Can You Move A Sustained Area Illusion? Options

[Zen Shooter01]

Phantasm, specifically. Suppose you cast a Phantasm of a horse. Can you make that horse run down the street, or does it have to stay where it was originally cast?

[Muspellsheimr]

Follows all the normal rules for moving an Area sustained spell - aka yes, you can.

That being said, I don't think you could make the horse run down the street, but walk is certainly doable.

[Zen Shooter01]

Do you have the page reference?

[Jaid]

If an area-eff ect spell is sustained, the aff ected area may be moved with a Complex Action, as long as it remains within line of sight.

so yes you can move it, but since you can have a max of 4 IPs and a horse running is likely going to cover more than 4 times the area of your illusion spell, a running horse is likely to prove difficult (or at least, a *convincing* one is.) (for clarification: you would have to create an image of the horse running from one end of the phantasm to the other. then, you would spend a complex action to move the phantasm. since there would actually be some overlap, and the area of the spell's effect would be slightly lower at the height of the horse's head, you would actually need a slightly bigger AOE than the below calculations propose, btw).

throwing 11 dice, the average horse can be expected to score 3 hits on a running test. that's +2 per hit to it's running speed of 100, or 106 meters.

to pull that off, you'll need approximately 26 meters on your illusion spell's AOE. meaning, you need to throw a force 12 spell, and withold 14 dice when casting the spell to boost the area. and also, you might just want to leave enough dice for the actual spellcasting test to even have a chance at the spell working on your target. also, the 8P drain is really gonna suck.

so, in short... theoretically, you could indeed pull this off. the max dice you can have on a spellcasting test is probably 7 (skill) + 6 (magic) + 2 (power focus) + 2 (specialisation in illusion spells) + 2 (mentor) for a total of 19 dice. after the penalties for boosting the area, this leaves you with 5 dice. i suppose you could spend edge... also, i suppose you could potentially have a bound spirit aid sorcery, or get an even higher rating power focus with the restricted gear quality from runner's companion. think that could get your dice pool plausibly up to 11-12 with that (more if you're willing to blow a service from a F7+ spirit). seems like an awful lot of trouble for something that can be duplicated with a trideo recording of a running horse, a reasonably fast small drone, a holoprojector, and some tape though (threshold 2 perception test to notice it's a fake)

[Maelstrome]

if i was the gm i would just let you do it. i dont see anything wrong with it as long as you keep it running in los.

[Zen Shooter01]

Thanks everybody for the speedy replies. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)