A troop member of mine made the following arguement to us last night.

On page 139 of AM5 under Ignem spells it says that fire is explained on page 181. On page 181 he goes on to point out that the target of ignem is individual and since an individual immersed in fire takes 4x damage that a level +10 fire spell should do +40 and that in fact it is more difficult to do less damage since that would be targeting only part which under basic spell guidlines is more difficult.

I would welcome your ideas.

He has a very good point in the way fire provides damage. In fact if you look at the dragon example in the Realms section, its breath has a base intensity of +15, however it's how well you roll to dodge it that determines how much damage it does by how much of the target is affected, doing up to +45 damage. The difference though is that the fires that the Magi do with spells like Ball of Abysmal Flame or Pilum of Fire, those don't deal in intensities. They deal a base amount of damage dependent on the level, not on how much of the target is affected. The target in those is individual, one thing, not an actual fire itself. The fire is the effect, in other words not the target. The fire created is of magical intensity, but as it is a Creo spell it only lasts for an instant and is gone (the damage remains as well as the chance that it ignites other fires).

The fire from a Ball of Abysmal Flame should do +30 damage (and of course there's still a stress die rolled with it), but it should not be doubled or tripled or anything.

New insights on an old topic...

//On page 139 of AM5 under Ignem spells it says that fire is explained on page 181. On page 181 he goes on to point out that the target of ignem is individual and since an individual immersed in fire takes 4x damage that a level +10 fire spell should do +40 and that in fact it is more difficult to do less damage since that would be targeting only part which under basic spell guidlines is more difficult. //

Page 113, under 'Targets and Creo' species that the Target of a Creo spell is the thing created, not necessarily the thing affected. In the case of a CrIg spell, the fire created is the target, so the "individual" in the above statement does not automatically imply the person is completely consumed in flame.

Since page 139 also states that the base Individual for Ignem is the size of a small campfire, one could extrapolate that the damage multipliers from page 181 are already considered in the spell design. For instance, the base damage (intensity)for a wood fire is +5. This would be the Level 4 Creo Ignem effect. At Level 5, which does +10 damage, you could assume either the fire is still the size of a small campfire, but magically hotter, or it is the same intensity, but now covers a larger area (×2 multiplier), and so on. So Ball of Abysmal Flame could be viewed as a small, concentrated ball of intense heat (+30 damage, ×1 multiplier), or a engulfing sphere of normal flames that completely immerses the victim (+5 damage, ×6 multiplier, in this case).