Only by inference. Pg. 47 of MitS details all the things that -Sorcery- cannot do, which includes a lot of the effects I was talking about (teleportation and space/time manipulation being the two biggies, but there are others). In canon, there's no advancement of the sorcery skill into the realms of metaspells, which is fine for most campaigns, since most people (I suppose) aren't running groups like mine, where the runners are in the 1000+ karma range, and still playing. But the canon rules don't specifically say that those restrictions on sorcery are restrictions on magic as a whole; it says -sorcery-. This implies, to me at least, and also to the fine people in the Hoosier Hacker House campaign (and I admit that I use a lot of their material), that sorcery is only the tip of the iceberg. So in answer to your question, no, there are no canon rules that I can find for non-sorcery spell casting allowing the manipulation of mana in uber-powerful ways. But that doesn't mean that those techniques can't be invented by a sufficiently intelligent GM and group. Take a look at http://www.hoosierhackerhouse.com/arc/mtf/..._metamancy.html

Not canon, but darn cool.

Fair enough Not everyone has to agree with me. At least not until I finish my doomsday device

~J

I suppose that I should also say that, to ballance metamagical spellcasting, it is very, VERY noticeable. Like, every time the mage in the group casts the spell 'Gate' (which opens a gate between any two points in space, distance not really an issue) there's the equivalent of an astral flare at the entrance and exit of the gate, which temporarily raises the background count of the area and potentially attracts all kinds of nasty things, like dragons and free spirits, who want to know what the heck is twisting the manasphere in such a wierd way. Let's just say that he stopped casting Gate unless the group decided that it was really, really necessary. If you want to go to Paris, take the plane, unless you want to deal with several large, curious, European dragons of as a welcoming party.

Problem is, that raises the question of why the dragons aren't able to Gate. And if they are, well... also, Harlequin really should be able to, and as for that pretty much all IEs, and then you've suddenly made things that people already complain about being too powerful and unkillable even more so.

~J

Harley and company are "statless" NPCs. Thus there's really not any such thing as "too powerful."

What this games needs, badly is some Immortal Dwarves.

"Ay laddie, we stayed around during the downtime to teach those pansies a lesson!"

You're right. In my campaign, great dragons and lots of the IE's (though not all) are capable of casting some really, really nasty stuff, including Gate. Of course, in my campaign, the current nemeses of the group include a couple of the worst horrors ever to walk across the metaplanes (Verjigorm being one of them), so gating to Mars isn't really going to save anybody's hoop, and they know it. Also, just because they -can- cast things like Gate doesn't mean they do it without breaking a sweat (or bursting a hemisphere, as it were), or that they cast spells like Retroactive Annihilation to punch holes through a ream of paper 5 minutes ago. The big nasty metaspells have serious consequences, and the Dragons, the IEs, and my PC's know it.

MitS does actually give direct support for spells which manipulate gravity.

Which, by extension, would mean the possibility of teleportation and time travel?

Where?

~J

I think he means levitation

Wasn't it in DC's DK2 where the government chained Flash to a treadmill/turbine and had him power the eastern seaboard for the rest of his life?

Heh, I'm guessing that most Quickenings are seperated from whatever they're affecting, but if one is incorporated in a process such as a generator then all mechanical parts receiving the energy may be magically charged in a kind of fallout. Or maybe not.

I think that if you give a Quickened spell a physical body with the intent of giving it a perpetrual task you've created a spirit and that could just get tricky. There probably IS a union.

P.S/ As far as I know from Awakenings, Divination is a read the present spell. It tracks auras and intentions over a very extended range and draws up a list of what's extremely likely to happen if conditions aren't changed, but it's no real guarentee, just an amazingly well researched prediction.

I knew I'd seen the effect of a Gate spell having something to do with Harlequin! Thanks Senchae; I feel vindicated.

Technically, I believe they use a sort of Earthdawn-era Metamagic whereby they can physically enter the Astral.

Woo! So still no teleportation. Good.

~J

at the speed fast movement goes with thie INT, it might as well be teleportation, of all purposes it really is.

For all practical purposes, yes. For all theoretical purposes, very very very no.
Hell, for all practical purposes, Newton was right.

~J

That 'enter the astral physically' is called Netherwalk. Also in the uber-powerful metamagic category.

For all proctical purposes, I don't think we're really discussing what's possible/not possible in Shadowrun in canon. We're discussing what's possible or not possible in our own game universes. Whether Netherwalk, Gate, or 'just' high level air elementary is used to get from point A to point B at rediculous speed, it's still not canon, and all of them can be argued to have a precedent, depending on how you interpret vague things that some of the super-powerful people in the novels/adventures have done.

Actually, we are discussing canon, specifically the interpretation of whether or not the restrictions on sorcery apply to magic in general. I'd say they do, but we can't get a canon interpretation of the canon statement.

~J

And in the Harlequin example, this is something he has done in canon, several times.

Yes, but do we have a canon answer for exactly how he does it? If the answer is that he physically enters the astral, it's not teleportation, and the can of worms isn't opened.

~J

And by that style of canon (ie, literature instead of rules), vampires can have cyberware, too. I tend to dismiss literature as "canon" for those purposes; authors tend to ignore rules (or are completely oblivious to them) for storytelling purposes, just like GMs do.

I think when they said that the novels and whatnot are "canon" they were referring to the storylines, not necessarily the rules interpretations/house rules included therein.

I will be amazed when someone actually finds 'proof' one way or the other.

I'm curious: why is it important if super-magic is canon or not?

About the magic-powered generators concept.... just for fun, here's a little bit of physics to calculate just how much bang you get for your drain. Obviously, it would vary a lot by the spell and the interpretation of how it works, not to mention mana-efficiency questions, but it's a starting point....

Let's take Magic Fingers, which is basic telekinesis allowing you to move something at MagicRating x successes Meters/Turn. Let's say a skilled but uninitiated mage with a Force 6 spell gets 6 successes, so that's 36 m/T, or 12 meters/second. Let's say the same mage can get 6 successes with TNs of 6 (reasonably generous, no?). That let's him move an object of just under 300 kg (at 300 kg, TN would be 7).

Let's say he moves the object straight up at 12 meters/second, and then lets it fall, releasing the energy into some kind of generator arm. The potential energy added during his lifting it up is Mass*gravityaccel*distance, which in this case is (300 kg * 10 m/s^2 * 12 meters) each second, or 36,000 Joules per second. In other words, that's 36 KW.

The United States right now uses a rough total of about 10^12 Watts of electrical power (thank you, Google), or 1 billion KW. You would need around 27.8 million Quickened Force 6 Magic Finger spells to run this country.

Now, on an individual basis, developed countries average 7.5 KW per person of power use and undeveloped countries around 1.1 KW per person (round-the-clock -- you use more when you drive, for example, but you only drive a short time). Based on that, a highly skilled (Shadowrunner-grade) mage could provide power for a family of 4 in the developed world, or a talented shaman could maybe run a generator that supplies a whole primitive village of 30 people with minimal appliances.

A crappy mage (say, 2 successes on 99 kg with Magic rating 4) might generate only 2.7 KW, or just enough to run his electronics. An amazing mage (say, 6 successes on TN 10 (700 kg) with Magic rating 12) might generate 168 KW, or enough for 22 people in the developed world -- maybe his whole apartment complex.

Now, in terms of cost... 1 KW-hour of electricity costs about $0.10 right now. If your average mage charges say 5000 nuyen per point of karma for the Quickened spell, then one 36 KW spell (Force 6, cast by a very good mage) costs you 30,000 nuyen. That's being generous -- assuming the mage doesn't charge you any on-going fees for that link back to him. You would expect 300,000 KW-hours for that in electrical terms, at retail prices, so this spell needs to stay up for 8333 hours (or just under a year) to pay the mage's fee. That's not counting the generator system, security for the area, and the distribution cost. We can assume that break-even on this would be several years, and it's fragile -- manastorms, wandering spirits, terrorism, astral bacteria... all these things could damage it easily.

For these reasons, I don't think you'd see this operating at an industrial scale. In the backwoods of the Amazon, you may well see it as an alternative to burning the local resources, but in modern areas, it would just be too expensive and complex.

Oh, for vehicle-use purposes by Shadowrunners to reduce op-tempo cost.... an automobile at 40 mph uses around 100 KW. It would be hard to generate that much power from a single Quickened spell, and an automobile is a relatively inexpensive vehicle to operate, and 40 mph is a slow speed.

--K

Prospero said it.
I'm a hermetic at heart. I like everything to fit nicely into the rules. Retroactive annihilation doesn't fit nicely into the rules.

~J

Prospero,
I would just like to point out that that kind of stuff isn't done in DnD much...There is a dimensional gate spell, and higher level teleport spells, but it is by no means a common occurence, and actually more befitting a Sci Fi game, ala teleportation from Asimov and many others...including Star Trek...and is easily explained in all of those dimensionally, which SR has stayed entirely away from(cept for Astral Plane)

Just my 2 cents.

About D&D: one word: Wish.

Another word: deities.

~J

I followed this and then grew bored.

Immortal elves have access to Earthdawn ritual magic, there are multiple fast as thought travel methods in Earthdawn (shift to astral and shift to fire come to mind).

Harlequin is the only non-dragon to learn the basics of Dragon Magic™, which can reshape the planet at will but draws a lot of attention if used whimsically.

High power magic is completely supported in the FASA material and by association the FanPro material, but if any PC gets to that power level the standard rules are no longer sufficient to explain the reality he must deal with.

Going away from techno-magic what about other forms of magic esc? With the rift in DC there's an astral rift right? All sorts of funky things are coming through. So that leaves the door open for all kinds of funky style of stuff. I'm running a Boston based game so I thought paying homage to old Lovecraft would be cool. So what sort of "other magic types" or "spirit" types could exist? The possibilities are endless.

Ideas I had were "Cthulu type of creatures that are basically spirits ect" creating some new rules for summoning and controlling. One idea I had was a ritual for summoning and a spell for binding them or they go free right away. They wouldn’t be necessarily 100% Cthulu but they would have that “flavor”. I have a “book of the dead” that was retrieved from a research area on an Island of Cape Cod. The book has the needed rituals and spells.

Setting up rules using ritual magic and other forms of summoning could be interesting. Possibly a form of meta-magic or a different “path” of magic. Not all magic is going to be wholly terrestrial based. I’ve always thought of magic as sort of a pond. The pond is the water, the universe and stuff. The lily pads are “planes of existence” as we know them. When the wind blows or by float the lily pads overlap a bit. That’s why the fantasy part of Shadowrun ebb’s in and out of existence. For all intensive purposes there would be a fossil record of what came along previously. That fossil record disappeared. This is one reason. It doesn’t really matter why? It’s a game that’s it just a game.

I read earlier that there is no movement via 3 flying ect? I thought about it and why not? Why couldn’t there be. If you can produce a powerful force or other type of power then why not a more sustained tempered power for movement or levitation? Granted the spell would have to be sustained but as long as you make some reasonable spell guidelines to base speed and how it relates to successes go for it. I think for Shadowrun the world is open. New spells are like technology in that they are constantly being invented and perfected. Maybe some guy later on down the line comes up with a spell that’s more efficient…… One idea I had was what would happen if say an entity that is on another nearby plane were to “aid” or give power to “burned out mages”. Who would be more corruptible than a burned out mage. Could a burned out mage or mundane “borrow” the power from a spirit from the beyond. That could be interesting?

One thing though I haven’t seen are spells having a direct effect on spirits that are “manifested” in our world. If they are manifested isn’t their consciousness focused on this world or is it dual natured as well? I think it use to be they had dual consciousness or something…..I wonder what would happen if one consciousness got drunk????

Another question can free spirits be born free. Can they sort of become the embodiment of say a group experience or social group? Say for a neighborhood could a spirit just pop into existence as the embodiment of the social or social psychology of the neighborhood? With that in mind what if each neighborhood had either a conscious or a semi-conscious spirit that sort of “hangs” out from time to time. I thought that would be an interesting idea approach for old neighborhoods. As the neighborhood changes so does the spirit. Seeking not to change it might pay runners to perform some “urban renewal” on the Yuppies that seek to gentrify the areas? Something interesting. I remember an old comic called warlock 5 (1986) that was similar to that. The only difficult idea would be deciding what makes a “neighbor”. Boundaries aren’t always cut and dry so it would have to very “general”. For Boston it would be something like “The north End” is easy but for Kenmore Square or areas it may be difficult. I like the idea of a neighborhood guardian who has his own agenda. Maybe good maybe bad, especially if the neighborhood gets polluted. (For a BU spirit it might be spirit looking like cross between an angry SKA wanna be and a Frat boy.) Additionally their power might fluctuate depending on the strength of the shared social experience and the mana levels.

Don't get me wrong. It's not like spells like Gate, Teleport, or Time Travel (which hasn't happend yet in my game) are cast willy nilly by PCs in every encounter... it's more like once or twice a year, game-time. The house rules are stringent and very effective at explaining how things happen, from a sci-fi/magic perspective even. Teleporting is within the realm of sci-fi, and I'm sure you could come up with a good enough explanation about how something could teleport without the use of magic. Parallel universes come to mind. Wormholes are totally within the realm of plausible, even likely, physics. Time Travel, at least in my game, is controlled by the Paradox Rule: while time travel backwards is possible, it's -not- possible in your own time-line, since to alter your own time-line would be to make it not your own (time travel makes my head hurt anyway). You can go back in a virtually identical timeline, and kill your own grandparents, which makes no difference to -you-, because it's not your own timeline. Get me?

A sci-fi explanation of a Gate could be as simple (ummm, well, maybe not so simple) as creating a localized space-time distortion and keeping it open with magical strange matter (I think that's what the stuff is called... I'm a little hazy on my quantum theory). Not a physical impossiblity, but it would make one heck of a show in astral space.

On the other hand, if you think this sort of thing is game-unbalancing (ie. you can't think of how you could control the player's use of such a power if they got ahold of it) then don't allow it. I'm just saying that we've come up with rules that make sense for it; we didn't just make up crack-headed magic as say, "Well, it's magic!" like they do in D&D.

The thing about teleportation is that it involves something moving from one place to another without having passed through the intervening space. Wormholes involve travelling through an intervening space that isn't the usual intervening space; Star Trek-style Transporters involve either transporting the component particles of someone and reassembling them or transporting the information that is them, destroying the copy at the original location, and creating an exact copy at the destination (source: The Physics of Star Trek) (on a side note, this creates the interesting question of whether or not the person that comes out is the person that went in, or if that original person died in the destruction of their body and the copy just thinks it is is the original). Those are questionable but fine within the realm of physics (except for the "Heisenburg Compensator", but this not being a Star Trek forum we'll leave that well enough alone).
Allow teleportation, though, and you break the game. Even just allowing the things I've already mentioned breaks the game. The ability to Transport involves the ability to disintegrate, so now you've got an überpowerful combat spell. The ability to use wormholes means that you can gate ANYWHERE. For instance, you can open a portal to the sun in front of the Aztechnology Corporate Headquarters for a few dozen femptoseconds and destroy huge amounts of stuff (well, maybe longer, but not long).

~J

@ Chesire Penguin - I'm all for house rules; it sounds like you've at least thought things out fairly well, so if you and your players want to have those elements in your game, more power to you. I, personally, would not, therefore I wouldn't want them in cannon (yeah, okay, its not that I can't ignore cannon if I want to, but I'd rather not have to if I can help it). Again, I would say that while all of those elements are within the theoretical boundaries of science fiction, none of them are remotely close to near-term hard SF/F which is what Shadowrun is at its core and what I like so much about it.

@kryton: A lot of the things you're talking about already exist in the rules, more or less. You want neighborhood spirits? They're the local city spirits. No city spirit is just a bland, "generic" city spirit (though perhaps ones in heavily urbanized areas with few actual inhabitants would be closer than most) that gets conjured. All of them are tied to the area they are called from. And then all you have to do is incoportate the rules for spontaneous manifestion from MitS. Viola - neighborhood spirits. And, even, spirits for various buildings. The older and more historic buildings might even have strong agendas, especially if the residents all feel similar on one or more topics, or have in the past.

And there is a free spirit - a shadow, I think - that has organized a cult to give power back to burn-outs. Its in Threats 2, but I can't remember the name (don't own the book myself). Its pretty freaky. Something like that would go well with Cthulu-flavored spirits, which could be cool. If you have Awakenings (an SRII book) then you should check out Azroth the God - really freaky stuff and could be really cool in a Cthulu-inspired campaign. Whether or not you have that, check out the Twisted Way and the Corrupted stuff if MitS. I personally wouldn't require a spell to bind them, just so that conjuing adepts who got caught up with the thing could call them, too - maybe handle it more like Invoking, with multiple conjuring tests against different TNs.

Anyway, I think the idea is cool. If you have some rules/stats for the things, perhaps you wouldn't mind dropping them my way?

No, those are a matter of things that have a chance of being somewhere suddenly being where they have a chance of being. They didn't change locations so much as their location was suddenly something different.
You could do that if you had something to manipulate probability, but... ewww... being able to manipulate probability to that extent is even worse. It's a lot less improbable that any given person will suddenly drop dead than that someone will suddenly be somewhere else they might be.

~J

Well... I suppose you could say so. I still say you couldn't control it.

~J