Thomas The Rhymer, doctrinae Criamonis

Retired Play by Post Campaigns Ars Magica 5th Edition: Canaries Are Dying
21

A few notes:

I double checked the validity of my specialities, and then decided to switch Durenmar Lore to (covenfolk), and Premonitions from (familial) to (nobility) -- his family are nobles, but this opens things up a little.

Note that with a Per 0 + Premonitions 2 + specialty 1 = 3+die, he automatically Premonitions imminent mortal peril to nobility, including himself.

Speaking of his noble self, I still haven't chosen between Heir and Close Family Ties. I guess I'm pending input from the campaign on this one. I've currently got his birthplace as the puppet noble family associated with Horn Hill -- no idea if any information about Horn Hill pre-exists, if there's any possible tie-ins to other magi, or anything else. Basically, I'm asking for ideas to further integrate my character into the saga setting using close noble ties.

Filling out his backstory, I decided to bring Laguna Sententia, the apprenticeship covenant of my other forum character, into this game. Ashka, the Tremere necromancer who lives at Laguna Sententia is the one who basically paid him the 75 build points that he's bringing with him. By extension, that means that his magic astrolabe was made by Norbart Gunthar, pater to my other character. I still need to name Thomas's parens, and fill in the details of his time at Durenmar, so Ashka makes for his only pen pal currently.

Also, I just want to double check on this point because absolutely no one has commented on it: Is everyone cool with the idea that [size=200]I am playing a Demon Tainted Companion[/size] ?

'Cuz, she's going to be right there in the covenant and everything.

22

Heir could be interesting, since we have a noble right up the road who's vaguely familiar with the covenant and who holds all the lands around the loch. Close Family Ties could work, too. But of the two, I'm slightly leaning toward Heir.

And I thought Janet was Fae-tainted? Oh, wait. Margaret. I can work with it.

23

Fae-cursed, Infernally befriended. The girl's got potential.

Tangent: Has anyone seen Record of Lodoss War? One of the running gimmicks in that movie was that every high-level fighter class who met the protagonist (a low-level knight-wannabe) would say, "The kid's got potential." That's Janet. Everyone who looks at her thinks, "That girl has got potential."

Potential for what, is the question.

24

A brief digression into a component of the game mechanics which I never look at: Reputation changes over time.

Thomas goes to Durenmar in 1214.1, and offers to do scribal grunt work, of the sort mocked by his tyro equals, and immediately gains Rep 1: Pencil Pusher.

He then spends another 15 seasons after that, continuing to gain reputation as a pencil pusher. He gains 1 xp for every "act" that contributes to his reputation. Should we count that as another 15 xp in that Rep? That only brings him to Rep 2 and change, which seems a bit small for 4 years of demeaning work in a well-networked covenant that has frequent guests.

Okay, at a quick glance, Thomas spent 6 seasons reading (assumed) Q15 books, 4 seasons making the 2 copies of his 50bp grimoire, and 1 year spent learning 25 levels of spells and 5 pts of In (I will avoid the standard tangent on spending XP on spells, except to say that this exercise really points it out in stark constrast). One of those Q15s is from scribe, though and another is Durenmar Lore, so those could easily be explained along the way . So let's say:
4 seasons reading, 4 seasons copying for his private gain = 8 seasons.
1 seasons scribing under the eyes of a Q15 tutor, and
another 7 seasons of general scribing (during which he picked up 15xp of Durenmar as exposure, and somehow managed to learn 25 spell levels and a bit about Intellego along the way fudge fudge fudge).

Tangent: Assuming his 25bp Magic Astrolabe was made by Norbert, it's pretty easy to deduce that this cost the covenant of Laguna Sententia a grand total of 8 pawns of vis + some hermetic alchemy vis extraction which is like free money for any lab rat, in exchange for Thomas spending 4 seasons of copying AND 4 seasons at Durenmar earning the right to copy. Works out to 1 pawn/season. You know what, maybe that's not such a tangent. Such a raw deal should certainly be some kind of multiplier.

Okay, so his first season there, he agrees to be supervised in his scribal duties, which ends up working out sort of great for him, cuz he basically gets a Scribe'ing tutor, but it makes his reputation. Rep 1, or 5xp.

Now, the 4 seasons spent reaping the rewards of his demeaning duties with book access, he's just sort of a background figure, so I could see that earning him 1xp/season = 4xp, current total 9xp.

The 4 seasons he spends copying the book earns him ridicule not just for buying a bridge in Brooklyn, but also because it takes him so gorram long. Of course, the joke is on them, because he only took so long so he could make a copy for himself too, but he still earns his bad rep. Call that 3xp/season? 21xp so far.

Now, the other 7 seasons should be at least 7 xp just for STILL being at Durenmar (yes, I'm not doing this in any kind of chronological order, but that's fine). 28xp.

He specializes in lab texts. 7 seasons * 240 spell levels/season, average spell requested is lvl 30, that's around 56 spells he copies out for other people. 1 xp per, we're up to 84 xp, that places him somewhere above the Rep 5 that I estimated originally.

~headdesk~

On the other hand, now I've established exactly what his reputation is, which makes it all a bit more usable in game. "Oh! I've heard of you. I think you did one of our lab texts. Hey, I heard you spent like a decade at Durenmar getting paid a pawn/season to do inventory and sweep up after the real magi."

25

Contemplating a few minor tweaks on the character:

1) I'm rankling a bit at gaining Common Sense as a virtue as part of his first initiation into the Path of Seeming. Nevermind that I don't feel like I'd need it as a player, but it's also next to impossible to use in a PbP setting. On the other hand, I am hard pressed to find a thematically appropriate virtue to replace it with. Something that implies an ability to see clearly, possibly an additional +3 bonus like the other two minor virtues. The nearest I could think of was Puissant Ability:Folk Ken, but that sort of overlaps with Clear Thinker already. A second Keen Sense? Suggestions?

2) Aside from the riddles surrounding his choice of actions during his first ten years, there's very little in his backstory yet about actually being a Criamon. Partly this is because I'm still familiarizing myself with that part of the canon. I have yet, for example, to pick his pater or write any concrete experiences of his life as an apprentice. If you have any favorite bits of Criamon-ness, or recall any published in the RAW that you think worth pointing out, please do so.

3) Given that scrying on magical targets is so dependent on penetration, I think it'd be wise for him to be able to create Symbolic Representations for the +2 multiplier to Penetration. He's sadly unsuitable for such an effort right now -- Dex 0, and no suitable skill (unless you want to argue Prof:Scribe somehow).

On the other hand, it was pretty easy for me to squeeze 15xp out of Post Gauntlet XP to spend on a Craft. The only question becomes which one. The obvious Criamon choice is "Tattoos." The backstory-thus-far obvious choice would be "Illumination." This leads to the following spell design

"Epiphany of the Illuminated Experience"
ReHe(MuCo), Base 5, +1 Touch, Mom, +1 Part = 15
Free Requisites: An, and Te as appropriate
Turns an illumination into a tattoo. Works best if the illumination was previously painted directly onto the subject by the caster, however the spell will also transfer an illumination from a page onto a body with a Dex+Finesse roll vs EF 9. If the caster did not create the illumination, then +3 to the EF. This same spell can be used to move a tattoo from the body and onto a page (if the tattoo is enchanted, then there'll need to be some kind of penetration roll.) (Loosely based on Dance of the Spidery Ink, HProj 93)

(Alternatively, could I get a Craft skill that covers both tattoos and drawing, so I don't have to tattoo every symbolic connection onto my body?)

3b) Could I take out one of the low level spells from his grimoire and spend 2bp on an Item of Quality related to his craft? In Bibracte, qcipher bought IoQs for 2 apiece, but I don't know if that was house rule or what. Also, what would the item and bonus be?

4) I should probably have a resource for learning Enigmatic Wisdom. If I pay the bps, can I have a talking skull/ghost mentor? Possibly stat him up as a grog? He can hang out with Janet and teach her Enigmatic Wisdom while Margaret looks after the kids, while I'm gone.

I'll call him Grandpater. He'll hate Joe.

26

More tweaks:

5) Given the current stat of the covenant, would it be better if I took something beside Free Study? It seems like its going to be a while in the campaign before he can use 4+ Intellego vis for study, and the math makes it a questionable proposition anyway.

6) Given that I just realized that I can cast it as a non-fatiguing spont in Aura 0+, I'm swapping Search for Vis with Air’s Ghostly Form CrAu 5.

7) Being a generous soul, I've decided that Janet's Lesser Malediction shouldn't cause her to spend the rest of her life pregnant. Just the next seven years. :smiling_imp:

27


Tattoos/Stigmata: A third eye, inside a mouth with pointed teeth.

28

Corrected Janet's stats after realizing Improved Char only added 3pts, not 7. This takes her out of the realm of potential fighter, but she now has Int 1, Per 3, Pre 3, Com 5, so she's still a teen mother who coulda have been something.

Also noted that her Black Sheep flaw gives her a negative Reputation in Cill Chuimein. I spent 20 minutes on Google looking for insulting terms for single mothers, but could only find websites explaining why we need to love them and treat them special. So I went with "Rep 2: Harlot Married to a Freak." After all, she got preggers out of wedlock, and now she keeps coming back to church on Sundays with her nose up in the air like that and have you SEEN the man she's shacked up with over in that other village? The one with all the wierdos? Well, THIS weirdo has a giant tattoo all over his face...

While doing all of this, I disturbed myself a great deal by running the City & Guild workshop numbers to see if Prof:Harlot would be a viable income source. Thank you, Game of Thrones.

29

Made some changes, above:

The problem with The Skull of Demetrius as a teacher is that it effectively counters the whole premise of the covenant having poor learning resources, but there aren't any rules for buying it as Signifacatos (Cov 101). Throwing some roleplaying limits on it is the best I've come up with so far.

30

~tap, tap~ This thing still on? It's been over a week since I posted these questions, and I've heard nothing but crickets.

Until somebody tells me otherwise, I have Craft:With Ink on my character sheet. This includes making ink, illuminations, and tattooing.

See stats, above.

While waiting for an indication about vis supplies in this game, I decided to take Puissant Penetration instead.

31

Sorry, I totally whiffed on the questions, there. I'm going to be in and out doing errands and having my 30-day review at work today, but I'll think about them and try to get something coherent put together by bedtime tomorrow evening.

32

Agree, that Common Sense doesn't make much sense in a pbp saga, unless it's for a player who has a tendency to make the wrong decisions for his character. How does Puissant Awareness sound?

Or Craft: Inking works too, but it's a reasonable ability.

I don't think it was a house rule, but I'm okay with it here. Perhaps a pen? I'll look through the S&M bonus charts later and see what strikes me, unless you come up with something first.

Let's go with a high-Grog level Magic Being.

To be honest, I'm not sold on the 5e rules on studying from vis. You study art/5 pawns of vis, and regardless of how much you study, you always get stress die + aura? 4E, now that I dig out my rulebook, is only slightly better (1, 2, or 3 pawns of vis, multiply the number of pawns by a stress die, add the Aura, gain that many experience points up to a maximum gain of three levels). I would kind of like to house-rule this to get something better, but I'm not sure how yet.

(In other words, yes, at least partly because I'm not all that happy about studying-from-vis rules.)

33

Finally getting around to plugging the character sheet, and I'm not seeing where the "2+3" on Artes Liberales comes from. Is there a Virtue I'm not seeing that increases his AL score?

Also, I don't have Hermetic Projects, so I have no idea what Fingers for Eyes and The Master's Message do.

34

The +3 applies to horoscopes, and comes from his magic astrolabe. It's the bonus suggested by HProj for the device.

Fingers for Eyes is basically a Touch version of Summoning the Distant Image, allowing the magus to see for a Diameter through the eyes of a target that he touches. Which would be pretty useless on its own, but if you're touching the person through an Intangible Tunnel, then it has more utility. So long as they're in a Room.

The Master's Message is an Intangible Tunnel-like effect that uses Touch instead of an Arcane Connection, and lasts for Moon duration. The idea is that you cast it on a grog, and then send HIM off to do things, while Thomas checks in on him from time to time, judiciously CrMe's the memory of a conversation about what to do next, speaks to him through a Phantasmal Head, or whatever.

35

I thought I had posted this somewhere, but I can't find it: I don't want people using virtues/flaws/stuff from books that I don't have (the books I do have are on my Library Thing).

That being said, it looks like The Master's Message is just a variant of The Intangible Tunnel. For which, the base effect is somewhat confusing, and involves math. If I'm reading it correctly, if you have a Level 45 Tunnel, that has a base level of 20, which allows you to cast 20th level spells through it. It's Base 20, +4 magnitudes for R: Arcane Connection, and +1 for D: Concentration. The Master's Message changes the Range to Touch (+1 instead of +4), and Duration to Moon (+3 instead of +1). That reduces the magnitudes added due to DRT from +5 to +4. So, if I'm following correctly, a Level 20 Master's Message has a base level of 4, +1 for R: Touch, and +3 for D: Moon. Which means, with a Level 20 Master's Message, you can only cast spells of less than 4th level through it.

The math for Fingers for Eyes works, if you're only using one sense (Sight) instead of two (Sight and Hearing) as in Summoning the Distant Image. But, as you pointed out, it's not every useful without some kind of long-distance tagging spell to go along with it.

The astrolabe: that's like a lab bonus for an item, right? Makes sense, and I'll allow it.

The Master's Message, I'm going to disallow, and I'll put a post in the House Rules thread about what books are usable/not usable for character generation, just to avoid this situation in the future.

Fingers for Eyes is allowable, if you still want it.

36

The thing with the Invisible Assassin section of Hermetic Projects is that it doesn't have any new rules. It just follows rules from the MRB in a direction that most people haven't thought of. It does offer spell variants to take advantage of those rules, but all of them can be extrapolated through the MRB rules. You don't even need Covenants or any of the HoH books.

It's easier to do the math from the spells rather than trying to determine the base and working back up. Opening the Intangible Tunnel allows spells equal to its level through, and has +5 modifiers as you noted. Master's Message has +4 modifiers, so spells equal to level + (5-4=1) can go through. In other words, Master's Message 20 would allow up to level 25 effects through.

It's basically a simplified magical Armillary Sphere, TMRE:51-52. It is enchanted with two effects, "Sense the Heavens" (InIm24), and "Move the Wheels" (ReTe37). For 61 levels of effect, it provides a +3 bonus to using Artes Liberales for generating horoscopes. If you want to call that the lab bonus, okay.

Intangible Tunnel-like effects are central to the 5 years of backstory right before joining the campaign, and my plans for his future growth. If you're not going to allow any Intangible Tunnel variations to ever enter play, then I need to change his entire spell allocation, his build points, and the last 5 years of his backstory.

Again, it is a core mechanic published in the MRB. I'm not sure why you'd want to disallow it, but its your campaign, so if that's the call you want to make, be aware that I need to essentially re-write my character's goals.

37

It basically boils down to "Can I reference the material when the spell/Virtue/whatever is being used to be sure that I'm understanding/interpreting it correctly?". Which is pretty hard to do if I don't have the book.

For example. Upon rereading the RegoVim guidelines and comparing it to the spell description for Opening the Intangible Tunnel, I see that I may have misunderstood the spell level of stuff that can be cast through the spell. I had interpreted the phrase "level + 5 magnitudes" to mean base level and not spell level, which is where I was getting the Level 4 spell from earlier.

Let me offer a very bad analogy. When I study for a test, I read and reread the book, sometimes taking notes, taking time to let it soak in, mulling it over until I understand the subject matter. I don't do so well on tests where I skim through a copy at the bookstore. It doesn't always soak in properly, I probably won't understand as well as I would like, and I'm going to bomb the test.

I'm not saying that you can't ever use a spell variant that's in a book that I don't have. What I'm trying to say is that I'm not going to allow something that's in a book that I don't have if I don't understand it. That's where I was at when I initially disallowed the Master's Message. But now that it's been explained more clearly (or, at least, explained to where it's more clear to me) and I understand it better, Now that I understand it better, I'm going to allow it.

I have the same problem with the Rego Craft magic discussions (such as the one on the Pegasaurus Rex over in Bibracte). Apparently, the kind of Rego Craft that's being discussed isn't the same as the one in Covenants (the inset on p. 49). In fact, I don't even know what book it's in. But I seem to remember being told which one it was, and knowing that it's a book that I don't have. And without the book to look at while all that stuff is being discussed, it's never going to make any sense to me (and I have tried to follow along as long as I could before I realized that I had no idea what was going on).

38

Quick synopsis of the Invisible Assassin section: In order for Intangible Tunnel to be effective, you have to be able to penetrate. That means low magnitude spells and high penetration. Here are some methods of increasing your penetration.

To continue your "study habits" analogy...

These are two section of rules that I have avoided at all costs up until now. Functional usage of the Intellego guidelines, and the entire set of Vim rules (beyond published non-general spells) are a headache that I just haven't been willing to deal with.

And because I've never sat down and worked the numbers, I've always assumed that this math is hard. And I'm always going to assume they're hard until I sit down and work at these formulae until they make sense.

So, what I'm hoping to do is use this character as a test ground for Intellego and Tunnel-like effects. I'm hoping that the process of building each step in game will be useful. One of the questions I intend to start with is the Master Message/Fingers for Eyes combo: "I cast Master's Message, and now I can target you with Touch range spells and sponts for the next moon. I can use FfE to see through your eyes....but only if you're in a Room? That's weird....how do I make a spell that doesn't have that limitation?"

39

Fingers for Eyes is Intellego Imaginem, so it's like Prying Eyes...it lets you see all the visual species in the room, as opposed to just those striking the grog you touched or whatever. I'm guessing.

40

Sure. But what would be the formula to see through the grog even if he's out in the woods? Is that better than a InMe version of this spell? What summa do I have access to that affects these choices?

Making these sorts of choices in-saga is where I'm planning on finding my Fun.