Yet more Spell Questions from a Novice

[Cuchulainshound]

@Shin

I feel like I need to apologize for asking questions about so many of the spells in the core book, but I feel like I need to understand them in order to be able to fairly adjudicate the design of new spells (and arbitrate the effects of the existing ones). Anyway, hopefully the forum community will continue to bare with me .

There are no stupid questions (but those are the easiest to answer...)

Many spells are, indeed, "legacies" from earlier editions when the guidelines were far, far looser, less unified and overall less coherent. You'll run into a lot of them, spells that are colorful and classic and traditional (in AM, anyway), and so aren't radically re-defined, yet don't actually, technically fit the new rules

Whispers Through The Black Gate is one such - there's no reason the voice should be heard - it's not a Rego forcing a sound, but an Intellego spell to gain knowledge - but the description says that the voice is heard by all. Meh.

You can do one (or more) of several things...

1. Ignore it.
2. Fix each in turn to match the Guidelines.
3. Explain to your Players that "magic is weird", and then ignore it.
4. A little of 2 and 3 combined

I usually choose #3 unless it's really problematic. And nothing says that the spell a PC or an NPC knows is the same as the "classic" version - new spells are personally invented all the time, so the variations can be infinite.