X-Topic-No: 7 Date: Fri, 27 Jan 95 22:04:42 PST From: John Sullivan To: mage-l@wizards.com Subject: Hanging Spells, 1 of 2 (long) Message-ID: Magic Made Simple: Hanging Spells by John Sullivan The art of hanging spells is an intermediary step on the road to the creation of true talismans. It provides a simpler way of setting a spell in a particular object or place and having it take effect at some time other than the time it is cast. When a mage hangs a spell she manipulates the tapestry, impressing on it a pattern which encodes a process instead of matter or energy. Unlike a talisman, this is not a dynamic pattern. Instead of carrying an ongoing quintessence flow like a living object, a hung spell contains stable quintessence as does matter. Rather than making something capable of casting magic itself, a mage who hangs a spell is doing something more akin to making an impression of an object in wax. Hanging spells are fully described at the time of their creation, but remain dormant until certain triggering events take place. At this time the spell goes off, just as it was originally cast. The spell's pattern is consumed in this act and it ceases to exist. All hung spells take effect one time only and are then gone forever. Examples of use: The ward is the best-known and most common example of a hung spell. These spells protect some object or place, like a doorway. A ward placed on the doorway of a mage's sanctum might remain inert until someone tried to force entry into the sanctum. At this time the spell would activate and most likely deliver a warning to the mage or take some offensive action against the intruder. The ward would be destroyed in the process and would have to be re-enchanted if the door were to remain protected. Many chantries prefer talisman-based wards for protecting their most precious secrets, since talismans remain intact after being triggered. For more basic uses, however, many wards are designed as simple hanging spells. The potions of historical legend are another example of hung spells. A spell enchanted into a potion can be given to anyone, even a sleeper, and serves as a single-use magical item. Well known historical examples include life effects used in "healing potions" or "love potions" that use mind effects to induce emotional states in the drinker. A potion provides more control over magic that is to take place outside a mage's presence. If a mage needed to send a sleeper to perform a dangerous task, she might want to cast some useful spell on him to ensure the job is successfully done. If this spell has a duration she can simply cast it and send him on his way. On the other hand, it would be pointless to try and heal the person before he has been hurt. If a need for healing is expected, the mage must either accompany him to cast the spell, or else give him some means of doing so himself when the need arises. A potion provides this flexibility and is simple for untrained sleepers to use. Drinking the potion provides an unambiguous triggering event and impresses the spell's expendable nature on users who do not understand magic. At the same time, since it works once and then is gone, it is less likely than a talisman to be abused by the ignorant. Note that the potion itself provides only a physical carrier for the spell. The same spell could be placed in any other object, or even on the target himself. Herbal potions are so ingrained in the mass consciousness mostly because they fit well into the paradigm of the Verbena, who frequently used them to help sleepers in their communities. Requirements: In order to hang spells, a mage must have Prime 3, as well as the sphere ratings necessary to cast the spell being hung. Other spheres may be necessary, usually at level one, depending on the complexity of the spell's triggering conditions. Quintessence and Willpower must be expended as part of the hanging process. The Process: To hang a spell, the mage first selects an object or place into which the spell will be woven. If possible, mages will use a physical object as an anchoring pattern for their prime patterns since this is easier than building a pattern without such an anchor. If necessary, a spell can be attached to an empty location in space at +1 to the casting difficulty. The mage then spends approximately half an hour preparing the pattern. This involves various level 1 and level 3 prime magics that detect and clear away any underlying imperfections in the tapestry that might interfere with the prime pattern to be created. No roll is necessary for this process, but it cannot be rushed or the spell will fail. Once this process is complete, the mage is ready to actually hang the spell. The mage casts the spell conjunctionally with Prime 3. The minimum difficulty is therefore six. The mage must expend a point of willpower to impress his will this strongly upon the tapestry, and supply one point of quintessence to maintain the pattern. The mage may use willpower and quintessence to assist in the casting as usual. The required points do not count against the normal limits since they are being used for a different purpose than actually casting the effect. Assuming the spell is successfully cast, the pattern will be impressed and the spell will be effectively stored. When its triggering conditions are met it will go off exactly as the mage cast it. No roll is necessary when the spell goes off. It gets the number of successes the mage rolled when creating it. If the effect is vulgar, the paradox is dealt with at the time of casting. Always check for paradox as if "vulgar with sleeper witnesses" conditions were in effect. Example: Arturo (Arete 5, Prime 3, Forces 4) protects his car with a hung spell that fires a forces 3 electrical shock effect at anyone who tries to open the driver's side door without making the subtle hand gesture Arturo habitually makes. This is a vulgar effect so, after half an hour spent clearing away any background magical influences from his car, Arturo spends a willpower and a quintessence, then rolls four dice with a difficulty of six. He gets three successes so the spell is stored in the pattern as a three success spell. Had he chosen to do so, Arturo could have spent quintessence to lower the difficulty below 6 and could have spent another willpower to get a fourth success. When a neighborhood low-life tries to steal the car the spell goes off and does three successes worth of damage to the would-be thief. Forces 3 does two health levels of damage per success, so the spell will do six health-levels of damage. Arturo doesn't have to check for paradox because he did so when creating the spell. If the thief is willing, and able, to try again the door is now unprotected. Triggering Conditions: A hung spell is a pattern, and it is triggered by its interaction with other patterns. The triggering conditions must be chosen before the spell is cast, and will have a major impact on the shape of the pattern. Triggering conditions must be specific, and must take place within line of sight of the spell. Unless special abilities are designed into the spell, triggering conditions must be detectable by normal human senses. A ward on a desk drawer could be triggered by anyone trying to open the drawer, by someone who doesn't first say a password, by a red haired woman, or by anyone carrying a gun. Note that the normal human senses requirement doesn't require that the condition be something an average bystander would necessarily be aware of. The anyone carrying a gun trigger would work even if the gun were concealed under a coat. Without magical modifications, however, a hung spell could not distinguish between specific individuals (Trigger if: my enemy, Jeremy of the Dark Reavers Cabal, attempts to open the drawer), take into account a target's state of mind (Trigger if: anyone approaches with hostile intent, but ignore them if they are friendly) or detect other things that are intangible to normal senses (Trigger if: the object containing the spell comes into contact with something carrying an electrical current). These kinds of triggers are possible, but require improving the spell's sensory apparatus by stacking effects of other spheres into the spell at the time it is cast. The examples above would require Life 1, Mind 2 and Forces 1 respectively. The first example would also require the mage to have successfully scanned Jeremy's pattern prior to casting in order to build the proper identifying factors into the spell. The maximum number of different triggering conditions that can be placed on a hung spell is equal to the caster's arete. When several mages cooperate to hang a spell, this limit is the highest single arete among the group, not the sum of all the casters. If multiple conditions are used they can be chained together with various logical operators. For example "Trigger if: anyone not wearing the sigil of my cabal opens this book, or if anyone at all attempts to remove it from this room" would let your friends read your book but not take it away with them and would set off the spell immediately if someone else tampered with the book. Detection and Analysis: A hung spell is a prime pattern containing stored quintessence. Thus it can be sensed and studied by a capable mage. Characters with the Awareness ability will be able to sense a nearby hung spell much as they would any other magical effect. A simple Prime 1 effect will reveal the pattern itself. Once a mage discovers a hung spell, he will probably want to learn what it does and how it is triggered. If he has Prime 1, a mage can study the pattern and possibly learn how it was constructed. If the mage has the sphere ratings necessary to cast the spell himself, an Int+Occult roll will reveal information about it. Storyteller discretion is required here. A single success will let the mage figure out what the spell does when triggered, while more successes might reveal how powerful it is (i.e. how many successes it has), what the triggering conditions are, and perhaps even suggest ways of getting around them. If the mage is not capable of casting the spell himself, analyzing it becomes more difficult. If the mage is rated in the spheres involved, but not highly enough to actually cast the spell, he might be able to figure out that the pattern is a hung life and forces spell, but would not understand just what its effects would be. If he is totally ignorant of one of the spheres involved, there is very little that can be learned. A large number of successes might give some information about triggering conditions, but what happens once the trigger is set off will remain a mystery. Destroying a hung spell: A hung spell's pattern can be unraveled and the spell removed using Prime 3. Like anti-magic, this is always coincidental, so you roll your arete against the same difficulty as that of casting the hung spell. To successfully unravel the spell, you must get enough successes on this roll to equal the original caster's arete. If you fail, the spell is unaffected. On a botch, the spell is immediately triggered. You can take down your own hung spells with very little chance of failure, since you presumably know just how you built the spell in the first place. Make the same arete roll to see if you botch, but otherwise you successfully remove the spell even if you don't roll any successes. Tampering with someone else's hung spells can be dangerous. While simply studying a pattern with Prime 1 is a passive activity and a spell cannot be directly triggered by it, actively trying to destroy the spell with Prime 3 is detectable and may well be one of the spell's triggering conditions. If this is true, you will get only one chance to take the spell down safely. Failing will leave the spell free to be triggered and it will go off. The spell will be destroyed, but not quite in the way you had hoped. Taking down a hung spell can be done in concert by a group of mages with Prime 3. This is generally a good idea if you have reason to suspect that the spell contains such a tampering switch, or was made by someone with a higher arete than your own. Overlapping Spells: It is never possible to put more than one hung spell on a given object or location. The patterns are too unwieldy to operate without interfering with one another. Simply placing too many hung spells in close proximity can cause difficulties as the patterns begin interacting with each other, leading to unpredictable results. If a single person, or a group in a confined space like a car, tries to carry more than 3 to 5 hung spells at a time, their patterns will begin to merge and mutate. As a result of this process spells may trigger prematurely or have their triggering conditions changed. When spells do go off, their effects may be a bizarre mix of the effects of other spells they have been subjected to. In a worst case scenario all the patterns may simply collapse, releasing their stored quintessence in the equivalent of a primally reinforced blast that does aggravated damage to everyone nearby. There is no way to predict just what sort of alterations will take place when patterns begin to interact, or how many patterns can be in a given area without causing problems. Advice for Players The thing to concentrate on when designing a hung spell is the triggering conditions since this is the easiest way for the spell to not do what you want it to do. A hung spell is a purely mechanical contraption and by no means intelligent. It will literally interpret the conditions it is given and the subtleties of a situation will be completely lost on it. A spell with conditions that don't accurately define the caster's intention is often worse than no spell at all. Arturo's car protector is a particularly bad example. It will give him trouble whenever he goes someplace with valet parking or needs to have someone else drive, while not even adequately protecting the car from theft. If you can install multiple conditions in a spell it is generally best to avoid trying to detect several completely different things. Instead try to overlap your conditions to better cover a single circumstance. Consider "Trigger if: this door is opened by anyone other than me, or if I open it without first touching this spot on the doorjamb." While the first condition would provide basic protection against burglars, the second condition makes the spell smart enough to catch special circumstances that would slip past the first. The spell would now be triggered if another mage used a Life effect to try and make his pattern look like yours, but didn't know he needed to touch the doorjamb. It would also give you a way to trigger the spell yourself if needed - for instance if an enemy with a gun on you decides to get clever and says "No, you open it." (Presumably the spell will warn your friends, or deliver some kind of area effect that can affect the gunman and won't seriously harm you.) Remember that there is a bit of vagueness built into spell triggers and you can make this worse by trying to be to inclusive or asking the spell to make subjective judgments. Telling a spell to trigger if it sees a short person or a someone with brown hair is asking for trouble. The Storyteller, who has to interpret the spell, will ask "shorter than what?" and may make a snap judgment that is not what you wanted at all. The brown hair trigger might work in some circumstances, but at the edges where brown shades into blonde or into black you will have problems. And of course if the target has dyed his hair another color the spell will ignore him completely. Even more subjective things like triggering if someone is wearing an ugly shirt wouldn't be possible at all. (Granted, these are pretty silly examples, but the principle is important. Be as precise as possible when designing triggering conditions and your spells are less likely to betray you in a crisis.) Another reason to take care in setting triggering conditions is the ease with which a spell can be fooled, especially by someone who knows what the spell's triggering conditions are. Having a spell trigger when it detects someone not wearing the sigil of your cabal works unless someone manages to get their hands on a sigil. It is especially easy for a mage to magically alter the situation to give a spell what it wants to see. If a spell triggers if someone approaches with hostile intent, it would take only a trivial Mind 1 effect to build an "overlay" personality that beams sweetness and light at the spell. Thus, while they are generally effective against sleepers, it can be risky to rely solely on hung spells to protect yourself from other mages. Advice for Storytellers Hung spells are intended to fill a fairly significant gap left unfilled by Mage, provide players with a convenient way of extending their power beyond their immediate presence, and give you another source of tricks and puzzles with which to enrich your game. They are not intended to help munchkin players abuse the system. Consider, for example a player who decides that casting spells in a crisis situation is too risky since they might fail, or even botch. However if he casts a hung spell on some object, he will know immediately if it has failed and can then discard it and start over. In this way the player might try to cast five copies of the two or three spells he usually casts, make sure they all have the maximal number of successes, and then carry them on pebbles in his pocket he can throw at someone when they are needed. Hopefully your players are above this sort of thing, but even so some guidelines like the proximity rule are helpful. Remember that hung spells are fairly awkward constructions, especially compared to talismans. They are magically less efficient and their triggering conditions are connections of pattern linkages that can only crudely attempt to logically model the complexities of the real world. Think of them as simple computer programs without the complexity to handle things like error trapping. If things go just right, they work. However it isn't too hard to bring them crashing down. The easiest way to handle the bookkeeping of hung spells is to write up a description at the time the spell is cast. An index card for each spell works well. This card should tell you where the spell is, the sphere ratings used, a quick description of what it does, the caster's arete and the number of successes rolled. The card should also contain the spell's triggering conditions. Have the player write down triggering conditions in the form of a sentence. For example "Trigger if: I am rendered unconscious by damage." or "Trigger if: this door is opened by anyone other than me, or if I open it without first touching this spot on the doorjamb." If you need to know how "clever" or generally how well constructed a spell is, use the caster's arete. For example, if a mage used Life magic to make himself look like someone a spell was keyed to ignore, he would have to roll a number of successes on the Life effect at least equal to the original caster's arete in order to fool the spell. Otherwise, he might look to the naked eye like the person in question, but the underlying pattern would not be exact enough to match the spell's complex criteria. Slider Controls Before posting to the wider audience, these rules were sent to two members of the Mage-L mailing list to be checked for inconsistencies and generally critiqued for usefulness and playability. My acknowledgment and gratitude go to Anders Sandberg and Paul Strack for their assistance in this area. With the exception of a potentially crippling loophole discovered by Anders (and since plugged in the main section), their suggestions distilled down to differences in campaigning and storytelling style. Because of the vague nature of the rules, Mage is particularly susceptible to these differences in feel. The main section was written with my own chronicle in mind, and the comments from Paul and Anders pointed out the need to consider other styles. This section is intended to serve as a sort of "control panel" for these rules, giving suggestions on how to tweak them to better match your chronicle and the role you want hanging spells to play in it. Casting Time The half hour preparation period was designed to keep players from coming up with hung spells on the spur of the moment. They were intended to be plot devices rather than a battle tactic. You may actually prefer that players be able to toss off a hung spell more quickly in an emergency. For instance if a player was trying to slow down pursuers, perhaps he could drop a quick forces spell that triggers on the next person to come around a corner. Option 1: A hung spell can be cast in a single turn at +3 difficulty. This gives a minimum base difficulty of 9 and pretty much assures the player will dump quintessence into the spell in order to succeed. This seems appropriate to the sort of quick and dirty, brute force magic of a character who is rushed and in danger. If the caster takes five minutes to prepare, the difficulty is +1. If I were using this option, I would also add some atmospheric side effects as a result of sloppy spellcasting. Perhaps a spell gives off a nails on chalkboard shriek as it goes off, or perhaps the spell itself is actually dimly visible as a shimmering in the air like heat rising. I would certainly limit the time that such a spell would last untriggered. (see Duration below) Option 2: Casting time is based on the complexity of the spell, from a few minutes for simple spells up to the full time required to make a comparable talisman for especially complicated spells. You'll have to make your own judgments for each spell in this case. Quintessence Cost In my chronicle, quintessence is not particularly easy to come by and so the quintessence cost of a hung spell is correspondingly low. Depending on how much quintessence your characters routinely carry around, you might want to increase this base cost. Option 1: The quintessence cost equals the highest sphere rating involved in the spell Option 2: The quintessence cost equals the sum total of all spheres being used. A Mind 2, Life 4 effect would require 6 points of quintessence, for example. Duration As originally designed, hung spells are intended to remain intact until triggered or destroyed. However if you find yourself having to deal with too many of them (wards on everything, alert messages triggered by nearly any action that takes place anywhere, etc.), rule that hung spells degrade over time even if not triggered. Their patterns eventually decay and their quintessence bleeds away into the tapestry. If you do give hung spells a duration, the caster should have the option of maintaining the spell by going to its location and spending its original quintessence cost to rebuild it with no roll required. The need to spend all that extra quintessence should be enough to ensure players use hung spells only where they are really needed. Option 1: There is a preset time after which a spell will no longer function. This time could be any figure you like, a week, a month, until the next new moon, etc. Option 2: The time an untriggered spell will last is determined by the number of successes rolled, using the standard duration chart. (Personally I find this approach less than satisfactory since the shorter durations are too short to be of much use in most cases and 5 successes would make the pattern permanent anyway.) Triggering Requirements The "normal human senses" rule for triggering conditions was intended to provide elbow room in determining how a spell must be put together, but some storytellers may be uncomfortable with this deliberate vagueness. If you want the need for additional sensory magic to be more concrete, require additional spheres for any triggering effect instead of those not determinable under the normal human senses rule. Under this option, Arturo's Car Protector (tm) would require correspondence 1 to detect the hand signal, or perhaps some other sphere depending on your interpretation. Caution is recommended if using this option. Re-rolling upon Trigger The reason for having all dice rolls involved in hanging a spell made at the time of casting was to save bookkeeping and make things easier for you, the storyteller. While having a hung spell stored exactly as it was cast should work in most circumstances, there are some situations in which problems may arise. Consider for example what happens if someone tries to anti-magic a hung spell as it is triggered, or something else happens that would be dealt with in a normal casting by increasing the original caster's difficulty. This wasn't an issue in my chronicle because I had already altered anti-magic (and anything else that raises another caster's difficulty) so that it removes the spell's successes instead of raising the difficulty. I didn't want to deal with having to backtrack and refigure successes, especially since the dice would probably no longer still be on the table by this time. If you want to leave anti-magic intact, consider this method for re-rolling an effect when it is triggered. When the player hangs the spell, record the number of successes as usual. If nothing happens that would raise the difficulty, this is all you need. If someone does anti-magic the spell, roll a number of dice equal to the number of stored successes. Note this is not the dice pool the original caster had when hanging the spell. If the caster rolled five dice but made only two successes, roll two dice when the spell is triggered. You know all these dice were originally successes, so adjust any ones or failures to be the minimum possible success. Then raise the difficulty by the appropriate number and see how many successes remain. Example: The ever popular Arturo's car protector is a forces 3 spell, cast at a difficulty 6. Arturo rolls four dice and gets three successes. The spell is stored with three successes. When Benjie, the famous Prime adept and car thief, attempts to steal Arturo's car, the spell goes off and Benjie tries to anti-magic it. He manages to raise the difficulty to 8. The storyteller rolls three dice for the spell, which come up 3, 7, and 9. The 3 is a failure, but we know Arturo had a success originally, so the 3 becomes a 6. This is no longer enough to succeed against the anti-magic, and neither is the originally successful 7. Only the nine survives, and the car protector goes off with only a single success. =========================================================================== Comments can be posted to Mage-L or sent to me at: sullivan@interramp.com This document is copyright 1994 by John Sullivan. All rights reserved. Permission is specifically granted to copy, transfer, and otherwise use this document for non-commercial purposes only.