We all know about some of the early magi of the Order and some founders being specialized in one element (Flambeau, Guernicus, that Tempestaria girl...). Well, I would like to create such characters.
Maybe it is me, and I do not see how to do it with the Elementalist rules of HMRE, but the elementalists there cannot hope to compare to Flambeau or the myths of Guernicus IMO. Is there any tradition that amasses similar spellcasting skills as these figures before they joined the order?
The reason why I am asking is because we have a potential project (apart from our hedgie saga, still in the building phase) of replaying the war against Dav'nalleus in full. We already have one player looking with a wolfish grin when she thinks about playing Pralix. Pre-hermetic traditions would be at the order of the day, and I am not even sure that Ignes Festi was 100% hermetic either (Pralix will be a spirit master for sure).
So, ranting off: How would you model Flambeau, Guernicus, or other powerful non-hermetic elementalists in ArM5?
Would you mind to run the maths for me? I have tried to create a flambeau-ish character using the elementalists, and failed every single time.
IIRC it is explicitly stated that Guernicus was a madter of Terram magics, even if he had a mercurian background. Isn't it?
Virtue elemetalist Fire. Summoning (Phililosophiae) Improved Characteristic, Great Staminax2 Just to get the Stamina 5
Elementalist Fire is a diffcult art so we will give the Flambeau a 8 in that and say 30 in summoning So he could summon a size 15 fire with that and a size 18 with an aura or roll above 2. Could make some impressive fire balls, pillars of flame and what not. Size 18 is a city size flame.
Marko can kick in and give me pointers but that should be some impressive fire spells.
but is said all his spells were Mercurian spells that one person could cast. He had the books to summon volcanoes and earthquakes but did not have the number of Magi to cast them. I can only guess that low level Mercrian spells just burned vis all the time.
I'm away from my books at the moment so I can't comment on Flambeau's lineage, but I distinctly remember that Guernicus was a member of the Cult of Terra and which is described elsewhere as an offshoot of the Cult of Mercury.
Ultimately, while I like the Elementalist Magic system presented in HMRE, I think it's a relatively poor fit for the sorts of magic Flambeau and Guernicus are described as performing in their respective HoH chapters which would no doubt be closer to the 38 great rituals the Cult of Mercury is described as knowing in various other 5E Ars Magica supplements.
That was my impression as well. In HOH:S in fact it tells how flambeau performed arcane experimentation to convert a Mercurian cantrip to light candles to turn it into the first version of POF in the history of the OoH. That does not seem to be very possible for an elementalist.
As far as I can see it, an elementalist summons a fire in his summoning circle/item. The fire has (or not) a Might score that will be used for penetration. If he summons a fire that has no might at all he can summon quite a large fire. If the fire has a Might score, it is effectively an elemental.
After summoning the fire he can control it to do stuff. I guess we can assume that the summoned fire will NOT need anything to sustain it. Otherwise it is quite pointless to summon a castle-sized fire since it will disperse very fast. OK, let's assume he can put the castle size fire in a bottle (quite a stretch again) for transportation.
Now he goes around and when he goes to battle with his overlord he unleashes the fire and controls it to jump from enemy to enemy. How does that work?
Is a one shot spell or can he keep controlling it without the fire diminishing in power? (like Pyro, the X-men enemy character)
At what rate does it degrade?
Or does the flame NEED to have a Might score (be an elemental?).
You are thinking of the Thurgery ( sp?) part which is summoning elementals. Phililosophiae summoning is like CrIg but it will also summon animals that are choleric aligned ( predators and fast land animals). You would have to add Control(Phililosophiae ) If you wanted to control the fire as well. Phililosophiae is dealing with natural things.
The Elementalist from HMRE are gnostic in their background so they would not fit with the Mercurian background of most founders. We can only guess what non-ritual or small ritual mercurian magic was like. As I said, I think it burned vis for all spells.
The summoning rules are far from clear cut in what you summon IMO. And in case the elementalist (philosophic) summons fire in its pure form, what about the other questions?
Assuming I summoned a CrIg "city size" spell:
1- Does the fire need fuel to be stored? (besides the fatigue level)
2- Can be used only once for a single spell regardless of it being "light a candle" or "incinerate Paris"?
3- Can be used repeatedly to cast smaller spells? (POF 1, POF 2, AoFR, POF3...)
4- Cab be used repeatedly with its full power? (incinerate paris & return to bottle, jump to london & return to bottle, jump to toledo & return to bottle...)
5- Does leaving the container to do the elementalist's bidding mean that the elementalist loses control over the fire?
6- If 3 is correct, how much fire do you use in a POF or BOAF? Not very relevant for a city-size spell, but relevant if you only have a house-size fire or a bonfire stored.
I am trying to understand how this works, but as I said, I keep botching my comprehension roll. Dunno if I can summon a great fire once per decade and work from there or need to keep replenishing the container after each single spell cast. I think that my first blunt encounter with Elementalists in HMRE (I was hoping for something else) left me somewhat dazzed when it comes to read them, since I tend to have lots of fun tinkering with the diverse hedge traditions and experimenting with them.
Using the Summoning(Phililosophiae ) fire as a PoF can be done much like the CrIg version. The spell is to summon a jet of flame of say size 1. That only requires a roll of 10( guessing here) and does +5 damage. The damage may be increased without increasing the size by using the extra power. So a +20 damage would require a roll of 25 but the size is still +1. Again this is not control. There is no jumping it into a container or uncorking the bottle. Most of the Elemental Summoning and Control parts of HMRE deals with the Thurgery aspect because that is much different than Hermatic magic.
Look at your questions and ask them as if dealing with a normal fire.
1- Does the fire need fuel to be stored? (besides the fatigue level) Yes. it is normal fire.
2- Can be used only once for a single spell regardless of it being "light a candle" or "incinerate Paris"? Yes. See Above example
3- Can be used repeatedly to cast smaller spells? (POF 1, POF 2, AoFR, POF3...) Yes. By spending fatigue.
4- Cab be used repeatedly with its full power? (incinerate paris & return to bottle, jump to london & return to bottle, jump to toledo & return to bottle...)Yes. By spending fatigue.
5- Does leaving the container to do the elementalist's bidding mean that the elementalist loses control over the fire? There is no container. There is only fire. So no.
6- If 3 is correct, how much fire do you use in a POF or BOAF? Not very relevant for a city-size spell, but relevant if you only have a house-size fire or a bonfire stored. Answered above ( I hope)
Again this is totally from my memory without HMRE to refer to. I reserve the right to call BS on myself when I look at the book.
PS I have a Ex Misc Beastmaster using Control (Phililosophiae ) in Canaries are Dying on this board. They are at once more powerful and less powerful than the Beastmaster given in HoH:S. I just have Control so I must see the animal or it must be in range of my voice to give it a command. But I can give commands to any animal that has the Choleric trait. So any predator and fast land animals. I can not summon them because I did not take the Summoning power. As a side, He can also control normal fire. Dimming it, making it grown and having it hop around. We shall see how it works out.
Hmm... I did a reading of the summoning rules yesterday night and I do not recall this methodology.
IIRC it mentions explicitly that the summoning takes AT LEAST several minutes (and usually several hours), so summoning round after round to cast POFs around you is not a real option since a one-round invocation is not an option. The rules mention the option to store the element. Storing wind (need a really large container to store a whirlwind) or fire (fuel) is complicated. Same for water and earth if the container needs to be able to store their real-world volume for later use. unless your container is a mountain valley, that is. In practical terms it means that without the medium already being there to be controlled Elementalists just create lakes, fill caves, create hurricanes or burn villages with their summoning powers. The container bit of the rules seems somewhat pointless then... Unless if you consider a Parisian inferno to be a "contained fire".... :mrgreen:
Part of my confusion (I guess) comes from the fact that the 3 types of elementalist methods are mixed together, so it is not clear to me what part refers to each tradition. A magically summoned fire (philosophiae) needs fuel but a fire elemental (theurgy) does not. I am not sure I would agree with that right away...
Exactly what I said several weeks ago when I asked some questions about Control. The magic table seems to be the Summoning table for the amount of material/animals you can summon. It is used the same for control. At least that is what I was told. HMRE Elementalist should just refine some vis like good little hedgeies and stay out of the way
After having a quick look at the book over lunch, I can say that I am right about everything except the time it takes to cast. The part about increasing the damage is in the Phililosophiae section of the Summoning rules. It is confusing when it goes on about summoning into a container but I think that really deals with the Thurgery aspect of summoning.
1- Does the fire need fuel to be stored? (besides the fatigue level) Yes. it is normal fire.
2- Can be used only once for a single spell regardless of it being "light a candle" or "incinerate Paris"? I must ask...by only meaning all or nothing? I think you can summon any flame from a small candle to burning Paris.
3- Can be used repeatedly to cast smaller spells? (POF 1, POF 2, AoFR, POF3...) Yes. By spending fatigue and time
4- Cab be used repeatedly with its full power? (incinerate paris & return to bottle, jump to london & return to bottle, jump to toledo & return to bottle...)Yes. By spending fatigue but no bottle.
5- Does leaving the container to do the elementalist's bidding mean that the elementalist loses control over the fire? There is no container. There is only fire. So no.
6- If 3 is correct, how much fire do you use in a POF or BOAF? Not very relevant for a city-size spell, but relevant if you only have a house-size fire or a bonfire stored. Answered above ( I hope)
The second question was related to the statement "I summon a fire of city size" before the battery of questions the question was related to my idea of the elementalist storing the city-size fire in a container and then drawing it out bit by bit to power effects. Seems this does not work with Philosophical elementalism, so the question was incorrect in the first place
Seems like a philosophical fire elementalist is a really bad choice for a combat magus then. I was hoping to be able to use these as the basis for early pre-hermetic fire magicians, from traditions similar to those of flambeau, but it sounds like a realy really bad choice to try to model that. Thanks for taking the time to clear this up for me.
My own take on the issue (which I don't make any claim is explicitly or even particularly implicitly supported anywhere) is that Bonisagus developed Hermetic magic primarily from Mercurian magic, and in particular developed the Ignem form in close collaboration with Flambeau, and the Terram form in close collaboration with Guernicus. Therefore, whilst by no means identical (I'd have questions over the "Techniques" in particular), Flambeau and Guernicus' magic in their respective areas of speciality probably weren't that different to Hermetic Ignem and Terram.
Actually, I'm not so sure now. Erik Dahl once described using high (Philosophical) Summoning to trap powerful winds or huge blazes within frangible containers for use as grenades which would work OK, but would seem to be costly in terms of both time and Fatigue.
But, it also got me thinking about Aeolus who was said to keep the Winds stored in a bag. Consider then an Elementalist who uses her Summon to conjure a powerful wind into such a container and carries it about with him, using Controlling to occasionally send it forth from it's bindings to attack his enemies!
Alternately, you might be able to do something similar by employing (Theurgical) Summoning/Controlling, employing a technique not dissimilar to that favoured by the Sahir...
