-BOW-
Thank you MUCH!
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HOLA!
So, I have a question about 'shape & materials' bonuses.
I my Magi goes to cast 'Charge of the Angry Winds', and he picks up a Fan, would he get a +4 to his casting total? ?
(on the Shape & Materials chart a Fan gives a +4 bonus to 'create or control' winds.)
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No, Shape & Materials bonuses normally only apply to Lab Totals for Item enchantment. Ie. If you were enchanting a fan with a Creo Auram effect that generates wind you could add +4 to your lab total (this bonus is limited by your Magic Theory score.
The Potent Magic virtue, however, does allow a character to work Shape & Material bonuses into specially designed spell, but only for spells within a limited sphere (equivalent to Minor or Major magical Foci, depending on the version of potent magic taken), but there too the spell must be specially designed to gain the bonus (which may not exceed your MT score). - Potent Magic is found in HoH: MC and TMRE.
Hope this helped,
Gremlin44
The exception would be Shape/Material bonus from the talisman of a magus. If your magus spent the time to open a fan for enchantment, make it into his talisman, and then attuned the +4 bonus during a subsequent season of instilling an enchantment, that bonus would apply whenever he has his talisman on hand. That's pretty handy, but best reserved for areas of especial interest to the magus.
You're right of course, I'm just less than familiar with the Talisman rules.
I also wanted to add to my previous statement - You don't need to possess Potent Magic to learn and use Potent spells from a lab text, though you must have a MT score at least equal to the Potency bonus or you gain no benefit.
You don't need to, just make sure you can touch the target, yourself, when you cast it.
Livemike is missing an important distinction which is what LordBoBo was focussing on, to whit "can you arrange to bypass MR with flexible spell?":
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a spell which is designed with Range: Personal always bypasses the Parma or MR of the caster, but can affect no other;
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a spell which is designed with Range: Touch "starts" outside Parma and is automatically resisted (though you can temporarily drop Parma to get round that).
You can always cast a Touch spell on yourself, as you are indeed always touching yourself, but that does not make the qualitative shift from R:Touch to R:Personal.
(Flexible Formulaic Magic does allow precisely this shift!)
This sounds a lot worse than it is. A base individual for Auram is a single weather phenomenon, which means that non-ritual Auram spells can potentially affect Boundary sized regions, since things like “clouds†and “wind†affect large areas already. You could increase the size somewhat and get a similar effect.
I think it’s that magic doesn’t usually work this way. If you want a ball of fire 30 feet in diameter, figure out how many magnitudes on top of normal group that is. If you want a 20 foot cube of ice, same deal. That it’s a cube or a sphere is cosmetic and up to the designer of the spell – an individual with enough increases for size can be a cube, sphere, anything you want.
Any spell directly affecting a large polar bear would presumably be an Animal spell with some number of magnitudes for size, although I'm not sure how many off the top of my head. If you just want to throw a fireball or similar at it, size of course doesn't matter.
In general, if you really want a specific size in your spell (as, say, CrHe's Trap of Entwining Vines), make it T:Group, figure out if you need magnitude bumps for size, and then just say in the spell description what the size and shape is.
The Volume Conversion Guide in Art & Academe (Chapter 5, don't know the page number off the top of my head) allows you to convert Targets with size modifiers into actual volumes. Each step on the table is a tenfold increase in Size, which is one magnitude added to the spell.
As it happens, the base Individual for many Forms (Corpus, Herbam, Ignem, Terram (stone)) approximates one cubic pace, which is the same as Size 0 (I know Corpus and Animal allow Size +1, but it's close enough for the moment).
T:Group is a tenfold increase from T:Ind
T:Room is a hundredfold increase from T:Ind*
T:Structure is a thousandfold increase from T:Ind
T:Boundary is a ten-thousandfold increase from T:Ind
(*Group and Room are the same magnitude, but T:Room presupposes an actual room, so is more limited. From the size of the room listed, you could just about get a hundred people in it if they are packed like sardines.)
So if a Ball of Abyssmal Flame is T:Ind (=4' diameter sphere), with one magnitude for Size it becomes an 8' diameter sphere, and with +3 Size it is 12 paces in diameter, or an area equal to a standard boundary with very little height.
I have a full version of this conversion, relating every point of the Size characteristic to a volume and various shaped objects. I'm planning a Sub Rosa article at some point.
Mark
Mark:
A base Boundary is the same for all Forms, and is one hundred paces (three hundred feet) in diameter.
And as far as I can see, it never bothers about 3-dimentional thoughtline...
True. All I was indicating is the flexibility and interchangeability of the scale. If you didn't want to ignore volume, then a height of 4 paces on that 100 pace diameter circle would give the same volume as T:Ind+4. Nevertheless, my approximation at this level of size is a useful rule of thumb. For example, A Herbam effect at T: Group with 3 magnitudes of Size could affect the same area, roughly, as a T: Boundary; and it wouldn't have to be a ritual based on Target alone. Of course, it would be a magnitude higher than a Boundary effect with the same parameters.
But, as you say, strictly speaking a Boundary has no height, just area. But when my PeCo specialist comes to me and says he wants to create a spell to damage T:Group+3 people, it is useful to know that this is roughly equal to a crowd of people standing in a circle roughly 100 pace diameter...
Mark