[Shadowrun 5] Making magical Traditions unique again ?

silva · Post by **silva** » Fri Mar 06, 2015 10:01 pm

I find the current magical traditions too bland in its characterizations, and would like to bring back the differences in the old 2e/3e days, where hermetic, shamanic and possession felt really different.

Is there some advanced rule that already does this? I don't have the new Grimoire so I don't know. If not, did someone came up with house-rules to do that ?

I'm playing a shaman right now and I miss the old spirits domains.

I appreciate the help.

Stahlseele · Post by **Stahlseele** » Sat Mar 07, 2015 12:33 am

Nope. No optional or house rule i know of does what you wish it to do.
They did away with that as of SR4, and i don't think even Bull will want that to come back.

silva · Post by **silva** » Sat Mar 07, 2015 1:29 am

How about dictating binding spirits is prohibited for shamans and mandatory for mages ? Also, bringing back the domains for nature spirits, and the loooong summoning rituals for the mages ? Looks pretty simple to implement.

Thoughts ?

Seerow · Post by **Seerow** » Sat Mar 07, 2015 1:34 am

I had some houserules for 4e to make more distinct traditions. I'll see if I can dig them up.

Edit: Found it, uploaded to google docs here

No idea how any of it would translate to Shadowrun 5e. Quick Summary of it:

Each tradition has one of three summoning styles.
-Spirits as Tools translates to the summoning/binding method of Hermetics. It involves creating a ritual, takes a long time to get a new spirit, but the spirit sticks around and is pretty powerful.
-Spirits as Friends is the Shamanistic path, and gets weaker spirits but can summon them more easily, and if you play nice you get to bind a handful of spirits you can call on frequently.
-Spirits as Guides is a new path I introduced that takes advantage of Endowment spirit power, and basically allows a Mage to gain access to spirit powers they use themselves.

Additionally, Each tradition chooses to focus on Summoning, Casting, or a Balance between the two. That focus determines your spell softcap, spell schools available, and the number of spirit types you have available.

Between the different types of summoning and the Summoning/Casting focus, you end up with 9 distinct possible traditions right off the bat, before considering things like Spirit types, Materialization/Inhabitation/Possession traditions, and Drain Stat, which gives enough wiggle room to have pretty much as many distinct traditions as you are likely to ever want while remaining distinct.

silva · Post by **silva** » Tue Mar 17, 2015 2:11 pm

Nice idea Seerow separating spirits between tools, friends and guides. I will note it down and propose it to the group.

Another idea is simply getting the old 3e rules and using it as is. One interesting thing I noticed is how Elementals only have engulf and movement powers, while nature spirits have a whole gamut of mystic ones - concealment, accident, confusion, guard, etc. I think these translate well the fact elementals are little more than lumps of fire/earth/whatever given animation, while nature spirits have a while mythic/mystic significance to their domains / aspects.

Orion · Post by **Orion** » Tue Mar 17, 2015 3:47 pm

You don't really need to write any new rules. A 4/5 E Shadowrun magician gets so many different abilities that you should be able to make whatever tradition you want out by granting some and removing others. If you look at Frank's "end of the matrix" document, he's got miscellaneous house rules at the end including an "aspected sorcerer" and "aspected conjurer" variant. They get either just sorcery or just conjuring, but at a discount and with free metamagic.

You could copy those over directly as traditions -- like a "psionics" tradition that's all spells, no spirits -- but you could also set up different restrictions, like a tradition that gets summoning but not binding, or that can only use summoning if they use binding immediately after, or that only get 4 spirit types, or can only learn health spells, or whatever. Draw up the list, and decide how many free points to give out.

silva · Post by **silva** » Tue Mar 17, 2015 4:56 pm

Orion, aspected sorcerers, conjurers, etc already existed in 3e. (and continue to exist in 5e, only under different name), so there is nothing new here.

About using the rules as is and just customizing traditions according to players whims, how do I do it ? I don't remember reading this section on 5e book.

Orion · Post by **Orion** » Tue Mar 17, 2015 5:33 pm

There is no section in the book. It's just a thing you could do.

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Wed Mar 18, 2015 1:38 am

silva wrote:Orion, aspected sorcerers, conjurers, etc already existed in 3e. (and continue to exist in 5e, only under different name), so there is nothing new here.

Frank's rules tweaks are still worth looking at though. The Aspected have been around for a long time, sure, but by the RAW passing up the full magician option is such an intensely shitty deal that only basket weavers and the incompetent ever bother with writing "Aspected Magician" on their character sheet. Meanwhile, humanoid NPCs are essentially arbitrary constructs in a point buy system, so MCs were already capable of writing up incompetent rent-a-mages for the runner team to defeat whether or not those NPCs were being given a token amount of BP in exchange for being shitty mages. It created a situation where Aspected Mages may as well have not existed, which is just plain dull, and giving them a head start on powers normally not allowed at chargen makes them considerably more interesting.

silva · Post by **silva** » Wed Mar 25, 2015 7:53 am

With the matter settled for Hermetic and Shamanic trads I went on to possession tradition and...

...man, what a mess. With all due respect, but I feel embarassed for whoever wrote this.

Voodoo allowed to possess unwilling victims ? Quaballa allowed to possess alive beings ? These things are totally WRONG as per the real world practices. A Voodoo/Santeria/Candomble Loa/Patron/Santo only rides who they find deserving of the honor, so they would never agree to ride an unwilling victim. And in Quaballa spirits only possessed inanimated things (as golems for ex).

So, my new question is: do you guys think Ill have much trouble slaping the old SR3 posession rules over it, just like I did for the other traditions ?

Also, possessed vessels do not receive immunity to normal weapons/hardening ? Am I reading it right ?

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Wed Mar 25, 2015 5:56 pm

Here's a very important thing to understand about the Shadowrun world: the magic came back, which implies that the magic was gone. Humans who professed to know magic during the "gone" period were still deluded charlatans during that period. It's a culturally insensitive thing to say, but the real reason IRL houngans can't possess the unwilling is because spirits aren't real. It "works" on the willing because the willing wish the charlatans to be right. If magic came back tomorrow in accordance to Shadowrun conventions, the vast majority of "houngans" would not be Awakened and would not have any magical powers, because in Shadowrun every single fucking 5th world tradition is wrong about how magic works in some very important ways. 6th world houngans being able to do shit that 5th world houngans can't do is thus a foregone fucking conclusion. So quit threatening to shit on houngan players in the name of verisimilitude. That shit is embarrassing.

silva · Post by **silva** » Wed Mar 25, 2015 6:46 pm

Whipstitch: cite the pages where this is explained, please ? Because my interpeetation of it bases on all editions Ive read so far is totally different from yours.

Orion · Post by **Orion** » Wed Mar 25, 2015 6:52 pm

People can take Geasa as negative quailities to restrict their magic. Write up required Geasa for some traditions, if you want. Also, consider that Shadowrun magicians have a great deal of power in themselves, unlike the priests or magicians in most historical traditions. Maybe a Loa would never willing possess the unwilling, but an Awakened Houngan can simply bind and compel it.

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Wed Mar 25, 2015 8:12 pm

I don't have a page citation, because it's fucking obvious and you're the first person I've met who needed it explained to them that non-magical people are not a good indicator of what magical people can do.

silva · Post by **silva** » Wed Mar 25, 2015 8:38 pm

Sorry Whip. Citation or no deal. The text as described is extremely open to interpretation. In special the way the magical traditions are depicted in supplements like Magic in the Shadows, where you have pretty correct (aka real-life accurate) instructions on the traditions practices - if "truer" practices were revealed after the awakening, then they would have explained it, instead of sticking to the accurate real-world descriptions.

By the way, there are some rpgs that use your argument - that the magical traditions as we know in real life are only fragments of the true magic that exist somewhere. But then they go ahead and make it clear on the differences and how true magic actually work (I think Nobilis and Unknown Armies use this motif). Shadowrun never did, or does, that in any edition that I know.

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Wed Mar 25, 2015 8:48 pm

You get that there's an entire metaplot filled with beings who openly and repeatedly mock the human understanding of magic, right? I know you're Silva, and that hoping you're not this dumb is futile, but seriously, c'mon. The books have mentioned before that traditions and theories like psionics have already come and gone because of their abject failure to cope with the stuff all the other theories of magic are demonstrably capable of doing. People debate shit about magic all the time in the Shadowrun world, but there's also consensus about things that no tradition has proven capable of doing. Remember, Houngans not only have to explain their own phenomena, but they also have to contend with the existence of possession traditions and spirits who do not follow those rules.

Orion · Post by **Orion** » Wed Mar 25, 2015 9:12 pm

Silva, how high would you say the Magic stat of a typical Santero is in today's 5th-world New Orleans?

vagrant · Post by **vagrant** » Wed Mar 25, 2015 10:07 pm

Zero, because there's no fucking magic in the fifth world. (I am not Silva.) That's the whole point. Everything that modern times know about magic is bullshit and provably wrong (in the context of the Shadowrun magic paradigm.)

Also, Silva is as typically a fucking moron, because every magic sourcebook and core rulebook have sidebars with magic theory in them in which they state how magic works. Like, that's part of the whole point. It straight up doesn't matter what real-life magicians think, because magic isn't real in the 5th world. Shadowrun magic works according to basic rules which are fucking known, and that's that.

silva · Post by **silva** » Thu Mar 26, 2015 1:48 am

Orion wrote:Silva, how high would you say the Magic stat of a typical Santero is in today's 5th-world New Orleans?

As an atheist myself, I would say 0 (zero). But a practitioner of the tradition could have a different opinion. And while the book says magic returned in 2012, it doesnt say it was zero before, only that it was on a low cycle, which could mean a magic rating of 1 or something.

So, as is always the case with Shadowrun magic, its left purposefully open.

silva · Post by **silva** » Thu Mar 26, 2015 1:56 am

vagrant wrote:Zero, because there's no fucking magic in the fifth world. (I am not Silva.) That's the whole point. Everything that modern times know about magic is bullshit and provably wrong (in the context of the Shadowrun magic paradigm.)

Also, Silva is as typically a fucking moron, because every magic sourcebook and core rulebook have sidebars with magic theory in them in which they state how magic works. Like, that's part of the whole point. It straight up doesn't matter what real-life magicians think, because magic isn't real in the 5th world. Shadowrun magic works according to basic rules which are fucking known, and that's that.

First, Ive just read in some book that nobody actually knows if magic was really zero before the awakening. It had a lowcycle, which not necessarily means 0. Indeed, there is a Shadowtalk discussion about it somewhere (perhaps in MitS ?). Ill look for it and post here.

Second, Ive read every sidebar on magica theory and not a single of them corroborates to what Whipstitch or you are saying. In fact, these theories put more doubts on the air than explain anything. See, again, the essay on MitS about the true nature of magic and spirits: the author describes various "possble explanations", and then concludes that "whatever, what matters is that it works". (

)

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Thu Mar 26, 2015 2:47 am

So, basically, your justification for houngans not having nice things is that you have read the rules and concluded anything is possible. Fantastic.

silva · Post by **silva** » Thu Mar 26, 2015 2:56 am

Nope. My justificative is based on SR3 fantastic and accurate description of the tradition as seen on Magic in the Shadows. Then seeing how SR4/5 made everything bland and inacurate.

Notice its has nothing to do with essays on the nature of magic or other bullshit, really. Its just an edition having better research and more faithful rules thn the other. I totally understand the impetus to streamlining of SR4, but at least get the core ideas right, damn it.

hyzmarca · Post by **hyzmarca** » Thu Mar 26, 2015 2:01 pm

Whipstitch wrote:Here's a very important thing to understand about the Shadowrun world: the magic came back, which implies that the magic was gone. Humans who professed to know magic during the "gone" period were still deluded charlatans during that period. It's a culturally insensitive thing to say, but the real reason IRL houngans can't possess the unwilling is because spirits aren't real. It "works" on the willing because the willing wish the charlatans to be right. If magic came back tomorrow in accordance to Shadowrun conventions, the vast majority of "houngans" would not be Awakened and would not have any magical powers, because in Shadowrun every single fucking 5th world tradition is wrong about how magic works in some very important ways. 6th world houngans being able to do shit that 5th world houngans can't do is thus a foregone fucking conclusion. So quit threatening to shit on houngan players in the name of verisimilitude. That shit is embarrassing.

This isn't entirely true.

The Ghost Dance popularized by Wovoka and the Ghost Dance used by Daniel Howling Coyote are the same dance. And the technique was originally taught to Wovoka by a magical being that's been around since the Fourth World.

There are, in fact, Shadowrun books set in the Fifth World that have low-level magic use and spirit involvement and vampires.

The Nosfratu in the novel of the same name, for example, was born centuries before the beginning of the Sixth World. He's still an elf vampire. Because manaspikes happened.

Whipstitch · Post by **Whipstitch** » Thu Mar 26, 2015 3:48 pm

It's not true in every case, just the vast majority. At the very least every paradigm of magic has had to deal with things they admittedly didn't know about coming back into existence. The setting is loaded with syncretism, and it hits me as super misguided to nerf a really famous brand of magic because of 5th century beliefs. That said, since this entire thread is apparently about killing off much of the syncretism anyway I'll go wander off elsewhere.

silva · Post by **silva** » Thu Mar 26, 2015 5:22 pm

It amuses me that Whipstitch is full of absolute and conclusive points about the nature of magic, when the very books are completely inconclusive about it. Then when someone asks him to come up with a citation or text to support his claims, he can't produce anything. And he still has the guts to try to diminish the only evidence someone brought up (when he himself brought none).