Re: Any Man Advice
 

Each communion member takes encumberance individually. The relationship between encumberance and skill level is still not entirely clear.

This is a big deal if you're pythium, because it puts an absolute limit on the number of Enslave Mind spells that your communion masters can spam. No matter how many communion slaves you may field, each slave will take a minimum of X fatigue per spell, where X is their encumberance (4 for a communicant.) Thus, after 50 Enslave Mind spells go off, your communicants start popping, no matter what you do.

Re: Any Man Advice
 

The master's magic skill affects how much fatigue he gets when casting a spell, but does not affect how much fatigue the slaves get. (dunno if added gems are an exception).

The slave's magic skill affects how much fatigue the slave gets when the master casts a spell - whether they drop dead sooner or later.

Re: Any Man Advice
 

Great explanation. I'll add what my testing showed on encumbrance:

The slave's encumbrance is added to the 50, so with enc 4 they'd take 108 fatigue in stead. And opposite, if they had astral skill 20 each one would only take 54/18=3 fatigue. (more realistic example: if the spell cost 20 total, the slave gets 5+4, so only need skill 5 to reduce it to 3. Easier done in big communions).