OK, spirits are bad news to mundanes. Not unbeatable, but very bad news. Unfortunately, the kind of bad news that they are to mundanes is probably not what you are looking for. The basic rules do not have battles against powerful spirits being climactic long running struggles like the end of a Final Fantasy game. Instead, spirits require skilled professionals to whip out really big weapons, and then they explode. Works very nicely for Insect infestations, btw.

See, a spirit has double their Force in hardened armor, which means that in order to hurt them at all you need to have a modified DV that exceeds that. Note that your net hits on the attack and extra damage from Ammo count for Modified DV, but extra damage from burst fire does not (though if you penetrate the armor, that extra damage is applied to the spirit). So if you are dealing with a Force 8 Spirit, and your Elephant Rifle firing ExEx ammo hits it, you'll be reducing its armor to 13(!) and doing 11 damage straight off. So you'll need to come up with 3 net hits to affect it. That's not all that hard to do, and if you succeed, the spirit is rolling 25 dice to soak 14P - which aint gonna happen. So in a couple shots of heavy ordnance, that spirit is going down like a prom date. Anything less and your weapons aren't going to do anything at all.

Insect Spirits are actually really easy to fudge for SR4. Remember that just like every other tradition, they get 5 spirit types. They also have a Threat Power that sometimes their spirits are possession spirits and sometimes they are normal materializing spirits. The rules for when and how that gets decided haven't been written, and I honestly couldn't tell you what they are going to be. However, since you're the gamemaster - it doesn't matter. You just decide which ones are flesh form, which ones are true form, and which ones are well merged.

A true form spirit gets its own stat line, so you'll want to restrict those to scouts and hunters. This is because you can use the Air Spirit and Beast Spirit for those spirits, and those statlines are in the basic book. Soldier and Worker Spirits have not been published yet in an official capacity, but you don't really need to know what their statlines are if they show up as well merged or flesh forms. See, a possessed spirit uses the vessel's physical stat line and adds the spirit's force. So just like you don't need stat lines for Vodoun Loas (and indeed in MitS, the Loa are written without stat lines), you don't need the stat lines of anything that shows up in flesh form.

Then you just need to give them some spirit powers and skills. Not a big deal, most spirits are somewhat interchangeable on that score. Workers of course would have Artisan and possible some other Technical skills as well, but that's not likely to matter much unless the hive is working with the players. You don't even have to be that consistent, because spirits have optional powers.

Queens are a bigger problem. Like Ally Spirits, they add to the spellcaster's magical skills and exist only one at a time. In fact, game mechanically they might as well be Ally Spirits. And of course, that doesn't help much because the official Ally writeup isn't out either...

Long story short: You can run an adventure with True Form Scouts and Flesh Form Workers and Warriors and it will seem just like you had Street Magic in your hands right now. If you play it off right, your players will applaud you for how close you came to the published material when the book finally comes out. They don't have to know that you always used the parts that were really easy to convert.

-Frank

Er... If I was GM, I wouldn't allow "aiming for the head" of an elemental. Take a fire elemental, for instance... the head's fire, the foot's fire, every bit... fire. It doesn't really matter which part you hit, elementals are as homogenous as mashed potatoes. You can't bite the head of a bowl of mashed potatoes, can you?

Maybe you can't.

On a more serious note, I really like snowRaven's suggestion. You could implement it by saying it was made of mud or some similar sludge (appropriate for toxic earth) and that bullets are absorbed (doing half damage). In fact, I think that there is some horror power which sets precedent for that ruling.

How is that not hard to do? That Force 8 spirit you're talking about has likely between 16-24 Reaction dice, depending on type, plus 8 Dodge dice and 8 Edge dice! You'll be lucky to hit it at all, let alone get any net hits on the test.

The German errata has the corrected spirit Init:

http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?show...topic=10755&hl=

spirit of beasts (Fx2)+2
earth spirit (Fx2)+2
fire spirit (Fx2)+3
spirit of man (Fx2)+2
air spirit (Fx2)+3
water spirit (Fx2)+2

And Reaction of +X not xX.

milspec