SR3: Our Magic is Different

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Aug 29, 2016 6:20 am

The purpose of the Guardian Spirits (at various points of production called Warrior Spirits) was to cover the martial Loa like Ogoun and Shango and also cover the Soldiers from Insect Hives. But the threat chapter was written by someone else, who refused to let the Bug spirits use the regular rule even though the regular rules had been written to include what the bug spirits did.

It was very frustrating. Epicycles literally just for the sake of making things more complicated and nothing else. It got so bad that Bloodzilla happened, I told the rest of the crew about Bloodzilla, and why that was bad, and they fucking printed it anyway on the grounds that while it might be a literal infinite power loop and also grossly unbalanced with the stated stats of great fucking dragons even if you declined to go infinite, it was at least "different." And I cannot argue that it isn't different.

EDIT: Oh dark gods! The SR5 Homunculi/Corps Cadavre shit pisses me off so bad. Sorcery can't do that in Shadowrun. It just can't. It's against the rules of Shadowrun magic for sorcery to make decisions. It can all kinds of crazy crap, but making decisions is off fucking limits. Animate Object does not and cannot make an independent servitor. It remotely puppets things around, it does not give a target animus of its own.

-Username17

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Mon Aug 29, 2016 7:32 am

The homunculus is described like this:

The homunculus obeys the leader’s commands as much as possible within the limitations of its physical capabilities. Commanding a homunculus is not like commanding a spirit. A spirit is intuitive and intelligent; a homunculus just follows orders and becomes frustrated when the task becomes impossible.

Corps Cadavre ritual is described in-universe as a modification of the Homunculus ritual modified for a different target, so presumably the zombies also just do exactly what they are told and don't think. The whole Grande Zombie thing is described to be a side effect of using human bodies that had Essence in them at some point.

EDIT: Oh, and SR5 mages can't make watchers anymore. It's now a spell under ritual magic.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Mon Aug 29, 2016 7:47 am

Right, that's super bullshit. The point is that sorcery isn't "stupid" it's incapable of making decisions. There's a big fucking difference. Ritual spells cannot follow orders. An animated object is a marionette, not a dog.

-Username17

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Mon Aug 29, 2016 9:03 am

Human Bodies that had Essence in them at some point.

SO . . all of them? O.o

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Mon Aug 29, 2016 9:21 am

Stahlseele wrote:Human Bodies that had Essence in them at some point.

SO . . all of them? O.o

Well, since the attempts to make artificial metahuman meat edible by ghouls have been unsuccessful so far, presumably not all of them.

Rawbeard · Post by **Rawbeard** » Mon Aug 29, 2016 10:40 am

Silent Wayfarer wrote:Are Guardian spirits supposed to be like Servants from the Fate universe?

You know, you could have a Animu tradition that summons Saiba and Acha and whatnot.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Mon Aug 29, 2016 12:01 pm

Somebody, might have been Frank way back, on dumpshock once made a sailor moon tradition.

Silent Wayfarer · Post by **Silent Wayfarer** » Mon Aug 29, 2016 1:16 pm

Rawbeard wrote:
Silent Wayfarer wrote:Are Guardian spirits supposed to be like Servants from the Fate universe?
You know, you could have a Animu tradition that summons Saiba and Acha and whatnot.

I always wanted to play Rin summoning a Servant. To be fair all you need is some kind of Great Form high Force Guardian spirit and it'll rape everything horribly, and SR mages are much more powerful than their Nasuverse counterparts.

Blade · Post by **Blade** » Mon Aug 29, 2016 1:32 pm

Hermeticism in Shadowrun is a strange beast. Some writers seemed to have a good grasp of what it is (from what I've heard some of the original designers are hermetics themselves), but others, and many players, seem to have gone no further than the "scientific approach to magic" concept.

This sometimes lead to a Hermeticism that was devoid of weird spiritual stuff, which feels a bit weird. Having magic that actually work in a way that's compatible with the scientific method could lead to a completely scientific approach to magic that could get rid of the decorum and go straight to what's actually useful, but it's not clear if Hermetics in Shadowrun actually went through this or if they are similar to today's Hermetics.

Nath · Post by **Nath** » Mon Aug 29, 2016 3:11 pm

Frankly, I'm not convinced many had a good grasp of shamanism and totems either.

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Mon Aug 29, 2016 3:23 pm

The corps cadavre mess started out in part because, like a lot of RPGs, Shadowrun in 2nd edition had multiple ways to animate a corpse - either with the corps cadavre spell, or having it possessed by a spirit, etc. These were simplified in SR4, but then the SR5 folks apparently didn't get the memo.

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Tue Aug 30, 2016 10:10 pm

What is the deal with the airline food toxic magicians?

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Tue Aug 30, 2016 10:39 pm

It is important to not get actual toxics mixed up with twisted shamans.

There are 2 kinds.
Despoilers and avengers or however they are called.
The former want to simply spread their kind of poison to further increase their own power while the latter is basically an extreme environmentalist terrorist. Green War is suspected to work with some of these. They are as anti human as you can get without killing yourself in trying to remove any and all influence of the human race on the planet.

Rules wise they are usually shamans and follow "totems" such as radiation for example and they straight up gain more power from toxic domains. A follower of radiation would be basically unstopable if he were to, for example, set up show in the cermak blast crater area. (That's the detonation crater of the nuke in chicago that took out the mega nest of the insect spirits and fasas old headquarter.) Because the radiation in there would act as aspected background count towards them while counting as aspected background magic against everybody else. Back in SR3 they also got a threat rating, which simply made them more dangerous.
Of course, they would also still suffer the ill effects of the radiation poisoning, but eh, there are magical solutions to that and it makes you stronger so who really cares?

sendaz · Post by **sendaz** » Tue Aug 30, 2016 10:48 pm

Magic in the Shadows gave a pretty good description:

MiTS pgs 124-127 wrote:
Toxic shamans are shamans whose outlook, sanity and magic have become tainted by environmental destruction and pollution. Many of them began as
eco-activists intent on defending the planet from further despoilment. Despite these good intentions, either through prolonged exposure to the
horrors humanity has committed or through some tragic life changing event, their minds became warped and poisoned. They now follow a twisted path of magic, intent on extreme goals and taking drastic measures.

Toxics are bad news all around because they don't have a lot of the limits normal shamans had.

A regular shaman calling up a spirit could only have that spirit operate within its own domain, but a toxic can and will happily send his toxic spirit after you even if it has to cross out of its toxic domain to do so.

Likewise they get to power up with Potency and could operate in toxic domains whose background count had other mages at a disadvantage.

Smirnoffico · Post by **Smirnoffico** » Wed Aug 31, 2016 1:37 pm

While we are at magic, what are spirits in shadowrun exactly? Maybe i was reading rulebooks with my ass ( a possibility), but i couldn't quite get it. Are spirits sentient? Do they have personalities (besides free spirits)? Do they have true free will (free spirits or not)? Can I summon the same spirit twice or they just mana constructs that follow certain criteria that get assembled every time a mage casts?

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Wed Aug 31, 2016 1:43 pm

Magic 8-Ball says:
Answer Unclear
Ask at a later point.
Yes
No.
Maybe.

They have gone to huge lengths to specifically NEVER clear that up!

On one end you have watchers. They have as many IQ Points as their Force.
On the other hand, you have Free spirits. Ally Spirits. Spirits of Man Ancestor Spirits. Which all exhibit signs of being sentient and being specific beings. And then you have elementals and spirits of the elements and they are basically magical drones.
And then you have Shedim. And Insect Spirit-Queens. And on the extreme end you have great form free ancestor spirits of man and above them Totems, which are as assholish as dragons.

BUT THEY STILL REFUSE TO CLEAR THIS ISSUE UP!
Is there a soul?
Do you summon the soul of a specific deceased when you call an ancestor spirit?
Nobody. Bloody. Knows.

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Wed Aug 31, 2016 2:13 pm

Pretty much what Stahlseele said. Spirits have the Sapience ability, meaning that they pass the Turing Test and appear to be thinking individuals with feelings. However, there is nothing to say we aren't dealing with Chalmer's Philosophical Zombies or Chinese Rooms or even personality fragments of the original conjurers.

Basically, Shadowrun is a world where Lakota Shamanism and Hermeticism are true. The logical followup to that is that any and all religious views that are incompatible with those are false. So, there is no Christian God at the top of things and there isn't a Muslim God either. Then the authors walked that back with a bunch of weasel words and ineffables and shit so as to not offend the sensibilities of the people whose personal religious world views are incompatible with Lakota Shamanism and/or Hermeticism. Considering that this group contains the vast majority of the player base, this was probably good marketing.

But the bottom line is that Spirits behave in all measurable ways like the spirits of place that shamanistic worldviews predict, but the game refuses to say unequivocally that this is in fact what is actually happening.

-Username17

Rawbeard · Post by **Rawbeard** » Wed Aug 31, 2016 3:05 pm

so there were those novels where they had a spirit (tradition and aspect unclear, whacked up ally spirit, I guess) who later, after fusing with a acyber zombie remembered he was a great dragon who killed himself. So I guess there might be forms of an afterlife? Same novels had a bloodmage, who got turned into a blood spirit and then into whateverthefuck, her transition was much more direct and for all intents and purposes it was her, not a spirit acting as her, or looking like her.

Shit like that is going to be the most clear you can get in SR, because the actual gameline pretends like this question shouldn't even be asked. I mean for fucks sake, you can kill someone and summon a spirit with their likeness and apparantly everyone who knows this is a thing just shrugged and never cared to explore this. FFS, Aztec should be at the front of "we can transfer your conciousness, kinda" or "nah, when you die, you die, fuck off".

Urgh. considering the game turned more and more into MagicRun (I can't even remember if there was any major plot in the game not tied to something magic in 4e) it's pretty fucking stupid things like this are getting ignored for world building purposes.

At least we got vampiric trees, amirite?

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Wed Aug 31, 2016 3:16 pm

I believe that "metahuman ghosts" may or may not exist and you can't prove one way or the other. If a spirit claims that he's John Smith, then there really isn't a difference between him being John Smith's soul, a spirit imprinted with John Smith's memories, and a spirit resembling John Smith being created by the conjurer at the moment of conjuring.

But dragons are weird. Ghostwalker may or may not be a resurrected dragon ghost. The current plot about nanomachines becoming bodysnatchers is a result of a dragon Eliohann dying and becoming a ghost and then merging with an evil AI and taking over the nanomachines.

Rawbeard · Post by **Rawbeard** » Wed Aug 31, 2016 3:21 pm

Jesus fucking Christ. this is the same guys who were against even the most rudimentary brainhacking... can we crowdfund a hostile takeover to stop this shit, or something?

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Wed Aug 31, 2016 3:33 pm

Rawbeard wrote:Jesus fucking Christ. this is the same guys who were against even the most rudimentary brainhacking... can we crowdfund a hostile takeover to stop this shit, or something?

It gets worse.
-It's not one evil AI - it's two! Namely, Deus and Cerberus. Both of them are trying to take over all nanomachines in general, and nanomachines in Eliohann's body in particular.
-Nanomachine-dragon-AI takes over EVO colony on Mars and half of Boston.
-The nanomachine-ridden zombies are trying to build a spaceship and go to Mars.

Silent Wayfarer · Post by **Silent Wayfarer** » Wed Aug 31, 2016 3:37 pm

I wanted to respond intelligently to all of this, but the only answer I can give is lolwut.

Am I lucky or unlucky that I just built for power and sidestepped all this metaphysical crap? Who knows?

Rawbeard · Post by **Rawbeard** » Wed Aug 31, 2016 3:39 pm

Thanks, after reading that I just feel empty inside. Now just to add insult to injury, please tell me players do not meaningfully interact with that storyline. I kinda need to know how much masturbation is going on in that "plot".

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Wed Aug 31, 2016 4:09 pm

@Rawbeard:
Dragonheart Trilogy. Known for such gems as giving us Luscious Brown Elven Nipples . .

The spirit was Lethe.
He remembered his name having been Dunkelzahn.
The Cyberzombie was Burnout. An ex hermetic mage. No Blood Magic there.
After Lethe tried to possess him and discovered that the necromantic (go fuck yourself if you say cybermancy is anything but that) magic used to create a cyberzombie kept him trapped in that body, he slowly began merging with his host body. Which then because of that remembered having been a child named billy.

The other blood mage you remember was the somehow innocent one, a female, used to build the bridge over the void in the metaplanes to where Thaila, some sort of GOOD eldritch abomination placed there by Harleaquinn to stem the tide of the ENEMY! is so they could taint her space and get rid of her and let the Horrors cross the bridge into our world WAY AHEAD of Target Mana Levels. BECAUSE REASONS!

@Longes
And now remember that as per more or less official canon watching a summoned ghosts behaviour was was good enough testimony in a court of law to sentence somebody as the killer of the ghosts human version.

@Silent Wayfarer
In MOST Gaming Universes it is best to powergame and do silly stupid funny shit and not give a rats ass about what the world thinks.
Because once you start to think about what the world should - and i hate to use this word in this context - realistically think . . it simply all starts breaking down.

@Rawbeard
As far as i remember, they actually tried a kinda sorta cross over with the shadowrun online mmorpg and the official canon for boston would hinge on player decisions in there. But i have no idea wether or not that ever went anywhere.

Longes · Post by **Longes** » Wed Aug 31, 2016 4:13 pm

Stahlseele wrote:@Longes
And now remember that as per more or less official canon watching a summoned ghosts behaviour was was good enough testimony in a court of law to sentence somebody as the killer of the ghosts human version.

In NAN, not everywhere.