Well I am making a mage, mainly for spellcasting, will get into summoning and binding once I get some spare karma. But for now I have a 6 spellcasting (spec combat) and have 30 bps to buy spells with.

I know manabolt and stunbolt, probably improved initiative, but what other spells should I be getting out of any of the books?


I already have a power focus of rating 2, here is another question I am debating.

Should I get
A. 12 spells
B. 9 spells + Rating 3 sustaining Focus
C. 7 Spells + Rating 3 sustatining Focus + Rating 3 Counterspelling focus

I am the only mage in the group and have a counterspelling of 4 already, but having 3 more dice would be nice, plus being able to sustain improved initiative would be good too. I really can't decide which way would be best.

Thanks for all the input in advance

You might have a look at mentor spirits, especially the dark goddess for street magic p181, it gives bonus die to both combat and health spells.

Yeah I already have Dark Godess as my mentor spirit, thanks for the tip tho.

Maybe it's a houserule?, but I don't think that Manabolt is effective against machinery, so maybe Lighting bolt, to disable those fast moving cars with tinted windows for example?

I was thinking either lightning bolt or flamrethrower to hit machines with also plan on getting heal, I have first aid level 4 and rating 6 MedKit to help heal drain damage, but still need heal to deal with wounds and to help heal other runners.

You might also look at some manipulation spells, such as mob control or influence
Heal is always very handy.
Manastatic works very well agains spirits. It creates a local background count.

I take it, your magic is 6?

Which tradition does your mage follow and what are the drain attributes?

If you take one which has logic as a drain attribute, you can buff your logic with cyber, don't know which atm, and have some space left for cyber eyes with all the goodies, as magnification, vision enhancement, low-light vision and thermographic vision. Be sure to pickup the smartlink for bonus dies when shooting.

I'd drop the manabolt and change it for a powerbolt.

You're able to lobe F5 stunbolts all day for only DV of 1 per bolt (==> (F5/2)-1)=2.5-1=1.5~1) Drain codes rounds down and the minimal drain is 1

Well my magic is only 4, its 5 minus 1 for the essence loss on cyber/bioware

I have cyber eyes, internal comlink, internal hotsim, internal datajack, platelet factories, trauma dampner, and cerebral booster rating 1 to get +1 logic

I am chaos tradition and mentor dark goddess. 16 dice for combat spells, and 11 to resist drain

Is it worth it to get lowlight vision AND thermo?

Right now my cybereyes have, Thermo, Flare comp, Vision mag, Vision enhance rat 3



The idea behind the mage is I refuse to use melee weapons or ranged weapons for the most part, I am incompetant in clubs/blades/unarmed...so don't need to bother with the smartlink

I also am working on hacking, have skillgroup cracking at rank 4 and stealing my programs from our main hacker. The idea is I am a mage but can jump into the matrix and help him with hotsim when needed with the internal jack/link/hotsim

You decide, but have a look at the visibility modifiers table on page 117 of the BBB.

Also what do you do when you are in a high background area, where your magic is reduced? I don't know how prevalent background count is in your game.
You can load it with stick 'n shock ammo

If you do have eyes with lowlight and thermo vision, do you have to switch between them? or are they considered to be on at all times? and you use the lesser of the negative modifiers?

Background count I don't really know, me and my friends are just starting shadowrun so we don't really know how that will pan out. My 1st 18 karma is going to go into raising my magic to 5, but thats still gonna take a bit.

Still overcast to F5. Remember hits are capped by Force, and with 16 dice you'll be wasting hits more often than not if you're only casting at Force 4. True, your one box of drain goes from stun to physical, but with 11 dice you'll soak it down to nothing anyway, and the rare, rare exceptions where you do take one box are far outweighed by what you'll get out of Force 5 vs 4.
If you're going to shun non-magical weapons, Force 5 (or even 7) Stunbolt is a spell you can cast all day long. Check the rules for casting multiple spells and you can probably manage 2 Force 5 Stunbolts per pass without drain.

You should ask your GM on his vision about cycling between vision types. I gather you just select the one you want to use and activate it with a free action, (a simple thought command through the DNI of your Cyber Eyes).

Quick question, Where can I find the trauma dampner? I cann't seem jto find it ATM.

heh I am a rolling master...as in I will roll 16 dice and get 2 hits, in some situations I will definately try to cast 2 spells in a turn (I hadn't actually thought of that) but will prolly both just get resisted.

Its in augmentation p.70

Thanks, So with this you can overcast your spells ast F5 and still suffer only stun damage.

Spells cost 3 BP each, so you technically only have enough BP for 10 spells.

No. Overcast Drain is never Stun damage. What they are saying is that there are no more actual boxes of potential damage with the Force 5 spell, so if you could brush off the Drain from a Force 4 without taking damage, then a Force 5 would more than likely garner the same results. If you don't actually resist the all of the Drain though, the damage from overcasting will be Physical.

Edit: D'oh! I thought you were still talking about playing with the Force of the spells. With the Trauma Damper, one box of Physical damage will be shuffled to Stun. But if you suffer two boxes, you would have 1 Stun and 1 Physical.

edit: Nevermind, you caught yourself. Carry on.

Your right. I was thinking about overcasting stunbolts with a draincode of (F/2)-1, where you only suffer one drain damage

You don't need both Manabolt and Stunbolt. They pretty much hit the same targets at the same effectiveness. I'd recommend an area of effect spell instead. Stunball or Ball Lightning are my favorites, although there are other good choices. Stunball is good for dropping large numbers of opposition without killing them, and Ball Lightning does a number on drones/machinery, as well as being able to fire around corners.

A counterspelling focus only protects against one spell category. If you're going to be a counterspell-heavy character you'll just have to get more counterspelling skill. Note that defeating Detection spells makes a counterspelling mage end up being a sort of infiltration specialist so you may want to spike some Infiltration ability as well.

Point for point spirits do more and cost less BP-wise than a spellcaster although it takes some studying to get good with them, time to keep rebinding them, and the binding materials cost nuyen.

If you are the only mage get as many spells as possible for your toolbox. If you are not the only caster then you'll want to complement the other spellcaster(s) and fill in what gaps they have in their own toolboxes.

If you can summon a F3+ spirit of man and you have the Increase Reflexes spell (which gives extra initiative passes) then you can have the spirit cast it on you and sustain it. That can last you until you can buy and bond a sustaining focus after character start.

right, but an R3 Combat Counterspelling Foci is a handy shield to carry around.

Mana Static. (Street Magic).

Quite without peer.

Thanks for the all the replies guys, am reading all the spells now. I did mess up and I do have 36 bps for spells so I can have 12 total spells, just forgot the math on it when I made the post.

I currently do not have any points in binding or summoning but plan to pick them up quickly, so I will probably cut 3 spells and get a sustaining focus and skip out on the counterspelling one. I have a will 5 and counterspelling 4, so I can resist pretty well....my friends are gonna have to deal on their own tho. lol

Err... while skipping binding is probably a viable decision, you need to start with 4 ranks of summoning. It is just that good.

You can provide counterspelling to friends in LOS.

Yeah, if there's any skills you should skip, it's Ritual Sorcery and Banishing. Better to leave those off.

My current mage even has an Incompetence in those two skills, that's how useless they are.

Ritual Sorcery is but Binding and Banishing are awesome. Where killing a spirit merely drops one of its services with a point of Edge and a Banishing roll you can take multiple services. One complex action and a strong roll and BAM! Gone.

For counterspelling you could also get a tradition that includes Plant, Guardian, or Guidance spirits since they get counterspelling. I dont think there is a set way to handle multiple counterspellers aiding one person but in most games I'd expect it to be better than just the one person. Oversummon a Force 8 Plant/Guardian/Guidance spirit and you've got instant access to 8 Counterspelling dice including the ability to dispel active effects.

Binding is definitely very good, banishing I still subscribe to the 'shoot it shoot it shoot' school of banishing thought. YMMV.

But either way, summoning 4 is mandatory on all mage characters. There are few better investments of 16 BP.

Yeah, except you'll probably take more drain than if you simply Stunbolted the thing unconscious. Not to mention that it's all dependent on h ow many services that summoner has on it. Lower-force spirits may end up being impossible to Banish, because they'll have more services. Gods help you if it's a high-force spirit with a lot of services. (In the game I'm in now, my mage has 11 services on a bound force-10 spirit. I got lucky on some rolls, but there's nothing preventing the GM from saying our opposition got lucky as well.)

So, you can use Banishing lots and lots of times, taking Drain each action, and still not get rid of the spirit. Or, you can simply manabolt the hell out of it, and get rid of it much faster, for less drain. Yeah, I'd say that Bainishing is pretty damn useless.

Well, if it weren't for the platelet factories and everything following my advice would have been: Cyber eyes? Don't need those, get contacts with the visual abilities you want. Internal comlink and hotsim? Why? Use external ones. Data jack, again, why? Trodes don't cost essence and I don't recall using trodes being penalized in this edition. Even my non-magic using characters do this 90% of the time to save essence for things that HAVE to be installed. If you do eliminate these for their non-essence using counterparts then ask yourself, does my mage really NEED the rest of the list? If not spend your money/points on something else and get your magic back up to 5 (I don't think that will save you enough points to get it up to six, but I haven't done the math).

Yeah I had thought of going with a no cyber/bio mage, but platelet and trauma + eventually 3x cerebral, and a pain editor(I know it doesn't work with dampner) with delta is very solid for overcasting/summoning/binding

Plus my guy is a hacker also and I'd much rather have my good link imbeded in my skull with the hotsim and then another link to spoof things through so its not as traceable. I am not the main hacker in the team, but I still have skill group cracking at 4 so will be ok when I hotsim. The hacking points are cutting into my magic a bit but it fits the theme for my runner.

You still don't need both a datajack and cranial commlink. The commlink does everything a datajack can do, and then some. There's really no point. Save yourself some essence, or get something else.

I was wondering that, me and friend were debating it, since we are just starting SR we are still confused a bit on how things work....is there ever a point to need a jack if I have a link/hotsim in my head?

I figured there might be some systems that aren't wireless and I'd need to jack into them?

That makes more sense. In addition to what Cain said I suggest getting rid of the eyes as well (replacing them with contacts/goggles/glasses) ands using that essence for something else as well.

Edit: And you should be able to run a second non-cranial comlink just as easily as one cranial and one not.

The eyes are useful for a primary spellcasting as they allow you to overcome vis mods to spellcasting.

The implanted commlink is no good to anyone, and an external rig is cheaper, easier to upgrade and doesn't cost essence. I'd ditch the jack as well. There is no reason not to use trodes, nanopaste or otherwise. Just jettisoning this stuff saves money. Consider throwing it into another cerebral ooster point of rating.

Not really, no.

You can still hardline a commlink, via skinlink or other measure.

Ah ok that makes sense, one thing I read was a skinlink only has a device rating of 3, and my good commlink has a 5/5/5/5 rating...do I have to upgrade the skinlink? or can I just pay the $50 nuyen and be done with it?

Just pay the 50 . I imagine that the Device rating is for if someone tries to hack the skinlink itself, such as if you hid data on it. Trodes also have a Device rating of 3, but they don't impede the Response of a commlink in any way.

I'm running just fine with one (1) in Summoning, 5 in Magic and 2 Power Focus dice, getting a couple of services out of ad-hoc summoned spirits, which is all I need.

Banishing is great for getting rid of watchers and other Astral tails without having to Project. It also means that other mages' Spirits aren't too much of a worry for a lightly-armed team.

I'm wishing I'd taken Binding, now, because having another couple of spirits available at the same time as the 1 un-Bound one would be a very handy force-multiplier for our small team.

Where can't you use a manabolt when you could use banishing?
The magician sending the spirit will notice anyway.

The only reason to take banishing is when you plan on actually taking over the banished spirit afterwards with binding.
And I second that you really want Summoning 4.

I have no idea why any of you think Banishing is in any way superior to just blasting the thing? Short of spirit stealing there is no reason to do this. And most of the time you run into Spirits that are bound to their locations by security mages (I mean, not every facility can have a mage on call 24hrs, but a Corp could easily hire a mage to bind a spirit to watch over a facility for pretty cheap) and banishing a bound spirit is an exorcise in getting knocked the fuck out.