The Knack positive quality says that it lets a character have one spell he can cast or one spirit he can summon. It makes his magic 1, that can not be raised. His magic is however effected by essance loss. Knack is also imcomptatble with adept , mystic adept and magician qualities......

Does that mean a character with a knack can not be modified in ANY way.. no adept, no cyber, no bioware, no genetech, basicaly nothing but armor and guns? Thats a hell of a lot to be able to cast one spell poorly. By my reading of the print, I cant see any other way.. has this been chnaged in an erata or even debated?

I treat it in the same manner as Latent Awakening. As long as the character's Essence is over 1, then they are still able to take and utilize the Quality.

We've seen that Edge is a magic of it's own with the right gear, so I don't mind it.

PLUS you can still initiate.

Though that's advised against.

I've been looking at ideas for a spell knack character and unfortunately the big problem is that most spells are fairly useless at low force levels (bear in mind that you can only overcast to force 2) and that limits your successes (in the case of overcasting to force 2, you can get a max of two successes and are taking physical drain for that much).

I did find one spell that would be useful as a spirit knack but it would need a good concept built around it: Shapechange or [Critter] Form would make a for a cool spell knack. Similarly a tech character that has a trouble sleeping due to not realising he has spell knack and repeatedly uses the crank spell on himself until drain forces him to get some rest.

Don't forget that you can get more hits than a spells Force with Edge, Mr. Croup. That can help make Spell Knack a little more useful, if you're willing to get enough Edge to make it so.

good point, i completely forgot about edge.

Still, without edge it doesn't do very much, especially when you consider that both Latent Awakening and Adept Qualities are the same price.

Ah, but as we've noticed, you can't get further augmentation without killing the magic. So you are mostly an uncybered mundane. What are you going to do besides pump up edge?

I looked at spells that worked well at low levels a while ago when thinking about a cyberzombie mage. Detection spells often work well even at low levels. Heal also works well, as even a box or two of healing will stabilize a character and make a good top-off for a medkit.