As a purely specualtive question, would you allow spirits to remove astral signatures from spells and conjuring?
As creatures of magic they can create wards, so it would naturally follow that as astral space is their natural enviroment they could remove astral signatures.
However on the other hand, a metahuman magicain has to use their sorcery or conjuring to erase the damning evidence of their magical crimes, skills spirits don't generaly have.

Of course if the CSI magician see's the spirit doing this your id'ed anyway.

If you deem it possible, would you say it was one service per signature or one service for all the signatures?

Only their own.



Nope!

The book says only magicians using astral perception can remove signatures.

It doesn't mention any sort of skill test to do this (just takes one complex action per force) and doesn't imply that you can only remove your own signature. I could be missing something of course but that's what I've been able to dig up.

I don't get why a being capable of creating a ward couldn't remove signatures but it seems that by the book it's only magicians.

If I did allow a spirit or adept with astral perception to do it I'd allow them to remove all signatures, their own or otherwise, just as a magician can.

The rules don't say you can only erase your own signatures.

They do imply that you must be a magician to do so but that language is common to the entire section on 'Magical' actions and by the same logic only magicians are able to cast spells.

I don't see why a spirit can't erase signatures and how many services it requires depends on how you word the request.

I mean a spirit will happily slaughter hundreds of people for a single service depending on context and what you say to it, what's a few astral signatures between friends?

[Edit] Ninja'd

By the book only magicians can cast spells, SR4 p169, but spirits can definitely do that...

In addition to this, by the book a mystic adept wouldn't be able to remove signatures but would be able to learn the cleansing metamagic in Street Magic, a metamagic technique that non-mystic adepts aren't allowed to learn (presumably because they can't remove signatures).

So yeah... it doesn't follow the logic I'd use for it but that's how it's written.

House Rule wise I'd probably go with letting anyone remove signatures who can learn the Sorcery or Conjuring skill groups, rather or not they'd actually learned those groups wouldn't be relevant.

I think you have a point there.

I would let anyone capable of creating an Astral Signature have the ability to smooth them back out.

Shrug. I wouldn't let a magician erase another magician's spell signature without the Cleansing Metamagic. As far as I am concerned, each has to erase their own.

Why?

Incentive to get the Cleansing Metamagic.

Also, it just doesn't make sense to me. I like the idea of everyone having to clean up their own mess, unless they have someone specialized in that type of thing along to do it for them.

I guess it just doesn't make sense to me your way. If every other mage that can see it can interact with mana, can interact with auras (assensing), can dispel each other's spells, shield other people, and so on, I just don't see precedent for not being able to erase someone else's signature.

The only interaction I see with someone else's spell signatures in that list is Assensing (examining). Nothing 'hands-on' that would set the precedent for actually manipulating or removing another's signature.

The RAW seems to disagree but I do see where you're coming from (seems like in third edition you could only remove your own signature... maybe I'm misremembering though). It looks like the precedent now though is that a signature is just a bit of residual mana left behind by conjuring and sorcery and that magicians (and only magicians for whatever reason >.>) are capable of cleaning up that residue regardless of rather it was them that left it or someone else.

Keep in mind too that Cleansing doesn't just clean up signatures, it cleans up background counts as well.