No, the caster has to maintain it every few weeks. Given enough wards, at an hour per point, you end up spending all you work hours maintaining wards. When you toss spirits into the mix this changes matters, but you don't want to use random spirits to cast wards that matter, as the spirit getting notified doesn't exactly mean that he'll tell anyone.

But if the whole point of a ward across the entrance to a nightclub is just to stop people from walking in with running spells and it's under direct observation then a spirit cast ward is probably fine.

It's a little more common than that.

Whatever.

I never claimed otherwise. That's kzt's argument. My point is that Magical Protection rackets would world in the same manner as any other protection racket.

Funny, but it seems to happen all the time in Shadowrun.

Not to mention the political clout that Mafia backing can bring to the table. Something you seem to be discounting out-of-hand.

Shadowrunners don't actually pick fights with corps. They're just tools, which is why they're generally safe from prosecution or retaliation. There is no sense in blowing up a rental car that's already been returned to the lot because one of its drivers ran over your dog.

I meant "interesting" in the sense that the boundary between where Merlyns decide they're not gonna push their luck any further, and where KE writes off the loss, could be right where the PCs tip the balance one way or another. Not "interesting" in the sense of "I'm glad Fortune isn't my GM." I *prefer* a game with grey areas.

KE and its rivals have limited resources, large but limited, and if getting into a fight with a Barrens mage gang, or some street shaman with fanatic cult followers, is not worth the $1000 that the local Stuffer Shack franchise can pay (at best) for warding, then I see KE as saying "sorry, Stuffer Shack, you're not in our service area".

The local KE boss might grit his teeth, and wish to wipe out the Merlyns, and might try, but if he fails, then he's way behind on budget and has nothing to show for it. Nothing that *his* boss will consider worthy of a promotion, that is. If he gets outfoxed and drops four 2000 lb JDAMs on a meeting spot that the Merlyns abandoned yesterday... or even if a street gang *did* lose some leaders... what did those cost KE, and can he possibly make a return on that investment, or did that cost give Lone Star the slight edge that they're always looking for, to take over the local contract?

I also see this as where magic is less predictable than mundane firepower. If the Merlyns happen to have a member with fluke high stats and Astral Chameleon, and the local KE mage is a nothing-special wagemage, then KE's gonna have a hard time tracking the signature. If the wagemage *does* track the signature and sees blood magic, she might stop right there, and come out of trance saying "Sorry Boss, trail's unreadable, I got nothing", because she'd rather spend next week putting up wards in the A neighborhood, than start a ritual magic duel with an gang of unknown power... and who knows, maybe the Merlyns pay a cut to the Yakuza and can call in killer kami if things escalate.

Against a mundane gang, then sure, KE *knows* they can call in firepower until the locals are outmatched, and pretty much has to, to keep their rep. But if their warding sideline has erratic service areas... well, that's magic.

kzt, in another thread, has taken a "when the kid gloves come off, the big boys always win" tack, and I've taken a "mostly, but not always" tack, and perhaps that difference in perspective is parallel here.

In most games, and perhaps in canonical RAW SR, the PCs are mercs who get hired by Ares to raid Renraku this week, and get hired by Renraku to raid Ares next week. But in other games, the PCs might make a point of never working for Aztechnology, and will work cheap for anyone who wants to put a structural hit on Aztechnology. I find the latter more interesting.

WJ Williams' "Hardwired" and Gibson's "Count Zero" are classic source material for how I play, and in both of those, a main character gets hired by a corp, and by the end of the book, the corp goes down hard because the main character was a mercenary, but not *only* a mercenary, and happened to come across a tipping point situation.

I never mentioned 'shadowrunners'. I just stated that the concept of the little guy 'street scum' taking on the big guy 'corps' is not uncommon in the Shadowrun setting. It could be anything from eco-terrorism to the rebels in Aztlan and the Tir, to small corps gangs, or organized crime syndicates taking on bigger ones.

Sorry. I was a little touchy, and somewhat scrambled with a few too many things at that time.

Probably. You can't fight city hall when the reward for winning is getting killed in a "mysterious accident" or by "random violence". As the various investigative reporters in Russia are finding out, one by one. And there are few things that annoy a manager of a corporation more then missing his quarterly target because group of street scum is messing with his customers or the people his plan said should be his customers.

You have to be a full service business, as nobody who wants heavy physical won't want at least good magical security. And given the way wards work, you MUST have the response contract with the same company that put up the ward and you are going to pay recurring maintenance at about 3-4 week intervals. It's a lot better deal than selling alarm services.

And KE has to have a LOT of mages. You can send out a corporate memo to all the mages to have anyone who isn't otherwise occupied to send a combat force 4+ spirit to 1234 North Broadway in Seattle, wait up to 10 minutes before they go home and to kill any magically active metahuman within a block attacking a spirit during that time. And at 4 pm 250 mages who are not otherwise busy spend a complex action and 200 some assorted force 4+ spirits show up on the astral and wait for the fireworks to start. Which won't take long, as one KE mage shows up on the astral at a standoff range and has his spirits attack one of the leaders. Who can be pretty much expected to defend themselves, before dying in under a swarm of spirits, which should trigger all the other gangers to attack. You won't get all of them, but you'll get enough to send a message.

And it costs KE a lot less than sending in 200 armed guys and getting some shot up, etc.

And one hacker stumbles across that memo, leaks it to the right source.

Sacrifical mage (say unliked poor performer Lone Star patsy), is sent to the scene told there will send a team of backup spirits to provide overwatch, but they need to catch them by surprise, if any spirits try to leave the scene, to destroy it.


Witness mage, then sumons a low-force watcher spirit and tells it to buzz by the sacrifical mage, and then go to report to Lone Star (or whatever).

Sacrifical mage, sees spirit going away to send warning and engages ... triggering a mass assult on him...

Lone star now has evedince of Murder by Knight Errant via magical means and a MASS abuse of their powers, spread through out the entire corperation.

Knight Errant ceases to exist, and the cooperate council is pertty much forced to censure this huge abuse of power (for being 'caught').

Something as huge a 400 spirits (even if trivial for mages to summon and send), is a HUGE act, and Mr. Murphy (or Murphy Johnson) will step in to see that it goes horribly bad for whomever is tryign to cordinate something that big....

In a world of (flimsy) plausible denability and corporate profits, big overt, acts like this would cause major issues.

Which is why crap like that hasn't been done already to clean out places like the Barrens. I readily admit that it's possible, and KE are certainly the group to do it, as they proved in Bug City, but it isn't likely to happen.

Besides which, as I said in the very beginning, there really wouldn't be a conflict in the first place, as the two groups wouldn't share the same clientèle.

Except Lone Star doesn't give a crap about ganger street scum either. As KE got away with setting off a nuke in the middle of a major city, they are pretty good at handling minor issues like this.

And it's got a really tight window to make it happen, and you have to have the Lone Star mage hanging around on the street with a gang of astrally active mages who hate cops. I don't think that the Lone Star mage will get a chance to attack the watcher, as he'll be busy being dead.

- 1,494,500,000 (25% of Worlds Population in 1999/Vitas(2010)

Yes, but that is modern time problems, just like the tech things happened differently. For instance, from 2020~ to 2070, 50 years of ork breeding and if I read right, they throw out litters of 4-5? Donno.