What if I had a airship, used improved invis, or a spirit's concealment on said airship, had a masking ward set in the airship to have a warded dome around the airship. Would that effectively make a airship thats completely invisible, to normal and astral perception?

Mind you, not sure I would even try it, just something that dawned on me on the crapper so I'm curious.

I believe I read something by one of the authors that said that spirit powers have finite limitations (in the case I think they were talking about movement, but same application). Granted, that doesn't make it official, and "limited" is up to the GM, so if you had someone who dug the idea, they might go for it.

(Or hey, high force greater form spirit.)

I don't see how Invisibility would work though. I believe that if you try to hide behind (or in) an invisible barrel, everyone can see you.

that's never really been resolved, as far as i know . . granted, that's about as far as i could throw you, but still *g*
But yes, it more or less depends on the GM again, because the improved invisibility spell would be visible on astral space again . .

It would give you an airship that still shows up on radar, but makes visual identification hard/impossible. On the astral, you would not see the spell. You could however see the astral shadow of the airship.

"Sir, radar shows an unknown airship moving towards downtown. Visual identification failed despite ideal weather conditions."

Since it would show on radar and to drones but not visual I think they would see it as a clear threat and respond with force.

improved invisibility means no radar and no drones can see it.
but the spells would be clearly visible on the astral . . "Sir, astral recon tells us that there's a BIG Spell with nothing in it headed our way"

Improved Invisibility does offer protection from radar? NO! It offers protection from sight and cameras.

not all sensorics?

I had thought that a ward, specifically a Masking Ward, would make the invis spell.. well.. invisible. Isn't it a -force to dice pool for perception tests using astral site to see past a ward? So wouldn't the ward cover the spells hidden inside?

For all that the ward would make it hard to see the spells inside the ward, the presence of a big floating ward would kinda drop a hint or two that something was up.

Arguably, the ward would hide activity inside the airship, since the ward is bounded by the airships walls. However, since the airship is invisible, obviously the invisibility spell would have to extend beyond the inner side of the airship, and encompass the entirety of the outside surface. I think the invisibility spell would be visible, since it isn't technically inside of the warded area.

"All wards must be anchored to a physical, non-living object." []
"If the physical anchor moves more than a few centimeters from its location at the
time of the warding ritual, the entire ward collapses."

page 123 Street Magic

Since Radar uses just a longer wavelength of electromagnetic radiation, I would assume that if visible light is not reflected than neither is it.

Yes, not all sensorics. Against ultrasound you´ll already need Sound Barrier, which will show up as a blank area (=dead giveaway). Concealment works against all sensorics, but offers no absolute safety on a sensor test from a military installation. Or sometimes worse, corporate traffic monitoring stations.

Then DLNs scenario starts. Better to rely on concealment only, which will not get you into trouble on its own. You´ll have a bit more privacy, but your general presence is no secret.

RELATIVE TO THE WARD i think. . .
so if the ward moves with the anchor at the same time and speed in the same continuum, then it does NOT collapse i believe . . and believe forms magic, so there <.<
curses for having to work ._.
out-posted twice <.< . .

Also, while the masking ward would hide the invisibility spell from astral, it does not hide the shadow of the airship. So any astrally patrolling mages would go, "huh, theres an airship flying at us, wonder why they aren't scrambling fighters.... Send a watcher back to the command station to say "Hey, you guys see that airship over in this general area?" and the shit hits the fan from there.

@ Muspellsheimr

Yeah, u`r right, was in the errata...hadn`t seen that before.

p. 123 Remaining Stationary
The third line should read:
“If the physical anchor moves more than a few centimeters
from its location relative to the limits of the ward’s enclosure(…)�

I assume a Masking Ward would also include itself. I mean, if you are using a ward so people can not see what you are magically doing inside, why use a Masking Ward if the ward itself can be seen. Defeats the point? Course, as I said, I assumed this is how it worked. I could be dead wrong.




Could you not just choose to have masking ward as a dome over the ship? Think Star Trek Enterprise shielding dome shape.

Its magic, it specifically targets the visible light spectrum (just to be careful, it does in the german edition). If a sense is not sight, it is not affected. Just the longer wavelength puts it outside the visible range, and makes the spell not work.

I'd agree the ward is not visible.




I would suppose so, I don't know what the area of that would be, take quite a bit to get it to encompass the whole ship. Again, you still run into the problem of the astral mages seeing an airship flying in, but the ground crews not doing anything about it. And if the mages try to fly in to check out the ship, they hit the ward and know to hit the panic button.

Would the astral mages see a airship? If you use illusion to make a chair in the astral, it works, but everyone knows its a illusion because they can see the mana of the spell, but if it was behind a Masking Ward, would they just see a chair? or nothing at all?

Also, because wards add -force dice pool to perception tests, if the ship had a force 10 ward on it, would any astral mages with a perception pool 10 or less even see the ship?

What if you used regular invis, mana based spell for astral stuff, would they then see it? Masking ward blocking mana from being seen, but invis still active and working? They just would not see the astral mana aura?

Again, I thought of this on the crapper, so yea, not arguing, just asking questions out of curiosity.

Arguably, they might become somewhat suspicious of the blimp-shaped ward approaching them.

Once again, if astral perception trumps the Masking Ward, then there's no point whatsoever to the spell even existing. It doesn't hide anything but fine details, which makes it little more than an NPC tool ("there's a ward on the room, I can't see what they're doing inside"), in which case it doesn't need to be statted out (railroads don't need mechanics).

It's illogical to assume the designers went to the trouble to stat out the drain of a spell that's only useful as a landscape feature. Masking Ward conceals itself with its own penalty, because otherwise it's not a spell, it's deus ex machina.

Wards are not Spells. They are two altogether different things.

Please re-read Masking Ward, p. 125, Street Magic.

What kind of illusion spell are you talking about? Mask could work, except it has to be of the same basic size and shape. So you could change your airship to look like... uhh, well, I dunno? A whale?
The only other applicable illusion is invisibility, which states by normal visual senses (which astral perception specifically isn't one).


You must've missed the part of masking wards which is, SM, 125, "Since the ward is transparent, noticing it requires an outside observer to either come into contact with it (since it is still a solid astral barrier) or make a successful Assensing +Intuition (3) Test."
I.E. it doesn't block astral sight, so there is no negative perception pool to it. Since masking wards aren't supposed to be seen, and its the opaqueness of a ward that causes the perception penalty, I don't think masking wards have the penalty. Instead, they get the concealing of astral activity inside the ward.


They would still see the airship, since astral perception is not normal sight, which is what invis prevents them from seeing with.


It doesn't trump the masking ward. It hides astral activity within the space. I.E. you can have a masking ward force 6 around your force 6 magical lodge, and be summoning bloodzilla at force 6 inside it, and anyone wandering by in astral space would be none the wiser (unless they pierce the masking wards concealing).

What do you think about this summary?

We have an airship with Improved Invisibility, then a Masking Ward around it.

Normal Vision will not see the space ship because of the Improved Invisibility Spell.
Assensing will not see the the Improved Invisibility Spell because of the Masking Ward concealing astral activity.
Assensing will see the Airship, because the Masking Ward doesn't hide what's in it, just any astral activity, e.g. spells?

Bingo!

For bonus, you could mask the airship to look like something else similarly sized which would affected the astrally perceiving people as well.

All that, plus:

Assensing might see the ward around the airship.

I'll bite. How would one go about doing that?

i'll bite too: what else is there in the size category of one of those frigging huge airships?
specifically, what else is there in that size category that floats around in the frigging sky ?

A Dragon??!!?!

noo . . not big enough and not cigar-shaped enough either . .
but it's the only thing that comes remotely close . . well, aside from those giant algea things they manufactured for use as zeppelin or whatever that was . .

Clouds...

Yeah, best bet would be to mask as a cloud and come in very very slowly.

Had someone offered that approach at my table, I´d now have a pretty hard time NOT grinning and chuckling.


As for the needed spell: Mask on the astral plane. Tarantula pretty much said it

yes, of course, why did i not think of that . . clouds . .

I'll ask again. What exactly are you using to "mask" a zeppelin? Are we talking the Mask spell now, or are we still talking about masking wards?

Mask spell.

Ah. That makes way more sense.

*starts singing "I am just a little black cloud"*

*Opens Umbrella*

Tut, Tut. Looks like rain.