Odd you should mention surgeons. Surgeons are a specialty off the basic MD, all of whom tend to specialize in a specific category.

Granted, not every mage will be interested in security, no matter how lucrative. But there are battlefield doctors in RL: what do you think a MASH unit was? Many mages will specialize, and security will be one big field to specialize in. The US military has enough doctors to staff every combat hospital in the field, every VA facility, every military base, every submarine and ship in our fleets, etc, etc. Not every doctor is interested in a military career, but enough of them are.

I just did some numbers on this, and you can probably expect to actually meet a security mage when you show up for 'work' I reckon.

My home town features 350000 people, of which 1% are magically active 3500, of which not all are mages. But for the sake of argument assume a third are, maybe a bit more. 1200 people.

Now of those let's knock out a further 20% for suitability reasons. maybe they are too old or too young or potentially unstable. (Your sec mages are going to have access to your most secure areas and they can read minds, so they need to be vetted!)

So with some fairly conservative numbers we have 1000 mages that are available in the population to work.

Lets say 2/5ths of those are attracted by the bright lights and big budgets of security work.

Thats 400.

Now we are talking on call security, so to have a guy on site, you need 7 (a point well made). that gives us 60 24/7 on call positions that can be filled. Now lets say that my town (being relatively affluent compared to the national average) has triple the number of mages, but of the triple the concentration of security mages quite a few are doing 'day jobs' like security research. So maybe we have 120 positions that can be filled

There are 3 major defense installations (airbase and two secure complexes covering a huge range of services), 2 major police centers, the parliament house, prime minsters residence, a couple of communications hubs, the national identities registries, the national criminal records system, government secure communications hubs, two intelligence agencies and a bunch of lower grade systems - like the welfare agencies.

Some of those sites are extremely sensitive (defense and the intelligence agencies especially) so I can see half the available mages disappearing between defense, the spooks and the cops (that probably gives you 1-3 mages on duty at all times in each building). Say another 3 positions are doing the PM, that still leaves you with 60 positions to cover the remaining big government departments and large corps. Hence even if the concentration here is only double you still have enough mages to provide a fairly rapid response. And thats only if your shadowrunners are knocking off the child support agency. The defense department has sec mages ready to roxor.

Edit: The flip side of this is if you go to a poor area - like, say, an urban combat zone - there will be exactly no mages anywhere because they will all have been offered cushy government jobs.

And frankly you would be totally mad not to take it. However, because adepts don't do anything that a better trained person cannot do, there will be the usual numbers of them running around.

If you don't believe all the mages are sucked out of poor areas though, there isn't enough mages in my town to do anything beyond secure extremely sensitive installations, so you wouldn't see them!

I was thinking 0.3% of the population are mages. Of course some of them will probably have magic 2-3 and not be that great. That said - big money on the table if you can manage to be 'pretty good'

I love it when the mage density topic comes up as it so often does. I'm getting serious Deja Vu, especially with that last post.

Cheesecake anyone?