Summoning and spirit rebalance

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.