Leadworker

A Minor Hermetic Virtue introduced in Houses of Hermes: True Lineages, available to Tremere magi.

The original leadworkers were able to affect a person by inscribing his name on a curse tablet, creating an arcane connection to him; this is a powerful ability, but is lost to their descendants.

The virtue is a remnant of the ancient magic called Defixio Magic, also known in Greece (where it seems to have originated) as Katadesmos Magic. A consequence of this is that non-Hermetic wizards, especially in Greece, may take this virtue as a Supernatural virtue.

Opinions and Commentary

It isn't perfectly clear what this virtue allows one to do. There seem to be several benefits.

• They can construct "curse tablets" if they know the "name" of the target. Viable targets seemingly include any spirit that knows its name, which would include virtually all ghosts, from any Realm, but also various other spirits of all Realms. With respect to the Magic Realm, this may plausibly apply to "named spirits", which may allow leadworkers to affect daimons without learning their True Names. It may plausibly also allow them to affect any demon and angel (well, angels on Earth), and perhaps any faerie. This is quite an extraordinary power, and the troupe may choose to instead require the "name" of such spirits to be the True Name, with the exception of ghosts and those animals that can recognize their own names (such as pets). The troupe should also rule on whether the latter includes magical animals.

• They may construct kolossi. Since something must be meant by "without spending... study time", these can arguably be made very fast, without needing a Craft check or significant time. Since a distinction is made, in the bottom of the Virtue's description, between a kolossus with and without an embedded connection in it, arguably a such a representation can be made with the name alone. The benefit here is thus that if one knows the name, one can make a "permanent" representation in little time (perhaps several hours, like a standard "simple" representation), and without needing a Craft check (which even a simple representation would normally require). Since the curse tablets are constructed from lead, and given the name of the virtue, however, it appears reasonable that Craft: Leadworker is still required - perhaps it's just that the task is so easy that it succeeds automatically.

• They can make kolossi that incorporate an arcane connection "taken from the body of the victim". Arguably, the "sympathetic connection" at the last line is a typo, and should read "arcane connection"; otherwise it makes no sense. Since fixed arcane connections are not, generally, simply taken from the bodies of the targets, and since "wasting vis and study time" is alluded to, arguably the intention is that the magus can fix the arcane connection by incorporating it into the kolossus, without needing to spend raw vis or significant amounts of time to do so. So the benefit here is that one can fix an arcane connection quickly (within hours?), and gets a powerful sympathetic connection bonus on top of that (presumably not cumulative with the lower bonus).