Would cat spirits be able to live off of the devil rat infestation? I mean, they're not literal physicl manifestations of their totems the way insect spirits are, but they'll still probaly enjoy killing them en masse. If cat spirits can't eat them, maybe tarantula spirits will.

...

*twitch*

Sure, you can order a Beast Spirit that takes the form of a cat to go and kill devil rats. It won't stick around any longer than a run-of-the-mill spirit does, though, unless you bind it.

*twitch*? What about free cat spirits? I'm sure they'd love playing with their own rampant food source.

If you summoned a spirit of man in the form of a cop, would it live off the donut infestation?

I do not see where SR4 says anything, but SR3 said spirits do not require food, water, air, or sleep.

Use shapechange on the hacker and turn him into a big kitty.

just do what I do: raise hell hounds

gets rid of devil rats and pesky cat spirits!

In Soviet Russia, Blackberry Cats raise YOU.

Hate blackberry cats. Little fraggers are just as likely (if not more so) to send you mousing. Talis cats are cool though. A cat with a small guy complex that can do something about it.

They ought to compile all of the Paranormal Animals/Critters books into one source for SR4.

And they ought to make it free, but I'm not about to push my luck.

Seriously. Who doesn't love the idea of a 200 pound lobster? Drooooool.

On a more serious note, there's a place in Shadows of North America (I'm reasonably sure it might be Quebec. Or some other place up in the north) that pays, like, a 5y bounty per devil rat hide. Now that's a darn good way to get down the population, considering, like, 1/20 of them carry friggin' VITAS.

I love the Abrams! I did a DIY run where I snagged a few from a corp sec facility, and had 'em served up at acorp banquet. Them's good eatin'! Thank goodness you can't astrally track something once it's dead. (and the hall was warded anyways).

The 4th ed. D-rat has no pestilence power. In fact, there's no pestilence power in 4th ed. at all, that I found.

It's a pestilence power? I thought they, y'know. Just HAD it. As in they were carriers of said disease.

I like dragons. I really do. But, honestly, I can't imagine why they'd be in the corebook. Frankly, if you're at the point of the game where you need to stat up rules for dragons, you might want to start anew.

Well, it's doubtful, but it'd be awesome if they did what they did with the SR3 GM screen/Critters and made it free off the site. I'm not holding my breath, but hey.

completely random, but I like how a dragon's breath is considered an 'elemental attack' and not an 'innate spell' like it was in SR3, so I don't have to worry about players using spell defense on dragonbreath.

I also find it interesting how the G.D.'s stats are basically given the 'ok' to go ahead and break the core rules of the skill cap for sorcerey with nothing said abot it. They wanted them to be better than PC's so they simply made them better than a PC could possibly be within the RAW. Annoying. But that points been beat to death, raised, and beat down again, so I now return you to your normally scheduled thread.

I'd say that tarantula spirits would be awesome. Too bad you basically lose your mind in order to summon them.

And for some reason, this reminds me of the cat-bun wars from Perfect Hair Forever.

What the Hell? Spider is not, nor has it ever been, an Insect Totem.

But seriously, after ~60 years of magic I would suspect that if this could work, it'd have been tried already.

Spider isn't an insect totem. It's just that the majority of these aforementioned spirits don't technically exist or are purely antagonistic.

And using an insect spirit to clear up a devil rat infestation is like using a gang of hostile, misanthropic ghouls to take care of those darn teenagers who play music too loud at night.

A spider isn't even an insect.

Back to the original question: Insect spirits don't "eat humans", they use living organisms to anchor themselves to the physical plane, allowing them to live here rather than constantly commute from their metaplane. If you want, you can have your cat shaman do the same thing with their spirits - it just costs a lot of Karma.

Inhabiting a living body with a spirit permanently to take up permanent residence on the physical plane is something that literally any conjurer can do - it's just that normally a magician can only do it with an Ally spirit (at least, according to the canon rules).

The effects are pretty much the same whether you are a Hermetic who is putting a spirit from the plane of water into a living host as when you are an Insect Shaman putting a hive worker into a living host. The eating of devil rats or whatever is completely secondary, the important part is the sacrifice of the living creature to your spirit so that it can merge and live here on a permanent basis.

---

Oddly enough, I'm not aware of any group flipping out over shamans and hermetics doing that - just insect spirits. I don't know why.

-Frank

But getting back to the original line, I'd rather use a Talis Cat. Cat spirits might spook a few Devil Rats, maybe the younger ones, but on a whole, en-mass collection of the blighters, you need real, live kick-@ss felines.

Sic'em, Fluffy.

Dammit, the Shadowrun world has to be cheesier! I mean, a lot of the discussion here is about how to make things more pragmatic and realistic, but seriously, it's cyberpunk. Despite what people have to say about Neuromancer's scholarly value, it was cheesy. It had chameleon suits and inexplicably hyperintelligent AI's and people on ROM chips. There was a dehumanizing aspect to life that people constantly worked towards that permeated everything, and everything about Shadowrun should show that.

Cyberpunk's a convergence of base materialism, in which the body is meat and the spirit is 0's and 1's, and chaos theory, in which people are psychotic not simply because they're poor but because civilization just can't handle that much order. Insect spirits being used to clean up devil rats is just like that. It's cost-saving, inhuman, and chaotic.

I disagree with almost everything you just said.

If you take

I wonder if you can buy devilled devil rats.