(TFT) 4 month belated reply - detect enemies

["Cas and Lisa (also Silvia, Max & Viveka) Liber" <casliber@ozemail.com.au>]

Rick,
some thoughts on detect enemies. Before making an item arbitrarily harder to
make, there are always ways of looknig at them which may make them trickier
to interpret. AW gives an obvious example of this when casting DETECT LIFE
in a forest.
Thus with detect enemies:

beings with hostile intent: is an animal predator (say a hungry tiger)
happily minding its own business, which would attack the subject if it knew
its presence, but doesn't yet, count as a hostile creature? I think not
initially.

A slime has no mind, hence no intent, how can it have hostility?

Say a king has one of these items and is scanning everyone, may he not pick
up all sorts of people as hostile? How does one define hostile? A king
sleeps with his concubine and his queen is annoyed (idly thinks of ,say,
going and cutting up his favourite nightshirt), king senses 'Hostility' -
how serious?? Paranoia city?? Maybe he would pick up everyone with transient
hostility, form a sulky pertulant 9 year old prince to a butler he has
awoken at 3 AM?
So he has a vizier who is an ultimate opportunist and has no specific
designs to murder the king unless he has a perfect opportunity would be
content being an advisor (and may radiate less 'hostility' than a stormy
queen, lets say)

Maybe the king is at a royal football match, with his team versus ye Packers
of Green Bay, who are hyped up and ready to attack anything and look at the
king as an opponent and mascot/patron of the opposing team; does the king
look at them and get transient hostility from them?

An item may not be able to sense the level of hostility, but lets say it
does and people use them, then there would be ways and means........

eg: an assassin's guild may have trained beasts, which they have trained to
attack the bearer of a certain smell, and they let it loose, and it follows
the scent through the castle or kings hunting grounds or whatever and is not
detected as 'hostile' as it is acting instinctively.
The assassin's guild may teach a special skill:
POKER-FACE MIND (1): IQ 12 Preq: Detection of lies. A character with this
skill can not only lie more easily (1 more die to detect a lie), but also
can bury thought in his or her subconscious, gaining a 4/IQ roll to avoid
being detected as an enemy by the spell.

Just some thoughts
Cas
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