resolve crisis effect (in familiar bond or item)

Hi to everyone,

I have been thinking about a magical object for one of my magi's laboratory, and I wanted to use a permanent effect of "resolve terminal crisis" with the sun duration and environemental trigger, and unlimited uses.
I was thinking that such an object could:

  • be used touching any person going to die soon (terminal crisis) then postpone the crisis it until it was dispelled or the warping kills the person (if adequate) or for some reason, the person has magic resistance at sunset/sunrise, effectively preventing the person from dying at that moment.
  • be used for any number of persons.

This raised 2 sorts of question:

  1. would you allow individuel effect with unlimited uses to affect, simultaneously, multiple persons. I would think no, but I can figure an argument on that because a firebolt spell with duration could be used 1 / round and create multiple effects at the same time, which is what I intend to do.
  2. since it would be warping, I was thinking that, for the magus only, putting that effect in his familiar bond would be better (effects in familiar bond never give warping points) and, since it's either useless (no crisis , no effect, no warping anyway) or useful (crisis, effect into action, postponing the crisis indefinitely) and nothing seems to prevent it.
  3. what about decrepitude 5. The corebook says "the person is bedridden and will die", but then you are being said that you must roll on the crisis table (and decrepitude score is a modifier to your roll), and if you do have "terminal ilness " you need to be subject to a magical effect (resolving or postponing terminal crisis, base 35 which I intended to use) to survive. So would it be so that this effect, if activated, prevent the person from dying from age? Of course, dispelling could come quickier than we think, if that would come from a magical object. But from a familiar bond, it would require to kill the familiar and that is not as easily done if the magus is not especially a fighting type.

Then, consequence: "undying" magus?

What are your thoughts on it?

From my reading of the core rulebook, decrepitude 5 circumvents the aging table completely. No rolls - the character simply lives just long enough to play out a death-by-old-age scene.

So ultimately you can't cheat the reaper forever - or at least you can't this way. :smiley:

Decrep 5 kills you. The real way to get an undying magus is through a lot of laboratory items that boost health (and therefore living conditions). A paranoid little bugger buried in a covenant somewhere who doesn't rely on longevity rituals. You can come up with a ton if ideas: Purifying the air. Purifying the water you drink. Purifying the food you eat. (An item for animal AND plants foods.) You can probably use Rego, Perdo and Creo effects. An item to clean everything. Items to ward against heavenly influences. Items to ward against demonic influences. Temperature control, and generation Humidity Control. Then you start getting intellego effects for an even more accurate ident of what is harmful and start linking effects, and... And when you consider Touch/Structure/Sun will eat up 6 magnitudes, and most of those will have magnitudes for complexity and precision... You'll essentially have an endless array of enchantments that you can make before you top out. You should be able to increase your living mod fast enough to only have a slight chance of death even at centuries old.

Sure you're bubble Magi, but who cares!

What does say that "decrepitude 5 kills you"?

The only gaming mechanism you use is the crisis roll if I read this section correctly, and in that one, the more lethal result is "terminal crisis" which a magus could overcome with help. Then he goes for another year, roll for aging, probably age (if he was not unlucky in previouses year), gaining decrepitude point. It doesn't either say that 5 is the superior limit.

I can understand why we would want that, but we would also want that there wasn't a pink dot loophole in the parma rule (which all troupes evacuate in one or another way :wink:).

But if magi can do longevity rituals which help aging, boost their aging rolls through health laboratory bonuses, why not using special effects to overcome the crisis in some permanent way. (The longevity ritual also prevent the crisis which dispell it.)
"Too easily done" is not an adequate answer : this is a permanent effect which involves lot of vis and is quickly dispelled if the familiar dies (which is somewhat more easy than dispelling the LR).
One of the questions hereover implies that if you use this effect, you can postpone 1 crisis (since the guideline say "crisis" at singular and I'm not sure you could be at the same times 2x affected by a single effect from a single device. Targets seem not to go around this (group cannot affect you 10 times)). So, I see this effect of the bond as a "I will survive this time when I'm caught off guard, just to have time to contact a friend magus who will cast a ritual version after I dispell the effect" (because you can't ritual casting a spell while affected by that spell but with duration (the spell is already in effect, only momentary). The magus during the crisis cannot cast ("crisis in bed") and need to rely ona friend I think.

So I'm trying to figure the situation which is not simple!

And, I agree with the importance of LR and health. The magus for whom I thought of this has not yet cast his LR (he is not a LR specialist but he likes to invent by himself, and could do a -24 LR), but has a laboratory with curently +17 in health and is quite happy with it. This effect would be part of a magical item in his lab with "surviving effects" (like arcane connection permanent mentem to activate other effects such as "teleportation to base", "heal all wounds with duration"... and this effect would have been the last of his " Fountain of Youth ").

Pg. 170, under "Decrepitude"

I believe that last part is an implicit reference to the Limit of Aging (pg. 80) - "Hermetic magic cannot halt or reverse natural aging, although it can slow it down and mitigate its effects."

As such, I read "Mortal Intervention" as "anything a mortal, including a Hermetic wizard, can do".

EDIT - my personal favorite version of unaging is "Be a Holy Magi" - their version of Twilight doesn't kill them (they just disappear for weeks at a time), so their Longevity Rituals don't warp 'em out of existence. Of course, LR do cause sterility, so for some magi this may be considered a sin...

Aah the limit of aging, got it.

So this effect would work fine until decrepitude 5. Okay, figured out.

It does sound like you could conceivably use both this version, as well as a LR, though - they cap out differently:

  1. A LR caps out via Warping.
  2. Aging caps out via Decrepitude.

So, if you use your version for the first couple of decades (along with a high standard of living), and then at 65+ or so, jump into a LR, you can add a few additional decades to you magi's life.

Yes that's the idea I intend to follow for the moment

Actually the magus has +3 bronze cord and +18 health lab which gives a friendly total of -12 to aging rolls. Unless 1 is rolled, that means he is fine until 210 years, where it starts to get ugly and at which point he could decide to create finally his LR. At that time, I hope being able to have at least a -30 LR, which should mean that warping beings to be the limitating factor. Then again, since he has characteristics boosting ritual spells, I think when his warping becomes 9, he will dispell his LR and just "age normally" and counter each aging point with ritual casting. I hope by this time (he would be 380-400 yo !), he has joined a mystery cult to become immortal or has finished to accomplish his goal of transforming the magic theory into "modern physics magic theory".

Decrepitude and crises would be the last obstacle at that time, and the limit of aging seems to prevent a "resolve terminal crisis" when your decrepitude score is 5 (as discussed here over).

I also recommend keeping a pet physician in your lab, and possibly a excellent quality pet cook in your lab. Both can increase your living conditions by quite a bit. Anyway, join the philosophers of Rome. Or House Merinita. Both of those groups have excellent paths to immortality.

Hm.... just thought of an option:

  1. Sufficiently large (ReVi) "Delay Effect" spell.
  2. CrCo spell that resolves a crisis Immediately.
  3. put the CrCo spell in the Delay Effect spell, with the "has an aging crisis" trigger - yes, they're both rituals, but you do get around the problem of having your CrCo spell be in your Familiar.
  4. In reading through it - I don't think this would give you warp due to having a spell effect on you - it's a delayed/suspended effect, which means it hasn't actually gone off.

Of course, it does take significantly more vis than the Familiar version.

Alternately, you could develop the Breakthroughs necessary to put ritual effects into enchanted items. (I know that Divine Magic can have Amulets - I thought there was one for Magic, as well...)

It's an idea, yes!

My first goal was to design a lab item, because they give laboratory bonuses and what better bonus to experimentation could I find than this one on various mundane "guinea pigs". Then I went through the warping problem, which for an item is a true issue. Hence, the familiar version. But I feel like its power will be hard to use on the magus on a "permanent basis" (reading this post!). For mundane or other ponctual uses, it would still work I think.
The lab item would have a permanent intellego mentem to the magus, which he can stop by not lowering his parma against that effect only (which IOS is possible by house rule). If he sees a mundane having a crisis, he will have to take an arcane connection of that mundane. The lab item being a chalice, the arcane connection would have to be put inside it. For this, a teleportation spell to it would be adequate (issue: what to use as arcane connection to the magical item). Then, he will be able, by lowering his parma against the intellego mentem effect, to activate the ReVi effect of the chalice, opening a tunnel towards the person suffering the crisis, and then activate the "stop crisis" ongoing effect... until the person can be brought back to the covenant or a friendly healer magus.

Your idea is really good, I will consider it. What may bother me is the "one guideline cannot do what the other do", and I would have to choose carefully which effect to put inside the warding ward. Or use all of them.

The magus has already too much breakthrough to do for our saga, but in the long term (post game just in my simulation home) why not. The breakthrough is in HMRE, witch section.

There are a few problems with delaying an LR.
The first problem with waiting too long for an LR, is you keep a frail body in play. Besides getting decreptitude, the magus is also losing characteristic points.
The second problem is that as you age, you need exorbitant amounts of vis to create the LR, requiring a high Magic Theory score or a high Creo, Corpus or Vim score, depending on where you fall on the whole LR vis debate that's brought up here from time to time[1]. At age 65, the LR needs 13 pawns of vis, which either requires an LR of 14, or Art scores of 13.

[1]I'm referring to the limits of seasonal vis use governed by Magic Theory and whether or not it affects the design of the Longevity Ritual. Some see the design as requiring no vis, and you end up with a ritual that you then fuel with vis, in that case it is limited by whatever Art the magus's LR is attuned to. Some see it the other way around, governed by the Magic Theory limit of MTx2. This whole mishegoss is also clouded by the fact that a magus can reperform their original longevity ritual at a later time, after it fails[2], and add sufficient vis based on their age and then the amount of vis limited by the Art score.
[2] Recreating a longevity ritual that has failed isn't the best idea, but it might be alright if someone was really unlucky and rolled a couple of ones...

You use a high health bonus instead of a longevity ritual. It takes a lot more work short term, but in the long term its good. You avoid warping.

I understand delaying the LR to not gain warping. It works to a point, but eventually that strategy will backfire when creating the ritual that can extend your life. One needs a Warping Score of 10 and a magical botch requiring at least two botch dice to actually enter Final Twilight. How long it takes to get to a Warping 10 is a matter for some debate, but it happens much later than actually earning decreptitude points, and takes, by experience points, 200 more points or events. Even at two per year, that's 100 years.