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Jaid
QUOTE (Athanatos)
I'd imagine it would atleast involve some drain. And some negative mods to rolls. I pretty much thought that it would atleast give a bit more in the way of minor advance attacks and taunting that seem to fit petty well with mages in various Games/Movies/books etc. Not that I think Shadowrun has to have everything that other venues have, but I would think that atleast some Awakened would develop the ability.

And probably involve some damage/temporary penalties if your Manifested form is disrupted by attacks able to effect it. Maybe even possibly death!

damage taken by astrally projecting mages is dealt to the mage's body. the *least* this should do is damage the mage's body when the manifesting mage is hurt.

if you really want to have the mage taunting people in advance, give them an ally spirit that looks exactly like them. problem solved. the players won't know the difference until they confront the actual mage anyways.
Athanatos
Ah, that is actually a pretty good idea. It atleast makes it look like you're mocking the "Mere Mortals!" lol.

Sterling
IIRC, the only way an astral projecting mage can cast on the physical world is if he were to attack a dual-natured target, and only mana spells would work, including area-effect ones. The rule was (and again, this is me up late and trying to recall the rule in question) an astrally active character can only cast spells at other astrally active characters. The whole point of manifesting would be to allow your mage to astrally scout (and a GM might consider barghests, wards, and a whole slew of other drawbacks to this tactic) and then manifest and relay to the team what he or she has seen, etc.

Now, the flipside is that if you choose to get creative (and half the time I have to read the rules carefully to close loopholes, my players get very... creative.. at times) you could have a gutsy player give his character the 'dual natured' trait from the SURGE, which means your astral mage could heal that character... and would probably have to quite often. Another tactic could be a Squirt or gel round filled with that astrally active bacteria, which means a sammy could 'tag' a target and sit back for the nuke, sort of a magical version of target designation. Manifestation also works really well for confusion purposes, as the old rule of 'shoot the mage first' doesn't work so well when bullets whiz right through the mage apparition.
odinson
I'm pretty sure they changed that. I thought only astrally active objects could be hit from the astral plane. your sammy could tag someone and the mage could nuke them but unless they were astrally active all he would do is kill all the bacteria.
Sterling
QUOTE (odinson)
I'm pretty sure they changed that. I thought only astrally active  objects could be hit from the astral plane. your sammy could tag someone and the mage could nuke them but unless they were astrally active all he would do is kill all the bacteria.



Odinson, that's a valid point, but rereading the rules it seems a little vague. Under the rules for single spell targets, it does indeed state that a mage on the physical realm can only hit other physical targets, and that astrally active mages can only hit targets that have an astral form. Dual natured or perceiving mages can hit either. But then it mentions that astral forms can only take mana spells, which seems only natural.

But the next section doesn't clarify the point when referring to area effect spells, it just says that you can target an area or point in space, hitting all valid targets in the area of effect.

The debate would start with whether or not the targets in the spell's area of effect were considered 'valid' if the caster was in astral space and the target was dual natured or an astrally perceiving and surrounded by non astral targets.

The Basic rules don't seem to be clear enough one way or the other, and from my viewpoint, I'm recalling previous editions that mentioned things like 'grounding a spell through a target', and things like that.

The answer, it turns out, was in Street Magic, and you're correct, it clearly says if you cast a spell in astral space it only affects targets in astral space. They did indeed change it, thanks for pointing that out.
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