DE p.304-305 “Magical senses must penetrate the Magic Resistance of creatures sensed, as well as the Magic Resistance (if any) of the person granted the sense. Thus, the Penetration of a magical sense should be recorded for future reference. The mundane sense through which the magical sense grants information does not need to penetrate Magic Resistance.”
LoH p.113 “. This effect allows the wearer to see his surroundings as though he were at the location of the targeted object (including being able to see creatures with Magic Resistance)”
Requires an errata is DE intent is to classify using a mundane sense at a distance as a magical sense. Not clear in DE if the intent was just to classify senses that the target does not usually have such as seeing heat or in complete darkness for a normal human.
Does projecting your mundane sense at a distance make it magical?
Does EYES OF THE EAGLE ImIm25 grant you a magical sense of being able to see further than any human can for you to penetrate MR in order to see the creature with MR? What about the ability to see in complete darkness or even in just seeing a bit better in darkness with MuCoAn Eye of the Cat?
Or is a Magical sense to be strictly defined as something completely alien to the sensory organ such as seeing odors or heat? Do we all agree that InIg 20 VISION OF HEAT'S LIGHT needs to penetrate MR?
Yes… kinda wished the spell would have explicitly said it needs to penetrate MR in order to see at a distance something with MR or at least specified in the guideline and/or the TeFo description
Some effects that need penetration:
Eyes of The Eagle
Vision of Heat’s Light
Sight of The True Form
Eyes of The Cat
SHRIEK OF THE IMPENDING SHAFTS
HUNT FOR THE WILD HERB
DISCERN OWN ILLUSIONS
DISCERN THE IMAGES OF TRUTH AND FALSEHOOD
Some effects that do not need penetration to perceive/work something with MR because it uses the mundane species to perceive
View from The Mannequin
Summoning The Distant Image
EYES OF THE FLAME
HAUNT OF THE LIVING GHOST
THE SHADOW OF HUMAN LIFE
PRYING EYES
THE EAR FOR DISTANT VOICES
MuIm effects because the altered thing starts to emit natural species
PeIm effects because nothing to resist
WIZARD'S SIDESTEP
IMAGE FROM THE WIZARD TORN
Bucking above effects helped me better understand it all. Hope it helps others
Haven’t read DE yet, but weird question- if something has MR then does it’s reflection have MR, or can the reflection be seen?
I mean on one level this should be a “duh, it’s their reflection, it’s still them” answer, but on another it would fit a lot of mythic effects that separate a person from their reflection in terms of what can or cannot be seen.
Funny. The Thing with MR emits natural species which probably does not benefit from their MR. Especially, in most cases, scrying is not targeting things that are hiding… they would be unaware someone is trying to see them. I do like to lean toward “Parma works” but for other sources of MR, I would lean toward reflection has no MR.
Note the p.304-305 statement says “creature sensed” with that magical sense, which presumably applies to objects and stuff that with MR other than creatures. But it does not say that all magical senses need to penetrate to gain secondary information.
I’ve always interpreted this as interrogating the being (sensing the thing with MR) requires penetrating, but interrogating natural species (sensing the surroundings) given off does not. So seeing like a cat or like a hawk would be fine. Now, all of these might be tricked by illusions and the like since they’re not gathering information directly from the target, but that’s the disadvantage of using them. Happily, this also handles the question about reflections.
More practically, do you all play that a skinchanger cannot see/hear/etc. the magi, for example? After all, their senses are just as magical as Eyes of the Cat or similar, and they have no penetration at all.
It is pretty clearly written that magical senses must penetrate the MR of creatures sensed. Since magical senses are defined as effects targeting a sense such as Vision, Hearing, Smell, Touch & Taste and that those never specifically target the creature you are going to sense, that the most likely interpretation is that when you have Eyes of The Cat or Hawk, you must penetrate to see the creature with MR. How else would that explicit rule apply?
So you play that the companion with Skinchanger cannot sense the magi nor any being with MR at all, right?
How else might you apply the rule? As I said, using a magical sense to detect species would need to penetrate the species. These species may tell you something about their origin or not. Tell me where that contradicts the rule.
I’m actually trying to apply DE rules… Maybe the skinchanger could be like the 2nd sight virtue and not require penetration?
Maybe I’ll understand better if you give an example of where the above rule applies keeping in mind that a magical sense is when the Target of the effect is the sense so for example, Vision.
Skinchanger explicitly requires penetration when normally needed and explicitly has no penetration.
Consider the following:
There is an invisible being walking on a muddy surface at night. Do you need to penetrate agains the mud to perceive the footprints with a magical sense? You’re sensing the creature, after all.
A magical creature grabs a Skinchanger. Does the Skinchanger need to penetrate to feel they’ve been grabbed? The Skinchanger is sensing the creature, after all.
You have vision enhancement and are looking at a wall illuminated at night. A creature walks in front of the source of light, casting a shadow on the wall. Do you need to penetrate to see the shadow? You’re sensing the creature, after all.
I could come up with piles of ludicrous scenarios where you’re sensing something using a magical sense, where that sensing is really a secondary thing. Could the statement really be this ridiculous? Or maybe could it be interpreted in a different way?
What I’m suggesting is it may well be interpreted in a different way. “Sensed” here refers to what the magical senses are probing. If, for example, you do InMe to smell who means you harm, probing someone’s mind, and need to penetrate. But if you enhance your vision to pick up mundane species better, then you need to penetrate against those mundane species. If those mundane species happen to provide information about a being with MR, then you get that information secondarily. This fixes all sorts of ridiculous scenarios and does not go against the DE rule you’re quoting at all. After all, doing things like seeing the light better might reveal something with MR, or maybe it just helps you see an illusion better and have no idea it’s an illusion. It’s not like just seeing better is really also supposed to let you discern illusions by detecting the underlying reality; you’re not probing the being at all, just interacting with the incoming species better.
Can I use an InIm spell with T: Vision to spot the location of a magus protected by MR? Is that possible with your interpretation?
It is possible canonically. So clearly some sensing is allowed while some sensing is not. This is another reason I separate what is interrogated by the sense from what is determined from what is interrogated. The actual interrogation by this InIm spell fails, so the user doesn’t know what the invisible magus actually looks like, but that doesn’t prevent it from letting the user spot the invisible magus.
The Skinchanger senses issue isn’t a concern, because Skinchanger doesn’t grant “magical senses”. That quote from DE specifically applies to “magical senses” = Hermetic spells with a Sense Target. This is reinforced in HMRE p53 for the Sense of the Mystic potential breakthrough, which also only applies to effects that have a Sense Target.
This would suggest that if you have an InIm spell that does NOT have a Sense Target, it would not have to Penetrate to sense something with Magic Resistance. Looking into InIm recently, though, it all seems kind of wonky and unclear.
The way that ArM explains Imaginem by sensory species, it does not make sense that Magic Resistance is carried over to the species that a MR being naturally generates… sensory species created by Imaginem are not Resisted; why would sensory species from MR sources be Resisted? The only handwave I can come up with is to assume that Sensory Target spells aren’t actually sensing sensory species but are detecting some other innate qualia that the spell effect interprets through the target’s Sense Target as if it were sensory species. Which seems convoluted and nonintuitive.
I brought up Skinchanger as people had brought up MuCo(An), which is equivalent to Skinchanger in this regard.
In some cases this is really what it is, like my example of smelling with InMe. But in other cases the sensory Targets are really being used just to interact with species. It varies.
I should have specified that InIm Sensory Target spells aren’t sensing sensory species, but instead some other non-intuitive thing. Like, instead of sensing the olfactory species that a thing emits they are instead sensing that the thing is emitting olfactory species.
It seems like the whole Magical Senses that behave like mundane senses didn’t get thought through. It makes sense that you can Resist some spell that’s smelling your thoughts; it doesn’t make sense that you can Resist a different spell smelling your farts.
That’s why I provided my suggested why of reading the quote about magical senses penetrating. Otherwise we need our non-magical species to have some sort of intelligence to know if they’re going to encounter someone who can’t penetrate their source, or the nonmagical species must be granted MR by their source, or something like that.
