So, with Canaanite Necromancy from Ancient Magic, they mention contacting dead Founders. What kind of secrets (magical or mundane) would said founders be able to share?
If I'm not mistaken, Ghosts can no longer teach Hermetic Magic, unless they initiated the Living Ghost virtue from the Mysteries?
The Range: Veil of Death has some very interesting uses, so I'm also curious if anyone has used this discovery in their sagas, and what kind of other secrets the PCs got around to digging up?
Why not? Source?
The ghost would need the Gift to teach Arts, wouldn't it?
Why? If it has knowledge of the Arts, could it not share this knowledge?
A book does not need the Gift.
Said ghost couldn't cast spells or in other ways use it's knowledge of the Hermetic Arts for effect without the Gift, but I don't see why it couldn't teach.
If someone does have a source for why the opposite would be true, I'd love to have it. It would significantly alter certain of my projects/ideas.
PS: Also please note that there's no guarantee that even the ghost of a magus/maga would retain memories of his/her Arts - ghosts are usually merely fragments of their living selves IIRC. But if they do retain knowledge of the Arts, why wouldn't they be able to teach them?
And to what extent would that same apply to Hedge Magi? Some hedge traditions require the Gift as well, as you might recall.
can a failed apprentice learn arts from a book to teach to others? Do they retain the arts they learned before they lost the Gift? I don't know that the rules have addressed this issue directly...
Well, there is an obvious way to circumvent this problem by just giving them "Gifted" Major Magical Quality, allowing them to retain the knowledge of Hermetic Arts. Whether or not they'd actually have it is up to the SG but it's not hard to argue that the ghosts of the Founder's caliber would retain their Gifts post-mortem (or some portion of it?).
So far I haven't made a character questing for Caanite Necromancy but yes, this would have so much story potential, beyond simply find it.
On the side note, ; there is a variant of Caanite Necromancy called Pictish Necromancy, for those playing on the British Isles.
What was House Diedne like, and why was it destroyed (we can contact Diedne the Founder, and got names of at least 2 Diedne Primi at different time periods). What happened to Tytalus, Pralix and Bonisagus? Who was behind the Sundering? What are the Tremeres planning? They specifically burn the corpses of their dead so that necromancers can't learn their secrets, which is no protection against a Caanite Magus.
In retrospect it also makes it very easy to learn lost languages and learn more about Hedge Magics (since a lot of hedgies gain their power through initiations, they'd retain them after death).
Either way, it makes for a treasure trove of info.
There are too many different types of ghosts of magi to make a sweeping judgement like this. Can the ghosts of Mormulus, Ierimya or Pitsdim (Calebais p.58f box, 61 box and 66 box) still teach the Arts they retain? Some can even cast spells with them still. But who would dare to trust their instructions?
The general problem of not just questioning ghosts, but being taught by them, is their inscrutable state of mind.
The problem with this is that you are implicitly assuming that the player will both create the character sheet of the ghosts that they will summon and be the one to summon them.
If I were the player of a character dealing with ghosts it would be someone else in my group who made the stats for said ghost.
Looking at things from the other side of the proverbial game master's screen, if I were the storyguide for a story about a player wanting to find ghosts to learn from, and I was making a detailed character sheet for a ghost, I would give that ghost the "Gifted" major magical quality if and only if I believe that it is relevant, and will pull the story in an interesting direction.
It is true that if you are assuming that you get to "roll" the ghost that your own character will be using then you can make a single "doom" ghost that has the Gift and high scores in every art and all the arcane abilities that are useful to a magus and why stop there, why not a high communication+teaching score too?
Such would not fly in any group that I play with. For example I might just create a ghost of a magus specialized in one art and give it a custom magical quality ability that allows the ghost to e.g. teach and/or use a single Art, or whatever else hacky stuff I would need to engage in, in order to make the story interesting.
The Cave of Twisting Shadows uses ghost instead of books for (most of) their library. It is actually listed as one of the alternates to books in Covenants (p. 102) in the paragraph labeled "Knowledge".
I don't have my books on me, but don't the Criamon ritually murder their best and brightest in such away to leave useful ghosts behind? I vaguely seem to recall that the victims volunteer.
You are going to be hard-pressed to find any other group of wizards who have been deliberately leaving "teaching" ghosts around.
Not all of their best and brightest. They ritually murder their Primi.
Your best bet there is Sub Rosa #13 which is near entirely about Diedne, both the house and founder.
As Troy said, only the Primi are ritually murdered. The “ghost Primi are not technically ghosts, they are each part of a single being that presents itself (and is likely fooling itself) as multiple beings. The ghosts though are just that many Criamon close to death return to The Cave of Twisting Shadows to die in order to stay and teach as ghosts. This seems to be a feature of that particular regio though it may be a feature of other regios. There are a number of regios or auras throughout the books that have odd side effects such as that and Arcane Connections not working (without the aid of their Cathach) .in the Aura of Qui Sonant Pro Quieto from Contested Isles.