You sense an area where ALL COLOR AND LIFE IS BEING DRAINED OUT OF. It is clearly a PERVERSION OF ASTRAL SPACE THAT YOU SHOULD NOT STEP INTO.

It is also moving. Toward you.


Sorry, had to say it. Wasn't an argument just me seeing some humor in it.

I don't know... a -4 Magic to all of your magically active buddies' powers would be a significant negative. Sure it helps with incoming offensive magic but honestly, the stuff that Magic can do FOR you is pretty useful. -4 to that is harsh.

Harsh enough that none of my players wanted to deal with it... especially after I giggled like a madman when one player asked about it while reading Runner's Companion.

Actually, the real benefit of astral hazing isn't so much the force drain, although that is nice, it's the extra drain it causes to any spell cast on you, including area of effect spells. Background count gives +rating drain to spells cast into it and unless the mage you're fighting keeps his Astral Vision on all the time he can get completely blindsided by it. I had a character with Astral Hazing in a car once who drove out from under an overpass and a mage in a helicopter tried to lightning ball me. Poor sucker knocked himself out from physical drain. Astral Hazing is really an offensive magic defense because of that.

Also, @Dr. Funkenstein, I agree with you on this point but you really do come off as pretty argumentative. You'd get more people to agree with you if you toned it down a bit.

With rating 4, it's neither a warp nor a void.

I think so. The mage recognizes that the barrier is gone, i don´t think that it is important because of what reason it crashed.

Yes I have read all the negatives and if I allowed it in the game I'd use them all. But totally shutting down offensive magic is still better. The thing is these things can't be judged in a vacuum, for example, "you impact the capabilities of your allies unless you also happen to have an Essence of 0". Well who the else is going to take it, you aren't taking this as a mage, it is virtually a big neon sign saying if you are a combat monster take this. They will need heals a hell of a lot less often because now there one weakness is not just reduced but basically gone, heck they are more resistant to magic than they are to physical damage. This will only set off wards of less than force 4, but yes it sets off alarms and wards, but since you are aware of it it can be used to your advantage almost as often as it hurts you. It gives a beacon of kill this guy first to who? The people who can't really hurt him? The penalty is all the people who I'm virtually invulnerable to hate me, that ins't that big of a hit. Don't get me wrong corp sec mage can say shoot that dude fast, he is bad mojo so it will come up but so be it. Yes it attracts beasties etc. Yes that is a bigger flaw than magic resistance, but being a permanent anti magic shell is more powerful than all of that combined.



Except again it gives larger benefits than all the negatives combined. It would be like if in debt said you have to pay back 4,000 every month but you get handed 10,000 every month from the tooth fairy. Yeah it has a flaw but the positive is bigger than the negative.

Actually most negatives are about being found. Whether it is distinctive style, sinner, or day job it is that you are easily found. It only takes assensing of 1 to gain information that the character is the cause of the disruption (general emotional state). You have a hell of a time hiding. I don't think any shadowrunner carries around a 1-6 meter globe of light when trying to infiltrate a facility. This is exactly what you are dealing with with astral hazing. The shadowrunner cannot hide in a crowd and even in a jungle his aura may show up just like a bonfire (minus the smoke). This may not mean much to you, but if you are with a non magic group this is a boon, but if anyone is magically inclined then you hurt the entire party. Ok, ignore camouflage, attribute increases and invisibility on said shadowrunner.

I view the shadowrunner with astral hazing as a magical D9 dozer with rock music blaring. Maybe in your games this a advantage, but in my groups it is not exactly what I want running around.

While I agree this is probably the biggest problem with it, it is something you know about and can deal with. Until the PCs are capable of masking they aren't really subtle just by virtue of being mages, or by having excessively heavy cyber aren't subtle to assensing or physical sensors, and yet people find out how to deal with it. Other than giving them a penalty to infiltration tests I'm not sure what else can be done about this, its a flaw, but I don't think its insurmountable. I am not about to change my game world and makes assensing checkpoints everywhere in order to make this a flaw.

Actually most negatives are about being found. Whether it is distinctive style, sinner, or day job it is that you are easily found. It only takes assensing of 1 to gain information that the character is the cause of the disruption (general emotional state). You have a hell of a time hiding. I don't think any shadowrunner carries around a 1-6 meter globe of light when trying to infiltrate a facility. This is exactly what you are dealing with with astral hazing. The shadowrunner cannot hide in a crowd and even in a jungle his aura may show up just like a bonfire (minus the smoke). This may not mean much to you, but if you are with a non magic group this is a boon, but if anyone is magically inclined then you hurt the entire party. Ok, ignore camouflage, attribute increases and invisibility on said shadowrunner.

I view the shadowrunner with astral hazing as a magical D9 dozer with rock music blaring. Maybe in your games this a advantage, but in my groups it is not exactly what I want running around.

While one hit on the Assensing test tells you what the person's general emotional state is, I am not sure if that is the same as knowing he is responsible for the background count.

Furthermore, it is the background count/astral hazing that is easily recognisable. Whether the aura of the person can be found is another matter. In a crowd or in a jungle, the person's aura should be no more obvious that any other person's. What could be immediately noticeable is that there is a background count in that area.

Modspeak:
First off, cut the bashing. Please. There, I asked nicely... It is a roleplaying game, open to interpretation and manipulation. Every person is going to view their Shadowrun universe differently. Everyone is going to interpret the rules differenty. If someone gets it wrong, politely provide them with your interpretation. If someone offers you an interpretation of the rules, politely either take note of what they have to say or ignore it. Slamming on each other because of how you interpret the rules and what you think of others' interpretations only makes the parties involved look like raging idiots.

Playerspkeak:
In our Shadowrun group, we follow the mantra that magicians are still very rare and valuable assets, which they are. I typically have corp and gov magicians spending a vast majority of their time in their on-campus caves experimenting with magic, summoning spirits, researching through ancient tomes (and datachips), and awaiting their 'on call' signal that the fit just hit the shan.

I will have to agree with Funk on the point of them being too valuable to be sitting in a check booth where a sniper a click out can pop their cork with one well-placed BMG round. Better to have the spirits and wards run the routine grunt work in the astral and call in the magicians when the situation requires a more 'personal' touch.

I assume this is because the caster of the indirect physical spell was inside the area of the astral hazing at the moment of casting the Indirect Physical Spell? Otherwise tossing that ball of lightning into the astral haze should not increase the drain for the caster.

As the player is emanating his emotions and he is the cause of the background count due to his emotions I would say a mage could pinpoint. Also a localized effect with a radius means if you could see a fire of a similar size you could see it with assensing. Not a big deal in dense forest or jungle from the ground, but from the air it is much harder to hide. Reading about aura from Street Magic would indicate you know exactly where the source is and who is causing it. No matter how you want to describe it as if by sight, hearing or some other sense normal people are about as loud as a whisper while our astral hazing is screaming. It doesn't take much to figure out who is the source.

It seems like it wouldn't be too hard for any company that employed mages at all to set up a fiber optic security system that allowed them to monitor major entry and exit points for suspicious magic activity...

Changeling With Astral Hazing Drawbacks
All friendly spells cast at a +4 Drain
Highly visible on the astral as a disturbance
Disrupts friendly magic users
Magical Hazard in a residential area (disrupts local security spirits who patrol the local neighbourhood)
Might get attacked by awakened critters/spirits who perceive the character as a threat
Astral mages flying past (Astrally and not looking where they are going) the characters might be thrown back to their body
Constantly pops innocent watcher messengers
Changeling with less than 1 essence cannot affect magical beings within essence meters (yes, that IS a drawback)
Magically Active Changelings gets a -4 magic

Now imagine what would happen if the background count were connected to the person within and especially his emotions.
Now factor in mood-chips. It's a party on the astral!

The domain/background count is easily recognisable for what it is on the astral plane. Detection of the changling's aura or astral form on the other hand should be no different or any easier than any other aura or astral form.

Agreed, but actual assensing of the aura in question would incurr a -4 dicepool modifier.