The Aegis Saga

[Kena Sugrue]

Ihave read the spell description and am hard-pressed to find anything in support of this position. The closest thing that I can come up with is "If the foreign spell cannot penetrate a resistance equal to the level of the Aegis, it fizzles out. The Aegis is also able to block...spells that were cast before they entered the Aegis, such as an invisibility spell cast on a magus outside the Aegis."

A Bjornaer's ability to change shape s also affected by an Aegis (per HoH: MC, p. 22), and an Aegis also supposedly impairs other Supernatural Abilities (although I don't remember ever seeing a cite for that).

Does an Aegis of the Hearth, in your estimation, dispel a Parma Magica? And, if so, does it do so always, or only under certain circumstances (i.e. there is some correlation between a magus's Parma Magica ability and the Aegis Penetration).

From a purely social POV, if Aegis dispelled PM you would distrust every magus that came to visit you. Also, (noble's parma) I don't think Second Sight is affected by the Aegis, you might consider PM the same kind of thing.

That, and you would never leave your own covenant. If you were to visit another covenant and were given a casting token, you have no guarantee that someone else involved in the casting wouldn't invoke your invitation for any or no reason. And it would make Tribunals all but impossible, for the same reason.

You have this turned around. Every visiting magus would distrust magi of the covenant they are visiting.

But yes, social issues are problematic in this scenario. However if the Heartbeast is affected why not Parma Magica?

The Heartbeast itself isn't affected - if you're in Heartbeast form and you enter a foreign Aegis, the Aegis won't force you into your Human form...but that might be as much a function of the Heartbeast's pure unadulterated awesomeness than anything else. The Aegis does affect your Heartbeast Ability, when you try to change from Human to Animal form or vice versa by making you roll your Sta + Heartbeast vs. an Ease Factor of 3 + (Aegis Magnitude 5) when a roll isn't normally needed.

I can almost see, by extension, requiring a Parma Magica roll when you perform the Parma ritual at sunrise/sunset vs. a similar Ease Factor, and am considering proposing a house rule to that effect for Canaries when I start it up again. But that's not the same as your Parma collapsing when you cross the boundary.

The way we play it, Both are breakthroughs that are not fully integrated into hermetic theory. Parma is the big thing that Bonisagus did himself and then his fili created the aegis based on that research so I think we can set a few exceptions without breaking the setting/rules

Full effect is defiled as applying a casting total penalty to all magic and suppressing all spells of a level less than the aegis

Partial effect is defined as suppressing all spells that are not personal and of a level of less than the aegis

The way we play it, Both are breakthroughs that are not fully integrated into hermetic theory. Parma is the big thing that Bonisagus did himself and then his fili created the aegis based on that research so I think we can set a few exceptions without breaking the setting/rules.

I'm in favor of parma not dropping when crossing an Aegis boundary, but I could see sagas working either way. If it dropped it would make for a more insular, suspicious Order. Not necessarily a bad thing.

As written down in ArM5 basic rules, Aegis of the Hearth protects - in different ways - against spells and their effects, enchanted devices and beings with Might score. Nothing else is mentioned as affected by the Aegis. I do not find any reason in ArM5 basic rules why the Aegis would have any effect on Abilities like Entrancement, Enchanting Music, Second Sight - or indeed Parma Magica, which is by ArM5 p.66 "a special ritual (not a ritual spell)".

And that is a precedent for a general procedure I would - also for systematic reasons - expect to be followed in the many subsequent rules books, already published or still to come: If some new type of magic, not based on spells, enchanted devices or Might, is somewhere introduced, its interaction with the Aegis should then and there be defined, too. E. g. in HMRE p. 7 you find it followed nicely.

As typical for sets of game rules whose complexity grows with each book, this procedure was not followed through completely, though, and a structural problem in the rules came into existence. individual sagas needed explicitly or impiicitly to define their own rules on interaction of the Aegis with the many different types of magic appearing over time. Which naturally led also to discussions on interaction of Aegis and Parma - in particular if the mentioned structural problem was not even acknowledged.

Not at all. In the ArM5 rules there is TMK not a shadow of a reason for this, and TMU the game world - which is a lot older than ArM5 after all - would not be improved by any interaction of Aegis and Parma either.

I think the intention is that it would make supernatural abilities more difficult to use, it may not have been stated as such in the text of Aegis of the Hearth, but the intent is clear, to block outside magical effects. Chris Allen did an excellent analysis of Aegis here. In a game setting where supernatural abilities are used with full effect within a foregin aegis, well, I would be mighty peeved if the SG brings an NPC with Enchanting Music and sings most of the important covenfolk away like the Pied Piper. This is the kind of thing that magi have the Aegis to protect against: the primary purpose effect of the Aegis is that it protects covenfolk so magi aren't always called away to take care of a pesky problem.

Parma Magica has a magical effect, and it can be knocked down by spells like Wind of Mundane Silence, so the rules are much more ambiguous than you suggest. If one effect can knock down Parma, why not Aegis? Note the spell indicates that it doesn't have a Perdo requisite, which suggests that according to Hermetic Theory it should have a Perdo requisite.

Your or Chris Allen's reasoning is what I would expect troupes to make, once they start looking for saga house rules about the Aegis. Note that it is reasoning faute de mieux, trying to substitute for non-existing rules. It first requires an acknowledgement, that rules are missing, and then a conscious effort to make them up for your own saga. It is of limited use when addressing questions related to other sagas, like here Peregrine Bjornaer's.

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