@HellcowKeith
How do spells like sending work with changelings if you have met various changelings under the guise of the same face/persona?— Son Of Sora Kell (@SoraKell) March 22, 2020
The basic issue here is what it means to be “familiar” with someone. Imagine you know a human who’s used a disguise kit to impersonate Bob. You’ve never met the real Bob. You use Sending to send a message to Bob. Do you connect to Fake Bob? Or Real Bob, who you’ve never met? I’d argue that Sending doesn’t care about what your target looks like; what matters is your PERSONAL CONNECTION to them. Thus in my example you’d connect to Fake Bob… and you could send a message to any friend, changeling or otherwise, polymorphed or disguised. However…
— Keith Baker (@HellcowKeith) March 22, 2020
… Sending also doesn’t reveal anything about your target or have obvious physical signs. If you Send to Fake Bob while they’re standing next to you as Joe, the message goes through; you don’t have any sense that Fake Bob is in the room or currently disguised. At least, that’s how I would handle it.
— Keith Baker (@HellcowKeith) March 22, 2020
“I’d argue that Sending doesn’t care about what your target looks like; what matters is your PERSONAL CONNECTION to them.”
This very quickly becomes untenable if you take it to logical extremes.
What is a “personal connection”? How can you have a personal connection with someone who isn’t who you think they are? Isn’t that a false connection?
If a false connection is still good enough to count, then what happens if an insane person uses Sending? For example, what if some random person is delusional, and thinks they’re the best friend of the king, who in reality they have never even laid eyes on them? Not even that they know a “false king” who is pretending to be the real king, but that it’s entirely a figment of their imagination. In their mind, they have a deep “personal connection” with the king! So how does that work?
The way I see it, it can’t – you can’t have a personal connection with someone who doesn’t exist. And likewise, you can’t have a personal connection with someone you don’t actually know. The spell just doesn’t really make sense, which is par the course for magic, but is still problematic in it’s own right.
Personally, I think it would be best if the spell required you to have met someone, or been within a certain radius of them. Because then this entire problem disappears – it doesn’t matter if the person you met was in a disguise when you met them, and it doesn’t matter if you actually know them, you can send them a message simply because they once close to form a magic connection.