Sacrificing Adepts, Red, Red, Red Options

[Ancient History]

Say you have a physad, with the Attribute Boost power, d'you think it would be right to let them have Sacrificing so they could slice themselves up to handle the drain? See, I think this would have two potential uses:

A) Kick-ass blood-adept NPCs!

B) Mimic the "boost" abilities of Adepts in ED, which is perfect for translating ED characters to SR characters.

[Zazen]

I'm always for new flavors of magic. Feel like describing that ED "boost" ability? :)

[Curugul]

Of course, the skill says "An initate using sacrifice can reduce Drain of any Magical Skill test by". Furthermore, Centering is allowed for adepts on that power, so why would this be any different.


Go for it.


Curugul

[motorfirebox]

because you can center and use blood magic. for instance, you can use centering for one thing, and then blood magic for something else in the same init pass (like, say, sneaking and boosting an attribute).

i'd be in favor of expanding blood magic adepts to more than just attribute. like, for instance, maybe a blood magic adept gains .25 'virtual' power points per grade. in order to access them, however, he has to use blood magic to temporarily raise his effective magic rating, in order to have access to those powers.

[Abstruse]

Or the evil NPC could use a sacrifice geas for his adept powers...then again, if it's an NPC, you can have fun with it. For every person he kills with his bare hands or a ceremonial, he gains another power point, fading away at a rate of .25 PP every <Magic Rating> minutes. Depending on exactly how badass you want to make him, he can either be limited or not by his Magic rating as to the number of powers he can use at one time.

The Abstruse One

[Ancient History]

Well, it was just off the top of my head...I started at troll bred-drakes and went from there.

For those who don't know, in ED an adept can give himself a temporary attribute or talent boost by taking strain and/or cutting himself; using blood magic.

[Talia Invierno]

A variant on that (the Sacrificing metamagic) was originally suggested in SR as an ability to be limited to NPCs.

Then again, so was the (then) physical magician.

For what it's worth, we've PC'ed or are PC'ing both while they were still NPC rules. (It's entirely possible the blood marriage rite is about to be resurrected - if not evangelised - by a couple of Tir renegades.)

Individual games, individual rules. It's obvious that the popular belief which allowed blood magic to function in Earthdawn still exists, so that's not an issue. Insofar as I'd suggest anything to another as to how to play their game, I'd mention that while blood magic was accessible to all PCs in Earthdawn, within the version the game designers chose to focus on it was specified that it was always something approached with caution and a little unease. But that's a roleplaying issue, and thus may not apply to the same extent in other games.

There's nothing canonical I can track that specifically attracted horrors to the performance of blood magic (that is, beyond their attraction to any magic accessing the astral, or beyond its probable role in raising the ambient mana level). Could be that my sources are limited. Could also be that if horrors are attracted to blood magic, that's a game balancer that should be kept in mind in any transposition of Earthdawn abilities to Shadowrun campaign.

[Ancient History]

Blood magic:

a) directly accesses the life force of the individual and translates it into magical energy

b) causes pain, which Horrors thrive on

c) Using blood magic on someone else creates the diabolical naughtiness that Horrors love.

d) Blood magic can be used to mimic abilities used by certain Horrors, which begs the questions of where it was learned, as well as if it attracts attention on the astral.

[snowRaven]

Sacrificing for Adepts? YES!!!

And while you're add it - make use of this baby I designed based on the ED pushing of talents and such: :grinbig: