Can a spirit appear inside a warded area from a metaplane? I saw this talked about as a way to get your allied spirit through wards. If spirits can appear inside a warded area from a metaplane then how do you keep spirits out?

I'd guess you've just answered your own question. If it breaks the game, then... no!

If it helps, a guy conjured a spirit inside a warded area in canon fiction. I guess that's not exactly what you mean.

If I was GMing, I'd likely say no.

If they are being conjured within the ward, yes. But they can't use their metaplanar shortcut ability to hop behind a ward.

Whats the difference between conjuring and calling a spirit? The only thing I see different is that when conjuring you are sending out a broadcast sort of like crickets chirping luring a spirit (or other crickets) to you. Calling a spirit you already know is only easier because its like you have their phone number now.

That is unless because of this canon example it answers one of the debates magic users have had in SR canon since the awakening, that spirits are really only extentions of the casters will. I mean if hes calling a spirit from another plan with conjuring in a ward then why should calling a spirit you already have services from be any different? Unless the mage is just making the spirit out of whole cloth on the spot and only through his training has the limitation that spirits come from another planes thus he cant possibly get it through a ward.

EDIT: And if this example was in a novel I would personally disregerd it. I hear there ar a lot of things in the novels that dont exactlly fit into the game world.

And conjuring circles and lodges are different, yes they are wards, but ones the conjurer controls so he can let anythignhe wants in and out of his ward.

Thats SR4 we are in the SR3 section.

It is the same in SR3. Spirits can take a metaplaner shortcut to instantly travel to their conjurer no matter where he is. Free spirits can take te shortcut to travel anywhere in the world instantly, so long as they are familier with the location.

I know, I just felt like being facetious.

Wow. So nothing can keep a free spirit out. At least conjured spirits can only pop in on you if their conjurer is within your ward.

And if the Free spirit has been in there before I believe the rules state. I dont think Free Spirits can just pop into a warded area unless hes been there before.

Short Answer; to appease as many people as possible...

However, I'd like to ask that if this forum was truly meant only for the older editions as you seem to be suggesting, then why isn't it labeled as thus?

Lack of effort on the side of the admins?

There use to be a day when if I walked into the forums and said SR Fucking sucks I would be warned, not because my stance on SR but because the way I said it, then if I came back and said the admin are retarded douche bags or something else along the lines of curseing and being a genral pain in the ass to the rest of the populace of DS you would get a 30 day ban. If you come back after that to continue your antics you would get perma banned. Yet I see ass loads of profanity and general lack of control going unpunished everyday here. Including the completely off topic post of Steve Irwin in the general gameing section.

I mean there are a few people here that have the reputation of being trouble makers and a few people have called the admins out on it. A few years ago they would have been perma banned long before that reputation was cemented.

LOL There use to be a Lounge here. That was till the admins decided it was no longer worth having and took too much time to moderate. Now it seems they dont even moderate here. That is unless someone really steps out of line, even rarely then.

And who does it appease if the people posting in the SR4 forum will come here to post SR4 stuff? It just muddles the waters. If there needs to be a clear line between editions shouldnt the other side stay there with there rules? I dont see people starting SR3 (or earlier) topics in the SR4 forum. A SR4 person coming here to ask a rules question is just going to get confusing and more then likely misinformed answers. Because personally I dont play SR4 and if I see a topic in this forum about the rules, Ill answer according to SR3 canon.

*Chuckles* And I remember when someone was suspended for a week for making an extremely snarky remark about someone's usage of 'leet-speak' in a post. (Comes to find out that English was his second langauge and he learnt it from playing Quake online.) In my opinion they were far too heavy handed back then, but then again I also received a warning in that thread so I might be slightly bias...

However, apparently we disagree on the amount of effort it'd take to add a label under the Forum name stating '4th Edition need not apply.', because I believe that although the 4th Edition forum was set up to direct most of the 4th traffic away from the older versions, it wasn't ever meant to be the hard barrier you seem to be wanting...

Of course, I've been mistaken before....

I dont have a prefference, I was just messing with Deamonseed. But Ill continue to think SR3 when I see something asked in this forum, and SR 4 in the other forum.

And who knows who's driving this boat around anymore. A lot of the old admins have moved on and the ones that do post in the rare occasion are also freelencers and/or have professional jobs. So I doubt their first priority any more is wether all the kids are playing nice let alone staying in their own play pen.

EDIT: And its heavy handed to punish someone for being rude to another person in a public setting? For nothing more then bad english? They didnt like fowl language on the forums before because they didnt want to deal with irrate parents if their children came here and seen all the profanity. I guess that means they dont care about the children anymore.

The regulars who have been around for years are far less likely to be slapped simply because they have more clout, they're usually friendly with the admins, mods, and the other old timers, and they're the guys who really keep the forum alive.
This is true in practically any system.

And this is completely off topic.

A free spirit has to know an area in order to ue a metaplanar shortcut to get there. In the most basic sense, they must have been there before. However, I'd rule that drastic (drastic as in tearing your house down and building a new one) remodeling can interfere with this power.

To get back on topic, if the summoner, using conjuring is already inside the ward, then the psirit can come to him there, BUT if the summoner is outside the ward then he cannot send the spirit inside the ward- UNLESS he has the psirit attack the ward to break in.

Think of wards as a wall for spirits/astral beings. Someone inside the wall can open the gate for you. If no one is already inside, sure you can break in, but someone's going to notice, and respond, just like a corp sec team will notice when you cut the feed from their fence sensors.

How I would explain that to a scientific-oriented nit-picking player :
A ward is a kind of permanent mana barrier. You can make those like a wall (block objects on one axis), like a stockade (block objects on two axis) or like a closed box (block objects on three axis). However, astral space and metaplanes bring a fourth axis into play. A mage is free to left this axis open or to block it.

He can block it at several levels : "outer" astral plane : a portion of the astral plane is blocked inside, spirits can exist there if they were there when the ward was created. If already conjured spirits are part of a magician's mind in your cosmology, then he can call it back when he is inside.

"inner" astral plane : the space inside the box has no astral space in it. Therefore, magic doesn't work there anymore, spirits can't exist, and it is possibly a local mana warp. It is up to you to authorize such a thing in your campaign.

it could also be left open in the "meta-direction". Just as a cylindrical barrier isn't really infinite in the zenithal direction, I would rule that in that case spirits can use a "metaplane shortcut" to be invoked here. Free spirits may have difficulties to use it though.

Hmmm... I think I'll bring more confusion while trying to help, well, it's part of the fun

Just because it is studied like a science in the game doesn't mean the player across the table from you can understand the underlying principals of this fictional science.

If he's so insistent on requiring a scientific explanation for the rules, tell him the rule, have him develop a plausible in game explanation for it, then have that explanation unveiled at the next big Hermetics convention.

A conjurer could walk within a warded area if not dual natured (ie, not a ghoul, shapeshifter or currently astrally perceiving). He/she could then summon a nature spirit relevant to the domain he/she's currently, or if a mage could labouriously trace out a circle and hope nobody objects to dragging a huge mound of dirt or a brazier into the warded area etc. A spirit conjured like this would not have to fight any astral barriers. If the summoner wanted to leave the warded place or pass through any other wards the spirit would need to overcome those wards unless as has been mentioned the mage doesn't mind spending a service to send the spirit to its home metaplane (instantly healing it of all damage) and then retrieve it again on the other side of the barrier(s). This can be used to bypass miles of earth too, for example, when dismissing a spirit on the surface of the ground and then recalling it within the bunker at the bottom of the mineshaft having passed through multiple wards in the lift on the way down, of increasing force, just to mess with any DN characters in your team and force you to deactivate all your foci, including your precious Increased Reflexes +5 Caster Only sustaining focus which it took you half an hour to cast on the way to the run.

An ally spirit and a bound free spirit never run out of services so they can employ this metaplanar shortcut as often as required.

Anyone, magical or mundane, who speaks the True Name of a free spirit forcibly summons that free spirit to their current location through a metaplanar shortcut. The free spirit doesn't have to fight any wards to get there. Nor does it need to fight any wards to leave; it can just step onto its metaplane and be gone from the physical and astral planes.

That's convenient if novels support the game rules but as has been said, they have literary license to do what they want (people like citing Talon's motorcycle ally spirit here) so I wouldn't go by fiction unless the rules say nothing about it at all - and even then take it with a pinch of GM discretion.

It's also convenient if SR4 follows the SR3 precedent.

Tell the player that wards block entry from the astral. Not entry from the physical world or entry from the metaplanes. If wards were to block spirit entry from metaplanes, then it should also block someone(that the creater of the ward did not authorise) to astrally perceive or project, because the physical and meta planes are different planes from the astral plane.

Right.
I need to increase my skill at English(Concise explanations).