My players are interested in investigating the history of their covenant site. They asked whether they could speak with the trees or the stones to get their side of things but I explained how their relevant Arts weren't high enough for that sort of thing yet. Then my wife, whose character is pretty good with Intellego Vim, asked if she can use that at some point to try and speak with the vis that can be collected locally. And then she started forming plans to speak with the essence of magic itself. She might've laughed maniacally at this point.
So ... does anybody reckon that you can use Intellego to talk with vis? My immediate thought is that you need to use InFo(Vi), form dependant upon how the vis manifests.
More directly, she might speak directly with the site aura, which possibly might be the spirit of the place depending on your view on that sort of thing.
This is a really neat idea. I'm not sure what the canonical answer is, because rocks and trees are material objects while vis is more like ether, an invisible fluid which needs to saturate an object to be interacted with. But what the hell! Just don't make it too easy. And I don't just mean setting a high level of the spell -- though Intellego spells to talk to inanimate objects do tend to have a pretty high base, and I totally agree with your prereq idea -- because spell level can always be ultimately attained. Rather, make the communication itself challenging.
All good thoughts, thank you! Naturally, I am hoping that she botches her first attempt - I can only imagine the entertainment that would follow.
Obviously I should create a genius loci for the covenant (it's the island of Pfalz/Falkenau in the Rhine, by the way) which answers to the name of Jalad and insists the island is called Tanagra.
Haha!, I know that feeling. But beware, it's always followed by an exploding stress roll...
The problem with InVi(Fo) is that it leaves the InVi field of expertise. If you are going to speak with some vis apples through a InVi(He) spell the herbam requisite is going to make it just a sort of unnecesarely complicated InHe spell.
But the main issue I see is that vis have some implicit temporality into it. Let's say there is an appletree that on the new moon after the spring equinox produces a set of apples which contain N pawns of vis. Then one should expect that if no one gets these apples, the next year a wandering harvester would find a set of new apples containing N pawns of vis that would be that year's harvest... But that's actually not a problem: if someone want to question the vis about past stuff, generations and generations may have already past and whatever they say can be quite far from reality, turnt into some kind of vis' myth. Imagine a past twisted by tales that old magical apples tell to the new ones, where they are the heroes of legends... and imagine your magi trying to get anything clear from these tales.
