As soon as I saw the name of this thread, I wondered how far in it would be before someone mentioned that....

of course, this is only true if it's dikoted. the dikoting is very important.

in any event, one very important aspect of materialisation is lost from inhabitation: the choice of many different forms for your ally spirit.

so materialisation is still more versatile than inhabitation.

(and arguably, a true form spirit would not necessarily look like it's intended host at all. consider insect spirits, for example).

I thought that was pretty clear in the Inhabitation and Ally description, but apparently needs to be highlighted:

-Frank

Well as written the true Petro Houngan sacrifices the child's mother to make a Great Blood Spirit, and then captures a kindergarten full of children to subsequently sacrifice to his spirit in order to make it do a one eighty.

And by "one eighty" I don't mean "turn around" so much as "add 180 points to its Force and destroy Tokyo".

Personally, I try to pretend that the Blood Spirit rules didn't happen. Honestly, I don't know why they happened. I pointed out the whole "unlimited power" thing months before the book hit the shelves and I submitted a version of Spirit Essence Drain that didn't do that. :shrug:

-Frank

As a general rule, spirits cannot interact with the matrix, AR or VR.

However allies with inhabitation power and a Hybrid Merge or a Flesh Form Merge are able to utilize DNI and "Augmented abilities". Which I think is the only case of them being able to use AR (If even then).

Even more interestingly, a Flesh Form merge gives them all the abilities/active skills/knowledge skills of the host. So lots of things are possible.

Inhabitation doesn't clearly address whether a flesh form still gets the spirit powers and modifiers to physical stats, and its implied that the host now uses the spirit's mental stats (since the host's mind is consumed). Seems to me a break around the need to purchase any skills for the spirit at all (in certain circumstances).

Example: Papa Grim, a Voudoun priest watched the horrific beating of his beloved spouse Callipso by some up and coming wizzer gang. Being a powerful Houngan, Papa Grim decides to "save" his wife (who he cannot bear to lose) by conjuring an ally spirit into her dying form (assuming he had the metamagic/formula/lodge/etc.). With the use of his binding dice, he helps sway the inhabitation test to a Flesh Form merge with her hibernating body.

Now his wife was no small fry voudoun priestess herself. So does this ally spirit have all of her magical skills/abilities (initiations?)/memories of Callipso + all the spirits powers (minus astral form) + the spirit skills + the physical stat modifiers??

In that case, it seems to bypass the need to "give" your ally a skill or spell while still gaining those benefits at no Karma....

What if it inhabited a decent hacker in a Flesh Form. Can it hack? It says under hybrid that unlike possession an inhabiting spirit CAN use DNI.

I'm still trying to figure this all out.

That's an excellent question. The original draft took a leaf from the old rules and gave Ally Spirits the mental attributes and Knowledge Skills of the conjurer. This statement was erased (though not completely, the astute can still catch a reference to that rule at the top of p. 106), and I have no idea what it was supposed to be replaced by.

This is the inherent problem with the committy design process. If one person over writes another person's handling of a problem without noticing that they are doing it, the problem goes unaddressed in the final document. I seriously don't know how Allies are supposed to use Knowledge Skills. I know how I wanted them to use Knowledge Skills, and I know that either Rob or Peter didn't like that, but if they ever decided to address that question it didn't make the final edit and I have no clue what their ideas on the subject - if any - look like.

Sigh. Yes they can. In fact, this is even more of a potential game balance problem because while combat prowess is kind of meaningless past a certain point (once you can kill a tank but can't beat a nuke, all numbers are pretty much the same), there actually are hard caps for how good a face can be. You can't destabilize the planet by being the hardest core mofo with a katana. But you can destabilize the planet by being a super human hacker or face man.

The oiginal document had Allies cost calculated geometrically, making Allies in excess of Force 6 an experiment in the theoretical rather than practical.

Heck, if you inhabit a human, your ally can handle VR. You can't expect them to like it, but they can use it.

Uh yes. Actually, the original document had Allies with the "Sorcery" power. The current version gives them the Magician quality with a prohibition on learning skills from the conjuring group. So if you inhabit a magician with your ally spirit it has the Magician quality and it has Summoning, so it can summon spirits on its own lookout. It can't subsequently raise its Summoning Skill, but now that it has one it can go nuts.

-Frank