I thought I'd try to kick start some conversation on the various metamagic techniques. A list of those I care about, with my comments/concerns. (Hint: I don't care about any of the adept metamagics.)


Ally Conjuration - Necessary for creating an ally spirit. Given the increased power and customization of allies (who wouldn't give theirs Influence?) a good idea, but it will make them much more rare.

Channeling - A good and almost necessary ability for possessory traditions, allowing you to do your own thang while being possessed for improved physical attributes and Immunity to Normal Weapons. I'm confused about use of spirit powers, though. They require spending a service, but how does this work? Do you use the power yourself on your action, or does the possessing spirit without control of your body somehow use them on it's own initiative pass? (I note no evidence that the 2 IP for spirits should apply to the initiate who channels and maintains control over the body.) If the latter, is this restricted to "soft" powers like Concealment, or can the spirit independently hit someone with a fire bolt?

Cleansing - Potentially more useful than the old one with the increased penalties from background count/hostile aspected domains, especially the latter if you can somehow sneak in under invisibility and do the deed. Four Complex Actions to neutralize a rating 4 power site (of any land area, provided it's a single site) for initiate grade hours? You better believe paranoid and defensive minded groups in charge of such a site will have heavy spirit patrols 24 hrs to avoid someone jamming a spanner in the works before launching an attack.

Divining - The one use of Arcana skill that might get used more than twice a year. Nicely cleaned up mechanic, probably too easy to get maximum info, thus forcing the GM to fudge in some metaphorical handwaiving.

Geomancy - A mechanic for converting background count into aspected domains. No player will ever take it unless you're in a magic centered campaign where you steal other groups power sites, but hopefully someone in your initiatory group will and owns the deed to an old abandoned church so you can get a couple of bonus dice on your ritual magic and binding tests.

Great Ritual - A way to stack on extra people in your ritual. Good for explaining how Lone Star or that corp killed you using the blood stains you left behind despite using your Grade 5 shielding inside a Rating 8 ward. No player will touch it.

Invoking - Allows the Quake power, so it's hopelessly broken. Makes spirits more powerful on the physical plane but the drain will force you to cut back on the force of your bound spirits to compensate. I would have liked some notation that great form is a bonus provided by the initiate in the binding, not a change in the spirit itself, so you can drop it all when they go free. I don't want free spirits with Storm or Quake; I don't recall if non-great forms are allowed to buy them after going free. I say no.

Psychometry - Backward looking divination, and thus less susceptible to abuse. Useful for spy/investigation mages, otherwise useful as a law enforcement tool to find and nail your players if they cause enough havoc to bring in a hot shot FBI or whatever specialist.

Sympathetic Linking - Want a poor chance to cast ritual magic on someone you've assensed or whose pen you stole from his pocket protector? Knock yourself out. Useful for players who do lots of ritual magic on targets, which I think we should see more of for Mind Probe, Influence, and similar purposes. Also helps the massive Great Ritual Circle of Revenge ™ concept to nail your mass murdering lunatic mage even if he's very careful about covering his material link and astral location tracks.

ADVANCED METAMAGIC - require prequisites, noted in parenthesis

Absorption (Shielding) - Far improved mechanically from its SOTA form. Sucesses directly erase DV on a later spellcasting (don't allow it on conjuring tests!) within reasonable limits. Subject to abuse by friendly magicians/spirits of man/allies casting moderate force but low drain spells at you that are easy to absorb. On the other hand, how else are you going to cast Napalm or some other double elemental area effect combat spell with a DV of (F/2)+7? Not obviously overpowered, I suppose, because most of the serious havoc you can do doesn't have crippling drain anyway, and if you have time for your helper to charge you up in battle, you're going to win anyway.

Anchoring (Quickening) - Wow. It's both useful and easy to use! Especially with Anchoring foci so your karma expenditure doesn't get insane. But enough to spend two metamagical slots on and forgo Flexible Signature, Masking, or Shielding? Tough call. Probably will be used most often by the sophisticated magical opposition.

Extended Masking (Masking) - Hide your active foci or quickened/anchored/sustained spells. Buy the book to see the limits on number of auras hidden and Force, but much better than the old SR2 and SR3 vanilla rules. Well worth taking for magical infiltrators or medium/high grade astral christmas trees.

Filtering (Cleansing) - Similar to the SOTA power, it allows you to lessen the effects of background count without taking the time to use Cleansing, or mop up whatever's left after you have tried Cleansing. Still with an awkward and complex mechanic, I don't see any players taking it unless they play a high magic campaign where they regularly venture into nasty magic zones for mysterious purposes. But give it your NPC Firewatch team mages when they have to save your team's ass on that one off adventure in the Cermak zone.

Flux (Masking) - Temporarily jam astral tracking or ritual magic that's using a material/symbolic link instead of a spotter. Potentially useful for magicians who piss a lot of people off and have lots of ritual teams trying to nail them or track them down, but the rules are less than clear as far as game effects. They say such attempts are "put on hold" while you maintain flux, but that doesn't tell me what happens to a ritual. Can they maintain the ritual at whatever point it has reached until the flux stops, after which you restart the timer? Is there a magical limit to how much time a ritual team can wait, or does the GM just decide how much time the team is willing/able to devote to standing around waiting to complete the ritual before they might call it off? (That's how I'd play it.) Having the ritual automatically fail can't be the answer, because then you could just use flux for a minute or two every hour to defeat all attempts at ritual sorcery.

Reflecting (Shielding) - It was more flash than useful in SR3 and it's worse now. Great, I can send back his spell with my defensive sucesses without drain. But he still gets counterspelling, so how likely is it to actually do anything? It used to be barely worth taking in the past for the odd chance it would actually do something, but now you're not only limited to half original force on the reflection (itself a generally pointless limitation after your defensive successes are reduced by his spellcasting ones), using it also counts like full defense and burns your next action before you even see how well you've kicked it bck. Thanks but no thanks, I'd rather just aborb it and then cast my own spell back with reduced drain and no low force cap. I'd house rule that this doesn't use your next action or that reflected spells cannot be counterspelled - they have the caster's own magical signature and glide right through. I prefer the latter for flavor and sneakiness. That would be worth having and burning an action on.


So, that's the non-adept specific metamagics in various detail. Any you especially like or hate? Answer to my questions/concerns?

After some additional reading, I almost thought Anchoring was worth taking for Anchoring foci alone. They mark a small step towards the mythical uber special teams force with mundane members magically enhanced. (What mage would spend karma on personal enhancements via Quickening when it's just going to get smacked by a ward without a truly massive investment?)

Alas, these oh so useful reprogramable mobile sustaining foci have a very steep bonding cost. Maybe the occasional Azzie/Ghost/Wildcat uber mage will condescend to bond a low force one and give his best buddy a defensive or detection spell he can reset between ward disruptions, but that's about it. Darn.

Okay, I'll toss in a few initial responses to the material (been reading it for a few days now and determining what can work in our games and what is cool "as it stands alone"). Please note, unlike Slithery D, I'm not going to babble these in any particular order.


Absorption - I have to give it credit, overall I like the mechanic now as compared to older system stuff and I *really* like the consideration of prerequisite metamagics. Kinda starts to seriously lay down the ground work for "paths of development" types of characters. What I do not like personally is the automatic adjustment of the DV Value using the absorbed points. Personally, I really think it should just be dice and let the dice mechanics determine how well you get to handle Drain Value Impact.

Flux - Intrinisically interesting but haven't played it yet so not sure. Really like the balancing mechanics here though. Keeps it playable.

Extended Masking - My personal opinion is still out on this one. I like the way it works but not the idea that Masking doesn't already take care of those things you (as a magical character) have bonded to yourself (with Karma). We're probably going to adjust this talent as it comes into our games, but otherwise it is by no means a game breaking power. Does make me wonder a bit more on Masking vs. Warding/Wards in general though. I mean to say, if it requires Extended Masking to hide all of ones own items, how on earth does a magician take a foci with him/her/it now using the Spoofing rules as they exist?

Geomancy - I think the problem with this talent, and the only problem I've personally considered so far, is that the talent doesn't explain how background/aspect counts can be created in the first place. It only really works by the wording in the text upon pre-existing background count areas. It does NOTHING to actually create a new aspectable site. For this reason I just think the mechanics needed to be expanded a bit somewhere else.

Ally Conjuration - as a standalone metatalent, this one is just wrong. It is frivolous and unnecessary IMO. In a game of already expanded karmic cost increases (we all know magical characters are karma whores anyway ), this metatalent just seems ill-required. The ONLY thing it does give me (and my group) however is the basis for Metatalents to develop additional spirit conjuring capabilities (expanded classifications). On the flipside ... the new Ally and Free Spirit rules are quite enticing. Gonna have to seriously see how this really works out.

Anchoring - I really do like the changes to this one overall, but again we haven't played them out much (ha ha, not at all at this point) so we're going to have some fun incorporating this stuff.

Divining - again this talent is interesting but the mechanics behind leave something to be desired. I am personally curious to see how the "Arcana Skill" is going to play out. I can say this on that skill in our group ... it's going to become the "Arcana Skill Group" very fast. Oh, and stuff like Divining do not take into account things like Masking, Extended Masking, Cleansing, Metaplanar Quests (of Masking/Obscurement) or the new Flux metatalent. As far as I can see, any of those things should give a "Diviner" some real headaches.

-=-=-

My one real gripe about the whole metamagic section. Once again, with the exception of "Great Ritual" and "Geomancy", the game developers seem to have dropped the ball on the idea of "Ritual Metamagic". I really was saddened to see that nothing in this area was given some suggestions. I would love to see what Ritual Metamagic would be like from the POV of the developers and not our groups.

(shrug)

Overall ... my opinion of this book is positive. Read through it twice, already started putting in "flags to be ready for" in our games here just so we can re-expand the gameverse.

i see that anchoring still isnt back at the flexibility and power it had in SR2. to bad.

I forgot two other uses for metamagic: Shielding lets you make a charged ward which should be pretty much the standard for wards made by high end professional security companies, and Anchoring permits trap wards, which have the potential to be really diabolical at high force levels.

anchoring looks pretty interesting to me, personally. high drain spells just became combat viable because of them (it may take a lot of karma to bind, but heck, it's an extra spell with 0 drain every single run).

isnt the drain taken when spell is placed into the anchor?
and isnt all anchored spells one shots (even tho the anchor itself can be reused)?

or did something change around that in SR4?

indeed, to clarify what i meant with the no drain spell, i am referring to the fact that you can simply cast a spell into the anchor, take the drain outside of combat (which means you have lots of time to heal from the drain, and lots of time to use absorption to lessen the drain if you have that metamagic also), and a spell which has high drain can very suddenly become much more useful.

I have a hard time imagining what use it would really be, though. If the drain is so high you wouldn't contemplate it in combat, it's probably too high force to want to spend 6xforce binding a focus to cast it. Unless you're a fan of single target triple elemental area effect spells, of course. I'd like to see some poor guy get hit by a force 5-6 fire/water/acid/ spell.

"My comlink shorted out, I'm knocked on my ass, my ammo's cooking off, my armor is degraded, and I'm almost dead!"

I'm ticked they did not use metamagic to put ritual summoning back into the game. Other than that it looks pretty good.

the drain doesn't have to be all that bad. considering one box of drain is likely to be very close to 10% of your total health, if something prevents even 2-3 boxes of damage (and protects from the possibility of glitching/critical glitching at a bad time, to boot) it can be very worthwhile in combat IMO. not to mention you can even potentially have it self-activating, and thus save yourself a precious action in combat...

Or prevent ambushes. Detect Enemies + [offensive spell] anchored will zap anyone who tries to sneak up on you or anyone liying in wait. Perfect for the paranoid.

Okay, not lying in wait then. Sneaky guys, yes.

"Congratulations, your mana bolt just struck a wall to your left. Presumably an enemy is sneaking just on the other side of it."

"Congratulations, your manabolt just struck your own ass! Presumably, something in your ass is an enemy to you... Might want to cast 'detect disease' on yourself sometime."

Note: Not intended to be serious. Just having fun with this.

what kinds of conditions can one set for triggering of the anchor?

whatever a detection spell can detect, i suppose. also, i think changes to the focus itself can be a trigger, if i read it right... so for example, you could have a 'potion' anchor which activates when someone drinks it... but i'm not 100% sure of that.

Yeah, you can link a detection spell by adding the force on and jamming the whole into your anchoring focus or paying the extra karma if it's a stand alone spell.

Alternatively, there are various touch triggers that require something astrally significant in contact with the anchoring construct - an aura that isn't the owner's, a change in background count, and...that's all I can remember. You can also do a countdown timer without linking a detection spell. So if you really want to burn Force karma they're mostly useful for magic traps and bombs. Get a (very expensive to bond) anchoring focus for more widespread fun.

hmm, so how would one go about creating a anchor with a healing spell that one would hand of to another member of the team, so that said member can trigger the spell when needed?

Do they take an action to trigger, or can you set it to trigger when touching a wounded person, and have an instant heal the firstt ime you get hurt? I'm guessing you'd have to design a touch range "detect wounded person" spell, but it could definitely be worth it.

Ah. I didn't realize it was so karma intensive. Ouch.

uhoh, sounds like it got somewhat worse then the SR3 version in that area.
in SR3 you could atleast set some kind of command that a person touching the anchor could think or similar to trigger it when needed, rather then having it trigger whenever he touched it.

that way you could could anchor a rubber band around his wrist or something and have it trigger when the user wanted it to or something like that. now it sounds like it can only activated by the caster after it have been pocketed or similar by the potential target...

Hmm. Well, it suddenly occurs to me that the new Thought Recognition spell is perfect for just this purpose. You'd need it at at least Force 3 to be fairly sure the intended activator won't easily resist it, but it will let you designate a thought code or phrase to activate the anchor. With the area effect you could even do it remotely. Just don't pick something that a random person might think at a particularly inopportune moment...

And the SR3 way didn't make much sense within the metaphysics of the game. What change in your aura does a specific thought make that an anchor can detect and recognize when you're not even bonded or personally linked to it in any way?

Do you have to resist? If not Force 1 should be fine.

How does a charged ward work?

I don't recall any mechanic to not resist spells that are ordinarily resisted. You could drop your counterspelling, if any, but I've always thought that you subconsciously resist anything aimed at your will even if you don't want to. (And how would a suicidal person not be able to resist a Powerbolt with Body?)

On second thought, this spell won't work at all for friendly, voluntary triggering. It detects the designated thought as soon as it happens. How are you not going to think of your code phrase until you actually need it? "Remember, if I need to heal myself I just think 'Code X-Ray' but not until...damn!" Maybe a custom version to only register "projected" thoughts.

Charged wards zap unsuccessful assailants with Stun Damage. Hit it and it hits you back. Try to press through and fail and you'll face even higher damage as it gets to increase it by net hits against your failed attempt. So at high forces like 8+ it will make it very risky to try pressing through unless you're pretty sure you're going to make it. Very few will take on a Force 12+ charged ward and a very high risk of one shot disruption.

Nice. Definitely a boost for astral security teams everywhere.

I personally like very high force Trap wards, which spring up around you if you don't notice them and stay out or spoof after an assensing test. You'll batter your way out eventually and not actually die away from your body, but before the astral patrol shows up?

Can you charge a trap ward?

No rules for it, and you'd have to be evil to allow it on your own. Each requires an advanced metamagical technique, so if you did you'd need a minimum Grade 4 who had taken nothing but Quickening, Shielding, Reflecting, and Anchoring. If you really have a need for a deus ex machina player trapper/killer, I suppose you could let one show up at a really important Azzie/SK facilitity or at a cutting edge research facility. Maybe make a new metamagic technique necessary to combine the two effects so that only a bare handful of people in the world, at most, can do it.

heh, atleast its simple to put a nice surprise for any would-be criminal on my apartment door again now that i can turn any item into a temporary anchor by spending a bit of karma. to bad it can only be triggerd ones...

I have belatedly realized the downside to Absorption: overloading your reservoir is a very real risk if you're facing two opponents, a near certainty if three magicians hit you before you can cast a spell, and quite possibly deadly if you're unlucky enough to be ambushed by four.

Then you throw a Force 12 manaball back with no drain test even needed and probably kill them all. Oh, well, nothing's perfect.

Reflecting still sucks.

You better be VERY far from that Mana Ball's center. A force 12 is gonna be BIG

Oops, make that a force 9. I was thinking of a magic of 6 limit and using the manabolt drain code.