I like this idea. Deals with the devil and all that. Lots of roleplay possibilities but obviously could be potentially unbalancing.

Has anyone had fun with it? Come up with new variations? How do you handle the cost? The quality says 5 BP per point of Edge, but only one of the examples given in the spirits section is Edge-based.

I typically find that my players tend to pick this kinda stuff up in game, often times by making a "deal" with someone they don't know is a spirit. However, it usually played out (in my games at least) as an exchange of favors (You help me here, and ill help you sometime down the road) where the spirit disappears after the favor is done for them and applies their half of the bargain subtly (reappearing later to continue "trading" as story appropriate).

Although I like the idea, the quality sucks. The spirit get's stronger, and in return you get to pay karma, so you don't lose the feeble benefit it gave you. No thank you.
Drain Pact is awesome, to some degree, similar to how awesome it is to be on Kamikaze 24/7. Everthing else is plain not worth it, especially if the GM randomly decides it's time you pay some karma again, because your spirit buddy leveled up.

The quality is crap. Spirit Pacts are, however, interesting and usable, but should be introduced through role-playing. If a character wishes to begin the game with a Pact, he should go over it with the GM & decide on a BP cost appropriate for the parameters of the pact, not for how lucky the spirit is.

One of my character's intends to use something similar to a Spirit Pact / Inhabitation - basically taking some of a spirit's essence into her own - to gain Essence Drain & Immunity to Age, without the restrictions/downsides of a Spirit Pact.

I had one character that I made as a new character with this quality. Every other character that I've seen with it acquired it in game.

In the one instance, the character was an ex-triad who fled to Seattle after having a falling out. This game is set in the 50s so the Triads rituals didn't have the fully potenet and nasty significance they do now. Anyway, the character was an elf (With Human Looking quality, although the Triads aren't quite so picky) who had made a spirit pact with a lesser nasty spirit from within Kowloon City. He'd made the Formula Pact, where in exchange for "Immortality" he would house the spirit's formula. Sounded like a good idea at the time, and all that. Years later, follwing betrayals and falling out of favor and all that, the character hops a ship, and ends up in Seattle. The GM let me take the Hunted quality, as the spirit isn't super strong, but is sending "minions" after him. Since there was little actual game effect for the quality (it takes a long time for an elf to notice any benefit for "immortality") I wasn't charged for the quality.

I would like the quality a lot more if not for its restriction to awakened characters. Since mundane characters, per the free spirit section in Street Magic, are able to summon and bind free spirits, I think that it should be available to them, as well. I wonder whether this is an oversight since the quality is printed in a book intended primarily for use with awakened characters, or if it is intentional.

mundane characters are *theoretically* able to summon and bind free spirits. if you use the house rules someone cooked up a while back for 4th edition (most of them just amounting to "non-awakened characters are actually allowed to take magic skills and use them only in certain completely reasonable situations") they can even get quite decent at it, in fact.

i personally think that, for the right kind of game, the quality should be open to non-awakened characters. even those who don't have appropriate skills to summon and bind free spirits (provided you're actually using the aforementioned houserules that allow them to even take such skills in the first place) can still make a deal with a free spirit, it's just a lot harder to find one.

So, like, binding to bind Free Spirits, and Banishing in attacks of will? I can see reasons for that, I suppose, but I don't really feel like it's necessary. I tend towards lower dice pools anyway, so a mundane character could use their edge to recoup much of what they're missing out on from not having the appropriate skills. Granted, a magician could use edge, in addition to those skills, but I think that it's only right that they be better at most magical tasks than mundanes, even ones that a mundane might be able to engage in.

yes, exactly those kinds of situations. other examples would include assensing when somehow forced into astral perception (for example when within the area of an astral rift), astral combat when actually projecting, and so forth. naturally, this shouldn't be available to joe blow the barren's resident. however, making it available to a specially trained lone star astral photography team who can expertly testify using auras as evidence in court? i think that sounds perfectly reasonable. likewise if someone has lived for years in an astral shallow and can regularly see the astral, i think they should be able to learn to assense stuff if they practice it eventually (in fact, fluff indicates that this is the case). it can allow for some really interesting characters imo, and like i said... it only makes sense. magic is generally speaking part skill, part natural power. while it shouldn't be possible for someone to learn the natural power part, i do think that the skill part should be learnable... provided you have access to the means to learn it, of course. it was, iirc, the case in previous editions that you could, and i can't really come up with any logical reason why a paranormal investigator who hunts spirits and uses force of will attacks on a regular basis couldn't eventually develop the ability to better focus their will to harm spirits. certainly, it's not broken, nor is it a particularly efficient use of resources (BP or karma, that is). and certainly, it's not something i would allow to be gained from skillwires or learned from a tutorsoft. but after all, if a mundane can learn the skill of creating spell formulas or collecting materials for talismongering, why couldn't they potentially learn other magic skills also?

Franktrollman has some different costs for spirit pacts that are much more playable.

As is the only one that is anything close to decent is the dream pact because that means you never have to sleep. Which isn't bad in a way.

http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?show...088&hl=pact


Dream Pact : Free
Formula Pact: 5 BP
Life Pact: 10 BP
Magic Pact: 15 BP

The Dream Pact isn't eactly that safe because you have no control over what the spirit does while you're asleep. Oh, there is nothing quite so annoying as meeting a nice possessing spirit girl who wants to make a Pact with you only to find out that she's a succubus when you wake up that first night on a stage half-dressed in drag and surrounded by muscular leather-clad men who are waving fistfulls of money at you and yelling obscenities while imploring you to continue dancing and take more clothes off.

And there are worse possibilities.

A spirit could get surgery without your permission, surgery that you wouldn't apreciate. And it could dangerously large amounts of sleeping pills to keep you under longer and longer.

This doesn't sound, to me, like something that should be called a house rule. These characters should be governed by exceptions, rather than rules. Saying that it's a house rule, while not incorrect, makes it sound like anyone can do it.