwidion spell is a nice counter-example. It manages to hear/see around from a bush of flowers. It's a creative use of the central rule of spell design even if MoH sometimes stretches the guidelines.

18

You might both be right. Depending on how the spell is designed, you can have as a Target your sense or the Thing you want to use your sense on.

If you Target your Sense and duplicate it to say see from the top of the mountain, you’ll see from that view point and wont need to penetrate to see what you see.

If you Target an individual at Sight range, You’ll be able to see that Individual (If the sense you’re using is sight), and only that individual and only if you penetrate.

W

19

I think the way to do this is genuinely unclear and your troupe will have to decide which model to follow.

The trouble is that having a spell that gives you unlimited range vision which isn’t centered on yourself falls between the cracks of the two ways intellego imaginem can work.

You gather info about the Target image (which can be at any range) with “using sense at a distance”, which is used almost in the sense of “probe an image at a distance”. That is, these spells follow the standard paradigm of “do technique to target of form”, with the targets being containers (room) filled with images.

Alternatively your Target is a sense that is created at range personal. You can create the sense at another range, but the rules automatically assume you give the sense to someone else then.

There are several possible more or less logical extensions from here.

First, some spells do what you want indirectly, so they could be taken as an upper limit of what the spell level should be. Image from the Wizard Torn is Re(In)Im 35 and allows you to see from the point of view of your image (and presumably hear, though it’s not explicit), and does this with a simple +1 intellego requisite. A variant of the spell with range sight that doesn’t project your voice and where your image is static (and you have to sit still to not break the spell) would be three magnitudes lower, i.e. Re(In)Im 20. It would still do more than what you want, because you don’t actually want to project your image presumably. At this point the spell also looks like an intellego imaginem spell with a rego requisite. Dropping a presumed +1 rego requisite gives level 15, but there is no official procedure for “flipping” a spell with requisites like that.

Then there are As Though a Plethron Distant from MoH and View from / Ears of the Mannequin from LoH. Both explicitly move your point of view somewhere else and do so with a special target based on Room +1 and (presumably) the use your sense at a distance InIm base. I think that’s not unreasonable in terms of the spell levels (Base 1 use a sense at a distance, +3 Sight, +1 concentration, +3 special target → Level 20) But I also find it inelegant to add another special rule given that the sense Targets are already a pretty unique special rule meant to deal with that.

Finally, we have Palm of Seeing / Hearing from TtA. These are R: Touch but are meant to be used with an Intangible Tunnel. They simply use the sense targets at a distance but the description says you can see/hear from the perspective of the target. It doesn’t say whether the target needs to have a mundane sense or whether you can target empty space. As I said above, a priori you’d expect those spells to give someone a sense, i.e. the location of the sense and the location of the person that receives the info are the same.

Which of these solutions or variants thereof is more desirable? Depends on your taste. Here is my approach and justification:

I think it is fair if this effect isn’t too hard (no +4 vision target) as it is something that you’d totally expect to have in Mythic Europe and Hermetic magic. The casually thrown in intellego requisites enabling it also support this is part of the canon. Prying eyes also mentions sense enhancements apply, implying that you do move your regular mundane sense to the target room. So if we use our normal senses, we don't use sense targets, so we have to find a way to use a regular target which can't be empty space.

(AFAIK there are no spells that target empty space directly - hence the special target for Plethron and friends - though there are many that do it with an "unofficial" second target, many creo combat spells, like Pilum of Fire, rego spells like Invisible Sling or teleportation spells. Hermetic Geometry could work but that's of course not helpful here.)

Senses work by detecting species, not images, so I think you can look out of the window of a Room target. The species coming in from outside are of the Form imaginem and you apply your intellego magic (in the form of moved mundane senses) to every imaginem target in the container. Now it doesn't automatically follow that we can see everything around a single image if we move our senses to such a target (at sight range or any other) as we are not applying the spell to a volume in that case.

But! All images shed species based on the kind of light that hits them. It can be colored light if it comes from a colored source or is emitted from a colored surface illuminated by another light source. This colored light from a surface is therefore intimately related to the species it carries, which means the species emitted by the next image that the colored light hits carry with them a faint impression of the other images around them. This is most evident in the camera obscura effect. Aristoteles already wrote about some of the related phenomena in the context of eclipses and the book of optics is available in 1220 in Mythic Europe. Similar things can be said about sound images as demonstrated by echoes.

All that is to say that with a sufficiently enhanced mundane sense, we could infer what the surroundings of an image look and sound like based on what species it gives off. Spells like the Eye of the Sage (InCo 30) allow just that with a simple imaginem requisite (though this is not consistent across guidelines). Therefore I argue that an enhanced mundane sense from a specialized spell can make much better use of this effect and see virtually everything visible/audible from the point of view of the target image.

Ergo, I’ll be using this spell:

SUMMONING THE DISTANT VIEW
InIm 15
R: Sight, D: Conc, T: Ind
You can see what is happening in a distant place within sight as if you were standing there. You cannot target empty space, but anything visible is a valid target, including clouds. This spell works by capturing the tiny patterns in the species the target image sheds, which contain faint impressions of other images because these emit colored light intimately related to the visual species of the other image.
Base 3 (Enhance one of your senses), +3 Sight, +1 Conc

20

This came up in a game recently. We have a biggish thing hiding in a river we want to find. Our magi has Merinita magic, so can choose road as a range.

We came up with the same range target issue. The problem I see is their are really two targets. One is the sense, and the other is where the sense is going, and RAW has problems with two distinct targets.

One should be able to cast the Intelligo Imaginem to affect someone else, so Touch, Voice, etc are logical targets, but yet, where does the sense go?

So we try a simple spell to move sight to, for the sake of an example, let us say the top of a tower the magi sees in the distance.

What range do we choose? It seems sight, as that is where we want the sense to travel to.
Duration? Concentration seems logical.
Target? Individual as the sight is owned by the individual.

If one asks, I want to cast this spell on my grog, is the target now touch? That is the problem. The targets are not useful that often. Yes, it is useful to be able to look in a room at a distance, look at a group of people at a distance, but a magi should not need such tethers to move their senses. Weirdly for these spells, I think a viable solution is the target should have an option of using range parameters also.

This way, Prying eye, change target “room” to road, sight, whatever, and it works.