Astral security and Street Magic Options

[Slithery D]

Street Magic pretty clearly bans overlapping wards that share the same area and boundaries, so you can't make intruders face group rules as they attack ten Force 5 wards simultaneously. Good. For those without a certain, uh, magnitude of sneakiness, it also pretty clearly bans putting a small cubic ward into a larger one to get the same teamwork effect for ritual sorcery defense, or just efficiency in creating layered defenses. Is this latter point how everyone else sees it? There is some room for fudge if you consider a wards area of intersection to only include its outer boundary, not its interior volume. If it were just the boundary, you could build a nice Russian nesting doll system of wards.

Let's assume worst case. What's the most efficient layered ward blueprint if you have to line them up side by side and want to force anyone to go through two wards to reach something in the middle? My interpretation of the "no overly complex shapes" rule is that a ward can be any convex shape. In a skyscraper that would require at least six wards - three for the sides (most people would probably use four, though, for a rectangular shape), one for the top and bottom, and one in the middle. That's a lot of wards, but I suppose it will still be worth it in a real corporate astral zero zone.

As far as the specialized wards go, I'm glad charged wards provide a reason for taking Reflecting. I still wouldn't do it. And trap wards, like Anchored Foci, provide a reason to take Anchoring and never spend karma actually anchoring a spell. I have the vague feeling some SR3 era specialized wards are missing, but I can't recall what they were.

Incidentally, I really liked how they handled biological astral defenses, i.e. ivy and FAB. You can fight your way through it, but it's visible on the physical plane and they can know to call in the astral troopers from off site. None of the weird metaphysical problems from when some of this stuff was first introduced in the old Corp Sec book. I suspect Guardian Vines or their equivalent were in an SR3 book I don't recall, but kudos if they're new. Haven Lily, is especially nice, although I'm not sure that it isn't counterproductive when it comes to astral security against pure surveillance.