Street Magic metamagic Options

[Slithery D]

I thought I'd try to kick start some conversation on the various metamagic techniques. A list of those I care about, with my comments/concerns. (Hint: I don't care about any of the adept metamagics.)


Ally Conjuration - Necessary for creating an ally spirit. Given the increased power and customization of allies (who wouldn't give theirs Influence?) a good idea, but it will make them much more rare.

Channeling - A good and almost necessary ability for possessory traditions, allowing you to do your own thang while being possessed for improved physical attributes and Immunity to Normal Weapons. I'm confused about use of spirit powers, though. They require spending a service, but how does this work? Do you use the power yourself on your action, or does the possessing spirit without control of your body somehow use them on it's own initiative pass? (I note no evidence that the 2 IP for spirits should apply to the initiate who channels and maintains control over the body.) If the latter, is this restricted to "soft" powers like Concealment, or can the spirit independently hit someone with a fire bolt?

Cleansing - Potentially more useful than the old one with the increased penalties from background count/hostile aspected domains, especially the latter if you can somehow sneak in under invisibility and do the deed. Four Complex Actions to neutralize a rating 4 power site (of any land area, provided it's a single site) for initiate grade hours? You better believe paranoid and defensive minded groups in charge of such a site will have heavy spirit patrols 24 hrs to avoid someone jamming a spanner in the works before launching an attack.

Divining - The one use of Arcana skill that might get used more than twice a year. Nicely cleaned up mechanic, probably too easy to get maximum info, thus forcing the GM to fudge in some metaphorical handwaiving.

Geomancy - A mechanic for converting background count into aspected domains. No player will ever take it unless you're in a magic centered campaign where you steal other groups power sites, but hopefully someone in your initiatory group will and owns the deed to an old abandoned church so you can get a couple of bonus dice on your ritual magic and binding tests.

Great Ritual - A way to stack on extra people in your ritual. Good for explaining how Lone Star or that corp killed you using the blood stains you left behind despite using your Grade 5 shielding inside a Rating 8 ward. No player will touch it.

Invoking - Allows the Quake power, so it's hopelessly broken. :) Makes spirits more powerful on the physical plane but the drain will force you to cut back on the force of your bound spirits to compensate. I would have liked some notation that great form is a bonus provided by the initiate in the binding, not a change in the spirit itself, so you can drop it all when they go free. I don't want free spirits with Storm or Quake; I don't recall if non-great forms are allowed to buy them after going free. I say no.

Psychometry - Backward looking divination, and thus less susceptible to abuse. Useful for spy/investigation mages, otherwise useful as a law enforcement tool to find and nail your players if they cause enough havoc to bring in a hot shot FBI or whatever specialist.

Sympathetic Linking - Want a poor chance to cast ritual magic on someone you've assensed or whose pen you stole from his pocket protector? Knock yourself out. Useful for players who do lots of ritual magic on targets, which I think we should see more of for Mind Probe, Influence, and similar purposes. Also helps the massive Great Ritual Circle of Revenge ™ concept to nail your mass murdering lunatic mage even if he's very careful about covering his material link and astral location tracks.

ADVANCED METAMAGIC - require prequisites, noted in parenthesis

Absorption (Shielding) - Far improved mechanically from its SOTA form. Sucesses directly erase DV on a later spellcasting (don't allow it on conjuring tests!) within reasonable limits. Subject to abuse by friendly magicians/spirits of man/allies casting moderate force but low drain spells at you that are easy to absorb. On the other hand, how else are you going to cast Napalm or some other double elemental area effect combat spell with a DV of (F/2)+7? Not obviously overpowered, I suppose, because most of the serious havoc you can do doesn't have crippling drain anyway, and if you have time for your helper to charge you up in battle, you're going to win anyway.

Anchoring (Quickening) - Wow. It's both useful and easy to use! Especially with Anchoring foci so your karma expenditure doesn't get insane. But enough to spend two metamagical slots on and forgo Flexible Signature, Masking, or Shielding? Tough call. Probably will be used most often by the sophisticated magical opposition.

Extended Masking (Masking) - Hide your active foci or quickened/anchored/sustained spells. Buy the book to see the limits on number of auras hidden and Force, but much better than the old SR2 and SR3 vanilla rules. Well worth taking for magical infiltrators or medium/high grade astral christmas trees.

Filtering (Cleansing) - Similar to the SOTA power, it allows you to lessen the effects of background count without taking the time to use Cleansing, or mop up whatever's left after you have tried Cleansing. Still with an awkward and complex mechanic, I don't see any players taking it unless they play a high magic campaign where they regularly venture into nasty magic zones for mysterious purposes. But give it your NPC Firewatch team mages when they have to save your team's ass on that one off adventure in the Cermak zone.

Flux (Masking) - Temporarily jam astral tracking or ritual magic that's using a material/symbolic link instead of a spotter. Potentially useful for magicians who piss a lot of people off and have lots of ritual teams trying to nail them or track them down, but the rules are less than clear as far as game effects. They say such attempts are "put on hold" while you maintain flux, but that doesn't tell me what happens to a ritual. Can they maintain the ritual at whatever point it has reached until the flux stops, after which you restart the timer? Is there a magical limit to how much time a ritual team can wait, or does the GM just decide how much time the team is willing/able to devote to standing around waiting to complete the ritual before they might call it off? (That's how I'd play it.) Having the ritual automatically fail can't be the answer, because then you could just use flux for a minute or two every hour to defeat all attempts at ritual sorcery.

Reflecting (Shielding) - It was more flash than useful in SR3 and it's worse now. Great, I can send back his spell with my defensive sucesses without drain. But he still gets counterspelling, so how likely is it to actually do anything? It used to be barely worth taking in the past for the odd chance it would actually do something, but now you're not only limited to half original force on the reflection (itself a generally pointless limitation after your defensive successes are reduced by his spellcasting ones), using it also counts like full defense and burns your next action before you even see how well you've kicked it bck. Thanks but no thanks, I'd rather just aborb it and then cast my own spell back with reduced drain and no low force cap. I'd house rule that this doesn't use your next action or that reflected spells cannot be counterspelled - they have the caster's own magical signature and glide right through. I prefer the latter for flavor and sneakiness. That would be worth having and burning an action on.


So, that's the non-adept specific metamagics in various detail. Any you especially like or hate? Answer to my questions/concerns?