My players love Spirits. They LOVE Spirits. One of them is a Possession mage (had I been as wise then as I am now, I'd have said no, but c'est la vie,) the other is a Hermetic.

They prefer to use Spirits as the answer to everything. Need to fly a man eight hundred miles to infiltrate a ship? Have a Spirit of Air carry him. Need to bring something washed ashore on a beach in mid-CalFree to Seattle? Have a Spirit possess it, shapeshift into a crocodile, waddle out into the sea, shapeshift into a dolphin, swim it back.

I put the kibosh on that last one by telling them outright that that wouldn't yield the desired macguffin in usable form, thus making them actually do some Shadowrunning for a change, but their answer to everything is Spirits. It's starting to get to the point where spirits seem to be the Omnihammer, and the world, the Omninail.

What can I do/what factors in the world are involved to make that kind of shenanigan (long-distance Spirit couriering/spirit theft of things) unworkable as a solution to most problems of that nature, that don't royally fuck Adepts (like a background count will,) or everybody (like a majorly-twinked combat drone fleet will.)




As a side note, is a Possession Spirit inside something still Dual Natured - IE, can it be attacked by something on the Astral, such as another spirit or a magician?

Yea, possessed means dual natured.

Beating spirit abuse isn't too hard if you remember the rules. 1. Never let them play possession based. But if they do, remember that the spirit is in charge. They don't "command" it, it's possessing them. At least they can't be sent out to do things (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Also, remember, sending a spirit on a remote mission uses all of it's services, and if it's not bound it's gone at sunup or sunset.

What other characters does your group have? Only the two mages? If so, of course they are going to use spirits, they're literally 50% of their class features.

They don't let the Spirit possess themselves! They let the spirit possess the Driving Adept who otherwise isn't much use in a fight. I let the DriveAd's player play the spirit they summon, since otherwise that would suck for the player. Or, more typically, they have it possess something that they want to steal, like cars.



Yeah, but they don't have a problem with that oftentimes. I mean, burning the services of two Bound Force 3 Spirits (one to possess the crate and shapeshift it, one to use Movement and Concealment on both of them,) to retrieve a 600,000 nuyen nanofax from where it washed ashore on a beach is a pretty damn good deal, financially speaking.


It seems to me like it's nothing but extremes. Anything which stops magic stops it cold in an hilariously sadistic way, such as a glowmoss-triggered hand grenade full of FAB3 rigged to detonate if something comes close enough to make the glowmoss light up.


Like... Here's an example, from the published adventure On the Run. The players need to steal an up-and-coming rockstar's commlink from his backstage dressing room at a barrens concert venue. The group are expected to physically infiltrate the warehouse somehow, sneak in and acquire the commlink or tap it and acquire the data from the commlink in his dressing room, overcoming bouncers, gangers, and drugged-up groupies waiting for their rockstar hero to come back and rock their world until they see stars. The possibilities for their doing this that the adventure accounted for are sneaking in, buying their way in, bribing their way in, talking their way in, seducing their way in, or ninja infiltrating their way in.

There is no Astral security whatsoever. For that matter, it's explicitly said that Nabo's commlink has no matrix security whatsoever, either, making me wonder why a hacker can't just hack it remotely, but, assuming the group's AI is busy (half the sessions she doesn't show up, which I reckon neatly represents the character's media addiction,) and the group jack-of-all-trades is derping (or wants to see the concert and just forgets about the 'run,) I just know that their solution is going to be to send a spirit to steal it. Either sending a Spirit of Air to Materialize in the dressing room, take it, and tear-ass out of the warehouse with it, or send a Possession spirit to settle into it, shapeshift into a mouse, and take it for a walkabout.

They wouldn't have to go to the concert. Hell, they wouldn't have to leave their home!

On the other hand, anything that impedes magic - Wards, for instance - stops them utterly, making them of absolutely no use whatsoever, and if I apply a Background count (because it's, you know, a riotous rock concert,) then that royally butt-fucks the Adept.

There's the hermetic and the custom tradition (whose tradition basically boils down to "I am awesome because I have a self-actualized view of magic that lets me take all the features I want" - I know, I know, if I'd known what I do now, I'd have put the kibosh on that,) mages. An artificial intelliegnce who lives in a Nexus in the DriveAd's Citymaster and has an anthroform drone she very occasionally uses. The DriveAd is an Adept focusing primarily on mechanical and driving skills. There's an amnesiac neotenous elf who's a little good with guns, little good with hacking, really good as a Face, and has both Electrosense and Magnetosense. And a cybered-up former Renraku company ninja who was Hung Out to Dry.

If you stop letting the phys-ad control the spirit, and follow the rules about how he's nothing but an impotent witness, maybe he'll stop letting the spirits possess him.

I'm not sure how a spirit can possess something and make it change shape into other things, or do anything other than what it was originally intended to do. Maybe I'm just behind on the rules.

Short answer: magical security.

Medium answer: spirits will absolutely walk all over anything and everything without magical security. The whole point of magical security is to stop spirits from waltzing all over everything. If adventures featured megacorporations who wrote their passwords on postit notes and run Windows ME, then the hacker would solve all their problems, too.

Long answer: Wards do not completely make magic useless. Wards make mages work around them. You can of course just bash a ward down and then do what you want, but that isn't subtle. You can also, for example, turn you spells off, go through, and then do stuff. Saying that wards make magic useless is like saying Firewalls make hackers useless.

Also, spirits should be defending any place that seriously gives a shit about security. Just having medium-force bound spirits on patrol will cut down on the shenanigans a lot and make things actually take effort.

Street Magic 103.

Also, they were presumably having a Spirit of Man with Innate Spell (Shapechange) do the thing with the crate.

You could invite social repercussions against the mages by not letting the DriveAd play while possessed. That should get him annoyed at the mages. If they want to, say, steal a car with possession, remember that if the spirits don't like their summoners, they will interpret orders as much against their desires as they can.


"What is a commlink?" [explains] "What does it look like?" [explains] ... spirit arrives, fails to find the commlink because it sees things astrally instead of physically. This can be either deliberate failure (it did not look as he described it), or unintentional (I could find nothing that looked similarly to what I was sent to bring).
Also, having a spirit tear his way out of the warehouse would be a good way for cops to get involved. I imagine that the spirit could leave an astral trail right back to the mage.
I also suggest a rule that a possession spirit shapeshifting while possessing a non-living object destroys or renders inoperable any fragile parts, of which there would be plenty inside a device as advanced as a commlink.

The problem with these is that they're only applicable if the group is doing a standard Run on a standard-issue megacorp facility. So far, they aren't. They were first hired to beef up the physical security of the Plastic Jungles, and as part of that got sidetracked into stealing an AK-147 Nanofax and five pallets of clean feedstock from the Vory, on behalf of the Ancients, who promised to then use the Nanofax and non-tagless feedstock to arm the Plastic Jungles with plenty of guns (and a few tagless ones for the group itself.) This started with me preparing a truckjacking, but then they decided that they'd rather fiddle the manifest of the container vessel bringing it into port so the Vory got some bullshit container offloaded to their smuggling sub, and the real container was put on a truck coming straight to the players.

The AI bollocksed that up right properly by royally butt-fucking the manifest hacking portion of it, by tampering with something she had no reason to tamper with, setting off alarms, triggering a fight with a security spider who terminated the ship's connection to the outside world, ending the fight. Then the captain of the ship decided that he wasn't going to keep such hot cargo aboard (they knew what she had done because she hadn't erased any activity logs,) and promptly dumped it in the drink. The ship actually had some astral security in the form of a mage and some Watchers, but their plan to tamper with the containere's RFID chips involved simply using a spirit to fly the ninja out and back.

But now, the container is simply sitting ashore on a beach. They convinced a sea captain with a fishing trawler to take them out to get it and then sail them to Seattle. But you get the idea - everything they've done so far has involved enemies who do not have megacorp resources to put up Wards and biofiber panels and all that other good stuff.




Correct on both counts.

Does shapechange allow you to change a box into things?
I really think they're SOL there.

Yeah, I'm not going to intentionally formulate out-of-character conflict between my players as any kind of a 'solution' to in-character tactics. That is, quite frankly, absolutely retarded.

As for the 'spirits not liking their summoners' thing, a Spirit can't. They can demand that any and every little thing the Mage asks be counted as a service, but if the mage says "Retrieve the thing and bring it to me," the Spirit can't decide to bring it to him by circumnavigating the world, thus intentionally making its journey so long that its duration (if Summoned) will run out and cause the object to be waylaid even farther away.

Besides, my players aren't exactly mean to their spirits. They don't send them into suicidal situations or anything.




Spirits are not Exact Wording Genies. They know what you intend them to do, and can't choose to intentionally fail in their task. (That's the kind of thing that gets pissed-off mages to Bind them to the remote task of scrubbing the Seattle sewers until every square inch of it is concurrently decontaminated, with a toothbrush, or some other Sisyphean task which is practically impossible yet technically possible, thus compelling them to attempt it.) They also tend to have the Search power, so it is very easy to tell a Spirit (in the Nabo concert case, for instance,) to find Nabo's commlink, starting its Search in the dressing room, and return it to them.



Cops? In Redmond Barrens? In the middle of a massive rock concert where the module explicitly states the cops have been paid off not to interfere?



I'm thinking about this. I was thinking of instituting a rule that Possession - any Possession at all - completely wrecked any electronic components of anything which was possessed, but then the player of the Possession mage pointed out to me that this would result in Possession spirits being used as magical EMP weapons.

Again, spirit doesn't know what the commlink looks like.

Also, try using the optional rule on page 187 of SR4A. Page 188 and 189 also have bits on how the spirit-magician relationship works.

You're right, spirits are smart, and will do the best they can (unless ill treated) to accomplish this task...

BUT

Spirits are creatures of the Astral. They deal with emotions. They are alien.

A free spirit *might* know what a commlink is, from their interactions with metahumanity. A newly summoned one likely will not. If they'd been asked to find a plant? Great. An item recently used by the summoner? Quite likely. A commlink in that room over there, that the summoner's never seen, can't identify the make/model and or decorations of? That spirit might just bring them a plastic spork.

Spirits see the world very differently from metahumanity. Even manifested. A spirit of man might have a better shot of all this, but in a crowded room, with people potentially shooting at him? That's a big crap shoot. The spirit's not going to likely find the commlink while on the Astral, as things are just shadows and vague representations. They'd have to manifest to find it.

---

I seriously doubt the Shapechange spell was meant to be used on inanimate objects. The spell itself states that gear and equipment does not transform. So if the spirit did manage to possess a box, all the items inside said box would not shapechange (possibly killing said critter?).

Dude, you took the single biggest balancing drawback to Possession Spirits, the vessel becoming an impotent passenger in his own body, and effectively removed it.

And you're surprised that your players are now abusing the hell out if it?




-k

Street Magic 103. The drawback is not meant to be making someone not get to play. Now, if the adept isn't roleplaying the spirit appropriately or whatever, sure, talk to him about that. But annoying your players out of game is a stupid, stupid idea and I congratulate you for not trying to do that.

I think what it basically boils down to is that your PCs are going up against relatively weak adversaries who don't have and can't afford magical security. Such adversaries are going to get stomped, and I think your solution should, pretty much, be to send them on more serious runs. Don't be a dick or anything, but yeah, a team with 2 mages should be going up against people with some reasonable level of magical security.


Did...did you read your own quote?



It doesn't matter if the spirit has seen a commlink before. If the summoner can provide a mental image what it's searching for, the spirit can find it.

I said the commlink. Does the mage know what Nabo's commlink looks like?

Presumably, yes. Nabo is a rock star. If I want to know what Paris Hilton's cellphone looks like, it's not exactly hard.

The player actually roleplays the spirit to the hilt, playing it up as a brutal celtic warrior who's one order from her summoner away from snapping and getting her murderboner on. The player also likes describing the tatoos that said possession makes glow on her skin.

One thing that occurs to me, though; I forgot, earlier, that Spirits don't actually get to use Force for all skills, don't they. A Spirit won't actually have Automatics equal to its Force, would it?




Well, I'm throwing them up against a (homebrew) Threat magician that the gang they pissed off called in due to a family connection. (She summons Shadow spirits.) She's also really powerful on the Astral, with a WF Katana and a lot of Astral Combat. I plan to have her simply demolish any Spirits they summon from the Astral, giving the meatgang a chance to do something while the mages are busy trying to stop her.

If a crate with a nanofax inside it turns into a dolphin with a nanofax inside it, the dolphin will die a cruel and painful death. (not that a crate could, by RAW, shapechange into anything since it doesn't have a body rating.)

If a force 3 spirit wants to possess an unprepared vessel (the nanofax) which is highly technologically advanced, then it has to get 5+ hits on 6 dice and only gets one attempt per 24hr period.

Basically, you're missing something here. Pretty sure its the possession test.
Also, calling on the spirits to do every little thing for you is spirit abuse. Make the spooks roll edge to resist summoning.

Final thoughts: BC it. If your driving adept is suddenly useless from losing a point or two of magic in a certain scene, then he is built completely wrong. Then again you've already established that he's built completely wrong with the whole "He's best used as a power bottom for ghosts" thing.

Spirits have the skills listed in their description at Force. A guardian spirit can indeed have Automatics F, although it costs an optional power selection to do that.

Even if they don't, though, they could just tell the Spirit they send in to gather all the commlinks in that room. Then they'll get Nabo's commlink along with those of his squeezes.


That might raise the alarm, but it's unlikely a handful of orc gangers armed with Ceska Black Scorpions and a mighty dice pool of six are going to be able to even scratch such a spirit. They'll just get beaten down and get their commlinks added to the pile.

The spirit wouldn't be able to see a commlink.

It's just a shadow on the astral, which is all it sees.
The astral is all wispy smoke and emotional meaning. Unless Nabo had a deep emotional attachment to his cellphone, it wouldn't appear distinct from the desk it's placed on.

Easy fix: Security uses stick-n-shock, since they don't want to kill people by mistake.
A long wide burst of stick-n-shock will mess a ghost up but good.

I think an answer to something like this is that something really valuable will have other groups gunning for it. Really valuable stuff washed up on a beach? Probably some mega-corp / mob / triad / runner group is also trying to get it's hands on it. The other groups can have their own teams arrive before / at the same time / after your group gets the mcguffin. Hilarity ensues.