Damnation of Memory Question


Advice


Background info;
Have a campaign that's been going for a while now, one of the players went Diabolist.
Been roleplaying it as a mage Jonathan Stroud style (Bartimaeus trilogy).
He's decided in keeping with that style, he'll be taking an apprentice.

This is where the spell comes in, his character wishes to insure that no spirit ever learns the child's real name, as lore-wise we've been going with the matching assumption to the series that having knowledge of a person's name gives the outsider some level of defense against being bound, especially if they get the person's birth name.

The character plans to use Damnation of Memory to wipe the memories of anyone who knows the child's name.

There is a will save on this spell.

I immediately dislike the implication that 5% of the population of any town will ignore a casting of the spell.
Multiple castings would help, but also get expensive and would require multiple material components.

So, I'm wondering how to run this spell. On one hand, I want it to succeed on mooks relatively easily.
On the other foot, I want people with competent will saves to have that chance of ignoring it.

Currently I'm debating running in a similar manner to one of the Power Word spells.
Any entity below x-health and y-HD don't even get to attempt the save.

Thoughts?
Criticism?
Suggestions?


Why not just disguise the child so well that no one can recognize him?

Hell, a hat of greater disguise could potentially make him look like a completely different race.

And while a perception check can yield that a person is using magic to look like a different race, it doesn't yield what the person actually looks like underneath with specific magic abilities to let you see through it.


Sangerine wrote:

There is a will save on this spell.

I immediately dislike the implication that 5% of the population of any town will ignore a casting of the spell.
Multiple castings would help, but also get expensive and would require multiple material components.

So, I'm wondering how to run this spell. On one hand, I want it to succeed on mooks relatively easily.
On the other foot, I want people with competent will saves to have that chance of ignoring it.

I would only check when it mattered to the storyline and roll the Will save only when it became important. Generally I wouldn't bother checking 'everyone' in the kingdom. I'd only worry about the individual outsider (or whomever) when it mattered, i.e. when they were really focused on determining the 'truth' and therefore applying their Will to the issue (similar to the concept of interacting with an illusion in order to gain the save against the illusion, random mooks aren't interacting with the spell).

As for the idea of scaling the save against HP/HD I personally wouldn't go that route though I could see providing some sort of bonus if the large flawless gem was somehow related to the individual i.e. a gemstone related to the birth month, multiples of value higher than required or similar.

I'm unfamiliar with the series you speak of but I assume the first step to preventing the child's name from being learned is going to be secrecy, the pool of folks who actually know the birth and/or real name is going to be very small and very well known to the caster (perhaps literally only the Mom and the caster will know). And far as I can tell from reading the spell they are the only ones whose Will saves even matter as no one else at that point actually knows the correct information to even require their memories to be tweaked/erased/obliterated. And secondly this small group, being well known, consent to having their memories obliterated bypassing the worries about any Will saves happening to be a natural 20. This assumes the child is not already born and grown. If the apprentice is already a grown individual then I would suggest that part of the 'adventure/story' be about finding an apprentice whose birth is a bit cloudy and already limited in knowledge to reduce the number of folks who know the truth and number of potential Will saves.


I'd just handwave it, because I have some concerns.

Can the character even cast it? It's Bard/Mesmerist/Psychic at their highest spell levels, and none of those are common Diabolist classes.

Are you sure everyone who needs to be effected can be brought into range? If someone who knows him went hunting, visited the next village over, or just if the town is exceptionally large it won't target everyone.

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