Except Awakened Critters may increase their Magic normally. They do not receive as much benefit from it as they would if they where an Adept or Magician, but it is not restricted to 1.

Well, a good example is the free spirit PC. The amount of powers they can have is based on edge but the effect is based upon magic rating.

Edge and Magic rating for a spirit is THE most important stat which makes them kind of boring.

One could base their abilities on Essence if one wants to call it Metatype powers. This would impact the characters if they go stretsam or just getting cyberware.

A pixies magic rating of 1 is rather puny and almost makes the concealability power useless. Unless you make them into magic users and raise their magic rating then they have a concealment power that is usable.

Another good example is the negative changeling quality of Astral Hazing which effect is the Essence of the character (but not the power of the effect - merely the radius).

The silly thing about Pixies by RAW is that as magicians they are almost literally invisible as anyone LOOKING at a pixie mage with magic rating 6 have a -6D6 to ALL perception tests...

So what do you have if the pixie has Concealment, Imp.Invisibility and Silence...

You cant see him, at all, not even his astral form or the active spells unless you have LOTS of perception.

Isn't that MORE broken???

There's only one way to find out: Burn out Pixies.

That's pretty much been the trend for quite a while now, and arguably from the beginning of the game: magic requires magicians. There were some loopholes in the beginning but things have really tightened up over three editions. I used to track it with my Mundane Magic page (which, like the rest of the site, is in sore need of an update).

That's not to say that if you're mundane and want a taste of magic there aren't options - but it pretty much relies on external foci, quickened spells, magical compounds, and spirit pacts - but yeah, if your innate trick is to summon a watcher or cast Ignite, you're a magician. End of story.

maybe just maybe not everyone has to play twinked out characters who throw 15 dice at everything *AND* can cast one spell just because they think that having a magical knack is a substitute for coming up with a realistic background for their munchkin wet dream that they desperately want to play because for them shadowrun is all about being the best at something but their GM tells them that it's unrealistic and then they whine and throw a hissy fit.

sorry, i've just met a bunch of really REALLY atrocious gamers in my life (IMG:style_emoticons/default/spin.gif) but yeah, the magical knack quality is definitely not there to just be a generic magical splash to an otherwise already impressive character. And of course, being an unaugmented mundane sucks so much and nothing interesting ever happens to them and they aren't capable of being good at anything. Just ask everybody alive today.

Oh I know, I know. It's just frustrating to see things rendered so relatively useless when the very potential they're supposed to represent is rendered moot. It would have been better if the rule was more like "a Magic rating equal to your starting Essence + 1" or even "use the character's Edge attribute for Magic for purposes of these powers." Or pretty much anything else at all.


There's more than two extremes when it comes to creating a character. It's not "unaugmented mundane" vs. "borderline cyberzombie possession-tradition mystic adept gun nut."

I mean, these knacks are pretty much the worst negative qualities you can have on a character. You can never be a magician if you have one. You can never be a technomancer if you have one. If you run into any critter with Essence Drain or get so much as a biocompatible deltaware datajack you lose the knack. Even a 15-point negative quality (Sensitive System) doesn't hit you this hard. And all so you can do one tiny little trick that, honestly, you could easily do by just being an adept or mystic adept (which costs the same as most of said knacks).

I'm going to have to agree on that. I completely understand the reasoning why at the time limiting it to Magic 1 seemed a good idea, but I never agreed with it. I really think that with the Astral Sight and the Knacks, you really should be able to increase your Magic normally so that you can take a bit of 'ware or at least get the most out of your limited magical abilities - which I'm all about. I'd love to write up a character that made the most of their off-beat minor magical talent.

Would really love for you to do that. IC at least that would give people a mental idea of where the limits of those talents were meant to be.

With a bit of house ruling similar to what I mentioned in my last post, I was able to make a really great Occult Investigator using only the Astral Sight quality. He turned out remarkably well and, to this day, is still one of my favorite characters.