ars magica is unique in that it has rules for breaking the rules.
I am trying not to break too many rules, so that I and the troupe of players have a firmly defined basis to play off of.
Well if you want to break no rules you obviously have to avoid an item that casts Wizard's boost. however when you say you want to avoid breaking too many rules what exactly is too many rules?
you could make the item a one of a kind item, perhaps it came about through experimentation and the lab text has been lost so it cannot be reproduced? maybe it is one of the lost rings of Verditius? are these solutions ok for you?
All those are possibilities for the future, when we all have a better handle on the mechanics.
At this stage I don't want to hand-wave explain rule-breaking phenomena more than I have already inadvertantly added to the saga.
so you want your ring to do something that can be achieved within the already established rules and history?
Do you limit yourself to the core rulebook or do you want some/all of the splatbooks?
It is the lead up to a cunning plan to make the player magi engage in Certamen. I am trying to find a carrot sufficiently tempting.
Also part curiousity as to how other troupes would react to a similar premise.
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I would find a ring with a MuVi effect that casts wizards boost upon my own spells to be a very interesting idea. As a player I would not at all be offended and the actual implementation of such an effect, although not allowed by the current rules, is straightforward when it comes to implementation.
It would give a neat boost to power, especially if it casts wizard's boost in a form where I am not super skilled or if it is at a higher level than what I can usually cast. It is not dissimilar to a watered down version of the virtue Flexible formulaic magic.
Generally I would be willing to endure a lot of certamen and other trials and tribulations if there was a cool magic item on the line, regardless of whether or not it breaks any rules.
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are you trying to push them into certamen with each other or with someone else? Because mad verdituous characters tend to be in Hubris fueled fueds which might result in such a ring being stolen and then sold and/or lost where the original Verditious will want it back and probably be unwilling to go through the Guernicus to get it.
A couple of players suggested their characters should try this Certamen thing. I am trying to introduce various plotlines. The ring would have been "greed", if it were not too overpowered (and also possible). I am also trying to set up "honour/duty", "might" and "right".
A typical - and most direct - greed plotline towards Certamen are vis sources.
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I have definitely had a vis source that was contested in a past game.. and we solved it every year with Certamen about who would collect that year, with the understanding that when Tribunal finally happened it'd be solved.
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I agree completely with this. Most players probably will as well, though it should IMO take a bit of time for a magus to learn enough about the item's abilities to be able to sum them up as above.
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Aye, such an item would need to be identified. Being a person on a forum discussing the ring from the perspective of a GM I have the benefit of perfect knowledge. If I got my hands on this ring in the game I would spend time trying to identify it in the lab with my InVi lab total, possibly even levelling said lab total up if I felt it necessary. As a player you can never be 100% certain that you have identified every power an items has. For that reason I would at least initially be quite suspicious that the ring might have more higher level powers with a more sinister purpose, and also curious to see if it might have even better powers.
That is a really cool device. It alows a magus to be able to cast spells they already know and use at greater effect. No need to invent a higher level version, no sacrifice of Penetration for this new higher level spell.
And since it's not just a boost of Penetration, it can be useful for non-combat magi as well.
It seems to be a nice bait for magi to take action.
Pity it fits the Hermetic magic rules so ill.
Also, good points about the need to work to identify the effect, and the risk of there being higher magnitude effects not yet identified. But can't you use InVi to find out how much vis was used? In that case you can do the math and may know if there are effects still unidentified
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Well if you can determine that amount of vis used that would certainly provide a very useful piece of information in identifying the ring completely (i.e. gain full knowledge of all the powers present in the ring). I assume you are referring to the InVi guideline of "Base 4: Judge the amount of vis present.". If this guideline allows for the invention of a spell that tells you how many pawns' worth of vis is present in an item, then that is a huge help. Personally I would be reluctant to allow it because it makes it much easier to definitively identify magic items and I like that there can be a nagging suspicion that you have not identified an item completely. But admittedly that is just my personal taste.
Once you gain possession of this ring you can already make a number of deductions based on the rules of the game. And I assume that these rules are known to the characters in the game too, I.e. knowing the things I present below are part of Magic Theory.
Maybe the ring is not an invested device, in which case it has by definition just the one power it claims to have.
Maybe the ring is an invested device, and it has been opened for enchantment with as many pawns of vis as its material suggests (a ring is tiny so it has a x1 multiplier). Lets say that it is made of marble so it was opened with 4 pawns of vis. In that case the ring is highly unlikely to have any sinister extra powers as the main power would by my estimation land at around level 25-35 ish after all the parameters have been calculated, which takes up 3-4 pawns of vis to enchant, meaning that once my InVi lab total (or prior knowledge of the main power of the ring) can exluce the existence of any higher levels power lurking just outside the reach of my InVi lab total.
However if the ring made of gold and set with a priceless gemstone it was opened either with 20 or 28 pawns of vis. which leaves plenty of space for enchantment. It also begs the question: "who opens an item with so much vis if they only want to put a single level 25-35 effect into the item".
All of this has mostly happened before a single season was spent investigating the ring in a lab.
Another concern is, Is this ring a talisman? That is relatively easy to figure out once I spend a season investigating the ring in the lab, as only an InVi lab total +stress die roll of 20 will reveal the device's function as a talisman.
If the ring is a talisman it is impossible to guess at the maximum amount of vis used in its enchantment.
However, because finding powers at higher levels requires progressively higher InVi lab totals, it becomes more and more difficult to say for sure that no powers are present. I would feel reasonably safe once I have determined that no unknown powers of level 50-60 ish and below are present. But reliably generating such a high lab total will require reasonably high scores in Intellego and/or Vim. For a specialist in either art, that is not so difficult but for anyone else we are looking at a large number of seasons spent studying those arts, an investment that might not seem worth it.
All of my deductions of course assume that nothing crazy is going on. If the ring is actually a demon or magical being in disguise, is made within a framework of magic the exceed mainstream hermetic theory or whatever then it stands to reason that some, most or all of these deductions may be wrong.
Yup. Personally I'm not sure one can - or even should be able to - get this information
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Intellego Vim guidelines:
“Magical items can have an effective residue magnitude equal to the number of pawn of vis used to open the enchantment (or the total pawns used for lesser enchanted devices). Magnitudes for non-Hermetic items must be set by the Story guide.”
So it is possible to find out how much vis an item is built with, so you can find out how many magnitudes of effect there may be in a device
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That is certainly both embarrasing and frustrating. Embarrasing because I looked at that very guideline you refer to and frustrating because the process of educated guessing about what an item could do is one I find to be enjoyable.