Sr3 - Search ability of a nature spirit Options

[Acenoid]

**contains spoilers about the old Universal Brotherhood campaign**

Hi there!

GM'ing the UB campaign in a classic sr3 setting. Players are in the UB section and the player summoned a force 3 spirit and explained to him: Here is a foto of the missing person. Please locate it for me.

Now my questions:
- Can spirits (as they think completely differently than humans, except for those ancestor spirits) answer questions like that?
- According to rules if you look for persons you roll with E*2 against a TN of the INT attribute of the person. Meaning the dumber the person is the easier to find it is ?! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)
- Does the hive of the insect spirits still belong to the territory of the spirit (I assume no, since they created their own toxic domain there)


General note regarding the adventure according to the adventure the whole building goes into alarm when the runners enter it. I tried to "follow" that advice and the runners were discovered quickly after exploring the ground level. They have gunned down most of the standard guards now (about 6 left, which I left on the various levels) plus the spirits of course (i didnt want to bring them into the game yet). But I feel it's too much dice rollling now - we had to stop in the middle of the combat previously, as it was 2 am already.

I plan to have some shortcuts where i will ask for some different kinds of checks and tick down their ammo levels until it proceeds with a "important" fight. On the other hand I feel it cheapens the insects... Still something to think a bout - Hard fight yes. But not the whole night...

Thank you in advance for all the replies !

[sk8bcn]

About yourrule questions, I'm not sure enough to answer tough I would say:

- Can spirits (as they think completely differently than humans, except for those ancestor spirits) answer questions like that?

> I would say no. I think the Spirit would need a contact with the person's aura but I even haven't reread the rule, so nothing sure.

- According to rules if you look for persons you roll with E*2 against a TN of the INT attribute of the person. Meaning the dumber the person is the easier to find it is ?! smile.gif

> well...

- Does the hive of the insect spirits still belong to the territory of the spirit (I assume no, since they created their own toxic domain there)

> I think that the territory is polluted, but not another domain. By the way, I don't consider Insect spirits to be toxic spirits. Both aren't similar.

[LurkerOutThere]

I started to reply to your reddit post but got distracted trying to source my assumptions. Search requires a strong mystical style link like you'd use for ritual sorcery. In certain situations you can get away with less but spirits don't "see" like we do so a picture probably won't cut it w/o a strong emotional attachment on it. For instance their headshot or selfie from Facespace is probably no good but the last picture they had of them and their mom that they kept above their door for years? That might do the trick. Ritual links are a sure fire bet though.

[Acenoid]

I started to reply to your reddit post but got distracted trying to source my assumptions. Search requires a strong mystical style link like you'd use for ritual sorcery. In certain situations you can get away with less but spirits don't "see" like we do so a picture probably won't cut it w/o a strong emotional attachment on it. For instance their headshot or selfie from Facespace is probably no good but the last picture they had of them and their mom that they kept above their door for years? That might do the trick. Ritual links are a sure fire bet though.

Good input. Well the image was shot by a beloved person, so I guess there would be emotions and that stuff. I will remember that the spirits think "emotionally" like when walking the astral space... Sometimes hard to think like a being from another dimension (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

[tisoz]

I've always played it that the person commanding the search projects a mental impression of the thing to be found. Showing the picture should only help. The mystical link is not mentioned being needed for Search but is mentioned for some of the metamagics.

MitS p. 99 has a better description of the Search power (uses a base TN4 instead of I) and an optional Search method. It also gives a better definition of the time it takes and the area the spirit may search.