I just picked up a copy of Street Magic today. I loved every part that I read--until I got to the section on The Dark Paths.

I could almost understand the D&D-esque "Player-Characters can't be evil, but your gamemaster can always change the rules, wink wink" bit. Role-playing games get a lot of crap from conservative nutcases who see them as recruiting tools for Satan--so it makes sense to dodge some fire with a "we don't advocate evil" disclaimer, even if it does seem a little thin in a game where you're playing professional criminals.

What really pisses me off though, is the spew of blantantly BS propaganda that fills the chapter on twisted magicians. The writers are bending over so far for conservatives who would never play the game anyway, that they need to sustain a levitate spell to keep from sitting on their heads!

...

You have no idea how many times I had to edit that sentence to stay in keeping with the TOS. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/ohplease.gif)

My problem is this: This is Shadowrun! The closest thing to a "good guy" is a character who doesn't stab his friends in the back--in their sleep--if he can absolutely help it.

Look at the sample characters in SR4: You have a mob enforcer, an eco-terrorist, (with 10 kilos of high-explosives) and a ganger who's first description line calls him an "urban predator!"

If these guys were awakened, they'd be twisted at least.

That's not even counting the Combat Mage, Gunslinger Adept, and Street Samurai, whose job description boils down to: "Kill people for fun and profit." Even if they're not hired specificly to assasinate someone, their purpose on the team is still to frag gaurds and otherwise use violence to aid in the comission of a crime.

I guess the part that pisses me off the most is the sidebar on page 138.



Emphasis mine. What pisses me off is that they're basicly describing all shadowrunners with the italicised statement, and parts of it could apply to the people who play shadowrun as well. I didn't realize being contemptuous and disaffected by society's rules made me a schizophrenic psycho, though I've heard a few prozac salesmen argue that point.

(I've also read an article in National Geographic that described love as a mental disorder best treated with prozac--incidentally one of their frequent sponsors--hence my contempt for society.)



Right. So the Street Sam who slices a corpsec guard to gain access to a facility is just your average Joe, while the mage who slices the guard and then uses his blood to resist drain on an invisibility spell is unscrupulous and disturbed?

I mean, killing a guy is one thing, but having his death serve an actual purpose besides just getting him out of your way? That's messed up, man.

It's interesting to see the devs displaying the same prejudice and fear towards the awakened that they warn us about in earlier chapters.



Ah, so now we come to it. Two pages of prejudice, character assasinaton, and bullshit, just to get to the fact that twisted magicians are potentially unbalanced as player characters. Why not just say that, like you did in Augmentation with Jarheads and cyberzombies, instead of insulting everyone who plays the game?

By this book's definition, I am twisted. And if I was awakened, I'd be trying to use my copy of Street Magic as a sympathetic link to sling some really nasty ritual mojo at the devs intead of bitching about it on the forums.

Hell, with the new spell creation rules, I could probably make some really good ones. "Jock Itch of Insanity" anyone?

[edit]

Fixed the post, apparently it got cut off for some reason.

Also, after reading the section on toxic mages, I'm probably closer to the toxic Havoc agenda than just twisted. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

I took it as more of a Chaotic Evil perspective. At least that is how I read it.

Using your street sam as the example, when you need something you would kill for it. You would go to the store kill the clerk and steal the item in question yes?

Well a toxic mage would go to the store, kill everything and everyone on the way, torture the clerk, burn the store and while hes at it poison the nearby water supply. And when hes done he forgot the item in question. Why? Because hes batshit crazy.

You know combat spells (including toxic waves) and mind-manipulation spells are quite "evil" in many cultures but in Shadowrun your mage can have them and cast them regularly without being a toxic mage.

It's a matter of degrees.

To start off with, your, "everyone stabs everyone in the back!" comment fits your version of SR, not mine. I certainly don't write characters that way or run games that look like that. I've got players that would do it, but that's entirely their own perogative and not something that I encourage.

Secondly, violence and criminal activity is a means to an end for every example you've given. The mobster has to enforce the family line. Sure, they break faces, but they know its bad business if they do it to every single shopkeep that says no. The ganger has to show other gangers that he's tough; if he doesn't, they'll move in and take his territory and possibly kill him and everyone he loves. The eco-terrorist...well, imo she's skating a thin line towards toxicity, but that's neither here nor there.

Combat magi, street sams, gunslingers, same deal. Criminal activity is part and parcel of shadowrunning. Why do they shadowrun? Well, why do your characters shadowrun? Exactly. Do they walk up to every Joe Star and say, "hey copper - I don't like your face!" and plug them in the piehole? Nope. One, that would be stupid. Two, that's bad for business.

Twisted lack that sort of control. Some do it as part of a "devil's bargain" like the magician in the intro to that particular chapter of Street Magic; he took the easy way out and now he's paying for it, and it's slowly killing his humanity. Bugs just don't see humans as anything more than food or new bugs. Most toxics are batshit crazy if you dig down enough.

Put it to you this way: Why does Character X kill someone?

Mobster: He wouldn't pay the protection money. And I did warn him.
Ganger: Because omae, he killed my brother last week!
Combat Magi: Do YOU want a Force 12 fire elemental on our ass?
Street Sam / Gunslinger: I wouldn't be able to get into the warehouse if I didn't. Besides - tranq rounds.
Toxic: Humanity is scum! Lower than the cockroaches they kill!
Twisted: Oh my...I'm...I have to...Lenore...
Bug: Hm? Oh, I was too busy summoning the Queen to give two shits. Click-click-clackity-click. You look pretty tasty.

See right there you've nailed my disagreement with Rad on this.

I've yet to play a street sam who would go to a store, kill the clerk, and steal some stuff instead of just paying for it. In fact of my two street sams currently in play, one is a struggling catholic who's currently retooling his arsenal to load up more gel rounds and cs gas, because the mage in the party is a priest who constantly chastises him for being a cold blooded killer. The other is a generally all around nice guy who just has this massive hatred for the government (after being trapped in bug city), and half the money from his runs goes into funnelling medical supplies into the containment zone (it's a 2057 game).

Neither of these guys is a cold blooded psychopath. The first comes close, but only when he's working, and only if the other guy is a genuine threat. He actually rates as fairly bloodthirsty by established shadowrunner standards, because he prefers live ammo to gel (current religious revival not withstanding).

This is the part you've missed, Rad. The opening chapters of the book make it clear that most runners are uncomfortable with Wetwork. It actually takes a particular class of psycho just to be willing to kill people on their runs. A lot of runners just do datasteals, heists, sabotage, espionage, all stuff that doesn't require you to kill anyone. The Shadowrun arsenal makes non-lethal takedowns easy and effective, and they're actually preferable because it means less legal fallout and less chance of the corp coming to get you afterwards. A runner could go his whole career without killing a single person, and he wouldn't really be considered odd or out of place.
This doesn't mean all runners are flower loving pacifists, and even those who try to avoid bloodshed will probably resort to lethal force when their backs are against the wall, but I doubt they'll feel entirely good about it afterwards.

There's a world of difference between being a bit jaded, or having a contempt for law and order, and the kind of psychotic behaviour that twisted mages are supposed to indulge in.

If you want your shadowrun games to run in a darker, more bloodthirsty world where every runner is a hardened and contemptuous killer, sadist, and rapist, who blows a guy's head off just for looking at him sideways and never buys what he could just steal, then be my guest. Personally, I think that sounds boring, one dimensional, and a whole lot like playing FATAL, but if that's the kind of game you actually enjoy then that's your deal.

Basically I'm totally with you. You should have seen the earlier drafts, the inappropriate moral judgments are actually toned down at the request of the other writers, if you can believe that. Actually you probably can, because it looks to me like the Dissonance section in Unwired looks like it was written by the same dude and the ham fisted and unjustifiable moral soap boxing is even worse.

-Frank

"A psychopath kills for no reason, I kill for MONEY..."

Seriously, that's the difference. I don't want a player in my game to be a sociopath. At worst, they should be callous and self-serving, but that's not the same. They do bad things because it's helpful to them to do so; for survival, personal gain or somesuch. The threat mages largely do bad things for the sake of it. Murder isn't a means to an end for them, it is an end. Quite simply, they are more interesting as villains.

I think it's a bit of a cop-out to say that the moral difference between PCs and Twisteds is a matter of self-control. If Twisted magicians lacked that sort of control, they wouldn't be a threat to society, because they'd be relatively easy to deal with. For one thing, they wouldn't have the attention span for their dark rituals if they acted the way they do in your example. I think Rad has a really good point, and most runners' morals aren't that far off from the Twisted. If you make a mundane eco-terrorist, you get a spot in the main book as a playable archetype. If you're a magician eco-terrorist, you're a "threat," and not a viable player character.

The only real reason I can think of to forbid playable Twisted magicians is if they're spirits would break game balance. I don't know if that's the case or not, because I don't have SM on me, but it's the only thing I can think of. And, of course, Twisteds don't usually hang out with shadowrunners, so it could just make the game awkward.

Toxic spirits aren't particularly unbalanced. Unfortunately, they also aren't fully written up. Rather than create a system for creating toxic spirits or exhaustively writing up all the possible toxic spirit types, the chapter author chose to have every toxic mage get a unique spirit set and then proceeded to make a series of "example" spirits based off the original 10 (sort of).

Unfortunately, there are nine sample spirits and each magician gets five. And mostly it just makes incomplete sets. For example: while the Poisoner gets Acid, Nuclear, Sludge, Smog, and Contagion; the Reaper gets Harbinger, Harrow, Carnage, and Contagion (4), and presumably some fifth spirit that you make up. And that's where it gets broken. Broken as in "doesn't work" rather than specifically overpowered or anything. There's nothing stopping you from making a Plague Bearer spirit (Toxic Beast) or a Reclaimer spirit (Toxic Plant) for your Reaper magician to have, but I honestly can't tell you if it is balanced or not, because it doesn't yet exist.

-Frank

Just a thought, but if the mundanes of your group can be considered twisted, your mage can be twisted, too. The roleplaying police is too afraid to kick in your door.

Who can blame them? That kind of attitude makes you into a dangerous threat, magical or otherwise. On the other hand, if you believe all runners are evil, your worldview needs way more grey for SR.

Simple, Shadowrunners are Predators. No denying that. But they kill to eat. They don't kill for the fun of it. Usually. Exceptions have been made, but they're usually of the "We're making the world a better place by adding some Chlorine to the Metahuman Gene Pool" variety.

Toxics, are like Richard from "Looking For Group". They kill for killin's sake, and, often, have the agenda to kill THE ENTIRE METAHUMAN RACE.

Even the most aggressive, evil, psycopathic Shadowrunner doesn't want that.

I mean, if he killed everyone, there'd be no more Shadowruns. And, honestly, where's the fun in that?

I am with you Rad on this.


-Chrysalis

Toxics really, are defined by one thing. They have been tainted by things that are metaphysically antithetical to life as we know it. This is, usually, no fault of their own. Like any good comic book hero or villain, their discovery of the wonderful power of toxic waste is quite by accident.

Some rage against this state and attmept to protect others from it, though often going overboard. Others embrace it and either attempt to spread it or enhance their power. Sometimes they go a bit overboard.

The only ones who might actually want to kill everyone are the steriles, who draw their power from barrenness. And even then most seriles aren't that stupid and would rather just live a life of solitude in a deserted wasteland just close enough to a city to get pizza delivery.


Most of the Twisted ways are twisted for no good reason, except perhaps the magician following them likes his work a little too much.

The Path of the Dead is about putting spirits in corpses. Any Possession magician can do that.
The Path of demons is about worshipping beings, which may or may not exist, whom are conventionally considered evil. But one religions' evil demon is another religion's benevolent god. Most demons are considered evil simply as a propaganda ploy to justify persecuting another religion that worships them.
The Path of Blood is all about knowing the Sacrificing metamagic, which isn't bad at all unless one misuses it.
The Faustian makes deals with Free Spirits. Anyone can make deals with Free Spirits.
Zealots have religious beliefs.

Invae and their Shamans are Communists, pure and simple. And as everyone knows, the only good commie is a dead commie. They are antithetical to the anarcho-capitalist ideals that most Shadowrunners hold and the Conservative capitalist ideals of most wageslaves. It isn't a concept that any sane resident of the Sixth World could possibly wrap his head around.
The exception is the Mantids, who are sex-positive radical feminist Objectivists, which is sufficiently compatible with both Conservative capitalism and anarcho-capitalism to make them seem reasonable by comparison.


Really, getting rid of Potency was a mistake, if not in game balance then in flavor. The difference between the twisted and a normal magician is devotion. The twisted is so devoted to his ideal or his method that its importance is blown out of proportion and it consumes his life.

What is it about being a Toxic Mage that causes you to gain an intense loathing for metahumanity? Couldn't you decide to be a Toxic Mage, but justify your actions or use your powers for good?

I can understand that Insect Mages lose their free will, but what causes the change in a Toxic Mage's mind?

Arguments like these.

-Chrysalis

Have you SEEN Humanity lately?

Add in Metahumanity. And there you go!

I know a number of people today that would like to give the Cockroaches their shot. If we gave them magic... Scary!

LOL
Damn, I near choked to death! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

Oh! Thought of another reason!

Former Tech Support Agents!

If that doesn't make you want to kill all of humanity, I don't know what will!

Speaking as a Former Tech Support Agent, Can's dead on about this one.

shit if i know, but there seems to be some near-militant treehuggers out there. and if any of those where to awaken in some way, i could see a percentage of those go toxic...

speaking as a 2nd level tech supporter for 3 major ISP's . . yes, he's still dead on target with that x.x . .
as for wanting to kill all of humanity?
my reasoning is: kill 'em all, let whatever deity feels responsible sort 'em out

Respect to a fellow veteran!

Okay, I've been up all night and I'm prone to ramble, so I'll try to keep this brief and to the point, since there's so much to respond to.

First, I was talking about twisted mages, not toxics. Toxics are just nuts, even I'll agree on that.

Second, many of the motives and justifications given here and in the core rulebook for a shadowrunners' actions are the same justifications that supposedly mark a twisted magician as insane. I don't buy that the same things that make shadowrunners "morally ambiguous" make twisted mages psychotic and evil.

I also don't buy the idea that twisted mages are automatically batshit crazy sociopaths--any more than I buy that about street samurai. Do they walk the line sometimes? Yes, but having a flexible or skewed moral outlook is a trait shared by all runners--it's a requirement for living in the shadows. Having a different perspective doesn't make you a psycho.

The morality of shadowrunners is supposed to be a grey area where characters may occasionally stumble back and forth over the line, but Street Magic paints twisted mages as all black--as likely to rape a kitten for fun as kill a guard in order to complete a job. Some of them might--the same way some any other type of character might, but not all of them are like that.

In some cases, a twisted mage might actually be more moral than a normal shadowrunner, because they have a reason besides just getting paid for what they're doing. Most people may not agree with their reasons, the same way people might disagree with a hacker's veiws on the free exchange of information or a shamans' views about preserving the sanctity of nature, but which is more callous? A runner who hurts people because it's "just biz", or the the twisted mage who is forced to hurt people in pursuit of a higher purpose?

Going back to my example with the street sam and the blood magic user, if your team is in a situation where they have to hurt or kill someone, isn't it better to give as much purpose to their deaths as possible? I can see blood magic being used with the same mindset as native tribes who praise and thank the animals they kill, and make sure to use as much of the corpse as they can out of respect--rather than letting it go to waste by just leaving the body to rot.

Also, keep in mind that blood magic doesn't require the spellcaster to kill their victim. Invoking blood spirits does, but just inflicting wounds to help you resist drain doesn't sound so bad--especially if you use the wounds you were already going to inflict during combat.

Both the razorboy and the blood magician occasionally have to cut a guy, so whats the difference if the blood magician also uses those injuries to power his spells, at no extra cost to the victim?

The way I see it, the difference between a twisted mage and a toxic one is that a twisted mage might be a darwinist who eschews traditional morality for "Survival of the Fittest", but still tries to promote his views in a socially acceptable way, while a toxic mage would be a nazi who thinks his race/metatype/whatever is superior and attempts to exterminate all others by "divine right."

Regarding the "Chaotic Evil" analogy, the standard Street Samurai could be seen as "Lawful Evil"--he may kill for money, but has a code of honor he believes sets him above common mercenaries. As far as gel rounds and the like go, anyone who invests that much time, effort, and nuyen into making themselves a souped up combat machine and then chooses a career where they're frequently "forced" to defend themselves is lying if they say they don't intend to kill people.

Read Watchmen by Alan Moore.
What makes a villain, villainous?
Twisted path wizzers are there to be antagonists of runners. That is their part in the drama of the game.
There comes a point where a 'bad thing' becomes 'evil'. The inference is twisted path followers embrace passing that line. Shadowrunners are pitched as anti heros. To be hero's of any stripe you must oppose villains. In this case there must be villains to face. Ergo twisted path followers.
We as adults know morality is a spectrum of choice, in a roleplay game with heros, even anti heros, the dev's have to draw lines for you to have villains.

Yeah, with my group, even without steering them around, the worst I had to deal with is a Character whose only reason to be around is Survival.

Even my characters from my stories aren't "Bad" people. "Money" Johnson actually thinks himself a pretty decent person.

And Nas, well, he's just a junkie. He just changed addictions.