One of the mightiest and very useful powers that (especially) spirits can grant is the Movement power, with which the subject can move as many times as fast as the magic attribut of the critter, which in the case of spirits is equal to the Force rating.

Well, we all know the discussions about the movement power, how we somehow have to accept that you don't accelerate and so aren't subject to friction (appearently).

However, can one really use that power on a non-living object? Like for example, a plane? Which would then suddenly be superfast? Really really really superfast? Imagine fighter/bomber arriving to the aid of your troops who need air-support. They'll fly and be there in seconds, instead of minutes, and thanks to the rules to not having to be near anymore once you use and sustain the power, those fighter/bombers could even start from the other end of the continent and still arrive timely. Heck, firing rockets and missiles with the Movement Power, what fricking changes would that bring to the world in terms of warfare?

Or for a less gruesome usage, what about all those ships on sea? If you normally needed some days to arrive with your giant cargo freighters which transport goods and food and all those stuff, you'll only need a fraction of the time now. Or trains, who can deliver tons of cargo and passengers on the land. Inland-transports will speed away. Heck, space shuttles or whatever sort of transports they use to go from Earth to those nifty space stations up there will also need less fuel. Everything will need less fuel, while arriving even faster than we can. Heck, what about fuel consumption? If you travel so fast with your vehicle, you'll waste less fuel, and so can do those routes again and again and spend less money and time for refueling. After all, time is money. And the less time you waste, the more money you can make.
There might be perhaps limitation for the usage of the Movement power in urban areas, but outside there, on the ocean, the air, or on tracks, perhaps even in space, transportation would tremendously change.

Or is there some kind of limitation which I've overlooked? I sure hope there is one.

In typical SR4 fashion it is written in such a sloppy fashion it can do anything you want. My opinion is that this so screws up the entire world's relationship with magic as shown in the SR4 book and in Street Magic that it doesn't make sense.

The original version in SR2 "predator and prey" had increased damage due to velocity and caused a person to get tired much faster. So you were really traveling MUCH faster in a physical sense, which spirits could use an attack by having you suddenly going 400 MPH as you started into a curve. In which case you not only would lose control but get killed by the ensuing crash.

Aha. What else did the 2nd edition version of Movement do? How much faster did you go, what was the maximum speed you could have with it, and what effects did it have on non-living objects like cars, trucks, trains, ships, airplanes and further?

As long as we're talking about ways the Movement power should totally mess with the status quo, what if a spirit used the power on a bullet? Could you get a whole mess of spirits, and have them use it on the electrons in a computer?

I'm not quite sure what you are talking about, because I am pretty sure that the original version of the Spirit Movement Power appeared way before Predator and Prey (SR1 & SR2 core rulebooks IIRC), and I don't recall it being anything like you are describing.

Cleverly P&P page 74 they point out that these are the corrected version and to use the P&P version if they conflict.

P94
"unwilling creatures forced to travel at dangerously high movement rates may make an additional opposed test each time they suffer damage as a consequence of the forced movement. A creature cannot run a victim into a state of terminal exhaustion without prompting additional resistance from its target."

SR1 just has "may increase or decrease its victim's movement rate within the terrain it controls, multiplying or dividing the rate by the beings essence."

Assuming that Movement could make vehicles go faster, I don't think it would see widescale use. The world is full of millions and millions of vehicles. If they start moving super fast, they start to lose control and crash into each other. Grid control systems would be useless because they could not sense when something was moving by spirit, nor could they predict how it would behave.

But I think the idea is just plain impractical. Mages are too rare and too valuable to have them work as glorified truckers.

You'd think so, but look up "Long-term Binding" on SMp94. What would an airline pay a mage so one $60 million airplane could take the place of five $60 million airplanes? Would you spend 5 karma for five million?

It's insanely useful, but not even mentioned in the fluff at the start of SM, in "the Awakened World", and it should be if it's typically used.

I don't like this idea. My plan was to simply say it only works on beings, not objects. Or to subtract the object resistance from the force. It hasn't yet come up, so I haven't yet decided.

However, it's clearly not clearly expressed in the rules how or whether it should work on 90,000 ton aircraft carriers just like it works on a single person.

Magic and tech can work together, but it should never be totally harmonious. There's no real explanation of the Movement power other than that it just makes things a hell of a lot faster. So imagine the incompatibilities. Movement spirit power on a train, what would happen to the tracks? I have no real canon support, but if a spirit was running the trains down the rails everyday, I'd start to warp the tracks, the trains would sometimes be running on the wrong line because the spirit was attempting to take a shortcut. Also, spirits can be quite fickle, and wierd things might end up happening to the contents of the vehicle. Your everyday commuter probably won't appreciate that warm breath on the back of his neck, as the anima spirit reads his e-paper over his shoulder.

Any thoughts on how movement shows up on instrumentation? Do drones flip out when movement-ed? How hard is it to program them to get it?

Check out the rules for sustaining critter powers. They work like sustaining spells, just without the -2 dice penalty, and they can sustain a number of powers equal to the magic rating of the critter. You do not have to accompany the things you want to have your power sustained upon. You could have a Force 6 spirit using Movement on 6 trains, for example, and staying there at the side of the mage at central, till sunset or sunrise.
Also, in the various threads which already discussed the Movement Power (there are tons of them), the concensus was that there wasn't any harmful friction effects due to not having any penalties to handling nor any damage coming up. So, it's just some warp-bubble-magic-effect, appearantly.

But this thread is not for discussing such things. It's for the everyday use of Movement, and how useful, or even changing it would be, if the rules as presented in the SR 4 BBB really are meant to work so. Working as glorified truckers, nay, truly as speed force giver will make every summoner a well-paid man. In heavily populated cities, Movement might not be used that much. But I already said that. However, for cargo freighters, or airplanes, space shuttles, trains, whatever such things, they would heavily change logistics. Heck, the military use of Movement would make tons of airbases and carriers obsolete, as bombers and fighters could start way behind the lines, and still arrive faster there than normal unaltered planes, and still consume less fuel to arrive at their target destination. But don't hang yourself simply up on one aspect. In the civilian and the military sector, this power would be gold. Time is money.

Just consider the tremendous changes that having all those things altered with Movement will bring upon our world. What do the game developers have to say about that?

I've been lobbying to get these issues discussed in books literally for years. First time it was ever really mentioned to my knowledge is Augmentation, where DocWagon pioneers using Movement on Ambulances to avoid the noid and make sure that people don't get their pizzas for free.

-Frank

bad bad bad man

Yeah, Movement is way too open ended currently. Some things that need to be addressed:

• Spirit Powers and Object Resistance
• Does Movement Power bypass friction
• Is there a limit to the mass being moved?

I think that if all of these issues are addressed, we will understand its limits much more.

Also, the SR fluff often times does not reflect the implications of the rules. Magic would have much more effect on society than security, and Spirits do shit that is just plain crazy. I seriously think that there would be no shortage of people trying to use magic in every field, and Magic planes are just the beginning.

I think SR would be a more interesting game and game-world if Frank was the lead developer. This seems highly of unlikely and probably wouldn't work out so good for other reasons.

But yeah, if you look at what magic can really do the fluff totally misses it. Not to mention that most of the writers don't know what they don't understand and write rules that make no sense to anyone who wasn't an English major. Like the amazing disappearing photons from jammers and how you can ignore weapon range with a scope. It's annoying.

The Game Designers have to answer that question. Being able to grant the Speed Force from "The Flash" would tremendously whack the world in severe ways. Without any limitations, you're going to have missiles who arrive at their target from the other end of the world in less than 10 seconds or so, making every defensive measure absolutely obsolete. Smuggling would be unstoppable, because you couldn't intercept the Movement-enhanced transport before it showed up on your radar (especially combined with concealment, or if needed to, Vehicle Mask, or an Anti-Radar Spell, whatever). It's just insane.

Indeed the books are constantly talking about industrial enchanting as if anyone gives a flying fuck about magic items in Shadowrun. In practice the big money is always going to be in magically assisted production, transport, and healthcare. Frankly I have no idea what a corporation would want with Orichalcum. It's expensive, it can't really be produced in any predictable or large scale fashion, and most importantly of all it doesn't really do anything! I care about alchemy only up to the point where it makes spirit binding materials. Health spells are amazing, transportation effects are amazing (telekinetic effects go out to line of sight, meaning that you can lift stuff very close to the encroachment of space without spending any fuel at all), and shaping spells can allow you to put things together actually seamlessly. But yeah, the implications of magic on industry and society are rarely gone into in any detail. It seriously took until Augmentation for industrial Movement to get any love at all.

Now part of this is that the summoners and sorcerers who do the real big money stuff do so behind the scenes in most cases. The average man on the street doesn't really think about the container ships that go from Hong Kong to Europort at all. In 2008 the man on the street pays no mind to the fact that 60 years ago the ships made that trip in a few months and today they make it in weeks. In 2072 the man on the street probably doesn't even know that magically assisted container ships make the crossing in a week. All he knows is that those bastards in Seoul are getting the new Worlds of Starcraft chips a couple days earlier than he is, so they'll be Zerg Camping with leveled characters when his finally arrives.

When you walk through a major arcology it is not at all obvious to you that the walls were created as prefabricated ferocrete blocks that were then opened up with shape metal so that fiberoptics and relays could be placed unharmed into the middle of metal walls that would normally be cut and sutured with plasma torches. The end user just knows that the walls are durable and nice looking and filled with helpful and expensive electronics. The fact that this was only possible because the architect called for a powerful sorcerer to call upon the assistance of an earth elemental to harmoniously blend heat sensitive microtronics with load bearing columns with a melting point measured in the thousands of degrees probably never comes up in conversation.

But I would like at least one character to just go ape shit and go through the lists of spells and spirit powers and list off crazy industrial uses for them. I mean, we all get having a magician cast trid phantasm and then have an actual tridrecorder record the output so that you can do awsome special effects shots. But I'd really like to see stuff on using Levitate to do seemless mid-air casting.

-Frank

There's been some debate on this, and I may have missed it, but I didn't see the SR3 version of the Movement power in the debate.

SR3 version: roll essense vs. half the vehicle's body, each success lets you speed up/slow down the vehicle by it's normal base acceleration.

Not sure how that would translate cleanly to SR4, maybe a threshold of half the vehicle's body.

As Frank pointed out the last time we did this, this allows the spirit to crash at 150 MPH a car that is turned off, as there is no need for it to be moving.

Also note that it really doesn't affect trans-oceanic travel at all, as the extra couple of seconds it takes to speed up a plane or the extra couple of minutes it takes to get a container ship up to speed is virtually meaningless in the face of long distance voyages. The SR3 version is pretty much only good for high value direct transport (and bizarrely for telekinetically hurling cars off of cliffs), because velocity changes happen on a long scale relative to in-city voyages but a tiny scale relative to planes, trains, ships, and anything else which pretty much just goes in a line.

-Frank

But it seems that the SR 3-version makes it harder to make anything highly armoured go faster. Then again, the SR-3-Version also definitively proves it that yes, this Power is meant to be used on vehicles too.

So does that mean that the concensus is that all those airplanes, ships, trains and other transports do indeed move with spirit-assisted superspeed in the world of Shadowrun?

This feels a bit like D&D. We have something magical that is in the rulebook, and while the "adventure use" is clear, the implications on the game world are unclear. I think this is, until some clarification comes from the game designers, up to house ruling. I don't recall anything (other than a shadowtalk entry about DocWagon) in the sourcebooks concerning spirits working on ships and planes, so my guess is this is ignored so far, as D&D ignores the implications their "adventurers need this" spells would have on their world.

Not really. If you applied the Movement power from the initial time the vehicle took off it was actually more effective than it was on a human. An Osprey has a SR3 vehicular Body of 5. That means that the Movement TN (half vehicular body) is only 2. A Force 4 spirit gets an average of 3.3 successes, which means that per round the plane is accelerating 4.3 times its normal acceleration. If you start at zero that means that at any arbitrary point until you hit maximum speed, the vehicle is actually moving faster than it would have been moving had it used the normal Movement rules as applies to humans (a flat 4 times speed). The power doesn't start meaningfully falling behind until you get to container ships and super tankers. And even then you're looking at doubling acceleration instead of quadrupling it - and the maximum speed is the same. But on a trip lasting a base time of weeks, those extra seconds and minutes it takes to speed up a tanker are essentially meaningless.



Not all of them. Just big and expensive ones. Easyjet probably has a number of flights that aren't powered by Movement. Trips across the Pacific would probably all be Movement enhanced, because fuel isn't free.

-Frank

I guess that a lot of people won't like the idea of relying on magic to propel their vehicles. You can assure them that the spirit can also protect it from crashing and that even if it does crash it won't be that bad, they can even witness it with their own eyes and still they'll be reluctant to let those weird mages and even weirder spirits take care of their vehicles.
I'm not saying that nobody will accept, but it won't be as wide spread as if it was a technological mean.

There are also lobbies and marketing issues. Why buy S-K or Ares latest plane (10% faster and more efficient) if you can do the same with a 5 years old plane and a spirit? A corporation will only sell a new service if they can get more this way than the way they did before.

They'll probably use the Movement power in some situations (especially military/urgent situations) but I doubt it'll be common use.

Besides, there aren't that many mages around and with something as recent as magic with as much to discover, R&D might seem more valuable. Sure your mage can cast a fireball today... but maybe he'll be able to mind-control the whole population in 10 years if you have him study magic instead of just casting fireballs.

Actually my players use this technique to travel: a container on which they cast levitate, invisibility, movement and concealment (the mage who casts these spells and summons the spirit is quite powerful). I don't really see how I could prevent this, and they can practically get anywhere on earth with all their gear and without being noticed.

The whole "there are not many mages around" argument does not work. If somehting is as valuable as spirit movement, people will pay enough for it so those mages summon spirits fot them - instead of risking their life in the shadows, for example.

Given how expensive fuel is, planes could afford to get spirits bound to them. And for a price that allows the mage to spend a lot of time on research.

Finally, it's not "recent" anymore. There are 2 to 3 generations now that grew up with magic in 2070. That's more time spent with magic than with PCs today.

If anything at all, they're trying to research time travel and teleportation (which we know that in SR, this will never suceed, but the people in the setting don't know it). And meanwhile, they'll research a way to make the Movement Power into a Spell, or even enhance Spirits to make the Movement Power even more effective.
Humans will use this awesome power to full extent, make no mistake. Having an old air-plane that is 5-6 times as fast as the newest state-of-the-art-superfighter just shows that that Power isn't really balanced for the game world itself, but that would be the consequence.

The official Shadowrun World is full with vehicles powered up by the Speed Force.

Of course it's possible. Harlequin did it. Though I think it was called nether walking or something. Sure to require a very high level of magic, but hey, it is possible.

I will at this time point out that in SR3 driving tests could be made to increase the accel rate of a vehicle with successes on a handling test as a multiple to the acceleration rate of the vehicle. A skilled (4) rigger with a VCR 2 (-4TN*) would do at least as well as the spirit for any vehicle with a handling rating of 6 or less. This can also be done remotly if the vehicle is on a rigger's network, so an entire airport could be controlled during the most precarious portions of the flight by one rigger for each runway in use.

Both together might save another 3.8 seconds of accel time, or might justify a harder TN for the rigger. Either way, the tech side is easier and more convenient for most applications. The spirit version still has the advantage of being more versatile in what it can apply to (such as no-tech bicycles), but rigging is more potent for commercial and industrial use by SR3 rules.

*Was this changed in errata? I'm just checking my SR3 book and it says -2*rating but that doesn't sound quite right.

strictly speaking, the reference you're remembering is most likely referring to the limitations on sorcery, not on magic. that being said, not having time travel and teleportation really makes for a lot less headaches, so i suspect that shadowrun will likely want to keep them out of player's hands, at any rate.