This thread will go into detail why if you must have different spirits for threats based on mind sets than you much have them for all different mind sets.

The fact is that insanity is a tricky thing to put a finger on and the 100 monkey rules rarely works.

Insect spirits do not need separate rules neither do shadim(sp) but you may argue that deep meta-planer spirits do need separate rules. That is a valid point.

I will go into detail in this thread why threats do not need new spirits from a rules point of view, and from a flavor point of view first before I go onto deep metplot spirits.

One, what do redemption cultist, nihilists, rebirthist , atheseists , agnostic, polytheists, and ceril killers have in common? They all most all would likely say that at least have of them are insane. To a polytheists the idea that there is no gods is silly, just as the idea that we will go to hell unless we bow down to one and only one god... I could point out more examples of this sort of logic but let's face it. Go to nearest Church, and ask the preacher or whatever.. Is it okay for you to bow down to Zeus as well as Jesus..I mean Jesus is just away to great Zeus..Hey. Zeus .

Now let's get down to the myth of the 100 monkeys. See about I think 40 years ago people started to notice that some monkeys on some island started to wash their food before eating them. They put out this paper saying that slowly monkeys would teach other monkeys to wash their food.Or some monkeys would copy the other monkeys. That is until one day 100 monkeys learned how to do this. Then not only did the monkeys that island who were not in those 100 monkeys started to wash their food, but monkeys on other islands did the same... An over night thing. The problem is that well over 10 years of the study what really happened was that some monkeys learned to clean their food, and some did not. Some islands had more monkeys that cleaned their food than other but no single island had all their monkeys do this, and well...

This boils down to this, if magic worked in away it did not matter what you thought of you magic or how you thought as it clearly does. THen toxic magic should be the same

More later...

Here's the real reason to have special rules for threats: it makes them alien. It makes them strange and mysterious and different from the player and his ways. It allows the rules to reinforce the mood you're trying to create. The fear of the alien is potent.

This is especially relevant with shedim and insect spirits, who are meant to be nigh-incomprehensibly alien.

What? The Insect and Shedim don't follow my rules! The rules I sepnt all those years at MITM learning?!!!

That was a waste of my corporate scholarship.

The other side of this (that I like) is that in my game, I can use things like this to poke holes in UMT. It's a theory, a young one at that. I think it should totally be shown to be very flawed. Much like real science, where we find commonly accepted scientific concepts to be at odds with each other (like quantum physics and relativity). UMT doesn't work in my vision of Shadowrun. On the exterior it seems to work. But a lot of the math just doesn't check out. One day there might be a working UMT. Just like how in real life, there might one day be a working Theory of Everything. But we just ain't there yet.

The unified magic ruleset for all pc spirits is nice, and has outgame reasons. The GM always knows special rules better, because he gets to know beforehand that they will be needed.

Something as alien as a magical threat should get special rules BECAUSE the players will not say "spirit-5-whatever".

That is of course a completely different angle to look on things. Ingame I consider it possible that in the end the variance of metahuman-summoned spirtits is limited. Constructs of will, constructs of tradition. Individual aspects are different from the main but in the end just the same.

I'm not sure that someone being from America is such a good reason to feed them a book so hostile to the notion of faith. I assure you, we have our share of anti-religious hostility here. (I find it to be as just infuriating as I do raging fundamentalism.)

Im also hostile to drug abuse and child porn. Is hostility necessarily bad when backed by good reasons for it?

And the reason was not being from the states (I said the states, there are more countries in America then only the states), but his initial statement:

I hate for this to devolve into a religious argument on a shadowrun forum, but remember that atheism is merely the inverse of theism. "There is God" and "There is no God" both are absolute statements with no proof behind them. Agnosticism is the only side that can claim not to fall prey to dogma, and, to be honest, we only do so because we are sissy centrist fence-sitters.

Also, there is no justification for general anti-religious hostility. Some of the kindest people I know are devout Jews, Mormons and Catholics. They do not deserve your hostility, any more than a man who believes in nothing but does no harm does.

But the thing is, even if 80% of religious people are nice, 80% of the large-scale violence and oppression in this world is religiously motivated. The middle east, the fighting in northern Ireland, and yes, serial killers. The nice people do not deserve that hostility, but the force that drives the assholes definitely does.

Now that Thain has moved it back to Shadowrun, let's try and keep it that way. DSF is not the place for personal religious debate. Thanks.

Personally, I think of shamans as Jazz musicians, rather than rockers. Otherwise, you've got it right, Thain.

Reading this thread is like getting a fork stuck directly into my eye. Most of the people aren't even arguing about the same things back and forth to one another. I'm not sure anything is being accomplished. As I see it, there are several distinct discussions:

Faith vs. Reason

Faith is by definition believing in something that you have no logical reason to believe in. That's unreasonable. In fact, that's insane. The "inverse", or not believing in something for which there is no justification or reason is not the "same thing", it is in fact the opposite: reason and sanity. Atheism is not the same as fundamentalism, it is distinctly different.

A refusal to believe in goddesses, or marshmellow men from Neptune, or anything else for which there is no proof or reason for belief in, is not faith. It is the baseline of human existance. In fact, to do otherwise is only madness in its purest form.

Moving on...

Game Distinctions vs. Flavor Distinctions.

Many things that happen in the Game do not have a 1:1 correspondance with things that happen in the story. Sorry, they just don't. That's because the game is a system of story arbitration to keep us from just playing Cops and Robbers.

So sometimes two things will be different in the story and use the same game mechanics. Maybe you're hacking into a system and using your commlink to mimic another commlink that has legal access to the system, or maybe you're attempting to forge credentials to give your commlink and equivalent account status that will be recognized by the system, or maybe... whatever. It's a Hacking check resisted by the Firewall of the system you are hacking into. We use this same game mechanic all the time to keep one player who knows alot about IT from just running roughshod over another player who doesn't, and also so that the resolution of these hacking attempts will be "fair" one t another. Sometimes a magician is summoning a Fire Spirit, and sometimes it's a Fire Elemental, and sometimes it is a Djinn of Smokeless Flame. There's no pressing need for a different power set on those three spirits, and there is a pressing need for those spirits to be game mechanically balanced one to another so we use the same stat line in all cases. They aren't "the same", but we use the same rules.

On the other hand, sometimes we use different rules to accomplish exactly the same effects. For example, during the height of a gun fight one player might run down the street at full tilt and we'd make him roll sprint tests to determine exactly how many meters there are between him and the corner at each second of the battle. But later on in the same adventure, he might run down the same street and we'd just hand wave it. As soon as bullets aren't flying around on a second by second basis, we can jolly well just acknowledge that he runs down the street in a short period of time because he's fast.

The needs of the game are not always the same as the needs of the story. Soemtimes we use different game mechanics for the same action. Sometimes we use the same game mechanics for different actions. It all depends upon what differences, what conflicts we are interested in modelling.

Moving on...

The Threat Traditions in Street Magic

Were the Threat Traditions in Street Magic handled in an extremely clumsy fashion? Hellz yeah! The specific Toxic spirits written up are insufficient to complete even a single Toxic Tradition put forth in the same book. In an effort to inject some "style" into the "rules" they just became unplayable. The Toxics are just an excuse to play Magical Teaparty because you have to make shit up as you go along. The Blood Spirits are broketastic, I mean they aren't even affected by Evanescence because they are Materialization spirits (oh noes! I have to materialize at some point in a week, I hope I have enough time to spend a complex action on that before next Wednesday!) and of course are powerful beyond belief.

OK? Right. That's a problem. But it's also "not for PC use", so the fact that it's unusable isn't a big deal. That chapter would have been better with no rules in it at all, but that's also water under the bridge.

Moving on...

Morality, Madness, and the 'Twisted'

Let's face it: people with different cultural values from you are indistinguishable from the immoral and the insane. I don't particularly want to start a debate about whether a deontological moral system is practical or desirable, but I am compelled to point out that if someone else is following a different system than you are it is indistinguishable from your reference frame from someone who follows your moral code and simply repeatedly fails to live up to it.

So yeah, the basic implicit statement in the Threat Chapter that there are "good guys" and "bad guys" is pretty questionable. Nahualis in Aztlan are expected to endorse human sacrifice under specific circumstances in order to ensure a healthy harvest and guaranty the dawn. That's abhorrent to the Order of St. Sylvester, who believe instead that you must drink blood every week and flagellate yourself to remind yourself of the suffering of your master (who you ate). From the standpoint of an outside observer, both groups are kind of... off. Is either one "toxic"? Seemingly not.

The core difference between Insect Mages and Houngans is that the Insect Spirits come from a Deep Metaplane and the Loa come from a near Metaplane. That's worthy of interest. As an initiated hermetic magician you can just opt to go to Guinee and watch the Work Loa running around in their undersea kingdom, but you can't go to Klandathu without a Spirit Guide or an Astral Gateway (and even with one, you still suffer temporary Magic Loss while you are there).

But for all that, are they still morally complicated? Yes. Are they playable in a Shadowrun party? Yes. Could they have been done with a less perplexing series of game mechanics that were more in line with the rest of the game? Absolutely.

The "Twisted" paths are really just an excuse to be an asshole. They aren't different game mechanically from other paths of magic, there's just an asterisk on your tradition that leads to the footnote:

*: This character is a total jerk.

:shurg: The Toxic Paths are incomplete. They are playable in some but not all Shadowrunner Groups, but there's just... missing rules. Probably they should have had less unique rules altogether so that there would have been enough space in the book to fit all the rules you needed.

The Blood Spirits are... broken. They just don't do what they are supposed to do at all. That entire section is best left ignored.

And the Insect Spirits are... overly complicated. They would have benefitted greatly from being simpler and more in tune with the rest of the spirits.

-Frank

Good post

(Offical Frank Fanboi, well, most of the time)

Faith vs. Reason

Eidolon asked that this thread focus on personal religious debate, and I will respect that by trying to ignore this entire paragraph. But to paint anyone of religious faith as "insane" and define atheism as "reason and sanity" is historically ignorant, blatant hateful, and downright insulting.

But, I said I was going to try to ignore it. I will make no other comment about it.

Game Distinctions vs. Flavor Distinctions

I agree with you here 100%, which I pont out because I disagree with everything else.

The Threat Traditions in Street Magic

Nothing in this chapter is "unplayable" in the least. Toxic traditions require the gamemaster to decide on things beyond the scope of the sample chapter? (oh noes!)

Blood Spirits, routinely billed as one of the two most powerful forces in the game are... wait a minute... one most powerful forces in the game!? (oh noes!)

Come on! The chapter opens with a page and a half about how Threat Traditions represent the sort of penultimate Big Bad Evil Guy in the game universe. It speaks at length about why the GM should invest time in making them have motivation, backstory, and a true role in the story.

These aren't Monster Manual entries for random encounters, they are the baddie you build a campaign around. They get to do cool stuff.

Morality, Madness, and the 'Twisted'

The basic statement in the Threat Chapter that there are "good guys" and "bad guys" isn't something I find questionable in the least. There is such a thing as evil in this world, there are things that are morally wrong, and there is such a thing as sin.

I don't want to start a debate about secular humanism and relative morality, because that would lead to a discussion on personal religious belief. That said, something like 95% of the world's population adheres to some type of religious morality. Every culture, every era, people believe in good and evil.

These are real concepts, and they exist in one degree or another in Shadowrun.

Runners are criminals. They are theives. They are killers. Some might even be considered murderers, anarchists, or worse. But in the typical Shadowrun campaign, and imho the default tone of the genre, they are anti-heroes.

The anti-hero is a character who has some characteristics that are antithetical to those of the traditional hero. An anti-hero in today's books and films will perform acts generally deemed "heroic," but will do so with methods, manners, or intentions that may not be heroic.

Thus, anti-heroes can be awkward, antisocial, alienated, cruel, obnoxious, passive, pitiful, obtuse, or just ordinary. When the anti-hero is a central character in a work of fiction the work will frequently deal with the effect their flawed character has on them and those they meet along the narrative. In other words, an anti-hero is a protagonist that lives by the guidance of their own moral compass, striving to define and construe their own values as opposed to those recognized by the society in which they live.

Clint Eastwood's Man with No Name, for example, would be one heck of a Shadowrunner.

But the anti-hero is still confronted with enemies that truly evil. Especially important in anti-hero fiction, the villain must be truly repugnant, and must be at complete odds to the anti-hero's (and ultimately our) moral compass.

V for Vendetta's V is an anarchist, an assassin, and a terrorist. The society he fights against is worse. Sin City's Marv is a murderous bastard, but Kevin is a freaking cannibal...

Batman, well... Bruce has issues. But the Joker is just plain twisted.

Isn't Scientology only moneytheistic?

No to get away form religion and back tot he main points.

Under the new magic system they seem to say that magic and people some how follow the 100 monkey rules. That is if enough people all learn magic one way they will all cast magic on way. Note that in more rearguards the Deva, Angel, Elemental, and Kami of fire have the same powers, and same sats. The difference being in how they look and the spell category they fall into. They look different and may act different. Oh well. Now given that you could make a spirit of man look anything from, the divine embodiment of yourself, to a catgirl,to an angel,to a lost child,to a old monk. Why would you need rules for the Christen spirit of man or the Aztec one?

The toxic effect of being spirits of man with slightly different powers is no better or worse than the shaman summoning spirits, the hermetic summoning elemental, the Shinto priest summoning spirits of the elements... It just means the GM has to do some bullshitting. Look it is a spirit of man with some the power of spirit of Gerry Gygax(sp)

What I am saying is that you have all the spirits you need. But if you are going to make new one do not take old ones and add a twist..Look it is a fucktard spirit..It has the powers of the spirit of man but looks like a LARPER and has control over geeks.....

You are incorrect on a number of points there. First and foremost, not all branches of Christianity require a belief in the divinity of Christ in order to prevent damnation to Hell. Roman Catholicism, for example.

But, more to the question at hand, you asked someone to name a monothesitc religion that is not a "redemption cult." Now, I could have taken issue with your base assumption that all religions are "cults" but I did not. I focus on the key word "redemption."

There have been, and still are, any number of Christian Protestant sects that do not beleive in the concept of redemption. Most beleive in redemption, this is true, but there are those that beleive that salvation is through grace alone. Predestination, the most well known of these theologies, holds that God chose who would be saved and who wouldn't at the moment of creation... nothing done on this earth can redeem those who did not receive this grace.

It is, to my mind, a very bleak theology... But it is certainly not the sign of a ""redemption cult."

Technically, the core of Christianity is that everyone who dies goes to Hell where they are feasted upon by a worm and seared with flames. And then three days later, everyone who put their faith in Jesus will rise from their grave as an immortal zombie.

Needless to say, the promised Christian Zombie Apocalypse already fialed to occur over 1900 years ago, so I'm a little perplexed by the whole thing.

---

But yeah, while it is true that the core tennet of Christianity is that you will literally be Saved (or not) from death, there are still nominally Christian sects that don't believe that. They preach... something else... instead. I'm a little fuzzy on the details.

But hey, people have come up with all kinds of interpolations. I mean, when the whole Zombie Apocalypse thing failed to happen the first time there was a big theological debate and some people believe that you'll come back as a zombie at an as-yet unknown future date, while others say that the whole Z-Day scenario is just a metaphor for having your spirit ascend into a paradise alternate universe that noone has ever had any direct evidence of. Further, many groups say that the whole thing of Jesus going into Hell and then demanding that all his followers do the same for a like amount of time is itself a metaphor and that actually good Christians don't get condemned to Hell for any time.

You know, whatever. It's got 2.1 billion adherrants, it doesn't have to make sense internally. That would be like asking a straight Answer about economic policy from China and India at the same time.

-Frank

Frank, that is the saddest interpertation of Christianity I have ever read... and I've read a lot about it. (I am a historian by trainning, with an emphasis on european history (which, by nessecity includes the Church.))

Approximately one in six of the world's population counts themselves as members of the Roman Catholic Church; As one of them I can tell you, it does indeed "make sense internally." There is no zombie apocalypse, there is no giant worm, and... get this... you don't need to be a Christian to be a good person.

If you want to take the time, you can actually study the issue, and find out exactly what it is we beleive. We've got books, pamphlets, and DVDs. Heck, we've got a cable channel! (Rumor has it, there is also this sort of regular weekly meeting where we talk about this stuff too. I haven't been in a while. I work weekends.)

Anyhow, we've also got ourselves one of them there websites where you can find out every last peice of Catholic dogma, doctrine, tradition, and belief.

I know, I know, DSF isn't the place for personal religious debate. I am not interested in proselytizing here. I'm just pissed off that people are insulting my religion, and, more importantly, what I thought was a really, really good post (by me!) is now back two pages, and no one is responding to it any more! Grr!

Get back on topic before the guys with the salmon colored font lock this thread!

Actually it'll be gold.

I like the UMT info, a lot of good posts have come up on here that have given me some interesting points of view to use in my own game.

But this one really needs to stay on topic. There are relevant points, but as has been said, this isn't the forum to be debating religions.

Shhh! Do not anger the men with the funny colored font.

I've always liked the UMT idea, from when it was first introduced. One of my favorite charcters was a chaos mage/street mage of 19 yrs of age, that kind of grew into the UMT as he got older and more experienced.

UMT is acutally how I reasoned in the change to hermetics and shamans ways of summoning. THere's that little piece in IIRC SOTA 64 where it talks about some UMT guys managing to stop summoning elementals and learning to summon spirits. The new metamagic goes on to talk aobut how they made the switch to summoning spirits like a shaman, but couldn't do elementals any more.

I figured this in as a spring board, with magi-technology advancing so that a hermetic could learn to summon on the fly, and a shaman could learn to bind. Basically the UMT summoning bit was the next step in magic's SOTA, and the worlds mages learned that little summoing bit. My interpretation at least.

Well, I personally dont like this "hey, we have new rules, lets find some in game reason for the rules change" stuff.

I prefer that reality reset thing I forgot the proper english word for.

Edit: Ah I think it is retcon.

Sort of like Metallica playing a concert with the San Francissco Orchestra.

When the learn to summon Mantis Spirits without a hitch, then I'll acknowledge a UMT. Until then, me and my mentor spirit are going to continue to sigh whenever we hear a Hermetic talk about getting his 3.0 in "Grimore Design 202"

Edit: Retroactive Continutity, or retcon, is indeed the word.

reinterpratation? Suspension of Disbelief? LSD?

If you just want to hand waive it, just hand waive it, no biggie. I just do it my way becuase I like the idea of in increase in the Magic SOTA. Magitech if you will.

You'd think I would know better.

And that did work out how long? The first one-night-stand?

hehe... actually yes The character only made it through one session. Salt on the wound man!

While it is traditional to try to pass off Mantis as being the "most playable" - they are actually the least playable Bug spirit type. You have to keep so many balls in the air to keep the nest growing, and throwing up each ball involves killing a sapient creature. You need to whack some men to get the males, and whack some women to make the females, and you have to kill some insect spirits to get the energy to make more females - it's a really large murder tally before you've got anything remotely capable of standing up to the inevitable ant attack. And it involves essentially picking fights and snatching bystanders. It's totally a bust.

Contrarywise, consider a termite nest: You want some true forms, which can be made from... stray dogs. And um... eventually you'll want to make a few attempts at Flesh Forms, which is only really attractive as an option with fellow shadowrunners and company men. The only people you have an incentive to kill are high Willpower characters with lots of useful skills. And Shadowrunners already do that. You just run around with less lethal attacks and nominate yourself as the guy who makes fallen enemies dissappear.

Most Shadowrunner teams would be perfectly capable of working with a Termite Mage on the team. A Mantis Shaman is right out.

-Frank

Yeah I had a suprisingly hard time w/ mantis. One of the reasons I chose it was because you can get the guaranteed godo merge w/ females. But then I had the problem of finding somoen in a good enough position to bohter, but anyone worth while was going ot be difficult to remove for any amount of time without anyone notticing. Especially for a starting charcter. The plan was to be heavy w/ influence spells, but the character didn't last long enoguh.

Got the shaman killed because it was an insect shaman?

The character I made was part of the yaks. Low level obviously, since it was a woman, but with a bit of leeway, because she was a mage. I was hoping that would give me a little bit extra cover to work under. Wasn't a bad idea, I just didn't build the chracter right I think. Was still an interesting idea I'd like to take a second shot at some time.