Drunken Review: Shadowrun 5

[John Magnum]

They seem very low, especially since the Targeting autosoft is weapon-specific and the Maneuvering autosoft is drone-specific. It seems like what you would actually want are a bunch of, say, rating 4 briefcases that each give Clearsight, Maneuvering, Evasion, and Targeting to a squad of same-model same-gun drones. I'm not sure how you'd run a mixed squad. Maybe each drone would use its slots for Maneuvering and Targeting and your RCC would have more generic programs in it?

EDIT: Oops, that's wrong. If a drone is running its own autosofts, then it cannot benefit from any of the RCC's autosofts. So if you want more than two autosofts at a time, which you do because there's six and they're good, you need to be running all of them on your RCC. But since four of those six are drone-specific or weapon-specific, you can't slave a diverse squad of drones to a single RCC. So if you want to have some drones that are stealthy with silenced weapons and some drones that are huge and tanky with big artillery pieces, you'd segregate them into different groups and use different briefcases for each group.

[TheNotoriousAMP]

Special note: the only one of my PCs that appears in an official Shadowrun book is Chun the Unavoidable, who was a Rigger and an Aspected Conjurer in 3rd edition because I am an unrepetent powergamer. He appears unnamed on page 118 of Augmentation having had his arm lopped off, and named on page 130 of the same book being incapacitated with botulism. But just so you know: he is a Conjurer and a Rigger.

Did that stuff happen in-game and you/someone else slipped it in there to canonise that campaign, or was this put in as part of a "Fuck you, Frank, fuck you." thing similar to the decapitation incident in Deadlands?

That was something I wrote in. And yes, those are based on campaign events. As a conjurer/rigger, you can sandbag as much as you want. If you don't commit your drones or elementals, you're basically just a guy. If you really need to bring the pain however, the pain can be brought. The other players actually knew the name of his greatform Water Elemental, because when she came out of the pokeball, shit got real. I put the character into the Shadowrun Horror boardgame as well.

-Username17

Out of all curiosity, what was the decapitation incident in Deadlands? Don't remember reading anything like it in the books.

Also, let me just put forward a theory and tell me if I'm wrong or not. Fans of the game should never be the primary writer behind the game. Fans of the game are great choices for freelancers, fluff writers and world building, but the core of the game needs to be built by people who aren't particularly attached to one class or another because they always play it. They build the game, turn it over for playtesting, tweak it, rinse, lather repeat, but its best that they remain detached. Wrong or right? Because 5th edition seems like the perfect clusterfuck caused by people who made their PC's and class preferences into canon.

[DSMatticus]

Frank used to write fiction for the Deadlands guys. One of the Deadlands campaign setting characters (Tombstone Frank) looks pretty similar to actual Frank, but with a cowboy hat and a sheriff's badge pinned to what is most likely his nipple. Then Frank and the Deadlands guys had a falling out over some rules disagreements, and Tombstone Frank was decapitated shortly thereafter.

The author claims it's a self-portrait, and he does have the face shape for it (also, it's not really clear why he'd lie in that context), which makes it all a hilarious string of coincidences.

[Username17]

Section.8 Magic



Shadowrun Magic has some fairly weird roots. As game magic systems are measured, it's shockingly coherent. I would say that it is the most coherent of any game, but I'm sure some asshole would bring up some indie title I've never heard of or a minor GURPS implementation no one cares about or something as a counter example. And apparently this is because the original Magic system was designed by at least some people who believed in magic. And unlike Mage, which can boast a similar claim, it wasn't written by asshole solipsists. And so the foundation of how magic worked and what it could do was hammered down with remarkable clarity back in 1989. There have been entire books dedicated to expanding magic and writing new rules and making it do new things, and these books were written for four different editions and there was new magic crap introduced in setting books and adventures and event books and even cyberware catalogs, and through it all Magic in Shadowrun has stayed remarkably close to its roots.

The mechanics of course change with the editions and expansion material is certainly added. A 4th edition player in 2009 giving the short hand of their Mystic Adept of a Possession tradition to a 1st edition player Shadowrun player from twenty years earlier would certainly initially draw a blank stare. But if you got into the deeper metaphysics of it all and explained what you were doing with Magic in order to have the powers you have, a player who had only read the big blue book from 1989 would still be able to nod their head and understand, because the fundamentals of how this shit works really haven't changed much in the last quarter century.

Which is not to say that Shadowrun doesn't have gray areas or genuine incremental change. They certainly did! Earlier editions had a concept of “grounding” which has been tossed, and AncientHistory and I have had a particularly heated argument over whether you could meaningfully enchant a laser and whether you could kill an astral spirit by running them over with a dual natured schoolbus. But the fact remains that we could have that kind of argument at all because magic was well enough defined for it to be plausible that there was actually a “right answer.” When you compare it to questions of what “arcane magic” is capable of in Dungeons & Dragons, there's no comparison at all.

Now while Shadowrun's vision for how magic works is remarkably clear, that doesn't mean that it is without problems. Magic operates on a “chosen one” basis: either you're magic or you're not. And the magic that you do uses mana that you personally channel. And this means that other people's magic is basically worthless to you. This fit with the original vision of personal will working, and distanced the game from D&D's santa sack of magic bling. Player characters do not cover themselves with magic rings and elvish cloaks and shit, it just doesn't happen. It can't happen. If you don't power a ring with your personal power juice, it won't do anything for you. And if you're one of the 99% who don't have any personal power juice, then nothing magical you'll ever find will ever do you any good. Needless to say, this is kind of lame, especially for a game about stealing shit. If magic items are personal, what exactly is the point of stealing anyone else's magic items? Shadowrun never had a particularly good answer for that.


In Shadowrun, you basically don't get one of these.

One of the great paradoxes of Shadowrun has been the ever receding “Now.” In 1989, the game was set in 2050 and every year after that, a year was supposed to pass. There was some time fuckups around 4th edition where there was a time skip and then time stood still for a few years when the production schedule fell behind, but now 5th edition is set in 2075 and until they fuck up the production schedule again we're back on target. Shadowrun is always five minutes 61 years in the future. But just as 25 years have passed for me since I first read the big blue book, 25 years have passed for the world of Shadowrun as well. Indeed, 25 years have passed in the world of Shadowrun. Which means that certain things that were said to be happening or about to happen in the original book should be old hat. This book still talks about Concrete Dreams, the band that they spent all that time wanking to in Shadowbeat, but for fuck's sake: that band was being played on Oldies Stations two editions ago. And so this chapter tries to update things a bit by talking about how there are now second and third generation mages. Um.... no.

The Awakening was in 2011, and it's supposed to be 2075 now. So when you meet some up and coming Sabrina “now,” remember that her mother was born in 2038 (and was thus one of the street kids running around in the background of a 2050 street scene, but I digress). Her grandmother was born in 2018, meaning that her great grandmother was actually a junior high schooler when the Awakening happened, and her great great grandmother was actually a regular adult and felt the first stirrings of magic while driving her children to soccer practice. Her great-great-great-grandmother was only 52 when the Awakening hit, and may well have learned some magic before dying of heart disease in 2035, tragically just a year short of seeing Sabrina's grandmother getting married. This book seems to think it's being edgy and transgressive talking about third generation mages, but really we should be talking about sixth generation mages. Fuck, Orks can have kids at 12, we could seriously be talking about ninth generation mages, and in the shittier parts of the world we probably should be. Now that probably sounds like a somewhat pointless nit to pick, but it's part of a larger problem: the fundamental unwillingness to actually allow the “mana levels are rising” plotline to actually move forward. Back in first edition we were assured that only one percent of the population of the world was magically active but that it was growing fast. Then in 2nd edition we were assured that... only one percent of the population was magically active but that it was growing fast. And then in 3rd edition we were told... well you can fucking guess at this point. It was an amazing uphill battle for me to get a citation into a 4th edition book that actually said that the percentage of magically active people had actually grown in the 20 years since the big blue book came out. There was an incredible amount of pushback even then. Now the 5th edition book doesn't bother giving a number for how many people are magically active. Numbers are not a thing this book is comfortable with. But I think it's telling that even though the characters we played in 1st edition have not only settled down and had children, but that their children have settled down to have kids of their own – this book is still talking about 3rd and even 2nd generation magicians. Honestly, this goes way beyond insistence that 2050s slang is still cool.

But we should talk about mechanics, and for that we're going to start with the concepts of Force and Drain. Pretty much everything magical has a Force rating, which is a measure of how powerful it is. Higher Force spells, spirits, magic items, wards, and effects are more powerful than lower Force versions of the same thing. Force is a relative measure of power, not an absolute one. A Force 4 Hellblast was bigger than a Force 4 Fireball, a Force 4 Power Focus was bigger than a Force 4 Spirit Focus. But within each effect, higher Forces meant they were more powerful. But higher Force generally also comes with higher Drain. Channeling mana to cast spells and summon spirits and what have you is taxing on the body and mind in Shadowrun. And when you use a bigger magical effect, the Drain is likely to be higher as well. If you channel an effect that is big enough, Drain can be serious enough that you can actually die (although players don't tend to push things that far for obvious reasons). The relationship between Force and Drain is somewhat dependent on what kind of thing you're casting/summoning/enchanting/whatever. Each spell or other effect has an equation for determining what the Drain code is, and Force factors into that equation. But you're still looking at a situation where casting a Force 3 Improved Invisibility has a higher Drain than a Force 3 regular Invisibility, because the base equation is different. The actual equations have changed considerably between editions (generally speaking getting simpler each time), but really none of them have been all that complicated. And crucially, they've been pretty recognizable from edition to edition. A 1st edition player would not be confused by what they were looking at if they saw the drain codes on the spell lists of 2nd, 3rd, or 4th edition (although the expression is considerable shorter in 4th than in 1st).

Now what things being higher Force actually did was fairly up in the air. For Spirits it was easy, it raised their stats. For Magic Items, it was mostly pretty simple in that almost all magic items were just boring boosters to your magic dicepools and the Force set how big of a bonus that was. But for most of the editions of the game, the myriad spells had no fixed relationship with their Force and their effects. Powergamers would talk about “Force Dependent Spells” that you wanted to cast at high Force, as opposed to spells that got something shitty like “being marginally harder to dispel” or something that you might as well cast at low Force. Shadowrun 4 finally standardized what Force did for spells: it set the 5th edition style Limit for the casting test. Now I'm not drawing an analogy or saying that 4th edition's spell Force effects were similar to SR5's limits, I'm saying that it was exactly the same mechanic. The Fifth Edition developer literally and specifically said that they were expanding that exact mechanic to everything in order to make the Limits. The ironic thing of course, is the in 4th edition, Spell Force Hit Limits were a good thing. Because all the things that are weird and idiosyncratic when your limits are set by how long of a barrel your gun has are quite appropriate when your limit is being set by how powerful a spell you have. If you're making an opposed roll, it's because someone is trying to stop your spell from working and then you want to pump more Force into it. If you want to accomplish a big task that has a high threshold, you need to pump more Force into it. If you're reeling from penalties because you're injured and drugged out your ass, then maybe you should conserve your strength and cast spells at low Force because you aren't going to benefit from a big Force anyway. It makes sense in a way all the extra limits 5th edition added really don't.



And yes, as some people have already mentioned, 5th edition decided to add the Force Hit limits to magical die rolls other than spellcasting. Which means that limits kick in super hard on conjuring, which is an opposed test so you want a high limit. So it's really hard to summon ginormous elementals because they have high dice pools opposing you, but it's also really hard to summon very tiny elementals because the limits are really harsh and the designers of fifth edition have no idea what they are doing. They thought that because it worked and was cool for spells that it could automatically be applied to everything else.



Shadowrun has an entire plane of existence called the Astral Plane. There's very little of interest there, but things on our plane of existence are visible but not solid. Magicians can all have their physical body go inert while they send out an astral body that can move around at the speed of thought. The speed of thought varies somewhat from edition to edition but it tends to be about a thousand kilometers an hour if you engage hyperdrive (not actually called that) and more like a bird than a plane if you don't. Mages can also use “astral perception” where they are still walking around as normal people but they also extend onto the Astral. This is an extraordinary ability and one of the defining powers of a Shadowrun mage. Since things look different on the Astral and you can poke your head through walls, magicians are a huge source of information for the team. SR5 gives people an Astral Limit which is basically just their highest Limit, which in turn is a whole lot like not even having Limits.

Sorcery has an explicit list of things it can't do and an implicit list of things it can do. With a few bumps in the road here and there, those lists haven't really changed in 25 years. When a new spell gets printed in any edition that causes controversy for being outside the guidelines, players from every edition can weigh in on the debate that follows and make cogent points because that aspect of the canon is largely the same as when Paul Hume was ranting in the late 80s. Sorcery basically follows the Law of Contagion from real-life sympathetic magic traditions, with the additional caveat that things the caster can currently see are essentially connected in an immediate enough way that you can channel mana into them in a split second timeframe. This means that people can cast spells on things in their immediate vicinity at speeds relevent to gun fights, or they can sit around for hours mucking about with locks of hair and voodoo dolls and shit. For obvious reasons, players have historically almost exclusively used the former while living in genuine fear of the latter. There was a modest rules clusterfuck with dicepool calculation and targeting that made ritual sorcery fairly useless in 4th edition, but the fluff remained essentially unchanged – and since player characters hardly ever used ritual sorcery themselves, the psychological effects of players wanting to purge blood stains lest corporate thaumaturgists murder them in their sleep remained for some time. SR5 scraps that shit and introduces actual ritual spell lists of special things you can do with ritual magic to try to make it more appealing. I'm not opposed to this in principle, but magic only has a handful of rules and the rituals in this short ass list still manage to violate like half of them. Sorcery not being able to think for itself is a pretty fucking important foundation of how Shadowrun magic works, and these assholes wrote a ritual that makes inanimate objects into intelligent homunculi. I'm all in favor of slaughtering sacred cows left right and center, but that's a very large cow to murder for no apparent advantage.

Regular spells get their time in the sun in this book as well. The first thing you notice when opening the spells section is that direct combat spells no longer do damage. The basic “I kill you” spell for the last 25 years has been “Mana Bolt” and now it does a number of wound boxes equal to your net hits. This is an amount of damage so small that it is actually laughable. It is literally impossible for me to believe that that actually got playtested at any point, because there is absolutely no way that playtesters would report being satisfied with doing 2 boxes of damage to enemies who have ten health boxes or more and risking Drain to do it. There's just no fucking way. None of the other changes look like they were playtested at all either. The somehow managed to make Illusions not make any sense. Shadowrun is historically one of the very few games where Illusions don't create giant arguments, because they do very explicit things and also are simply allowed to be extremely powerful. But in SR5 they've sort of failed to explain who gets to resist Illusions and when, and I genuinely don't know how it's supposed to work anymore. Fuck this book.

Spirits are ridiculously powerful. Always have been. They live on the Astral Plane and project into the physical world. Which as you recall from the whole Astral Projection deal means that they can go places at airplane speed, phase through solid walls, and are literally 100% immune to physical attacks of just about everyone until they choose to take physical form. They can follow you around all day taunting you until you pass out from fatigue and only then materialize and murder you in your sleep. Even when they take physical form, they have very high stats, formiddable magic powers, and are still nearly immune to physical weaponry. Still, Shadowrun has historically had hands down the best conjuring system in any game. You conjure spirits and you get a number of services from them, and this all seems to work much much better than any of the planar binding bullshit in any other game I've ever seen or heard of. The whole limits thing has made actually conjuring spirits totally fucked, but the actual spirit command rules are pretty much still solid. Indeed, credit where credit is due: Spirits have most attributes equal to their Force, which gets crazy really fast, but in 4th edition they introduced the Edge stat, which at stat == Force got Really crazy. In 5th edition they cut Spirit Edge to Force/2. We are on page 303 and I have found a change which is individually good.



I haven't gotten to Adepts, Enchanting, “Reagents,” or Foci... but I have gotten over three thousand words. Magic is just going to have to be two posts.

[Username17]

Also, let me just put forward a theory and tell me if I'm wrong or not. Fans of the game should never be the primary writer behind the game. Fans of the game are great choices for freelancers, fluff writers and world building, but the core of the game needs to be built by people who aren't particularly attached to one class or another because they always play it. They build the game, turn it over for playtesting, tweak it, rinse, lather repeat, but its best that they remain detached. Wrong or right? Because 5th edition seems like the perfect clusterfuck caused by people who made their PC's and class preferences into canon.

You are completely wrong. There's not even a little bit of that that is correct.

First of all, game writing doesn't pay very well. People write game books because they are fans who love the work, or because they are starving and have no other source of income. People who would do game design for purely mercenary reasons exist, but you have to ask why they aren't writing technical manuals for stereo equipment and making a lot more money.

Secondly, while Sturgeon's Law certainly applies to game design - and 90% of everything really is crap - I can't name a single piece of RPG writing produced by a non-fan hack that was even a little bit OK. Monte Cook is a D&D fan. Sometimes he makes something good like 3rd edition D&D, often he makes something shitty like the Book of Iron Might. But the only reason he ever makes anything good is because of the genuine love he puts into his work.

Shadowrun 5 isn't bad because the people writing it have pet agendas for their characters, it's bad because everyone over there is a no-talent asshole. Remember that they had the great talent exodus where everyone with an ounce of self respect told them to go fuck themselves over the whole embezzlement and withholding of wages thing.

-Username17

[John Magnum]

For fun I tried to see how expensive it is to kit out a big drone army. It turns out that the unit price on a roto-drone equipped with two weapons slots, each of which has an assault rifle and that rifle's underbarrel grenade launcher, is only 15,000 nuyen. If you want to mount them with semiautomatic grenade launchers instead, it's not that much more expensive. It's not clear what the fuck happens if a drone tries to dual-wield, or if they experience recoil, or if they're capable of reloading, or any of that shit. But a basic extremely well-equipped flying murderbot is remarkably cheap.

[Stahlseele]

Drones can not and never could reload themselves.
They usually came with large ammo bins though, so for example, an assault-rifle would get a belt fed ammo capacity of 250 bullets or something i believe.
i may be getting this mixed up with the vehicle turret modification though.
Dual-Wielding does not actually really work in shadowrun. But there are rules for that. if you use 2 weapons, you split your dice-pool 50/50 and roll individually for each weapon.
Recoil usually had something to do with the drone body in some form or way.

If a drone counts as a vehicle, it simply does not have to deal with any kind of recoil at all. At least, if its body attribute is high enough.
Seeing how they changed the recoil mechanic in SR5 . . i have no clue how that works at all.

And a flying murderbot should be a bit more expensive than just 15 to 20k O.o
Hell, you can have, if you are unlucky, personal carried weapon systems that cost more fully tricked out x.x

[kzt]

In SR3 you could buy a flying death machine that included a medium machine gun and ammo for, IIRC, less than the cost of the ammo. And the flying death machine was legal, unlike the medium machinegun by itself. So this has always been an issue.

[name_here]

In SR3 you could buy a flying death machine that included a medium machine gun and ammo for, IIRC, less than the cost of the ammo. And the flying death machine was legal, unlike the medium machinegun by itself. So this has always been an issue.

So wait, things become more legal when strapped to a flying death machine? What? Why? How?

[Lokathor]

whether you could kill an astral spirit by running them over with a dual natured schoolbus.

Don't see why not. Assuming you could get a dual-natured school bus some how.

[Ancient History]

Yeah, that happened a couple times. You'd have a drone with an integral minigun or something and the Availability/Legality would be less than the individual minigun...call it an oversight. In SR3 and SR4 I remember you could start out the game with almost your entire body replaced by prosthetics...cyberarms, cyberlegs, cybertorso, cybereyes, cyberears, tongue implants weapons, olfactory booster...but not a cyberskull, because the availability was too high for starting characters. Just one of those wacky little things.

[Silent Wayfarer]

It's the same way how silencers/suppressors are illegal while an Ingram Smartgun (with an integral suppressor) is only Restricted.

[Nath]

Fifth edition introduces a new one: common use cyberprograms are legal, but (in my understanding of the rules as written) they can only run on cyberdecks, which are Restricted.

[John Magnum]

As far as I can tell, in SR5 there's only one gun drone worth using. The MCT-Nissan Roto-Drone flies, has enough Body for two weapon mounts (or one heavy weapon mount), and costs 5,000 nuyen. The weapon mounts themselves cost another 5,000, and then you just have to pick your weapon. The Ares Alpha is 2,650Y, deals a respectable 11P, and comes with an integral smartlink and an underbarrel grenade launcher, and is available to starting characters. Or for 5,000Y you could get a semi-automatic grenade launcher.

Flying murderbots are extremely cheap in SR5.

[Stahlseele]

@AH:
Cyberskull is perfectly chargen legal in SR3.
It's just so bad that nobody ever bothered to actually use it.

And the problem in SR3 was not the legality of the limbs starting out, but the sheer essence and money cost of the limbs.
Everything using standard grade would set you back 6,25 essence AND 525k nuyen.
So you would need to make AT LEAST SOMETHING alpha.
Which means spending twice as much money on it.
And then you still have no essence left for stuff that actually will make you any better.
If you go for all metal bits(obvious limbs) and replace the torso with an alpha grade one, then you have left all of 0,7 Essence and 240k of the 1.000.000 Nuyen you had to start kitting yourself out.

Cyber-Limbs were fucking trap options and worse than useless in SR3.

[Rawbeard]

Wait, combat spells don't have a base damage anymore? What the shit fuck is that about? Well, at least now banishing is almost worth a damn again, I guess.

[Stahlseele]

They were horribly OP in SR4 and in SR3 usually.
Now they are all but worthless. Seems they can't pull off an in between.

[Rawbeard]

They should have just removed them entirely. This is a horrible trap option. Direct combat spells do not do what they are supposed to do. Considering what they tried to do for SR4A to "fix" direct combat spells, this is clearly a "fuck you" to everyone that told them they can't do math and their fix did the exact opposite of what they tried.

[Stahlseele]

SR has a proud history of not removing Trap Options.
Look at Cyber-Limbs. Under SR3, you were better off without them.
And SR4 came along and Dr.Trollman made them all better now.

Also, the Magic Supplemental is not out yet, so there's probably gonna be something in there to bring spells back to OP standard i guess . .

[Cyberzombie]

It's the same way how silencers/suppressors are illegal while an Ingram Smartgun (with an integral suppressor) is only Restricted.

You can always explain away those oddities via some kind of backroom lobbyist deals with corporations. Ingram makes a sizeable donation to lawmaker's campaign funds and gets an exception placed on their gun. That sort of stuff happens all the time in the modern world.

[Ed]

It's the same way how silencers/suppressors are illegal while an Ingram Smartgun (with an integral suppressor) is only Restricted.

You can always explain away those oddities via some kind of backroom lobbyist deals with corporations. Ingram makes a sizeable donation to lawmaker's campaign funds and gets an exception placed on their gun. That sort of stuff happens all the time in the modern world.

Sure, and that'd be a neat bit of fluff, but they don't.

I'm pretty sure you just put more thought into it than anybody working on SR5.

[Username17]

Manabolt in SR4 is not "broken" it's "effective." With the two shot problem in full effect, it is rather expected that you can take two consecutive simple actions to drop an opponent with your firearm of choice. Manabolt is very good at dropping an opponent (if you overcast it), but that takes a complex action to cast, which is two simple actions. Also it causes Drain. There are enemies against which you are better off casting Mana Bolt than you are shooting bullets, and enemies where the reverse is true. But that certainly doesn't make it "broken" or anything like that.

As to legalities, it really doesn't even seem weird to me that guns which don't make a lot of noise are less illegal than aftermarket sound suppressors. That's how the law works now. I have difficulty imagining a law that wouldn't work like that.

-Username17

[kzt]

Silencers are a lot more effective in movies than in reality. A very good good silencer might reduce a rifle to only 2-4 times as loud as a jackhammer at 3 feet away, which isn't exactly "quiet", much less silent.

In the US you cannot sell a gun that includes anything that reduces the sound without requiring that you sell it as a suppressor (with all the ATF forms, fees and months of time it takes to process these). If, for example, you provide a mock suppressor on your .22LR MP-5SD replica the ATF will actually test it to ensure it doesn't actually do anything to reduce the sound.

Also it's a US thing that that restricts silencers that much, I understand that in France, the UK and most other places they are sold directly over the counter without any significant regulation and are required to be used for some purposes.

[A Man In Black]

Also it's a US thing that that restricts silencers that much, I understand that in France, the UK and most other places they are sold directly over the counter without any significant regulation and are required to be used for some purposes.

It's a prohibition thing, like the bulk of US firearms/munitions laws. They're restricted under a bunch of laws that existed mainly for mafia-busting. Assaulting someone with a silenced weapon is mentioned in the same part of the law as assaulting someone with a submachine gun, for example, and has extra penalties at the federal level.

It makes a sort of sense that suppressors would be restricted anywhere that there was a similar moral panic about shadowrunners.

[Smirnoffico]

Back in first edition we were assured that only one percent of the population of the world was magically active but that it was growing fast. Then in 2nd edition we were assured that... only one percent of the population was magically active but that it was growing fast. And then in 3rd edition we were told... well you can fucking guess at this point.

If in 40 years magic users went from 0% to 1% of population, how much the number would rise in next 20-25 years? Granted, there were no major disasters during this time unlike the previous 40 years. Is gift guaranteed to be inherited by the children of the mage?