What's the Light Level for a foe targeted by a Umbral Shadowmind spell?

[Miss Disaster]

Let's say we have a combat area that is entirely in *Dim Light*.

A wizard casts the Shadowmind spell with the Umbral Spell metamagic feat attached to it ... against 4 Orcs who all have Darkvision.

By my interpretation, a failed saving throw by these Orcs will have them experiencing Supernatural Dark (meaning their Darkvision is useless). I'm assuming that I can chose the order in which the spell and the feat affect my foes. And by doing so, I would chose for the Umbral Spell feat to first affect them with Darkness (lower the light level one level, although can't dip into Supernatural Dark) ... and then have the Orcs affected by the Shadowmind spell (lower the light level one level via illusory effects, and *CAN* dip into Supernatural Dark).

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Am I accurate on interpreting this combo? Please advise on any missing details if I am off. Thank you!

[Gallant Armor]

You wouldn't need Umbral as Shadowmind negates darkvision

[Miss Disaster]

Gallant Armor wrote:

You wouldn't need Umbral as Shadowmind negates darkvision

Not according to the Shadowmind spell. My scenario I listed is to get the enemy to experience Supernatural Dark from the current Dim Light conditions. 2 steps needed. One from the spell and one from the metamagic feat. My concern is the sequential way that both affect the target(s).

[Plausible Pseudonym]

Shadowmind strips away dark vision and see in darkness, so supernatural darkness has no meaning. If Shadowmind lowers light conditions to partial or total darkness the targets see just as poorly as a creature with basic vision. Only True Seeing would help.

[CBDunkerson]

Umbral Spell "does not stack with itself or with any other effect that creates darkness". This might be taken to mean that it wouldn't stack with Shadowmind, BUT that "spell creates an illusion of darkness rather than actual darkness". Ergo, I'd rule that you've got one actual darkness effect and one mental illusion (phantasm) effect which makes the target believe it is darker... so they'd stack.

That said, GA and PP are correct about Shadowmind effectively negating darkvision and See in Darkness. Since the spell is making the targets believe there is not enough light to see by their natural abilities to do so under normal conditions are irrelevant. This is explained by the last two sentences in the spell description.

Thus, 'order of operations' is irrelevant and Umbral Spell redundant. Shadowmind alone reduces the perceived light level to 'dark' and removes the ability of darkvision (and even See in Darkness) to penetrate it... effectively making it even worse than 'supernatural darkness'.

[Gallant Armor]

Miss Disaster wrote:

Gallant Armor wrote:

You wouldn't need Umbral as Shadowmind negates darkvision

Not according to the Shadowmind spell. My scenario I listed is to get the enemy to experience Supernatural Dark from the current Dim Light conditions. 2 steps needed. One from the spell and one from the metamagic feat. My concern is the sequential way that both affect the target(s).

From Shadowmind: "However, the spell creates an illusion of darkness rather than actual darkness, so low-light and darkvision don’t allow a target to see in the conditions created by the spell. Even targets that see normally through magical darkness suffer a loss of vision from this spell."

Darkvision doesn't help the target see while under the effect of Shadowmind.

[swoosh]

The OP's question does become relevant again though if the starting conditions are normal light instead of dim light.

[CBDunkerson]

In normal light I'd have the Umbral Spell reduce it to dim light and the Shadowmind make them think it was dark... while again invalidating darkvision and See in Darkness.

The alternative, applying Shadowmind 'first' to make them think it is dim light does not make sense to me... because Umbral Spell would still be making it ACTUALLY dim light. The whole point of Shadowmind is that it makes it so that you can't see things you actually can... so it needs to make visibility worse than the actual situation.