Sprawlrunners archived rules

• 1: Furious Magic x Sprawlrunners x MagusRogue
• 2: Downtime, advancement, and wealth
• 2.1: Advancement and rewards
• 2.2: Using the Wealth Die in Sprawlrunners
• 2.3: Downtime Actions
• 3: Advancement and rewards
• 4: Using the Wealth Die in Sprawlrunners
• 5: The Heat Die
• 6: Reckless casting
• 7: Trappings & modifiers

1 - Furious Magic x Sprawlrunners x MagusRogue

These are some ideas on how to combine ManuFS’s Furious Magic supplement with Sprawlrunners and MagusRogue’s Guide to the Sprawl. It draws on all three of these books to hopefully present a coherent whole.

Power Edges

Unchanged

The following Sprawlrunners Power Edges are left unchanged: all the Chi/Physical Adept ones, Weapon Focus, Flexible Signature, Lord of the Spirits, Masking, Shielding, Spirit Companion. See below for notes on the other Focus Edges.

All the Edges in Furious Magic are left unchanged, although several do not apply to Sprawlrunners as there are no Weird Scientists.

Initiation

The Shadowrun concept of Initiation is translated to Furious Magic by using the Higher Spheres Edge. For plot reasons, if the GM is requiring a metaplanar initiation quest, I suggest skipping the Seasoned variant of Higher Spheres; just do it at Higher Spheres II (which is equivalent to “Initiate”) and III (“Greater Initiate”).

Focus Edges

Sprawlrunners’s Focus Edges, in particular, need special handling.

Force/Power Focus

Sustaining Focus

When obtaining and binding the focus, the caster picks one Power that it is associated with. Whenever using that Power with an Extended Duration, the caster does not take the usual point of Fatigue when the Power ends and the caster does not suffer the usual -1 penalty to further arcane skill rolls while the Power is being sustained.

Note that this contrasts with Focus Effort, which works with any Power the caster chooses but prevents them from maintaining a second Power at the same time.

Spell Focus

When obtaining and binding the focus, the caster picks one Power that it is associated with. If the spellcaster gets a Backlash on that spell, the focus absorbs the damage instead, and the caster does not suffer the effects of the Backlash.

The focus’s astral link to the caster is disrupted by this and it must be re-bound before it can be used again (takes hours; GM discretion; likely cannot be used again until after the next Downtime phase.)

On a Critical Backlash, the caster avoids Backlash but still has to roll on the Uncontrolled Magic table.

Alchemy

• Spend 2 LP on reagents for any Power, add on +1 LP per modifier being applied.
• Resultant preparation can be used by anyone, as per Artificer in the SWADE base rules.
• The creator rolls Magic to activate the Power as normal at time of creation to determine the preparation’s effectiveness & drain etc.
• Preparation lasts 1d4+1 hours before it fades.

(this mostly based on MagusRogue’s work)

Mystic Adepts

Modelled as a new Arcane Background. Requires Spirit d6+, Fighting or Shooting d6+, Focus d6+.

• Uses Focus (Spirit) as their arcane skill
• Can only take Higher Spheres once
  • Novice powers: arcane protection, boost Trait, detect/conceal arcana, environmental protection, protection, relief, smite, wall walker.
  • Seasoned powers: damage field, deflection, disguise, healing, speed, warrior’s gift.
• All Powers always have the Self limitation
• Chi Points can be used to purchase Powers interchangeably at a 1:1 ratio

Spirit summoning

The Summon Ally power continues to be used to summon Shadowrun style spirits, but with the following limitations:

• Duration rules for the summoning follow the rules given in Furious Magic: a base duration of (Arcane Skill die type) minutes, or an Extended Duration of (Arcane Skill die type) hours. In Shadowrun terminology, an Extended Duration summoning is called “binding”.
  • Binding does not count as a sustained power, so the caster does not take a -1 penalty on all arcane skill rolls during an Extended Duration summoning.
• A normal summoner can only have one spirit summoned at once. This limit can be increased by the Lord of the Spirits and Spirit Companion Edges in Sprawlrunners.

2 - Downtime, advancement, and wealth

Sprawlrunners uses a fully abstracted resource system, replacing the traditional RPG structure of buying gear and tracking a currency balance with a mechanic called Logistic Points. This works well for some tables, but we found it a little jarring for the characters to have no reason to discuss or negotiate the in-game payments for the jobs they undertake.

The rules in this section consist of several linked systems that work together to nudge the feel of Sprawlrunners a little closer to how Shadowrun works, but still without requiring detailed tracking of the resources each character has to draw on.

1. Advancement tracking is moved from an “advance after each mission” model to “earn karma after each mission, spend karma to advance.” This is very similar to how older editions of Savage Worlds used XP. This helps our table smooth out the rate of advancement, as we play short sessions – and sometimes long missions that span many sessions.
2. In addition to their LP pool, each player has a Wealth Die (see SWADE pg 145). LPs are used to buy all illegal or quasi-legal gear, as before. The Wealth Die is used for other expenditures: bribing a bouncer, paying for a nice dinner, purchasing small/legal items, and so on.
3. When a character completes a mission, they typically receive an in-game payment from whoever hired them. This payment is only used to determine how many Downtime Actions they get to take before their next mission.
4. In between each mission, the players get to use a number of Downtime Actions. These actions can be used to obtain bonuses (including to the Wealth Die, LP, or bonus karma points), advance the character, heal up, and a variety of other useful things.

2.1 - Advancement and rewards

There are two kinds of rewards my characters earn from a mission: karma and nuyen. Nuyen is used to fund downtime actions. Karma is used to Advance the characters.

I typically award karma at a rate of 3-5 per session, depending on how much the PCs get done, and also give out occasional bonus points for cool writeups of downtime actions and stuff like that. (Note: at-the-table cool stuff, like clever strategies, funny jokes, and excellent roleplaying will earn Bennies, not karma.)

Savage Worlds advances

Core SWADE has a simple structure for advancement: every so often, the character earns an advance. Each advance can be spend on a few things, such as improving traits or new Edges. Every three advances, the character also improves their rank, which unlocks new Edges and other abilities. Sprawlrunners doesn’t change this structure.

Advances are quite “large”, as it were. Each one is quite a significant power boost for a character. It’s slightly tricky to work out at what rate to hand them out, as our mission length varies quite a lot and our sessions are quite short.

For my campaign, to smooth over this, I made a small change and re-introduced karma from Shadowrun. Karma will be simply spent on advances at a straight 10:1 ratio (ie. one advance costs 10 karma.) This means I can have a slightly more granular mechanic to reward my PCs than just SWADE advances, but it doesn’t change any game balance.

Alternative houserules for when to advance

The above advancement rules will take a charater from the rank of Seasoned (our starting level) to Legendary (SWADE’s maximum “level”) in about 9-12 months of play. There’s no level cap in SWADE; you can continue to advance forever, but your character does become more and more powerful. Eventually this will cause me problems - it’ll get harder and harder to create challenges without stretching the narrative - and we’ll have to talk about retirement.

There’s a few options we could take here:

1. Ignore it, and either have your characters tear through opponents like tissue paper or lean further into pink mohawk and get bigger and bigger opponents, even if that starts to get silly.
2. Retire characters at some appropriate point after Legendary rank.
3. Slow the rate of progression down somehow to delay when we have to do the above.

Some ideas for how to slow stuff down:

1. Simply award less karma across the board.
2. Continue to award karma at the same rate but change the amount of karma it takes to advance on a curve as you rank up. So at Novice, it might be 5 karma to advance; at Seasoned, 10; but then it goes up to 15 and 20 points as you progress through Veteran, Heroic and Legendary.
3. Keep karma and advances the same, but require more advances to go through the ranks. See below for an example. As stuff like Edges and your LP budget (etc etc) are gated behind your rank, this is something of a compromise; you get advances at the same rate, but it takes longer to get access to the really powerful edges.
4. Some combination of (2) and (3).

Example of (3): normal SWADE uses four advances for each rank. Here, we make it only three advances to get from Novice to Seasoned, then +1 advances per rank after that; so it’s four for Seasoned to Veteran, five for Veteran to Heroic, etc. This doesn’t produce a huge change but is just an example. Obviously we could further change these however we want.

2.2 - Using the Wealth Die in Sprawlrunners

Your character’s gear is bought with Logistic Points, as per Sprawlrunners core rules. LP represents not just the cost of acquiring any old gear, but the cost of acquiring gear suitable for crime: untraceable, scrubbed of all hidden RFID tags, no inconvenient ballistics records on file, no background checks carried out, etc.

Occasionally, though, your character might need to pay for other things. Incidental lifestyle expenses in the game (eg. if Mr Johnson stiffs you on the restaurant bill); bribes to get past a snooty nightclub bouncer; spreading some cash around to grease the wheels during legwork.

For these, we use the SWADE wealth mechanic (pg 145.) This abstracts the amount of liquid cash your character has available to a SWADE-style die type.

Starting wealth

At the start of each mission, Wealth resets to your lifestyle’s die type. For most characters, that’s a d6. If you have the Poverty hindrance, it’s a d4. The Rich edge makes it a d8; the Filthy Rich edge a d10.

Trolls starting wealth die is one step worse than usual, because of their increased lifestyle costs. A troll with Poverty rolls d4-2.

Downtime actions such as Side Hustle or Stash Nuyen can provide short-term bonuses or reductions to your Wealth Die.

Spending Wealth

When the time comes to spend money, I’ll tell you what to roll, based on how much you’re spending and what your current Wealth die is:

• If it’s a trivial amount, you succeed automatically. (If you make a lot of trivial purchases in a row, I might eventually call for a Wealth check on one, just to represent the accumulated expenditure.)
• If it’s too large an amount, you simply cannot afford it. Sorry chummer.
• If it’s somewhere in the middle, roll a Wealth check. If it succeeds, you can afford the expense, but your Wealth die goes down a step. If you get a Raise, you can afford it and you don’t need to reduce your Wealth die.

Note that this might mean that when (say) splitting a restaurant bill, some of you are rolling to see if you can afford it, and others aren’t. It sucks to be poor.

Example Wealth roll modifiers for Shadowrun currency types

As a rough guide, you can translate Shadowrun monetary amounts into Wealth roll penalties as follows:

2.3 - Downtime Actions

Mission rewards in-game can be in a variety of forms: hard currency like UCAS dollars, untraceable digital currency like nuyen on certified credsticks, corporate script, large quantities of easily resold or bartered product like high-grade pharmaceuticals or ICE breaker software, or even (the old fashioned approach) precious metals, gemstones, or bearer bonds.

In game mechanics, we handle all of these as Payout. Each point of Payout awarded after a mission buys one Downtime Action that you can do before the money runs out and it’s time to look for work again.

Downtime Actions do not have to be all declared upfront. For example, an injured character might choose to use their first action on Rest & Recuperation, and then depending on how the roll goes, might repeat the action or switch to something else.

When Downtime Actions require aby kind of die roll, note that you cannot spend Bennies on this roll. Bennies are for when the camera is focused on your character!

Advancing

Although advancing typically happens during downtime, it does not have to, and it does not take a downtime action when it does.

Healing & recovery actions

Lie low

If you attracted an unusually breathtaking amount of attention on the last run and so have a Heat Die, you will need to skip town for a while until the heat dies down. This takes one of your actions and clears the Heat Die. In extraordinary circumstances (a Heat Die of d10 or more), it might even take multiple actions. Be less obvious next time!

Rest & recuperation

For one Downtime Action, you can make a normal Natural Healing roll (see SWADE pg 96 for full details). Roll Vigor; success clears a Wound, each raise clears another Wound.

Characters with the Fast Healer Edge can make two Healing rolls for a single downtime action.

Other characters can Support this roll if they also spend a downtime action. This will usually involve them rolling their Healing skill, for obvious reasons.

Buff actions

Actions that give characters a temporary boost or advantage of some kind.

Carouse

Your character decides to blow off some steam and celebrate still being alive. They spend an extended period of time indulging whatever hedonistic vices most appeal to them.

Take a one-step penalty to your wealth die type die for the next session.

There is no mechanical game benefit to carousing. This is deliberate ;)

Centre / Hang out?

You spend some quality time with your nearest and dearest. Write a scene telling us what you do together, and take a free point of karma for your trouble! (If you don’t want to write a scene, see Train below.)

Intense training

Your character chooses to focus their efforts on honing a particular skill or attribute. They have to already have the skill – ie. at least have a d4 in it.

Until the next downtime phase, the character can get a free re-roll on any failed roll for the trait. This stacks with any other re-rolls or bonuses the character might have. Activating the re-roll is a free action.

You can only be trained in one trait at once; if you repeat the action, you lose the previous training.

Side hustle

Shadowrunner’s skill sets can be used for more mundane activities than the epic, daring heists we play out at the table. Riggers can do courier work; streetsams can work as bodyguards; mages can provide protection services; deckers can skim low-security systems for paydata.

If your character spends their downtime on a side hustle, they can earn a little extra cash in their pocket. Take a one-off bonus to their wealth die type for the next mission.

You can only do Side Hustle once in a given downtime.

Changing the world

Long-term project

Maybe your character is engaged in some sort of longer-term thing: researching something, making something, trying to create a spell… anything we’ve agreed upon.

We’ll handle this a bit like a Dramatic Task in SWADE or a Clock in Blades in the Dark. You’ll have some fixed number of segments to complete - you might or might not know how many, depending on what you are up to. For a single downtime action, you can make a Trait Test using any appropriate skill to work on the project.

Test success will tick a segment on the progress clock. Each Raise will tick a further segment. On a critical failure, you lose one segment.

Stash nuyen

Your character is saving up for a rainy day. Retirement? Paying off their dear old ma’s mortgage? Up to you. They spend their downtime living thriftily so they can divert as much money as possible to their savings. If you want to work to a specific goal, let me know what it is, and we’ll set up a clock to track progress towards it.

Attune spirits

An attuned summoner mage with the Initiate edge can journey to the metaplanes, explore a new metaplane, and learn its True Name. From then on, they can summon spirits from that metaplane whenever they please. You can do this action multiple times in a single downtime phase if you want.

See summoning traditions.

Network

You spend time working your contacts, buttering them up, making sure the next time you come calling they’ll have the good stuff set aside for you.

Roll a standard Networking test (Persuasion or Intimidate vs target number 4). If you succeed, take bonus LP on the next mission according to the table below. For each raise, take a further bonus LP (again, as per below). You cannot spend Bennies on this roll.

No penalty for failures, but you can’t try again; people have had enough of you for now. You can only do Network once in a given downtime.

3 - Advancement and rewards

There are two kinds of rewards my characters earn from a mission: karma and nuyen. Nuyen is used to fund downtime actions. Karma is used to Advance the characters.

I typically award karma at a rate of 3-5 per session, depending on how much the PCs get done, and also give out occasional bonus points for cool writeups of downtime actions and stuff like that. (Note: at-the-table cool stuff, like clever strategies, funny jokes, and excellent roleplaying will earn Bennies, not karma.)

Savage Worlds advances

Core SWADE has a simple structure for advancement: every so often, the character earns an advance. Each advance can be spend on a few things, such as improving traits or new Edges. Every three advances, the character also improves their rank, which unlocks new Edges and other abilities. Sprawlrunners doesn’t change this structure.

Advances are quite “large”, as it were. Each one is quite a significant power boost for a character. It’s slightly tricky to work out at what rate to hand them out, as our mission length varies quite a lot and our sessions are quite short.

For my campaign, to smooth over this, I made a small change and re-introduced karma from Shadowrun. Karma will be simply spent on advances at a straight 10:1 ratio (ie. one advance costs 10 karma.) This means I can have a slightly more granular mechanic to reward my PCs than just SWADE advances, but it doesn’t change any game balance.

Alternative houserules for when to advance

The above advancement rules will take a charater from the rank of Seasoned (our starting level) to Legendary (SWADE’s maximum “level”) in about 9-12 months of play. There’s no level cap in SWADE; you can continue to advance forever, but your character does become more and more powerful. Eventually this will cause me problems - it’ll get harder and harder to create challenges without stretching the narrative - and we’ll have to talk about retirement.

There’s a few options we could take here:

1. Ignore it, and either have your characters tear through opponents like tissue paper or lean further into pink mohawk and get bigger and bigger opponents, even if that starts to get silly.
2. Retire characters at some appropriate point after Legendary rank.
3. Slow the rate of progression down somehow to delay when we have to do the above.

Some ideas for how to slow stuff down:

1. Simply award less karma across the board.
2. Continue to award karma at the same rate but change the amount of karma it takes to advance on a curve as you rank up. So at Novice, it might be 5 karma to advance; at Seasoned, 10; but then it goes up to 15 and 20 points as you progress through Veteran, Heroic and Legendary.
3. Keep karma and advances the same, but require more advances to go through the ranks. See below for an example. As stuff like Edges and your LP budget (etc etc) are gated behind your rank, this is something of a compromise; you get advances at the same rate, but it takes longer to get access to the really powerful edges.
4. Some combination of (2) and (3).

Example of (3): normal SWADE uses four advances for each rank. Here, we make it only three advances to get from Novice to Seasoned, then +1 advances per rank after that; so it’s four for Seasoned to Veteran, five for Veteran to Heroic, etc. This doesn’t produce a huge change but is just an example. Obviously we could further change these however we want.

4 - Using the Wealth Die in Sprawlrunners

Your character’s gear is bought with Logistic Points, as per Sprawlrunners core rules. LP represents not just the cost of acquiring any old gear, but the cost of acquiring gear suitable for crime: untraceable, scrubbed of all hidden RFID tags, no inconvenient ballistics records on file, no background checks carried out, etc.

Occasionally, though, your character might need to pay for other things. Incidental lifestyle expenses in the game (eg. if Mr Johnson stiffs you on the restaurant bill); bribes to get past a snooty nightclub bouncer; spreading some cash around to grease the wheels during legwork.

For these, we use the SWADE wealth mechanic (pg 145.) This abstracts the amount of liquid cash your character has available to a SWADE-style die type.

Starting wealth

At the start of each mission, Wealth resets to your lifestyle’s die type. For most characters, that’s a d6. If you have the Poverty hindrance, it’s a d4. The Rich edge makes it a d8; the Filthy Rich edge a d10.

Trolls starting wealth die is one step worse than usual, because of their increased lifestyle costs. A troll with Poverty rolls d4-2.

Downtime actions such as Side Hustle or Stash Nuyen can provide short-term bonuses or reductions to your Wealth Die.

Spending Wealth

When the time comes to spend money, I’ll tell you what to roll, based on how much you’re spending and what your current Wealth die is:

• If it’s a trivial amount, you succeed automatically. (If you make a lot of trivial purchases in a row, I might eventually call for a Wealth check on one, just to represent the accumulated expenditure.)
• If it’s too large an amount, you simply cannot afford it. Sorry chummer.
• If it’s somewhere in the middle, roll a Wealth check. If it succeeds, you can afford the expense, but your Wealth die goes down a step. If you get a Raise, you can afford it and you don’t need to reduce your Wealth die.

Note that this might mean that when (say) splitting a restaurant bill, some of you are rolling to see if you can afford it, and others aren’t. It sucks to be poor.

Example Wealth roll modifiers for Shadowrun currency types

As a rough guide, you can translate Shadowrun monetary amounts into Wealth roll penalties as follows:

5 - The Heat Die

The authorities in the Sixth World are bloated, corrupt, lazy, and largely ineffective. Rarely are they focussed on going further than “peacekeeping” (ie. violently intervening in anything they don’t like the look of). Crime prevention and detective services get very short shrift in the annual budgets. The city may be covered in cameras and all manner of surveillance gizmos, but most of the time, ain’t nobody got the time to look at them on the off-chance they catch a glimpse of a perp.

Occasionally, though, the PCs may nevertheless do such spectacular things to someone important enough that they end up being actively hunted by forces much more powerful than themselves who are suddenly told “screw the budgets, we want these guys. NOW.”

These rules provide a simple framework for running these incidents.

The Heat Die

Heat represents how close the authorities are to the PC’s trail and how complete a view they have of the PC’s ongoing activities. It is represented by a die type, ranging from d4 to d12.

Some authorities might not have the resources to take the die type all the way to d12 and so it might be capped at some lower value.

The Heat Roll

Every time the PCs take an action that puts them at any risk of exposure, we make a Heat Roll to see what happens. Actions that might result in a Heat Roll depend a lot on the resources of whomever is tracking the PCs, but might include:

• Being in public around active security cameras hooked up to facial recognition, gait recognition, etc. Disguises can help somewhat but not totally.
• Digital forensics, eg anything linked to a SIN that the authorities can discover, eg bank accounts held in a fake SIN.
• Physical forensics, eg blood or other viable DNA left at a crime scene.
• Astral forensics, eg using magic and not taking several minutes to wipe the scene of all traces of the caster’s astral signature afterwards.
• Having an active material link in possession of the authorities, like a preserved tissue sample. (This is a disaster.)

A Heat Roll is a roll of the current Heat Die. If the search is being led or co-ordinated by a Wild Card NPC, an additional Wild Die is rolled.

If the result of the Heat Roll is a Success, the authorities investigate the outcome of the action after the PCs are done and successfully link it to the PCs. Raise the Heat Die by one step.

If the result is a Raise, the authorities realise what is happening in sufficient time to intervene - vastly complicating the PC’s lives.

Taking precautions

Most of the time, the PCs can take precautions to obviate the Heat Roll. For example, they can wear disguises, hack or avoid cameras, destroy physical evidence, wipe astral signatures, etc.

Such precautions always come at an extra cost, either in consumable gear they need to use or in terms of extra time they need to take (or both.)

When taking active precautions, one PC can attempt a suitable Skill roll to oppose the Heat Roll. This cannot be Supported.

Shaking the tail

If the PCs can come up with a suitable set of actions to try and lose their persuers temporarily, they may attempt to do so.

This will usually take the form of a three-step Dramatic Task. If they can collect three task tokens, the Heat Die drops by one step; five task tokens and it drops by two steps. The Heat Die never below a d4, however,

Losing heat

For permanently getting rid of heat, see lying low in Downtime Actions.

6 - Reckless casting

Normal magic involves carefully constructing a structure in astral space to draw the magic through. This helps prevent damage to the mage from wielding the mana, and when Drain does occur, its effects on the body are limited.

If the chips are down, any mage may choose to spend a Bennie to instead use wild magic, drawing mana directly into and through their own aura. The extra power surge allows them to cancel up to 2 points of penalty to the roll (which stacks with any other similar penalty-cancellation effect.) However, if they take Drain, then it will be a Wound rather than Fatigue.

If you roll a Critical Failure on a reckless casting, you should expect significant problems to occur…

7 - Trappings & modifiers

Power trappings

Under these houserules, the three combat Powers - bolt, blast, and burst - are always cast with one of the following trappings. These trappings only apply to those combat spells. Rules for trappings and power modifiers for other spells work as per normal SWADE.

Mages learn spells in the usual way. They learn bolt as a single power, and can cast any of the trappings below – ice bolt, fire bolt, manabolt, etc – freely.

Except where mentioned below, no additional power modifiers can be used on these spells; for example, you cannot put Heavy Weapon onto an acid bolt (consider using earth bolt instead.) However, the specific modifiers that are part of each spell are still allowed - +2PP for +1d6 damage, and (for blast only) +0/+1PP to change the blast template to Small or Large

Wind

Required modifiers:

• Invisible (0) - cannot be seen to the naked eye; more subtle than the other spell types.
• Nonlethal (0) - deals nonlethal damage.
• Range (+1) - all ranges are doubled.

Total: +1PP

Optional modifiers:

• Range (+1/): for a further +1PP, extend range by another Smarts×2 inches.

Acid

• Corrosion (?) - +4 damage vs barriers and gear. If damaged, gear is rendered useless and armour loses 1 point of effectiveness.
• Lingering burn (+2) - on the target’s next turn, they suffer another damage roll, of one die type less.
• Evasion - acid attacks work by projecting a stream of liquid acid, which is unusually slow-moving. They can be evaded as per SWADE pg. 102; on a successful Agility roll at -2, the would-be target can jump out of the way and are unaffected.

Total: +3PP

Ice / Cold

• Biting cold (+2) - inflicts a point of Fatigue if the target is affected by the Power; this cannot cause Incapacitation. This lasts until the end of the next turn.
• Freeze in their tracks (+1) - anybody affected by the Power reduces their Pace by 2 points until the end of the next turn.
• Ice Shards (+1) - 2 AP.

“Affected” above means the target actually suffered damage. If the damage roll does not exceed their Toughness then the extra effects do not happen.

Total: +4PP

Electricity / Lightning

• Bypass metal (+1) - ignore all metal armour. NB: body armour is almost entirely smart materials, ceramic plates, and ballistic weave; it is largely unaffected. However this can often bypass vehicle or drone armour if they have not been constructed with specific electical dampening protections.
• Conduction (+2) - if target is soaking wet or submerged in water, take an extra d6 damage. Also applies when used against vehicles, drones, and most gear.
• Unpredictable arcs (0) - if the caster rolls a 1 or 2 on the Spellcasting die, a random bystander is hit instead of the target - friend or foe! Resolve as per the Innocent Bystander rules (see SWADE pg 104). This still happens even if the overall spell casting attempt fails.
• Short range (0) - Range is reduced by half.

Total: +3 PP

Water

• Knockback (1) - targets damaged by offensive water spells must make a Strength check at -2 or be knocked 1d4" away from the caster. Targets knocked into a wall or other hard surface take 2d4 nonlethal damage.
• Nonlethal (0) - water based attacks inflict nonlethal damage.
• Soaked (0) - targets are left soaking wet; they gain resistance to fire attacks (-2 damage) but are vulnerable to electricity (+2 damage.)

Total: +1PP

Earth

• Armour Piercing (1) - 2AP
• Heavy Weapon (2) - can damage targets protected by Heavy Armour.

Total: +3 PP

Fire

• Armour piercing (1) - 2AP
• Burning (1?) - on a roll of 6 on a d6, any flammable character damaged by fire magic catches fire, taking 2d6 fire damage per subsequent round. See Fire, SWADE pg 127.
• Unsubtle (0) - fire attacks shed a lot of light, which can be good (if you need light to see) or bad (if you’re not trying to draw attention.)

Total: +2? PP

Power

Powerbolt, powerball, and powerburst are magically generated fields of sheer kinetic force. They use the standard power description as written.

Total: no change to PP

Optional modifiers:

• Range (+1/+2): double the power’s listed range for 1 PP, or triple it for 2 PP.
• Selective: (+1): the caster can freely choose which targets within a blast or burst are affected.

Mana

Manabolt, manaball, and manaburst are special in that they connect directly to the target’s aura, so the magical energy flows into the target directly from Astral space.

• Range is line of sight - including optical-only vision modifiers like binoculars or fibre-optic cables. The mage needs LoS to every target in a burst or blast. Targets within the area but out of sight are unaffected. Cover modifiers apply as usual for targets that are partially obscured from the mage’s vantage point.
• Armour is ignored (+2) - but note that very heavy enclosed armour is bulky enough to envelop and hide the wearer’s aura, totally shielding the target.
• Can only target living beings.
• The only type of combat spell that can be cast on the Astral plane by a projecting or perceiving mage (but only at an Astral or dual-natured target.)
• Damage is reduced by one die type, eg. base 2d4 for bolt.
• Rather than Toughness, damage is rolled against a similar stat, but equal to (2+(Spirit/2)) instead of Vigor.
  • Normal Toughness benefits do not apply here. However, the target gets +1 to this “mental toughness” for each cyberlimb they possess. It is difficult to target the auras of heavily cyberwared individuals.

Total: +2 PP

Optional modifiers:

• Selective: (+1): the caster can freely choose which targets within a blast or burst are affected.

Notes on interactions with combat spells, cover, and vehicles

Most of the trappings above – wind, ice, water, fire, acid, power and lightning – take the form of physical energies that the caster manifests at their body and then travel to the target. Cover affects this as usual. If the target is behind transparent cover, such as armoured glass, the power hits the glass; it may or may not penetrate, as per the rules for Cover and Obstructions (see SWADE pg 101.)

Lightning

Lightning spells can penetrate metal conductive barriers if the target is touching them. The target gets no benefit from cover.

If the target is inside a vehicle and the vehicle has insulative armour (see vehicle mods), the energy flows safely around the outside of the vehicle, and the occupants are unharmed. This applies even if the spell was area of effect, ie. burst or blast.

Acid

Acid spells that strike any form of barrier or cover will always damage it, even if they also penetrate and damage a target behind them.

Mana

Mana spells never penetrate barriers, as they travel to the target in Astral space. Cover penalties still apply to the Spellcasting roll, but only because they obscure the target and hide some of its aura.