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Magic

This is the magic rebalance section. In addition to the specific sections below, here’s a few generic notes:

Healing drain

  • A mage who takes drain for something cannot heal that drain while the something is still ongoing. So spell drain and summoning drain is permanent as long as the spell is sustained or the spirit not yet dismissed or disrupted. An exception is binding; once a spirit is bound, the summoner can heal drain as usual. Slap patches still mitigate the effects of drain in the usual way, however.

Enchanting

I believe that, per RAW, the enchanting rules are very weak and uninteresting. They need a ground-up rewrite if they are to be as useful as spellcasting or summoning.

Mystic adepts

Mystic adepts, like magical adepts, must choose one of the three magical skills to specialise in: spellcasting, summoning, enchanting. They cannot do the other two.

Even with this change in place, I suspect mysads are still over powered. This is a start though.

Prior art / acknowledgements

Large swathes of these rules owe debt to: Lormyr for this post and this post (see also this thread) (and this post) u/dezzmont for these (quite radical!) suggestions

Design goals

  • Eliminate the infinite power scaling possibility for mages. Although it’s theoretical in my campaign right now, it still troubles me.
  • Reduce the incentives for mages to game the system by casting spells or summoning spirits during downtime then healing up before stuff kicks off.
  • Make it more expensive for mages to get access to higher buffs (of the order of +3/+4 to attributes and +3/4d6 to init.)
  • Give mages something to spend nuyen on; elevate powerful foci to be as rare and exotic as deltaware mods.
  • Recalibrate foci boosts to fall into the rough envelope of “+1 to +4 dice” that Shadowrun generally applies to various kinds of buff, eg stat augmentations.
  • In return, give mages some greater tactical flexibility, eg. by making spell foci more general-purpose.

Something else I’d like to tackle but haven’t currently found a way: give physads a different mechanical feel to “samurai, but magic” and also give them more benefit from the (expensive) decision to increase their Magic attribute versus just initiating again and again and taking the Power Point metamagic. I am considering doing this by allowing them to take more powers than they have power points and swap them in and out in a ritual process that takes several hours. This would give them some role flexibility that cybernetic characters couldn’t match.

1 - Summoning and spirit rebalance

Rebalance spirits to make them less overwhelming in combat

These rules are canon for my current campaign.

Summoning

  • Spirits cannot be “oversummoned” ie. you cannot attempt to summon one with Force greater than your Magic value.
  • Any Spirit of force 8 or greater can choose to ignore the summons at its option. Expect to roleplay a short scene to convince it to answer your call…

Spirits

  • Spirits no longer get Immunity to Normal Weapons when manifested by default.
    • A summoner can give Immunity to Normal Weapons as an optional power to their combat spirit type, chosen at summoning in the usual way. This will take two optional power slots, so is only available on spirits of Force 6 and above.
    • All spirits that do not have ItNW get an armour value equal to 2x their Force. This armour also applies if ItNW is bypassed, eg. by a weapon focus.
      • Some sample soak dice pools:
        • Water F2: 6 dice
        • Air F4: 10 dice
        • Earth F6: 22 dice
        • Beasts F8: 20 dice
    • Blight ammo will be fairly rare amongst opponents due to its high cost (250¥ per round.)
  • As before, a summoner can only have one non-bound spirit at a time. The total Force of all bound spirits cannot exceed the summoner’s Magic rating.
  • Spirit’s Energy Aura power no longer adds +Force to their Engulf attacks, as that results in 3×Force total damage, which is too much. Instead Energy Aura only changes the spirit’s Engulf attack to match their elemental type. 1

Binding

Binding a spirit now requires the creation of a binding trinket, consuming a number of drams of reagent equal to the spirit’s force. No extra roll is done for this, it’s just part of the binding process. As with other trinkets, this lasts a few weeks but then fades away, releasing the spirit. Binding is no longer permanent.

You have to have the associated trinket on your person to call the bound spirit.

At any time, a summoner can bind a number of spirits with a total force equal to 2× their Charisma.

Remove the following bound spirit services:

  • Spell sustaining
  • Spell binding

Change Aid Alchemy, Sorcery and Study: instead of a flat bonus to your roll equal to the spirit’s Force, treat this as a standard Shadowrun teamwork roll. The spirit rolls (2×Force) dice. Each hit on that test contributes a bonus die to the magician’s test and raises the mage’s limit by 1. The maximum number of bonuses is equal to the magician’s skill rank.

Example: Alice the mage has summoned Bob the Force 4 fire spirit. Alice asks Bob to help her cast a Fireball. Alice has Spellcasting 4 (she’s a novice.) Bob rolls F×2=8 dice, scoring 5 hits (lucky Bob!). That would get Alice 5 bonus dice, but she has Spellcasting 4, so she can only get 4 dice.


  1. thanks to u/mitsayantan for this idea. ↩︎

2 - Foci rebalance

Nerf foci, but make them more flexible too

These rules are canon for my current campaign.

  • All Foci have a maximum rating of 4. Add (Force x 3) to all foci availability codes. All nuyen costs are multiplied by the focus Force value. (See below for tables that work all this out.)
  • No action (casting one spell, summoning one spirit) can be affected by more than one focus. If you have more than one focus that can help (eg. a spellcasting focus and a power focus), you have to pick one. That focus can only contribute to one aspect of the process eg. the spellcasting test or the drain test, not both.
  • Make spellcasting and summoning foci multi-purpose by combining the subtypes. For example, a single Combat spell Sorcery focus can be used for spellcasting, counterspelling, rituals, or sustaining, however the mage needs at that point in time. However it can only do one thing at once, so if it is sustaining a spell that means it cannot be used for spellcasting while the sustaining is still going.
    • Additionally, allow spell foci and spirit foci to offer dice on the drain resistance test equal to their Force, if they were not used to contribute dice to the sorcery roll.
  • The total Force of all bound foci must be less than or equal to 2x the character’s Magic rating.
  • Remove focus addiction rules.

Idea to discuss but don’t yet have full rules for: foci can be attacked via Astral combat. After a certain amount of damage, their link to their user is disrupted. The focus can no longer be used until it is re-bonded to the user in the usual way (ritual + karma cost.)

Reference tables for focus price/karma changes

Power foci

A Power focus adds its Force to the user’s Magic attribute, and hence all spellcasting and summoning dice pools.

5e RAWHouserule version
F16 karma, 18 k¥, 4Runchanged
F212 karma, 36 k¥, 8R12 karma, 72 k¥, 14R
F318 karma, 54 k¥, 12R18 karma, 162 k¥, 21R
F424 karma, 72 ¥, 16R24 karma, 288 k¥, 28R

Spell or spirit foci (karma/nuyen/availability numbers are the same)

For spell foci: for one school of magic (chosen at time of binding the focus), it adds its Force to the dice pool used for one of spellcasting, ritual spellcasting, or counterspelling. Or it can sustain a spell from the chosen school of Force less than or equal to the Force of the focus.

For spirit foci: for a specific type of spirit (chosen at time of binding the focus), it adds its Force to the dice pool used for summoning, banishing, or binding that type of spirit. Or it can be used to increase the user’s Magic rating by its Focus rating for the purposes of determining the maximum total Force of spirits that can be summoned at once.

5e RAWHouserule version
F12 karma, 4 k¥, 3Runchanged
F24 karma, 8 k¥, 6R4 karma, 16 k¥, 12R
F36 karma, 12 k¥, 9R6 karma, 36 k¥, 18R
F48 karma, 16 k¥, 12R8 karma, 64 k¥, 24R

Weapon foci

5e RAWHouserule version
F13 karma, 7 k¥, 4Runchanged
F26 karma, 14 k¥, 8R6 karma, 28 k¥, 14R
F39 karma, 21 k¥, 12R9 karma, 63 k¥, 21R
F412 karma, 28 k¥, 16R12 karma, 112 k¥, 28R

Metamagic foci

5e RAWHouserule version
F13 karma, 9 k¥, 3Runchanged
F26 karma, 18 k¥, 6R6 karma, 36 k¥, 12R
F39 karma, 27 k¥, 9R9 karma, 81 k¥, 18R
F412 karma, 36 k¥, 12R12 karma, 144 k¥, 24R

Qi foci

Not currently sure. Might make them the same as power foci.

Enchanting foci

I cannot imagine why any PC would ever want one of these, so I haven’t houseruled them yet.

3 - Reagents and trinkets

Change reagents to add a new option - trinkets

These rules are canon for my current campaign.

  • increase the cost of reagents, for now let’s say to 1000 nuyen per dram * (remove rules for harvesting your own for a bit, they need rebalancing now)
  • remove all RAW uses of reagents (except binding - see the Summoning section)
  • add a downtime action to create a trinket. You can create a number of trinkets equal to your Alchemy skill in a single downtime scene.

Trinkets

Trinkets are small objects that are linked to the caster’s tradition or personality in some way and can offer a one-time boost to a magic test. They are crafted by using reagents:

  1. Choose how many drams of reagent to use
  2. Roll Alchemy + Magic
  3. Resultant trinket has Force equal to the lesser of the roll and the number of drams used.

NB: Regardless of resulting power, all the reagents you declared in step 1 are consumed.

Trinket usages

Similar to foci, trinkets can be used to add a number of dice equal to their force to any given magic roll. Unlike foci, trinkets burn out after one use. You do not need to declare how a particular trinket will be used until you come to use it.

  • Spellcasting - can aid the spellcasting roll or the drain roll
  • Summoning - as above; can add to summoning roll or drain roll
  • Sustaining - can sustain any spell for (Force) Combat Turns.
  • Counterspelling
  • Dispelling
  • Banishing
  • Hide magic - add its Force rating to the roll to avoid having magic activity spotted
    • so the test becomes Perception + Intuition [Mental] vs (magical skill being used + trinket rating - spell/spirit Force)

Trinkets on the astral

Unlike foci, trinkets do not have their own aura on the astral when not being used; they can be noticed but only if someone assenses your aura (and they can be disguised by Masking in the usual way). Therefore carrying one does not immediately mark one out as a magician to anyone who glances at you on the astral plane; they have a stealth advantage over foci. If a trinket is actively sustaining a spell, it can be seen at a glance, however.

Maximum number of trinkets bound at once

A magician can only bind a number of trinkets at once equal to their Magic attribute.

4 - Initiation and metamagic houserules

Cap initiation, cap max number of quickened spells, but make quickened spells more durable

These rules are canon for my current campaign.

  • Normal characters have a maximum initiation grade of 6, and a maximum Magic attribute of 12. Getting beyond that is out of reach for PCs or normal NPCs (barring dragons, immortal elves, Things Man Was Not Meant To Know, etc.)
    • If it ever matters, I might add in a way for grade 6 initiates to continue to learn new metamagics. Seems unlikely my campaign will need it, however.

Metamagics

Quickening

  • The total maximum Force of all quickened spells on one person or object is equal to the lowest Magic stat that was used to cast any of the spells.
  • Dispelling a quickened spell now only disrupts it. It can be restored via a ritual that takes a few minutes.
  • Quickened spells cast on living subjects with a Magic stat “bed in” to the subject’s aura over a period of a few hours. They cannot be detected other than by assensing, and they can be hidden via the masking metamagic power. They can also pass through mana barriers unimpeded.