I am reading in preparation for a campaign that I am planning to start in the near future (waited until Augmentation) and I was curious about something. This is mainly addressed to all of you gms out there. If you had to tell someone what the highest Initiate Grade possessed by a metahuman (no dragons, immortal elves, or anything like that) in your campaign world, what would that number be? How high would you let it go? Thanks.

In the sourcebooks, metahuman initiates tend to top out at Grade 9 for the true badasses.

In my game 4 is really high and 5 is a-mazing. YMMV.
Grade 5 is ((10*5)+(3+6+9+12+15))*.6 = 95*.6 = 57 karma to achieve.
Backing that with matching magic points is an absurd amount of karma. At best: 3*(6+7+8+9+10)=3*40=120 karma

I really haven't seen much reason to boost Magic very high. If I initiate, it's to get a "cheap" metamagic and/or boost the effects of my metamagic (for the ones that use your grade to determine their effect).

Joining a group and taking an ordeal (many of which are easily done, especially for runners who can often cover a Deed every other grade) reduces th cost by 40%. Getting to Grade 5 is extremely easy, costing only [5+(8+9+12+14+15)] 63 Karma plus monthly dues and whatever demands each ordeal entails if any. At that point it's just cheaper to buy the next five metamagics if that's what I'm after; only boost beyond that is the bonus from your grade. Which is nice, but +5 is more than nice enough of a bonus.

Getting moderate to high initiation grades isn't that difficult and I assume most average magicians are around Grade 3 if they've joined a group, which is extremely common. The only reasons to go very much higher is purely for the metamagic boosts, and a Grade 10 or even 12 magician wouldn't be uncommon amongst the heavy hitters in my games.

But then I tend to prefer heavily magic-oriented games, so it's not quite as bad as it sounds if you're used to playing with sprawl gangers and thugs.

[EDIT: Nevermind, I forgot for a minute how the grade improvement works}

My own GM tends to top out his NPCs at around 6 or 7, since it's rather expensive for even a superior prime runner to have the Magic stat to support the grade beyond that level. That's pretty strong, especially with a full suite of foci. I would think grades 1-3 should be pretty common for professional magi. I've always figured the reason you don't see many high grade initiates has as more to do with the relative scarcity of mages in general than it does with the cost of initiation.

Due to a hard cap on magic, the absolute best Metahuman mage in my games would be an Elf with Magical Aptitude, which would allow him to be as high as a 12th grade initiate, putting him on par with a baseline Great Dragon. (The highest Great Dragon, by the by, could be as high as an 18th grade, 20th if it had Magical Aptitude).

They'll never meet those people, mind. That's, like, Harlequin powerful.

Grade 3 is plenty fine for a high-end WageMage, while the strongest in the city of Philadelphia (The runner's place of business) is a grade 7 Initiate of the Green Dragon triad. Mind you, that one's recently come into an object of great power and is suffering Focus Addiction from it. Oops!

The Black Lodge has a Grade 6 initiate running things, while MCT's top researcher, who can't throw combat spells to save his life, is also a Grade 6. He's the most powerful "Known" mage, getting TV time and the like, helping MCT with PR work. The Green Dragon's mage is known to the shadows and anyone that dips into Chinatown regularly, while the Black Lodge guy is, at best, a rumor to most. The Lodge has public "Lodge Houses" in the city, where wannabes and older folks gather like modern Masons, but the *real* stuff is quietly done in the suburbs.

Of course, all of this happens in the second-largest city in the UCAS, but in a home campaign, so isn't official. Awww.

STILL! Having the benchmarks handy for the big guns is nice, just so the players can look and go, "Okay, in the grand schme of things, where do I fit in?"

Thanks for all of the replies. I appreciate you all taking the time.

Wakshaani and I both house rule Hard Caps into Magic, although we have slightly different values.


Personally something to remember is that since ( Rating 4 ) is the same as Third's ( Rating 6 ), those ( Grade 9 ) Initiates should only be ( Grade 6 ) as well.

Initiation is something special in my game. I have the "average" mage in my game have Magic of 3. By that I mean demographically. The people the runners come across average higher because of the nature of their business, but I try to present a world out there where the average mage isn't super-powerful.

Given that this is the average magical ability, and that average skills such as Sorcery and Conjuring will also be around the three mark, I see there being a fair bit of room for growth without initiation.

Most of us here are capable of getting a doctorate if we really want one. Most of us here are capable of training hard and eventually running a marathon. How many of the people do you know who do push themselves that far? Most of us don't go for the doctorate because what we've got is "good enough." A wage mage has a fat paycheck, gains instant "wow" when he hangs out in a bar and has membership in an exclusive club of special people.

If you've ever thought about learning a foreign language for example, and not got very far, you've just failed at half of what it would take to become an initiate. Some people do, but without needing to a lot don't.

And aside from that, there are other needs for your karma. The typical Shadowrunner, with no family, no nine-to-five and no boss, has a lot more time and opportunity to pursue initiation. Mr Wage Mage has a boss who keeps insisting that he bind spirits for a year and a day or create foci, etc.

And add to that, not everyone may be capable of initiation (especially the higher grades). It costs 45 karma for the office manager to get his Logic from 3 (typical for someone who's gone into management) to 6. That's considerably less than the 63 karma that Dr. Funkenstein described as "extremely easy" earlier on. So if you want grade 5 initiates running around as wage mages, you have to ask yourself why every manager isn't also a verifiable genius. The answer is that even though the rules allow this to happen, it doesn't mean that everyone can. Augmentation aside, could you or I or our mothers get to Strength 6? Of course not, even though in theory they could spend the karma to do so.

Initiation for a wage mage is rare in my game, occuring only in very wealthy or significant places.
Initiation amongst criminals is only mildly more common.
Initiation amongst shadowrunners is reasonably frequent.
Initiation amongst academics (in their field) or isolated mages with a quiet life, is quite common.

Because I see initiation as representing more than just an extra metamagic technique, but instead an a spiritual epiphany of some kind, individuals in my game with a high initiation grade tend to be significant players in some way.

Hope this helps,

-K.

Managers don't always have to be "better" at their jobs to be managers. For example, an experienced burnout with quality knowledge and social skills could be make a valuable project director. Anyway, just because a lot of us feel that grades 1-3 should be pretty common, that doesn't mean that 5 or 6 plus isn't somehow any less impressive. By any measure a Grade 3 initiate would be a valued employee riding high on the payscale. Grades like that and higher in the corp world are probably at least the equivalent of a high powered trouble shooter or consultant, tasked with "working" at multiple sites via the matrix, astral projection and loaned services, with the ability to pull rank and order around security teams if they have to. The term spiritual epiphany, however, carries too much baggage as far as I'm concerned. Initiation is really a blanket term for many different traditions; Shamans may accomplish a metamagic feat with guidance from his mentor while a Hermetic may uncover an unintuitive but effective new way to tap into the astral, or perhaps simply away to work around their own mental blocks (which is essentially what many self-imposed geas are).

Uh-Oh, looks like dogs and cats are thinking about living together again knasser because I almost agree.


Basically the way I see things as working is that ( Grade 1 ) Initiates with ( Magic 3-4 ) are the "norm" among Mages in general with more then a couple years of slinging mojo under their belt, and Quickening is one of the first Metamagics corps "encourage" wageMages to learn.

Grade 1 or 2 is common, as any mage will be able to reach those. The average magic attribute of 3+ for professional mages (types with magic 1-2 will likely stay untrained) is enough to allow that.

Grade 5 or 6 is already rare - few have the required potential from the get-go, and raising magic requires "a lifetime". Compare the grades to established martial arts. Black belts are rather common, white-reds less so, and 9th dans are few and far between.

Remember that just because someone's a grade 3 initiate doesn't necessarily mean they have the dice to sling massive mojo around. For example Cleansing, Great Ritual, and Geomancy metamagics are all talents that are generally more valuable to magical groups and the corps than they are to a runner team. Great Ritual in particular I could see being required as a first metamagic technique in many traditions and magic groups- You simply act as a magical "ground" to help siphon off any excess juice for the sake of the group, and it hardly takes much raw talent. I think it'd be quite credible to find a peaceful Wiccan/druid/whatever group that has several mid-grade initiates practiced in Great Rituals, healing and Geomancy but little else. Such a group wouldn't even really need anyone with a magic score higher than 3 or 4 or even a total dice pool bigger than 5 or 6 for most spellcasting. Very vanilla, but perfectly possible and quite thematic. There's bound to be entire groups and traditions that emphasize initiation at the expense of raw magical power or even spellcasting in general.

The highest I have in my game at the moment is a grade 6 initiate (a sterilist toxic magician who works for MCT).

I have never had an occasion in my game to need to know this, and odds are no character would know this either, but a quick-and-dirty ballpark estimate would be, not counting IEs and dragons, probably 12ish.

Here's a relevant quote on Initiation Grade from the FAQ:

The thing is that some players feel that "High grade initiates" fall more in the line of 20+ grades of initiation. I've heard talk, in fact, of teh Immortal Elves all being at least double digits, by which people mean 50+. Some have pegged Harlquin as a 100th grade initiate.

These are the numbers that make little Wakshaani's topple.

Nah. Harlequin's high double-digits, max.

Erm, yeah, double digit initiation is some hardcore stuff. I mean, just because I believe that there is actually a fair amount of Grade 3 wagemages running around with a High lifestyle and fistfulls of nuyen doesn't mean that I think hitting double digits should be considered remotely normal. Hell, when I read about the Saeder-Krupp researcher in the Mana Void example in Street Magic, I remember thinking "Whoa! An 11 Magic attribute!", and that guy was "only" a Grade 5 Initiate. So I think it's important to remember that Initiation, while important, is only one of several ways of gaining magical power. I've had a grade 5 Mage myself once. He sure as hell didn't have no 11 Magic though. I'm prepared to believe that there's a fair amount of guys out there with an average Magic attribute (3) who've pushed themselves hard and initiated as far as that magic attribute will let them go, but I'm not prepared to think that there's terribly many guys out there slinging double digit mojo. And apparently that kind of power is enough to convince the big S-K that you should be sent into space to perform cutting edge magical research on Lofwyr's dime, so I'm pretty confident in saying that kind of thing is well beyond the street level most runner teams will be operating on.