[Panpiper]

Ritual Spell: Aether Spawn

Cost: 1 astral gem

Summons one commander and a number of identical 'troop' units, numbers balanced to taste.

Creatures are small, stealthy, fast moving/flying, 1 hit point etheral that do a 1 AOE AN attack.

To be effective one will need significant numbers of them, meaning one or more astral mages will have to devote many turns to accumulating them. However once massed, they would form an effective deterrent against raiding, as an attacker will have no way of knowing whether or not a province is haunted by these things.

I expect we would see a production line of clammed astral mages with ritual orders set to autocast.