Speaking to stone without Intellego

Here are a few sneaky spells to allow an Ars Magica hermetic wizard to speak to stone without using Intellego. Why? Well my player character is darn awful at casting Intellego spells (perception magic) and I need a work around. It seems suitable that it the work around is more complex and harder to do than the direct approach, but also pleasing that it can be done.

The Unobtrusive Observer’s Sight in Stone
Muto Terram / Mentum 30, R: Touch, D: Sun, T: Part
The surface touched is awakened to consciousness. The surface is able to see and hear it’s surroundings, will remember details of events for the duration of the spell.When cast a small human face is added to the surface touched, and effect’s perception is based upon the position of that face. The position and size of the face is decided when the spell is cast.

(Base 4 to awaken the consciousness of a plant in the earth instead, Mentum requisite in base effect +0, highly unnatural effect for earth +1, to affect stone +1, R: Touch +1, D: Sun +2, T: Part +1)

The base 4 guideline from MuHe is the closest similar spell guideline but it is not a perfect match to the effect, as the earth is arguably “less alive” than plants. Therefore I added an additional magnitude to adjust for a “highly unnatural” effect.

I also considered the Muto Terram guideline for Level 5 which changes earth into an animal as being very similar in style, and it was nice that the two difficulties matched.

The Unobtrusive Observer’s Voice in Stone
Muto Terram / Corpus 25, R: Touch, D: Conc, T: Part

The surface touched gains the power of human speech as long as the earth is already awakened.

(Base 4 to grant the power of speech, highly unnatural for earth +1, Corpus requisite in base effect +0, to affect stone +1, R: Touch +1, D: Conc +1, T: Part +1)

Credit must go to the Ars Magica community (Ezechiel357 and Pralix) who helped in my forum post, they’ve added a few more sneaky ideas around this concept – particularly the point that granting a Creo Imagonem / Mentum effect is more direct and would probably be the more direct way of granting the speech effect; but I think that style effect may still need Intellego to allow the effect to understand the mind in the stone.

I also found a similar Herbam based effect called the Eye of Daisy in an old thread.



Leave a Reply


WordPress.com Logo


Google photo


Twitter picture


Facebook photo


Connecting to %s