So, I've come up with a couple situations I'm not so sure about:
You cast Inmost Companion with a duration of Moon instead. Your body and mind are significantly separated so that sunrise/sunset are not at essentially the same time. When does your Parma Magica drop?
You cast Leap of Homecoming, moving from a location just before sunrise/sunset to one just after sunrise/sunset. Does this avoid the triggering event? Does this pass through the triggering event and thus experience the trigger during the moment of transportation?
Noting that sunrise/sunset can move both east to west and west to east depending on local geography (valleys/hills), how do you judge sunrise/sunset for someone underground?
Pretty much these are all YSMV, but my take would be:
When it drops for your body. It is your body that does the Parma ritual.
A Sun duration spell lasts until the next sunrise/sunset. If you Leap with an Active sun Duration effect to a location from before sunrise to one after sunrise, you are now at a time after the next sunrise, so the effect expires. Item effects (and similar) that trigger when the sunrises/sets trigger when you pass from a pre to post sunrise state.
Sunrise/sunset at the point on the surface of the earth directly above them.
You either run out of Arcane Connections to things to the left, or drown in the Atlantic Ocean, or fall off the earth, or get eaten by whatever lives on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, or you eventually wrap around into the next day, which is a time after the next sunset, so your effect expires.
Does the Mythic paradigm have any concept of time zones? I'd ignore that particular issue, I think it is reasonable in a world that ignores Newtonian Physics.
I'd treat sunrise for underground as whatever it would be at the spot immediately above, which would be a guess.
It should do. For example Chapter 32 of "The Reckoning of Time" by Bede (673-735) is called "Why the Same Days are Unequal in Length" and is all about why the length of the day varies depending on your north-south latitude, and also talks about the sun "bringing noon and evening in its train" as it orbits from east to west around the earth.
Also Eratosthenes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eratosthenes utilizes the different position of the sun in different locations at the same "time" to calculate the earth's diameter.
Although medieval writers seem to conceive of this as everywhere being the same "time", but the position of the sun (and therefore when sunset and sunrise occurs) being different depending on where upon the surface of the earth you are. Which still means that the timing of sunrise/sunset triggers depend on your location.
Time zones, per se, no. They are a modern arbitrary convention. But sunrise/sunset at different times, yes, definitely. Even the circumference of the earth was pretty well known for well over a millenium prior to the Ars Magica time period.
Richard, interesting take on the teleportation. I'll have to think about that and what it means with much longer range teleportation.
As for the location directly above you underground, as several have mentioned, that's where I have trouble. When you do that you can end up with parts of your body having sunrise/sunset significantly (like hours) apart from each other. So it's sort of like Inmost Companion in that you might experience sunrise/sunset at multiple times with different parts of you.
Outside of being under a magical effect, that would require being squished to death. Let's say you're under a vertical cliff face that runs north-south. Part of your body will be below the bottom and part will be below the top. That will put either sunrise or sunset or both, depending on surroundings and facing, at different times for those two spots.
Note that because of the atmosphere refraction, the sunrise is actually a Diameter ahead of the sunrise. :mrgreen:
That is, the real top of the Sun is barely touching the horizon at about the same moment the image of the Sun becomes fully visible. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunrise#Angle
I think this is so cool that this full-up-but-actually-full-down moment should be sunrise.
I don't think that's a real problem. How do you cope with a magus who is standing (above ground) so that he is partly on the shady west side of a wall at sunrise and partly in the open? Cope with this the same way.
Decide where his centre is and use that as the reference point. It's not an issue.
TMRE p. 70 tells us how to deal with reisistance when body and spirit are seperated.
Middle column, under Talisman Connection.
Ofcourse, as already pointed out, raising your Parma requires a small ritual, so I probably wouldn't let a magus do this while not inhabiting his body.
Much tricky. I'd say no - your effect would end, as you would now be in the wrong part of the day (day has become night/night has become day).
Honestly? Arbitrarily.
They are underground and can't see the sun.
Since there is not "Temporis" art, how'd they keep precise track of time anyway?
Good find. Hmmm... Too bad it and ArM5 seem to be somewhat contradictory. With Inmost Companion both your body and mind are protected by your magic resistance as normal, while TMRE seems to suggest this is something special for Inscription on the Soul and that normally the magic resistance would get split. Hmmm...
"They" don't need to. Spell expiry is a supernatural/astrological event. The magus doesn't cause spell expiry to happen.
Also a magus can easily keep track of time underground by witnessing the expiry of spells, although the smallest time quanta a magus can easily measure thusly is Diameter. But he can measure a Diameter very precisely.
I'm sorry, I must have failed to make my point clear.
I would happily just declare "The sun is going down", rather than worry about the exact timing of it.
Thus the word 'arbitrarily'.
I'm not going to worry about sun down being 2 mins earlier because there are some hills in the way - if the magi have time for that sort of things when underground, I'm not keeping them busy enough.
Sure they could, and they should have a bit of warning, but not exact timing.
Sure, that's how I would do it as a storyguide too.
The issue still arises because in-character it happens at a definite time, and the magi will want to plan for it --- such as, they will presumably try to avoid being in the midst of a combat encounter when their Parma falls due to sun-down. Which is fine too, it happens when the storyguide says it does, but the magi can take (reliable or otherwise) measures to figure out when that will be and thus plan accordingly.
2 minutes? It could be hours. Where I go in the summer the sun sets earlier on the western side than on the eastern side by about an hour due to local geography.
Sure, a maga experiences "sunset" at a different time depending on whether she is in a valley or on a hill. So what? As long as she is only ever in one place at one time, then there is not a problem. If a maga standing in the daylight in a valley has a Sun duration effect active, it will expire when the sunsets. If she subsequently walks up onto a hill (where she can still see the sun) the effect doesn't suddenly reactivate, because there is no effect. The effect expired and ceased to be when she was in the valley. Hermetic magic cannot break the Limit of Time, and a maga certainly can't break the Limit of Time by going for a walk up a hill.
Sure, I can accept that one time thing. But let's look at the consistency of the overall reasoning in the thread in light of what you agree on here: the ground of a hill changes when a magus experiences sunrise/sunset, but ground does not do the same for those underground. Why does some ground work this way and not other ground? This is why my question arose and why I'd attached my comments about sunrise/sunset varying in the way I did. I don't want someone running underground to avoid sunrise/sunset, and I doubt anyone else here would want that. But I like to have things consistent in some way because it makes it easier for me to judge situations that may not be so clear-cut.
he would killme at first view