In a Reign of Winter campaign, my winter witch created this spell both for utility to scout a broad area quickly, to keep an eye on her companions, and to have some fun with another character (after which the spell is named).
I figure you all can help refine it. The info is not well organized, but I'll work on that once the refinements are made. So go ahead and tell me all the ways I screwed it up.
Maka's Many Minions
Transmutation (subtype cold), witch spell level 6
Cast time: 1 full round
Comp.: VS
Range: close
Duration: 10 minutes per CL
Target: one mundane pile of snow or snowballs, or water.
This spell creates and enchants 3 Fine sized snowballs (about the size of a fist) per caster level, or only 2 per caster level if only water is available.
The enchanted snowballs are like oozes and can somewhat mold their shape to be more cute or more scary, have legs or be wheel shaped, and squeeze through cracks.
The snowballs can be entertaining, as the original purpose was as much for entertainment as utility, and as they can control their shape as oozes can, they are quite resilient against being thrown or squished or when taking bludgeoning damage. The snowballs cannot however deal any real damage beyond that of a normal non-magical snowball.
The caster retains an empathic link to the snowballs and can give them rough instructions as long as they remain on the same plane, or more detailed instructions when they can speak to the snowballs. The snowballs understand all the languages the caster knows.
When a snowball loses animation from the spell ending, the caster gets a rough idea of what the snowballs saw and did from the snowball's perspective. If a snowball is destroyed, the caster makes a will save, failure means the caster is struck by painful experience and is thus stunned for a round. Either way, there is only a 50% chance of the caster knowing any particular piece of information the destroyed snowball discovered. Dispel magic works by causing spells to end and thus any snowball ended via dispel magic (each snowball rolls separately when struck by the dispel), acts as if the spell ended normally, however, antimagic field and similar effects suppresses the enchantment and if the spell ends, or the snowball melts to nothing, before the magic is no longer suppressed, then the caster learns nothing.
The caster can enter a trance depriving themselves awareness of their own surroundings in order to see and perceive from the perspective of some of their snowballs. The caster can see through a number of snowballs up to a number equal to their casting modifier at one time, but may switch which snowballs they are perceiving through as a swift action. Seeing through multiple snowballs is rather disorienting for anyone not used to it, and thus any perception checks take a penalty of -1 for two snowballs and the penalty doubles for each additional snowball. The GM may reduce this penalty as they will for a caster that spends time and effort getting used to the multiple points of view.
When the caster is currently perceiving from a given snowball, they have greater capacity to give more accurate orders to the snowball.
The snowballs can be ordered to attack and may punch, kick, or slam, but they have no real damage potential except to insects and other things smaller than the snowballs themselves, but still suitable enough for playful tussles with children without worry of causing real harm.
Once animated, the snowballs can travel any direction quite quickly, able to form themselves into wheels to roll fairly quickly for their size and yet still able to change their forms to overcome various obstacles.
There is no real limit to the distance from the caster, but if ever the caster and snowballs are no longer on the same plane even temporarily, such from a teleport, the link is cut and the caster learns nothing from the snowballs they did not already learn.
The snowballs can easily hide in snowy conditions, and even without snow their size and the nature of the enchantment makes it easy for them to move around stealthily and quickly to serve as scouts.
The general idea,
The idea is that if you do not specifically look through the snowballs, that you'll get a general idea of what was scouted and some particularly notable things but not necessarily everything and certainly not all the little details. Good for getting a general idea of the lay of the land and learning that a stream or cave exists, or dangers and strangers, but not all the details that might catch the eye if one were to walk there themselves. Of course, you could also have the snowballs on the lookout for specific things and then you'd know if any were found. You might send them through a city looking for smiths and then know where the smiths are in that city for example, or send them through several acres of woods to plan your path or find a good campsite or defensive position.
Of course, the snowballs are meant to be funny and silly like the droids of the separatists of star wars during the clone wars, yet able to play with kids, or gang up on a certain monk that is rather playfully childish in attitude. :)
A lot of things were left to GM discretion since that is my general philosophy about mechanics, that they are merely legos made of clay meant to be picked for the general concept and then molded and refined to match the needs, limitations, and expectations of the GM and how their world works.
To address your points,
- I know it needs rearranged, ordered, and organized better, but as writing on a phone is so difficult and takes so long that I'd wait till I had a better idea of a second draft.
- They are just animated snowballs, no extra enchantments of flight or anything of that sort, even their stealth comes from appearance, size, and behavior not extra magic. I figure a quick stat block sounds like the way to go and answer all those sorts of details.
- Oozes, whether they count as oozes is something I'm uncertain of and want to leave to GM discretion. They are not mindless and though amorphous, do not move like most oozes, more like gels or japanese style slimes.
- Their perception should match the caster's natural perceptions, though nothing magical like detect magic. And seeing through them should be the same, yet this is another gm call because is something like Trueseeing an enhancement on your senses or an enhancement on understanding what you perceive and noticing details? The latter would make sense to still work through the link but the former would not.
- Keeping track shouldn't be a problem, and hasn't in the campaign yet, but I can see how your method of running things would make a difference here.
As run so far I can basically just leave a snowball with each companion and send the rest to scout an island. There is no tracking really needed for that. The gm can just consider things in terms of area explored, with the number of snowballs dictating how quickly area can be explored and chances of certain things being found.
- The spell target is a pile of snow/snowballs. So only that material gets animated. It doesn't create material at all. The GM can determine if there is insufficient material available snd if so how many snowballs the spell manages to create. I don't see a need to be specific about this.
1. I'd change to to Snowmen instead of Snowballs.
2. 3 per caster level is far too many. It really needs to be more along 1 per caster level, half that if water.
Not snowmen, that makes me thing of three balls stacked with sticks for arms, a coal face, and a carrot nose. But a better name would not go amiss, and I already gave the name of minion in the title so I should probably stick to that for consistency. Probably fit better when I strip out the flavor text for reskinning in my system.
As for numbers, I don't think it is too many, for the minions are much less capable than prying eyes and magnitudes shorter duration, and the number is needed for exploring area in the limited time frame. Cutting the number by three also cuts the explorable area by three as well. And well, a large team of little silly creatures was rather the image that inspired the whole thing and was indeed the starting point for the whole spell's design, both in character and out.