I'm running Queen Euphoria and one of the PCs has a bound free spirit. Said bound free spirit was ordered to use its Possession power on Euphoria to keep her ot of trouble, and from whining, while the runners babyst her the first weekend. I see a problem coming if the spirit doesn't leave Euphoria.

Can the insect spirit possess the same body? Does it force the free spirit out? does it possess both the free spirit and Euphoria? Something else?

Have the insect shaman banish/disrupt the spirit first.

Well, if you want to be evil about it, the insect shaman could successfully summon the queen, the queen spirit and the free spirit fight, and the queen rips the free spirit to shreds (disruption).

That is unlikely as the Queen has a stated force of 5 and the Free Spirit has at least F10 and SE 10 giving it an effective Force of 20. That is why I said it was unlikely to happen.

I see one option of increasing the Queens force enough to defeat the FS. However, the scenario says the queen is helpless and vulnerable while incubating in Euphoria.

Another solution is hat Euphoria comes out of the adventure whole.

The best solution is trying to get the player/PC to order the spirit out of Euphoria in between kidnappings while it looks like the adventure is over.

It still leaves the question of how many beings can possess a form? As long as the challenger defeats the strongest/controlling being, they may all pile in? Defeat boots out all but the owner of the body (if they were present)? Other?

A force 10 bound spirit? Well thats your mistake. Your player got acess to a force 10 conjuring libary, and a force 10 circle, and finally managed to pull a tn of 20 out? I suppose...

Either way, its feasable that the shamen kicks your spirits ass out after cunjuring the queen. Or prehaps use some watcher pack attacks? Or heck, just stun guns the heck out of Euphoria?

Always consider your APL (avg power level) when looking at written modules. A force 10 bound spirit brings that number up a pretty big jump.

Cash for Karma and Karma for Cash are something I've been familiar with since starting playing SR, but I am not sure if I have ever read it in canon. It's so that the mage can get rid of unwanted nuyen to buy more spells and skills (if not saving for foci) and so the rigger can dispose of karma in favour of more nuyen. It's something like giving 5000 gives you 1kp and every 1kp you give away gives you 500 . NSRCG has it implemented. In plot terms you can represent it by the character going out and spending his hard earned cash on food for the homeless, perhaps bribing his instructor with extra funds (thus winning him a bit more karma to spend on the skill) etc etc. So if you have a free spirit that barfs up a chunk of gold once a month you can "reward" it with karma generated by spending that gold. People might wonder where you got it from. They might assence it and try and track down your golden goose. If you're looking to feed your pet FS karma though why not just tell it to learn Conjure Food 10 and send it to Africa whenever you sleep?

As for Euphoria - perhaps there are wards around where she's being kept possessed and the FS cannot pass through them. For example, there's one around her toilet and she's desperate to go, so the FS decides it will deposess her and jump back in as soon as she's finished and steps out.

Additionally, since FSs take no drain from Sorcery they are undepletable spellcasting batteries. Any player that asks his FS for Increase Reflexes 10 on the basis that the FS won't need to resist 20 Deadly Naval drain (or whatever it works out as) might end up with Parkinson's, but a mage that just uses his FS to cast every Heal (with the LOS modifier of course) for him is tolerable. So the guy who's bound the FS gets separated from the rest of the group and takes some Stun and regular damage. He needs healing fast. He chants the name of his FS three times and orders an extra-value heal and some fries. Its job done, the FS is told to return to Euphoria. Queue the music

If the group is powerful enough to summon and bind Free Spirits of that caliber, then they are powerful enough to break Queen Euphoria. Accept it, let them legitimately stomp all over it, and move on to something more challenging, like Imago or Harlequin or something.

Or Shutdown.

I''m going to agree with Toptomcat here. From now on your team shall be known as The Kirks because they won the unwinable game.

There is way way that Euphoria can be invested while possessed. The process takes many hours (if not days) so it isn't just a matter of the Queen shredding the Free Spirit. The Free Spirit can attack the Queen before it even has a foothold on our planes. Likewise, at that force the shaman isn't likely to disrupt it.


As for the Cash for Karma issue it is quite fair. Cash for Karma is an actual rule. It's in the SR3 Companion, I believe. I like to think that there is a network of Karma brokers made up mostly of Free Spirits of various types. Still, using the wealth power this way is murder. I would actually make it very difficult for a PC to profit from the wealth power by invoking market discrimination.

Wealth's products are precious minerals and similar materials. You can't produce electronic nuyen or real paper scrip out of thin air. You have to liquidate those minerals somehow. The problem is that precious minerals are precious because they are rare and impossible produce artificially. As such, the Wealth Power will have a detrimental effect on the market if the market doesn't discriminate agaisnt it. Today, artifical diamonds are other artificial gemstones are not worth as much as their natural counterparts because of this. Detecting the product of Wealth will be easy. Wealth will produce things that are too perfect. Gemstones will be literally flawless. Minerals will contain no contaminents. These 100% perfect minerals will be worth much less than there real and flawed counterparts. Flooding the market will only make them less valuable.

100% perfect materials would be more valuable in some instances, such as gemstone lenses.

Well, why don't you just have the F10, SE10 Free Spirit start asserting itself. Remember, it wants these silly runners DEAD. It's had no choice but to do what his master's been ordering it to, and usually, powerful Free Spirits HATE this. Have it make a deal with the bugs, it'll let go of Euphoria so long as they take out the magician who bound it, or at least free it from him. then proceed with the module.

Yeah, enslaving powerful creatures is never a good idea.

A bound Free Spirit can't disobey and it was ordered to protect Euphoria; therefore, it can't make that deal no matter how much it may want to.

But it can do other things against them. It can, for example, secretly take over an organized crime family in its spare time and tell its underlings that it doesn't like its Master. It can't order its henchmen to kill its Master but it can drop some pretty obvious hints.

LOL!

This is true with normal possession but Insect Spirit investing is very different from possession. First of all, Possession can only be done against astrally active characters...... and I was about half way through that sentence when I remembered that Euphoria isn't a magician. You see, a Free Spirit possess someone by beating down that character's astral form and then taking over the body. The host must loose to the Free Spirit in Astral Combat. Do you see where this is going? The Free Spirit can't possess Euphoria because it cannot fight her in astral combat because she doesn't have the ability to interact with the astral plane. That's a problem there.

As I was saying. Insect Spirits work differently. They don't Possess their victims. They Invest their victims. The concept is superficially similar but the results and the process are very different.
Free Spirits beat their hosts astral bodies into unconsciousness and then take the wheels of the host's meat bodies. The host wakes and and regains control when the Free Spirit leaves. This can be done anywhere at any time and it only takes a combat turn.
Investing takes several hours and it can only be done in special cocoons. The specifics of the process are unknown but the results are. The process removes or destroys the victim's 'soul' (for lack of a better term) without damaging the meat body. The Insect Spirit then either takes up residence in the meat or consumes it completely and becomes a 'True Form'. Which of the two occurs depends on the victim's willpower. Most 'Flesh Forms' have insectile features due to the Invae's attempts to gestate into a 'True Form'. If the victim has high willpower the meat body may retain its memories and impose its personality on the Invae. Again, the exact mechanism is unknown. Perhaps the a fragment of the 'soul' survives in these 'good merges' but it may just be that the meat brain incluances the Invae where the Invae would normally influance the meat. At any rate, it is nothing like possession and there is no evidence that larval Invae can fight resisting astral forms before or during Investation. Most victims are rendered unable or unwilling to resist and it is impossible for an Invae to exist ooutside of a cacoon untill gestation is complete.

Also, it does't work the same way for Shedim Possession, either. Shedim can only possess empty bodies but you can get your body back by disrupting the Shedim squatting in it.

The way I see it in the case of the standard Possession power the second spirit would have to disrupt the first or force it to leave and then defeat the owner's Astral Body in Astral Combat. This should be easy since the owner will still be unconscious in most cases. In the case of Shedim Possession the Shedim has to disrupt the Free Spirit and then kill the owner in either Astral or Physical combat before taking the body. Obviously, for the Shedim to use physical combat it would require a body. In the case of Insect Spirit Investing it would be impossible. Any Free spirit would shred a larval Invae in the cocoon. The Shaman or Mother would need to disrupt it.

time for the minority report

okay advice to your magician player

"Spirit these are your new standing orders
You are not to act, speak, or conspire in any way to harm me.
You are to actively and immediately warn me of ay plots to harm me that you discover.
You are to use all your powers to oppose any attempt to free you
You are to obey nobody except me
You are to never speak of your true name."


Oh and guys, force 3 SE 1 to F 10+ SE10+ is a huge jump over such a short time, many spirits would keep riding the gravy train until it peters out

The way we play it in my game, the most powerful FS on earth is a Force 25 SE 23 unique spirit. He's pretty much the strongest a spirit can get on earth with the current mana-levels (okay, so technically he's only a shard of a much greater spirit, but it still counts). Any higher, and it starts to become impossible for the gaiasphere to maintain the spirit's form (that is, the current mana-levels are actually so low as to be like a mana-warp for a spirit of that power). This forces all the uber-spirits into the metaplanes (possibly even the DEEP metaplanes) to avoid a messy death by starvation on earth. At a certain power level, the spirits NEVER come to earth, because the only time they'd be able to survive is about the same time some rather.... unpleasant characters also take up habitation.

It's not canon by any means, but I think it makes sense.

Also, about the Free Spirit conspiring against the player? Maybe with yaks, or wiseguys, or ninja clans, but these are bug spirits they're up against. You know, spiritual-bane-of-the-natural-order bug spirits? Piss-off-other-spirits-by-their-very-existance bug spirits? It is very unlikely that a spirit would collude with them.

An ungodly force free spirit capable of taking the bug spirits out all alone might conspire with them at first in order to remove the guy that's got his chains around the spirit's soul. Afterwards he can mop up the bad guys, earning the Run Karma as an added bonus.

I usually see Karma for Cash as being money poured into a specific activity. It's not like there's some First International Bank of Karma sitting out there with an exchange rate, the character is spending his money on training, on books, on taking people out to dinner and socializing beyond the norm, tossing some extra cash towards that Enchantment you're working on to have a consultant tweak it a bit... whatever it is you choose to justify all that extra cash turning into what's essentially XP.

"Normal" Karma, on the other hand, is that nebulous something that makes people learn or do amazing things. It's esoteric, it's je nais se quoi, it's bullshit, but it's also the reason why a character gets better if his player does something really amusing.

Feeding a free spirit bought Karma that he's essentially creating in the first place, while possible by the rules, is something I wouldn't allow. The character could use the money from his spirit to buy HIMSELF Karma (which could represent, say, days of time and thousands of rounds of ammo spent on the range), but under my paradigm of Karma for Cash, there's no way the magician should be allowed to spend that cash to turn the free spirit into something huge.

Yeah. Sorry. Every other type of character in SR has to work to improve, be it improvement by boosting a skill, or by pouring his Karma into something like a bound free spirit. Having something that literally gets more powerful the more downtime I give the group is just bent. How's that song go... "Get your money for nothing, your Karma for free..."

Historically karma has been awarded for "doing the right thing." Cash for karma could simply representing donating your money to charity.

It doesn't explain how doing good acts helps you learn to speak swahili, but nothing ever has, nor do I think it needs to.

Downtime can be very character building. If it isn't "character building" that's because it isn't roleplayed. In most campaigns downtime is simply glosses over. However, downtime can be an adventure in and of itself.

I wasn't saying that the wealth power should be combinable with cash for karma, just giving another option for explaining cash for karma. In fact, in a game where karma is based at least partially on good deeds, giving up something that isn't a sacrifice wouldn't be worth any karma at all (or at least have a drastically reduced rate). So an heir to a giant fortune or a sprit with the wealth power wouldn't be able to spend money for karma, he'd have to find something else to sacrifice.

Perhaps instead of a flat 1:5000 rate the karma received should be based on the amount given up. If someone has only 500:nuyen: t their name, giving it up might be worth 2 or 3 karma. If someone has millions, they'd have to use a 1:1,000,000 ratio. A spirit with a wealth power or a character with access to one couldn't benefit at all from the rule because giving up a portion of infinity isn't worth anything.

The numbers aren't calculated or tested, just tossed out as a basis.

I still think that the best way to limit a spirit's weal power is be reducing the value of the raw minerals produced by the power. Even if you limit cash-for-karma you still have to deal with the magician having access to an infinite amount of money. This leads quickly to permenant luxury lifesyles, delta-grade 'ware, and Force 12 weapon foci.

Much simpler just to disallow it. Perhaps not the best option for some games, but it avoids having to try and decide on economic trends and the impact of a fresh supply.

Can Wealth create the various minerals used in orichalcum? Can it create orichalcum?

Why not initiate to 20 and get a 20 spellcasting. You're getting karma slower than you're earning interest.