This talk of Masteries is making me want to theorize about how Forgettable, Mindhole, and the Memory Packet spell work. Not to try to finagle a spell idea out of it, but just to spitball the mechanics.
Forgettable:
Forgettable: People can't seem to remember your face. Characters who've met you must succeed on an Intelligence Test to recall who you are.
Mindhole
Relevant facts;
Relatively Simple (M - 2 to cast, M - 3 to cast reliably.)
"A target at short range will forget everything they know of you.
- You have no way of controlling or limiting this effect. It's all or nothing."
From Realms of Sorcery, pg. 164
Casting Number: 8
Casting Time: Half action
Ingredient: Fingernail clippings of the person to be forgotten (+1)
Description: You cause one character within 48 yards (24
squares) of you to wholly forget you exist. If the target
fails an Opposed Will Power Test with you, all knowledge
and memory of your existence is wiped from his mind.
He can still notice you as normal and remember anything
so perceived going forward
Mathilde could throw them around with ease as an average Grey Journeywoman. The material component is possibly the most generous one I've ever seen or heard of, which I'm sure helped.
Way back when, Mathilde described Mindhole like this;
Threadmarks: Purge of the Haunted Hills - Nachexen, 2476
...or Shadowcloak, for instance. Your spells draw more from the mystical significance of shadows - the sudden plunge into darkness of Mindhole, the tireless advance of the dusk and dawn of Shadowsteed.
So my theory is this;
once upon a time, some poor Grey rolled Forgettable. Perhaps out of pragmatism, spite, or a desire for recognition, they managed to Codify it into the spell we know today as Mindhole.
My guess is that Mindhole works by using the shadow of the Wizard casting the spell as a sort of template.
A shadow being a featureless non-entity cast by something, that nevertheless matches the shape of the caster.
The wizard then uses the shadow template and coshes/sieves the target in the brain-soul. The memory bits of the wizard in question are then attracted to the 'big' Ulgu template of the wizard, neatly being extracted from the target.
So, the Memory Packet.
The March to Karak Eight Peaks - Week 3 - The Forest of Gloom
They are ratmen, boundless in number; in your tongue, they are called Skaven."
The words echo unpleasantly in your head, and grow. A thought unfolds uncomfortably in your mind, and you're taken back to a day forgotten some fifteen years ago. A voice, unfamiliar to you, droning in a bored voice. "Number thirty-two. The Ratmen and the Conspiracy of Silence. If you believe you are accessing this memory in error, please contact the Grey College at your earliest convenience." Information blossoms, summoned by a name erased from history.
Like most of the thread, I also think the foundation of this technique is Mindhole.
The trajectory seems pretty obvious, right? Some lucky Grey managed to get a spectacular Mastery of Mindhole that allowed them to selectively delete memories. But the memory isn't deleted / destroyed? And it can be recalled with a codeword??
Hmm. Let's run that theory again.
A Grey rolls the mastery gacha and gets a Mindhole that can wear off (Mindbox?). This seems pretty bad, right? However, they're a Grey and used to
rules-lawyering finangling with metaphysics. They don't Codify it straight into a spell. They work on making it part of a
Ritual instead.
Rituals are a much more immobile endeavor, compared to spells. Good for infrastructure or long term impact, not great for immediate punchiness. But they can be designed for multiple participants, and those participants can be lower in strength (Magic Score) than a Wizard trying to Cast an equivalent effect. You know, like the Perpetuals that the Colleges are full of.
So something like this;
2 Ritualists - Perpetuals are ok, their strength is buoyed by experience and being located directly in the Grey College, and the effect is Relatively Simple.
1 Template - the Lecturer whose information will be sealed away. As we can see in vanilla Mindhole, you can cast it for someone else ('s fingernails). And if they're a Perpetual as well, they'd fill the 'ulgu laden' requirement.
The Targets - 10-15 grey wizardlings. This is where the real reliability is. If you had one wizard with the 'Mindbox' mastery, they'd get exhausted doing all the lectures and then chaincasting the spell. With a Ritual, you could theoretically scale it to affect a small area instead of an individual. Like, say, a classroom.
So the magic effect isn't the lecture itself. The magic is a shadow on the memory of the lecture, obscuring it until the light of the keyphrase dispels it and rejoins the information to the rest of the mind* (with slightly distressing results, judging by Mathilde tasting blood).
*Alternate metaphor: the magic is a box that seals away the information, until the key of the passphrase opens it and frees the lecture.
as you might have guessed from my other posts, I like theorizing about Boney's Sevirrics.
