A player IMS wants to make a necklace that has tiny metal anvils on it like a lucky charm necklace. On command these will detach and grow to the size of normal anvils and then plummet to the ground (he plans to unleash them while flying around). Obviously this spell is going to be tremendous fun with his foes getting ACME style anvil deaths. Very Wile E Coyote.
But this brings me to my question. How do you grow or shrink something? what technique and is there a certain magnitude to shrink/grow to a certain size.
Note that the player wants the diddy anvils to be as light as mundane diddy anvils would be, and conversely for the full size anvils to be as heavy as mundane anvils.
You would use muto terram, and I dont think the spell level would be so extremly high.
This remind me of the multi barreld want of mega death that one players I heard of managed to have his magus create in Ars Magica, fun yes, but oh dear.
Another thing to remember is that this would work extremely well, just like in the cartoons. There is no conservation of mass in the medieval mindset. Thus something shrunk gets lighter, something that grows gets heavier.
Your player would be wiser to make a neclace that shrunk normal anvils to tiny size then on comand dispelled the magic (duration concentration, item maintains) This gets the item around magic resitance, a magically enlarged jewlry-sized anvil would still get bounced by parma.
Take the existing guidelines for large targets, and apply them in reverse...
The guideline for MuTe L4 is "double the size of an item (8 times volume is double all dimensions)". So, you could also apply this to reducing an item's size by half (or reducing volume to 1/8th). Add a magnitude, divide by half again. Your "Make a mini anvil" would then end up being a good level, to reduce an Anvil to tiny size (L4 to divide by 2, L5 by 4, L10 by 8, L15 by 16, L20 by 32 - a 12" anvil reduced to 1/32 of it's size is around 1/4" / 6mm long.) would be around L20 or 25 as a base (depending on the size of the Anvil).
I can imagine the Tribunal. magus X is on trial for dropping a werry large anvil on top of magus Y`s head. Well that is a way to give a Quesitor a heandache, quite literary.
Yep. Master Tyrell beat me to it. You want to take something NORMAL and shrink it. A NORMAL item falling will by pass the Parma Magica.
The reverse is to enlarge an item. The enlarged item is magical and while magical can be defended against by Parma Magica. To which a magus might say, "Is it raining?" Then attempt to blast you out of the sky.
This attack on a magus is likely a death blow. While killing spells are not illegal, killing a magus is. So proceed with caution?
Has anyone thought on the mechanics to find whether you hit? I guess that it's rather difficult to hit people spot on from above with the "gravity" as only force.
This by the way reminds me of my earlier campaing of modern Mage, where one of the players mages' favorite magic to combat vampires (who had a nasty habbit of not staying dead) was to conjure heavy safes over their heads to bash, crash and pin them under the weight while he ran to safety. He'll be thrilled in a nostalgic way to hear of your anvils...
There is a turn based computer rpg named Shadowharts where one of the charecters, a femme fatale type girl use her mobile phone (in the 1920!) to summon up anvils that fall on the enemy heads, it is hilarious.
In a Mage game once it was sugjested combat moose. Use Life 2 to grow a moose to 8 meters long, give it laser beams to shoot from his horns and send him running towards the enemy.
Might thought too, yet... its a bit off. The magic isn't really involved in hitting, since if you only use the magic to do the dispel to dispel the effect on the anvil that shrinked it in the first place it isn't really instrumental in targeting the placement or movement of the object. The real trick is to be exactly on top of the target when letting go of the anvil. Targeting/finesse maybe the answer - but only in lack of better options.
Problem with reducing full size anvils, is that the effect will be higher lvl - full size anvils are more than base individual for metal, after all...
Btw - has he considered making an bag of the smithy? Whenever you stick your hand in, some random item from a smithy appears... Maybe an anvil, maybe a little hammer... Damn fun if you're flying and forget to let go...
I see one other problem, little charm braclet size anvils in the neclace is well and good, but if they are just shrunk, every sunset or sundown the mage better not be wearing them for they will go back to normal unless he use vis to enchant them.
If the magus uses duration concentration, item maintains concentration, and an environmental trigger for sunrise and sunset the anvils may or may not flicker at dawn and dusk depending upon the opinion of the storyguide. Certainly setting up constant effect items with sunrise sunset triggers explicitly does not make an item that flickers at dawn and dusk. It isn't crystal clear that this could be extrapolated to an item with duration concentration and the "item maintains concentration" modifier.
I dont think my group have used duration consentration in that way in our gamings as I would not know, is it a new rule you can do that? What I understood was that things would go bac to normal at sunride and sunset.
IMHO, items that maintain concentration will flicker at dawn/dusk, even if there's a linked trigger. That's the tradeoff for the flexibility of being able to cancel the effect at will.
I was thinking over my lunch break that it would be easier to have the effect as constant duration and range touch.
Then you'd rig up some little wire traps or such to keep the anvils attached to the neclace. When it's time to throw one, just unhook it and the anvil will be out of range for the effect. This gets around the whole question of whether or not there is an anvil flicker at sunset.
