SR3: Our Magic is Different

[Username17]

In SR3, how do magicians vs shamans play out and how well do aspected work?

This is a weird enough topic that it deserves a separate thread, so let's do this like buddhists.

First of all, SR3 has a game engine where things become more difficult by having higher target numbers, but you get more skilled by rolling more dice against that target number. As target numbers get high, the amount of dice you'd need to roll to have a reasonable chance of success rises exponentially, while dicepools people actually get rise slower than linearly (as each new die costs more than the one before it). So while the system is theoretically open ended, in actual practice it's relatively easy to push difficulties to "go fuck yourself" levels and no competence you'll ever see, even on Great Dragons, is going to meaningfully interact with any task outside that range. It's very weird, and the designers didn't understand the limits of their math engine so there are a lot of ways to break the game around the edges of the RNG.

But we're here to talk about the different flavors of magic users. And in SR3, the different kinds of magic user were very different. And I mean like "you might think they were literally designed for a different game altogether" different. The types of magic users anyone cares about are Hermetics, Shamans, and Voodoo Houngans (yes, really). And there are two packages you can buy: Full Mage, and Aspected Mage. Full Mage costs more and you get the total package of every kind of magic that a magic user could potentially use, and Aspected Mage costs somewhat less chargen resources and gives you your choice of one of several different weirdly defined subsets of the magic abilities and gives you more starting points to buy spells and sundry shit. Therefore, obviously, if you can find the killer app where get exactly the magic power options that you ever intend to use, the Aspected Mage costs less and gives you more. On the other hand, there are a lot of magic powers you could potentially invest in and a lot of them are pretty awesome, so Full Mage was never a bad life choice.

But now let's talk about the three branches of magic. Technically there were others, but they were either pointless and redundant (German Pagan Idolatry, for example) or NPC only (like the Bug Mages, the Toxic Shamans, or the Irish Reincarnated Elf Druids). Technically the Wuxing were different enough that you'd notice, but only barely and you have never played with anyone who has played one of those. Voodoun was available only in expansion books and was weird enough that not every Mister Cavern would let you play one, so we'll get into their weird ass corner of the Shadowrun universe in a later post. For now we'll talk about the two that were in the original big blue book: Shaman and Hermetic. Shamans have two things going for them: they get to have a Totem that gives them bonuses and penalties to (for the most part) different kinds of magic; and they summon spirits for free in a single standard action. Hermetics have one thing going for them: they get to spend a fuck tonne of money and a really long ass time summoning spirits, but they can call up as many spirits as they want from the ones they've already summoned.

So, Shamans. Their spirits are tied to the domains they are summoned in and vanish the next time the sun rises or sets. And Shamans can only have one spirit at a time. You might as well chew through your spirit services like they were pizza vouchers because you're going to lose your spirit and have to summon a new one if you go into someone's home (a domain shift), or the sun rises. On the plus side, you can summon a new one in a second, and though drain gets pretty fucking intense if you try to summon big spirits, you can throw around services from little spirits all day long. Any Shaman with access to conjuring (which is to say: any full mage that is also a Shaman) will be called upon to throw low end spirit services around like mad. And some of those are quite good, as for example Movement and Concealment have some pretty drastic effects even at force 3. The other thing they have besides being a low end spirit service ATM for the entire team is that they have Totems. Most Totems give you a bonus to one or two categories of spells and penalties to some other one. Since this is a game where you choose to buy or not every single spell your character knows, this is a huge advantage even before we get into the subtle fact that the Totems are in no way remotely balanced. Simply put: if you are a Shaman whose Totem gives you a bonus to casting Illusion spells and a penalty to casting Combat spells, you are going to just do that, because like in any system where there are an arbitrary set of spell categories you can do just fine with only ever using one or two if you just grab spells that are awesome or versatile from your favorite category. Note this means that if you want to be a spellcasting specialist, you will very definitely want to be a Shaman, because obviously.

Hermetics have no bonuses or penalties, which since you select your spells and skills by buying them with points rather than rolling them on charts or whatever means that Hermetics are flat worse at casting spells. They can use spells from any category, which is a thing, but it's a pretty minor thing. Furthermore, summoning a spirit takes hours of game time and thousands of Nuyen. A Hermetic in a "low money" campaign is basically not even playable. And they simply cannot do the job of spirit power spamming that Shamans can. However the big deal for Hermetics is that you summon your spirits into Pokeballs and you can have several Pokeballs concurrently, and all of your spirits can be out of their pokeballs at the same time. And here's the really really big deal: you pay drain for conjuring when you put spirits in to Pokeballs, and pay absolutely nothing to pop them out. This means that you can afford to fuck around with spirits that are very much bigger than what Shamans can do - you are required to make your summoning rolls during downtime, which means that any drain that is less than lethal is flavor text. Also, any encounter brutal enough to warrant popping one elemental spirit out of its pokeball is probably nasty enough to justify using two spirits - or five. A properly played Hermetic might seriously not use any spirit services for an entire adventure, but when they let their hair down they go all Phoenix Force on your ass.



Obviously, your mileage will vary. Depending on how you play, either or both of the Hermetic and Shaman could be stand out all stars.

-Username17

[Longes]

So totem-wise, it seems to me like the totems which give bonuses to Spirit of Man are the big winners, since most of the time you are going to be summoning in the city or in a building, yes?

Owl and Sun totems also stand out, as Owl gives +2 dice to everything at night and +2 TN to everything during the day, while Sun gives +2 to all spirits during the day and +2 to combat, health and detection magic at all times, with the penalty being +2 to conjuring TN at night.

Also I'm curious for your opinion on SR3 houngans. It appears that unlike SR4/5, their spirits can only possess you and your buddies, not everything.

[Stahlseele]

I am always astonished by how good of a memory that frank Troll has o.O
Or how fast he can do research and then simply condense it down like that.

[Username17]

So totem-wise, it seems to me like the totems which give bonuses to Spirit of Man are the big winners, since most of the time you are going to be summoning in the city or in a building, yes?

Owl and Sun totems also stand out, as Owl gives +2 dice to everything at night and +2 TN to everything during the day, while Sun gives +2 to all spirits during the day and +2 to combat, health and detection magic at all times, with the penalty being +2 to conjuring TN at night.

Also I'm curious for your opinion on SR3 houngans. It appears that unlike SR4/5, their spirits can only possess you and your buddies, not everything.

TN fuckery is a really big deal. In general, Owl and Sun involve teabagging the rest of the party slightly by being somewhat overpowered until something happens at the wrong time of day and then you just fucking die. Target Numbers going from 4 to 6 is like having all your dice pools divided by three.

Basic level powergaming is to take something like Bull, which gives +2 for Health Spells and +1 for Combat and Detection and has no drawbacks. Next level powergaming is to take Monkey and simply note that Manipulation bloat is so intense you can have all your spells be Manipulation spells and as you've noted you might go a whole campaign without ever summoning a spirit that wasn't a Spirit of Man. So honestly "+2 to Manipulation spells, +2 to Spirits of Man, -1 to Combat Spells" is pretty similar to "+2 all the time, no penalties."

-Username17

[Ancient History]

SR3 magic came about as a great compilation and re-think of all the crap that had come before in SR1 and SR2 - stuff which literally just piled up into a vast trainwreck of options, most of which wasn't even trying to be balanced together, and large chunks of which (Awakenings) technically was released incomplete.

The hairy point wasn't necessarily the Tradition divide, but the Full Magician/Aspected Magician/Physical Magician/Physical Adept thing - which touted itself as a full spectrum of magic use but got almost super mix-n-match as the edition continued on. In a lot of ways, it was inherited directly from SR2, but slightly cleaned up and then people fell out over the fiddly details.

The Aspected Magicians were maybe the most bizarre of the bunch, because there were several types. You could be aspected with regard to a single magical skill (Sorcery, Conjuring, Enchanting - and did they have Astral Adepts that specialized in Aura Reading, or am I mixing up editions in my head? It's been a while), and then "specialists" like Totemists, which were shamans that could only use magical skills their totem gave them bonuses for. You could basically mix'n'match the different aspected magicians with different traditions; for Sorcerers it hardly mattered, since you weren't conjuring any spirits...I think Voudoun had their own special aspected magician took, but I haven't picked up Magic in the Shadows in a long, long time.

[Stahlseele]

Aspected Shamans(Shamanists) can only conjour spirits and cast spells to which they get bonus from their totem.
Now look at Cojote. Doesn't give any bonus and has no malus either.
Yep, you can make an awakened that can do nothing with his magic.

[Ancient History]

Well, they can still bind weapon foci and crap like that. But yeah, figuratively shooting yourself in the foot is a thing you can do with Totemists.

[Longes]

You explicitly can't make shamanists with totems that don't give a spirit/school bonus. So no, Coyote is not a valid choice. Neither is Owl nor Sun.

[Stahlseele]

Is that right?
I wasn't sure wether or not i was misremembering a rule forbidding you from taking a totem that doesn't give any boni or mali . .

[Username17]

So, Aspected Mages. Aspected Mages cost a lower priority if you're doing the priority system and less points if you're doing the points system. Unlike SR4, this difference in cost is actually significant. Also if you are doing the points system (I don't know anyone who played SR3 without allowing the points system from Runner's Companion), you get a whole lot more Force Points to start the game with.

Force Points are what you buy spells with, so an Aspected Sorcerer or Aspected Elementalist or Aspected Shaman will simply know more spells than a Full Mage and you will have more points to buy skills and stats and shit with. Aspected Conjurers don't get spells at all, but there is an optional rule to allow them to spend their Force Points like Karma to buy themselves into Initiation as a starting character. My experience is that this is usually allowed, since without that rule an Aspected Conjurer cannot spend their bonus Force Points at all. With that rule, you get to start with most of the metamagics that actually matter for a Conjurer, and an increased magic attribute.



Now being a Full Mage gives you more than two things, so being an Aspected Mage is considerably less than half the full package. As a Full Mage you get Astral Projection and Enchantment and potentially some other minor shit from splat books that Aspected Mages do not get. This is why being an Aspected Elementalist isn't necessarily just better than being a Full Mage Hermetic.

Elementalists and Shamanists get a limited set of spells and a limited set of spirits. Since you don't get to choose what domain you are in and thus what type of spirit you'd need to summon at any particular time, no one ever plays Aspected Shamans. All Aspected Magicians who are Shamans are either Aspected Sorcerers (who take Totems with Conjuration penalties) or Aspected Conjurers (who take Totems with Spellcasting penalties), because obviously. Elementalists are more interesting. Remember that you can do pretty much everything you'd ever want with Manipulation spells (except Heal people) and Earth Elementals aren't qualitatively inferior or even different to Fire, Water, or Air Elementals in their capabilities. Yes, Manipulation Bloat in SR3 is so bad that there are Manipulation spells that are friggin mind control that are mysteriously not in Illusion and also Manipulation spells that "create and control fire in a way that damages people" that are totes not exactly the same thing as Combat Spells like fireball. But despite the obvious powergaming opportunities, you rarely see someone play an Earth Elementalist, because while Enchantment is a... niche concern... Astral Projection is really awesome and one of a Full Mage's core competencies. Also, Full Mages get to summon Watcher Spirits, which are pretty sweet, and Elementalists do not.

The draw of the Aspected Sorcerer is obvious. You don't do any astral scouting and don't have spirits to throw around, but you have a bigger spell list. Probably objectively less powerful than a Full Mage, but you can be a contributing character. All Aspected Sorcerers are required by law to be Shamans, because they get Totem Bonuses instead of not doing that.

Aspected Conjurers can be Shamans or Hermetics (or even Houngans, to be honest). As an Aspected Conjurer Shaman you will start with extra drain resistance with Centering and shit, so you will be able to consistently shit out slightly larger spirits to do utility tasks. As an Aspected Conjurer Hermetic, you still won't be able to afford to use your spirits for trivial or incidental actions, which means that your character will need a sideline. My suggestion is to become a Decker or Rigger or even a Street Sam on the side and just accept a few implants. As a Hermetic Conjurer, you can definitely accept some Geases to keep your high starting Magic attribute despite some Essence Loss. Remember that everything you conjure except Watchers is required by law to be done during downtime, so there's essentially no drawback to most Geases you might take. It's shit like "oh noes, you have to wear protective goggles while using your highly expensive and fragile equipment in your lab!" Whatever. The big draw of the Aspected Hermetic is that you start with Invoking, which lets your downtime summonings be even bigger. And by bigger, I mean they can create magnitude 5 earthquakes just for fun.

-Username17

[Longes]

My experience is that this is usually allowed, since without that rule an Aspected Conjurer cannot spend their bonus Force Points at all.

In the corebook aspected conjurer can spend their Force Points on foci and starting with bound spirits. So while aspected shaman conjurer just starts with a big ol power focus, aspected hermetic conjurer may very well start with a big bound spirit with a dozen of services.

[Stahlseele]

And don't forget the options to put kinda sorta geas on different spells to reduce the force cost only while learning it though.
Making the spell exclusive for example(meaning you can not do ANYTHING ELSE WHILE CASTING IT) reduces Force Point Cost to learn the spell by 2.
Using a fetish(which is something like a focus but not quite) reduces the force point cost to learn a spell by 1, but you simply can not cast the spell at all if you do not have your fetish on your person/body somewhere.
So, depending on how creative you can get and how successfull you are in defending against your GM hitting you with the core book/magic book, you can really stretch those force points quite far if you want.
Technically, if you make them ALL EXCLUSIVE, you can have 30 force 3 spells as an aspected sorcerer supreme.
Wether or not you want this is another question entirely, because of how the force of a spell affects the spells effectiveness.
But there are some spells where lower force does not actually make them less effective, just easier to counterspell/break by an enemy. So of you chose wisely, you will have little to no problem there either.
And because you are such a minmaxing powergaming scumbag steve of a magician, you also get the added benefit of lower drain damage to resist because the spells are lower in force.
Also, seeing how the drain damage is force/2 round down, you always want some odd value for the spell power, never even.
So, 3 or 5 are the usual sweet spots, depending on the spell in question.
If a spell has, for example, like the powerball the following drain code: Force+1/(+1DL) it means if you cast the spell at Force 3 and want to do medium damage(remember, SR3 DMG is LMSD), the final comes out to:
TN4 for the roll to resist S stun damage.
This will create at a point in space of your choice that you can see with your own eyes, a sphere of annihilation with a radius (or diameter, i forget) of 3m, dealing 3 points pf physical damage to everything in it.
Living beings and objects as well. So if there is something in there that is small / weak enough, you simply make it disappear from existence, as per the fluff.

[Username17]

The way spells interact with variable TNs makes the need for Force wildly different on different spells.

For starters, the target numbers for enemy resistance tests are the force of a spell. This means that any spell you expect to be resisted will be five times as effective if it is cast at force 6 than if it is cast at force 2. If you intend to cast spells that enemies are going to roll resistance tests against, those pretty much need to be exactly Force 6.

For all other spells, the effect of Force is ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. It sets the difficulty to dispel things, but you usually don't give a shit. If someone is in a position to dispel your spells they are usually also in a position to shoot you in the fact. Many spells have specific Force effects and thus minimum Forces that they can be cast at to not be embarrassing. But others just don't. Casting Personal Silence at Force 1 is basically just fine.

So the thing where you have to pay Force Points to learn a spell at a specific Force is a really weird spell costs thing. Different spells have different ideal Force ratings, which means that it costs different amounts to learn them. Stun Bolt is learned at Force 6, while Personal Silence is learned at Force 1. So in actual play, Personal Silence costs much less to learn than Stun Bolt. But that's all emergent - there's no actual rule stopping you from learning a completely worthless Force 3 Stun Bolt or a high drain and puzzlingly worthless Personal Silence.

-Username17

[Stahlseele]

Well, aside from being a smart cookie and a good little minmaxer of course . .

[Username17]

Anyway: Voodoo.



Voodoo was introduced in Awakenings, which was basically a book where Steve Kenson got to take all the drugs and write up a bunch of stuff so weird that editors published it even though a lot of it was unfinished. I mean seriously, what the fuck do Astral Adepts even do? Why are Psychics so fucking terrible at everything? And so on. But there was one piece in all the insanity that had fucking traction: possession spirits.

When it came out, there wasn't any kind of codified system for what was an appropriate vessel. Those rules were written ten years and two editions later by Bobby and me. And SR3 was sort of in between on all this. The system wasn't streamlined by any means, but it at least managed to mostly have complete sentences. You know, baby steps.

At the core, Voodoo is like Shamanism when it comes to having Totems bonuses and penalties, and your conjuration is about voltroning yourself into a terrifying spirit-man amalgam rather than sending out Pokemon at all. You are allowed to have two spirits at a time, and one of them is fixed by your chargen choice of totem Patron Loa. What is the point of having two spirits when only one can possess you at a time? Uh.... none? Like, there is literally zero reason to have two spirits at a time unless one of the other player characters wants in on the possession action, in which case they can spend 10 Karma for the privilege of eventually being possessed at the same time as you are. And then a second player character could spend 10 karma to be told "lol! I can still only summon 2 spirits at a time, you dumb fucker just wasted 10 karma!"



Now the calculations of Voodoo get really weird. First of all, you don't really care about Services. It's one service to start your possession timer, and that lasts for 12 hours. At the end of that timer you resist deadly stun drain and the spirit vanishes in a puff of awesome. So having more than one service is only ablative armor for Banishing. Do you care? No. No you do not. In practice what this means is that Houngans generally swing in with bigger spirits than Shamans do, because they are going to need to go sleep after every spirit use anyway and they don't give no fucks about getting more net hits to get more services. But the spirits are still smaller than Elemental Spirits, because you have a 12 hour clock to pop the spirit into your body after initially summoning it (which then starts a new 12 hour clock for it staying in your body). So there's no downtime summoning at all.

Also, there are zombies. Some places say you can't make them if you aren't an NPC. Other places don't. I dunno. Also the rules are really vague but can certainly be read that if you ever get knocked unconscious at any point in the future all of your zombies go on a cannibalistic rampage for no reason. So there's that. The rules for Zombies are not actually complete, but could potentially be very powerful. All in all, you have to have a very long discussion with Mister Cavern before you can make zombies. Most people who discuss Houngans as playable characters assume that you either can't or won't make any zombies.

In any case, what a Houngan does is summon a spirit 12 hours before the mission and then goes to sleep to work off drain. Then when the mission starts they turn into the Hulk.

-Username17

[Ancient History]

If any of this sounds really fucking confusing, it has to be balanced against AD&D's specialist magicians, which provided the basic inspiration/template/counterpoint. D&D had...a lot more specialists, but the restrictions they faced were generally much more arbitrary; there were quite literally many more [fire] spells for Fire elementalists than there were [earth] spells for Earth elementalists, and that's before you get into the wigginess that was dividing it up by school, or one-offs like the Wild Mage. Shadowrun's approach, while complicated in that it allowed a *lot* of options (we haven't even gotten to physical magicians yet!) was altogether generally more practicable as a system than arbitrarily deciding which schools of spells your character couldn't learn or cast from.

[Stahlseele]

In any case, what a Houngan does is summon a spirit 12 hours before the mission and then goes to sleep to work off drain. Then when the mission starts they turn into the Hulk.

-Username17

Which, you have to admit, sounds all kinds of awesome right there . .
Voudoun is one of those edge cases where a Troll or Ork Summoner can actually kinda work, simply becasuse of how it works.
You can boost your already impressive physical stats further with the spirit possessing you. And you do not take sudden drain while on the job. And Trolls and Orks can sleep off stun damage really well as well. And you gain access to the Spirit powers to boot. 3D Movement being super usefull and making you look positively badass.

[Silent Wayfarer]

In any case, what a Houngan does is summon a spirit 12 hours before the mission and then goes to sleep to work off drain. Then when the mission starts they turn into the Hulk.

-Username17

Which, you have to admit, sounds all kinds of awesome right there . .
Voudoun is one of those edge cases where a Troll or Ork Summoner can actually kinda work, simply becasuse of how it works.
You can boost your already impressive physical stats further with the spirit possessing you. And you do not take sudden drain while on the job. And Trolls and Orks can sleep off stun damage really well as well. And you gain access to the Spirit powers to boot. 3D Movement being super usefull and making you look positively badass.

Sounds more like Superman than the Hulk at that point. Do you get eyebeams?

[Username17]

Sounds more like Superman than the Hulk at that point. Do you get eyebeams?

If you take the right Loa you can shoot lightning bolts. Doesn't say from where.

-Username17

[Mask_De_H]

Shit lightning and eat thunder.

Did any of the weirder bits of these systems make it into SR4? Because I can see traces of the Summon/Bind dichotomy, the Totem min maxing, and throwing spirits into yourself to become Shaman King clearly porting over.

[Username17]

Did any of the weirder bits of these systems make it into SR4? Because I can see traces of the Summon/Bind dichotomy, the Totem min maxing, and throwing spirits into yourself to become Shaman King clearly porting over.

Well, SR4 was written by people divided into two camps: the reductionists (example: me) and the obscurantists (example: Lars). The reductionists wanted to cover as much of the older material as possible with as few rules as possible. The obscurantists wanted to replicate the feel of Shadowrun's weirdness by making as many stand alone pieces of obscurica as possible. The project leads vacillated between those viewpoints and often made snap decisions in favor of one group or another that were quite at odds with what they had come up with for other parts of the rules.

So let's take the SR4 Plant spirit. It has Magical Guard because the signature spirits of the Wu Jen ("spirits of the elements," not to be confused with "elemental spirits" or "spirits of nature") had the ability to provide fucking spell defense, and they had various spirits that were conceptually indistinguishable from Air, Earth, Fire, and Water elementals, but they also had Manitous which were Spirits of Elemental Wood. So as a Wu Jen in SR4 you have a spirit that provides Spell Defense because that was the singular weirdness of Wu Jen conjuration in SR3. Guardian spirits in SR4 also have Magical Guard because the power has the word "Guard" in the name and the editors thought I left that extremely powerful ability off the spirit with by far the most dangerous attacks in the game on accident even though I told them repeatedly that it was deliberate.

There are a lot of kinds of possession in Shadowrun! Boy howdy! I'm almost certainly missing some off the top of my head, but here's a short list from the annals of SR3:

• Zombies: are spirits that are popped into corpses on a temporary basis.
• Grande Zombies: are evil spirits in corpses that get to live there permanently but also eat human flesh to gain power and maintain a living, youthful appearance.
• Shedim: are also evil spirits in corpses that live there permanently and eat human flesh to gain power and maintain a living, youthful appearance but they are different because fuck you.
• Corpse Cadavres: are corpses animated by sorcery but not by spirits even though that's a violation of the rules of magic because the aforementioned fuck you.
• Imps: are evil spirits that possess magic items that people spent good XP to bind and then take your hard earned XP away with them when you inevitably kill them and end up having to destroy your favorite power ring.
• Free Spirits: have access to potentially several powers including "Hidden Life" where they are just sort of always possessing some person, place, or thing; and "Possession" which doesn't tell you what - if any - restrictions it might have for a Free Spirit because it's just a page citation to a page that tells you to go back to the directing page to find out what limits your possession has.
• Insect Spirits: merge with living hosts and make bug monster hybrids like in Aliens.
• Channeling: is a Metamagic where you can pop your spirits into your body for various shared life bonuses.
• Loa Spirits: possess Houngans and Serviteurs.
• Ally Spirits: can be merged with a homunculus or a living host, but that's not evil the way it is when bug spirits do it because fuck you that's why.

Now, under my original proposal, all of that was going to be reduced to one thing. Possession was going to be temporary for unbound spirits, and the act of binding would make it longterm and use the same rules for Zombies, Insect Spirits, and Homunculi. A potential binding target would have to be prepared as a vessel, which is why you'd need to keep your corpse in a lab for a while before you made it into a zombie and why insect hives would need to capture people and stick them in cocoons for a number of days before they could turn them into monsters.

Anyway, obviously the developers thought that was too simplified and coherent and made me write Possession and Inhabitation as different things. But you can still see how much reductionism I was able to pull off even so (like how Ally Spirits use the same inhabitation power as bug spirits instead of being crazy hat).

-Username17

[Longes]

Grande Zombies are what happens when you make a zombie and fuck up. Specifically, you fuck up by knocking yourself out with the drain from the zombie making ritual. When that happens the zombie runs away and goes on a rampage.

In SR5 the zombie thing is actually done in a relatively clever way.


Corpse Cadavre is a modified Homunculus ritual* which animates a pile of dead bodies instead of an action figure. However, unlike the action figure dead bodies remember some of their skills, and may get increased Intuition and Willpower ratings if GM feels like. If GM does feel like, then the corpse cadavre gets to make a roll each day. If he succeeds, he runs away, becomes a Grande Zombie, tries to acomplish something from his past life, and falls apart in a few weeks.

There are also Zombies, who are different from Corpse Cadavre. Zombies are living people who you feed a special zombie powder which paralyzes you and gives -3 to Will and Logic, and then you temporarily brainwash them with a magic ritual, creating an unthinking loyal slave.

* Which in itself is essentially a time prolonged Animate spell.

[Lokathor]

Guardian spirits in SR4 also have Magical Guard because the power has the word "Guard" in the name and the editors thought I left that extremely powerful ability off the spirit with by far the most dangerous attacks in the game on accident even though I told them repeatedly that it was deliberate.

Ah, so Guardian spirits shouldn't have Magical Guard?

[Silent Wayfarer]

Are Guardian spirits supposed to be like Servants from the Fate universe? They're human-looking combat powerhouses who are shadows of ancient heroes which can go ethereal and protect their squishy little magus buddies from other pokeheroes and their masters.

[Grek]

You -could- have one that works like that, but you're not required to. Aztec Guardian Spirits manifest as animals, Islamic tradition gets djinn, Norse has Valkyries, Voodoo has Loa possess them, etc.