IMS, this spell has a different name but I pulled it from 3rd Ed. Iberia Tribunal book p84.
MOTION OF THE DISTANT WAVES
Design: Using a series of wooden ships, carved out of AC’s from the keel of real ships, this spell is cast as a ritual and the ships placed on a map. The wooden replicas will move about the map showing the location of the ships.
Base 3 (Corpus: Find a person you have an AC to)
Range: AC
Duration: Year
Req: Rego (move ships around)
Target: Group
InHe(Re) 45
(Oddly enough, it came out to the same level as originally posted in 3rd edition.)
Do I need the Requisite?
Can I use Group to include all of the ACs in the ritual instead of doing several smaller rituals?
Aquam has a Guideline of 2 to "get an image of water within range." Should the base be smaller?
Depends if you consider the ships moving on the map to be a cosmetic effect or to need the requisite. To play safe I would keep the requisite, but you can discount it as easily. If you discount it I would only allow the magus to use it and see the results. he would see a ghost-like image of the ships moving across the map. A grog standing nearby would simply observe the magus concentrating on the map while holding an AC to the ship, but see nothing strange on the map's surface. I really liked that spell back in 3rd for sure. The case of the magus bookseller that has ink liquefy in his presence when he casts spells was way more strange, though.
I would agree that it's likely easier to do with "ghostly images" but the visual of a magus hovering over a map while little wooden ships move around on it is really cool. I was playing around with this website...
If you click on each plane, you can get a Google View from the cockpit!
Back on topic... okay, dropping duration would also allow it to become an Enchanted Device. So changing it to Conc/Diameter brings it down to Lvl30. Using Conc, with the item maintaining, then it would be more doable for an Invested Item. Using Sun (lvl35), with a Constant makes it permanent.
QUERY:
If I enchant a map with the above effect, say using Sun, can I just fix AC's to ship and add them to the map? Or should I do the CONC route, so it tracks whatever ship AC is placed on it when activated? In other words, are the AC's for each ship set into stone when I make it a constant effect meaning I can't add new ships?
I would say if you bumped up the effect by one level (for complexity), you could place AC's to any number of ships on the map, and have them move around in real time.
To make the effect even more interesting, the AC could be incorporated into a miniature replica of the ship.
, V