Spirit movement and sight or can an earth elemental see through the ground? Options

[Hat]

The group I run for uses spirits or one of the mage types astrally projecting in order to do scouting. One of the things they want to do is have an Earth Elemental look for a secret underground base. With the search power making a request to find an underground manmade structure - especially if you were less than a klik away seems trivial. So, can spirits simply fly through the earth looking for things? If they came out into a sealed underground room that had no light source and nothing living could they tell? Can a mage see underground, determine whether he's in a chamber, or how would all that work?

Perhaps a better question may have been - how do you deal with astral scouting trips without getting heavy handed about mana barriers and other astral protection?

Thanks!

With a sweep of his...

Hat

[weblife]

Its difficult for Astral spirits to travel in Earth.

But if Earth spirits had a burrowing power (they do not by RAW) I would say it could be used, and that it would be likely that Earth spirits can also navigate fairly well underground. I do not see any reason to give it special detection abilities though.

As its physical in form, you might want to hand a scanner device that can penetrate earth and send it down digging.

Remember though that underground installations typically have vibration scanners to spot diggers coming close.

In SR3 we had the Move Earth spell... Mmmm... good times. Basically tunnelling everywhere in a rocksled with air support.

In other news. Spirits on remote services no longer count against the
limit of summoned spirits.

So you could summon as many as your drain allows, sending each off to do its Remote Service and then return with their report.

[Hat]

Ok, so spirits / astral forms have a hard time moving through the earth? Is it because they can't see? I thought that astral forms basically worked as ghosts. Go through solid objects as if they didn't exist. If they're inherently limited to needing things like doors / openings etc, is there anything you can point to in the rules to that effect? Does that mean that a spirit basically has to wait for doors to be open to move into buildings for example? Does it matter whether the object is natural or man-made?

With a sweep of his...

Hat

[HentaiZonga]

Ok, so spirits / astral forms have a hard time moving through the earth? Is it because they can't see? I thought that astral forms basically worked as ghosts. Go through solid objects as if they didn't exist. If they're inherently limited to needing things like doors / openings etc, is there anything you can point to in the rules to that effect? Does that mean that a spirit basically has to wait for doors to be open to move into buildings for example? Does it matter whether the object is natural or man-made?

With a sweep of his...

Hat

Natural or man-made doesn't matter, but the solid Earth is special. Earth has its own astral form, with the consistency of quicksand (mostly due to all the microbacteria and such in the soil, if you're of the Hermetic bent, but also due to the beautiful Mother Nature Earth Spirit's soul, if you're a tree-hugging hippie). So individual rocks don't have astral forms, but unbroken ground does.

[Hat]

Ok, so if there's an underground base a spirit could perhaps find the entrance to it (as it would be manmade) but being encased in solid rock would have to enter it and scout it through corridors. The only way to block a spirit (or astrally projecting mage) from scouting the entire inside would be to put up one or more mana barriers. Is that right?

With a sweep of his...

Hat