FASA Games, Inc.

Hello everyone,

another Nethermancer question:

To which spells can the Nethermancer's Circle 5 Karma ability be applied? Would it work on the "Pain" spell to create two additional temporary wounds?

Karma: Spend a karma point to increase one penalty from a spell you are casting by 2.

I guess it would be open to interpretation (unless the developers actually rules on this) but I would expect the 'penalty' to be the 'side effects' of the spell and not the main effect itself.

In your example of the Pain spell, the Wounds would be the 'effect' while the 'penalty' would be the reduced movement.

Thus; I would say the '+2 increase to penalty' would mean it would add two more rounds to the duration of the reduced movement. (i.e. rank+2).

The penalty is never the duration.
This spell has no penalty at all, so you can't use the karma ability here.
E.G. Arrow of Night has a penalty:

If the target suffers damage from the spell, they suffer a -2 penalty to their Mystic Armor until the end of the next round.

I'd even say that the word penalty must be included in the spells desciption to use this abilty.

Greetings,

Belenus is correct. I wouldn't say it must say penalty, but it's definitely a good start. The spell should indicate what the penalty is, rather than relying on a condition (unless that's how the table wants to roll). For example, Spirit Dart clearly has a penalty, but doesn't use that exact terminology. Whereas Ethereal Darkness causes a Full Darkness penalty to sight-based actions, but making it more Full Darkness doesn't particularly do anything. On the other hand, Spirit Grip offers two penalties, so one of them would be -4 (though as a GM, I would allow each to go to -3 in that instance if the player wanted). Pain is not affected because there's no penalty to make worse and it doesn't get to inflict more Wounds.

Hopefully this clarifies things.

Cheers,

Morgan

Thank you!