I was reading through the description of warding in SR 4 and wondered how many mages it would take to ward one of the megacorp's base buildings. As I am far too lazy to look up the volume of the Renraku arcology, I decided to go for a modern example that would fit about the right size template, the Empire state building.

Turns out that it is just over 1,000,000 cubic meters.

Now, a single mage can ward (magic * 50) cubic meters. On average one would expect mages hired for warding to have a magic attribute of 5 (actually, probably less, but I can't be arsed to do the math for more complex numbers). 250 cubic meters. Not to worry, though they can summon a spirit each to help them, force 5, for an extra 250 cubic meters each. Watchers are impractical, as for a decent level warding they are either not going to last long enough, or knock out the caster. Let us assume the mages summon the spirits in seperate locations to avoid the empire state building racking up a huge background count. That gives 1,000,000/500 = 2000 Mages. I reckon a megacorp could get 2000 mages togther.

let's say they want a force 5 ward. That's 5 hours work for 2000 mages at 100 nuyen an hour. A million Nuyen. Pocket change for a megacorp. Even if you factor in an extra 500 nuyen each transport and accomodation costs, and an extra 100 nuyen each per hour for the spirits, it's a steal at 3 million.

Now the fun part, 4000 warding rolls (don't forget the spirits). We will assume that all the mages apart from the lead mage are saving edge to avoid glitching, as only a critical glitch would influence the final roll any.

The helping mages all have the impressive willpower and magic ratings of 5 Each, as do the summoned spirits, for 10 dice each. call it 9 for dice lost to normal glitches reduced from criticals, (spirits will have been ordered not to glitch). Then 3 of those dice, on average, wil be hits.

There are 3999 entities rolling for 11,997 extra dice on the lead mage's roll.

The lead mage then rolls 12,007 dice, and adds edge to the roll beforehand the mage is human (to explain the high edge), and has 5 edge. He rolls 12,012 dice, rerolling 6's
4004 hits on the first roll,
2002 extra dice to roll
667 hits on 2nd reroll
333 extra dice
110 hits on the 3rd reroll
55 extra dice
18 hits on the 4th reroll
9 extra dice
3 hits on the 5th reroll
1 extra dice, that does not hit.

that's 4802 hits.
The bulding will be warded for just over 92 years. So they won't have to do that again in a hurry.

Now who can get the most accurate value for the amount of time one would expect the Empire State building to remain warded should the minimum number of mages required to do so attempt this massive feat?

Well for one thing, someone would notice a project that large. That much magic flying around is bound to get every Awakened enitities attention within 50 miles.

For another... how would you handle the drain on that?

And the amount of money you would be paying for that would likely be better spent on... the biofiber stuff. Not to mention the amount of attention... yuck. Thats like asking for a 'Runner team to raid your place. Better invest in the best security on the planet for the eniter building at that point...

if the lead mage saves his edge to reroll failures, you'd get 4000 on the first roll, and then 2667 (on average) for the roll of all 8000 failures. Making an impressive 6667 hits. Based on 92 years per 4800 hits, that'll last 127 years.

Wouldn't you only need to Ward the outside edges of the building? Kinda like the warded areas being the skin of the orange as opposed the the whole thing.

Why ward an entire building when it's far more economic, fun and annoying for intruders to ward the crucial areas plus some random spots to keep people guessing? Think of it as building a 3d astral rat maze.

Thats one heck of a lead mage... seems there is no limit to the size of warding teams.

The ward will last until the first run, nowhere near 90 years

Sure, if you're mundane or an adept without astral perception. Any mage worth his salt would look at that giant fubar ward and either freak out or wonder why the hell they bothered. If you hide anything that 'Run worthy in your corp tower aside from legit business dealings, accounting specs, and various other similar things... thats just silly. It does have, as you said, "Renraku Corporate HQ" on it. Hiding the best stuff on secure disappearing LAN, stand alone nodes with uber IC. Which are likely things like various project data, both grey and black types. Astral Security isn't your largest concern in a Corp HQ building, Matrix Security would be.

I don't think it would be easy to gather 2000 mages, even for a mega.

Considering that corporate headquarters are usually built in massive cities, you'd like to think that any AAA that owns it's own building would have enough magical staff within a couple hours suborbital flight (read, any other major city) to fly them in once a CENTURY and put up a badass ward

Or you could just handwave it...

Well, I don't think an entire compound would be warded - just the important parts.

Why bother with transporting the summoned creatures far?

Just summon them elsewhere, somewhere you want to give a huge BG count too. Like, say, somewhere you hide out stuff that's likely to be hunted by magical eyes. If you can generate enough of a BG count to qualify as Warp, you're doin' good.


And I personally like the 2,000 man Warding Brigade. Very... Megacorporate, IMO. Efficient? No, but since when have the corps actually been efficient? None of them have! They're game villians/entities, not real corporations.

Real corporations aren't efficient either, I might add.

If you have 2000 mages setting up a ward, don't you have 2000 mages who get to decide who is affected by the ward?

Also, keep in mind that if you do just one ward, a single breach brings the whole thing down. I'd rather have a small team of mages running around the complex setting up many different wards of varying strength (stronger at more sensitive locations) than one big one.

Like someone else said, HR nightmare!

1. 2000 mages is a lot even for a mega to muster, given the population percentages.

2. Coordinating any kind of event for 2000 mages and 2000 spirits is going to be a nightmare.

3. Ensuring that so many people and so many spirits remain undisturbed for so long in such a public place would be a nightmare.

4. Dealing with the ramifications of the background count that ritual would produce could get ugly.

5. Putting such a large percentage of your magical force in one place to perform one task would be a security nightmare - on one hand, youve got almost all of these critical employees in one place, begging to be bombed or something; on the other hand, you've got hundreds and hundreds of sites around the world that aren't being magically protected.

Successes aren't really important, just don't critical glitch. They would just cough up the karma to make it permanent. Drain would still keep them from going overboard on the Force; the last thing they want to do is put 85% of their mage force in the hospital!

Nobody ever accused a Megacorp of being efficient.

Besides, that's just the kind of security flaw that makes for a glass safe. It's incredibly sturdy, but exploited properly can turn to a weakness.


This is a Shadowrunner's stock in trade. And unless the PCs are playing as Renraku's Corporate Security Arcitecture and Thamatalurgical Security Specialists, it's a good thing. Because this is a game, and that game is Shadowrun, not Lemmings.

Bah, all these grouches. If Aztechnology can afford to keep offing initiated mages for their blood rituals, then other megacorps can afford 2000 odd uninitiated mages on retainer.

They have in the order of millions of staff, after all.

The second thing is this is the sort of thing that a megacorp would do as a publicity stunt. "We got the most warded building in the world."

Of course it would be sensible to just ward restricted areas, but who wants sensible, 3,000,000 aint much to spend on a publicity campaign. Also if they all do the ritual spepratley, then you don't get the comedy 92 year duration on the spell.

There is the whole problem that a plebby astral mage overcasting a force 10 mana bolt at it will pop the thing, but hey, no plan is perfect.

As for taking out the staff, even up to force 9 there is no danger of fatalities, just have an autodoc available for all the mages at rtitual's end.

As for the background count, remember that each mage is just warding their own section of the building, and the volume they are working in is equally huge. The Background spike would be a small one over a huge area, not a huge one in a small area.

Anyway, less naysaying, more math!

Actually, if you go the (much) cheaper route of warding only all of the rooms and hallways with an exterior wall, you get the same effect as warding the entire structure, with the added bonus of being able to trap magical effects inside your building.

Gillette: "We need to get the hell outta Dodge. Good thing we have these these Improved Invisibility spells."
Magician: "Er ... yeah. About that whole leaving-while-invisible thing ..."

Okay on the number of mages thing.

Lets take the global population in SR to about 6 billion like it is nowadays (sure its been 60 years but Vitas etc has killed an awful lot of the extra people). Okay I guess that around 10% of the global population works for a mega corp. So thats 600, 000, 000 people. okay? lets assume that they are evenly spread btween the megacorps - thats 60, 000, 000 per corp. Now 1% of these are awakened thats 600, 000 awakened individuals per corp. Those with magic 5+ are probably the top ten percent of this population so thats 60, 000. Okay many of these are adepts, judging by propotions in most groups thats around half of them. This leaves 30, 000 mages who can do the warding. Why only use 2000?

I'll admit most of the figures here are made up but hey they sound about right, and we are talking about warding the Empire states bilding as a publicity stunt.

10 percent of the population may work for a megacorp, but there's no way that 10% works for one of the top 10 AAA corps. 60 million is nearly twice the population of the state of California (current day), or three times the population of New York state. 6 million seems more likely to me. My corp sourcebook is in a box in the closet though