Okay a player in my group asked me a question that got me thinking.

If an Adept has the living focus ability from street magic can he aquire the quickening metamagic to use with these spells?

I would say no,but I'm not sure. My gut says the Adept never has true control over the spell so can't quicken it, but the write ups don't make it clear. Any thoughts?

I always pictured quickening similar to Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time, tying the threads off of the spell you cast, which, to me at least, suggests a level of control of the spell beyond maintaining it. It really has no basis in SR magic I suppose, just how I look at it.

Sadly, I don't have a solid answer to your question. My call would be that adepts can't use Quickening unless they can cast spells (e.g. Mystic Adept), but that's just my personal interpretation/preference.

I'll add another question about the Living Focus power though, or maybe sustained spells in general. If a mage casts a levitation spell that an adept sustains, can the adept control the levitation fully or does the mage still have to "drive" him around? And more generally, if the mage casts and sustains a sustained spell on someone else, is it possible to give control of the spells effects to the person the spell is cast on? For example, if a mage casts levitation on another character, can the character control where he levitates?

An adept first quickens when he "dies" for the first time. After that, he can gain power by decapitating other adepts and stealing their quickenings.

There can be only one!!

They even made IV

There can be only five? Nah, that sounds so wrong. The highlanderish seven, that's the ticket!

"There can only be one t'ousand!"
- Nac mac feegle

To weigh in on the actual subject at hand: I'd say, as mentioned, that a Mystical Adept, as a blend of Adept and more traditional caster/summoner, would be able to learn Quickening, but a straight up Adept wouldn't, for mainly the same reason common to that stance. They don't know how to use Sorcery, they can't control Mana in that fundamental mindset.

To weigh in on the tangent in two ways.

First: AAAAAAUGH, another? Ok, bonus points for digging up the corpse of all of these actors careers, especially for bringing Methos in, but I see so much as one WWE wrestler and I will personally go make sure Adrian Paul has no chance of being the One.

Second: I actually had a viable set of rules for handling Highlander style immortality in 3rd Edition a while back. Sadly all of those rules where scribbled in the margins of the sheet of the one Immortal I ever made, and the sheet has been lost.