A properly built conjurer can summon or even bind force 12 spirits (go edge), but has a significant chance of dying. Now we've got a pissed off force 12 spirit. What's the easiest way to kill it (and still stabilize and evac our stupid magic user)? Please don't include specialized builds. I'm looking for things that can be done by characters in any generic party or easily available contacts. Awards will be given for lowest cost, lowest skill, and most elegant. Reasonable availability on gear is a plus. Collateral damage will be added to cost. (Nukes = double spendy!)

Force 12 Spirit? Don't try it. Either you have got a expert combat mage (Willpower 12 to resist direct combat spells) or your have got a friendly sniper with APDS ammunition at hand (You have to break a 24 points armor, even for snipers nearly impossible).

Oh, well, there is one chance to get the spirit down. Use the mana static to reduce his force and then get the mage or sniper in. (Use a second mage for this spell, the drain could knock him out.)


Coldan

Willpower 12 to resist direct combat spells, OR a guy with Willpower 6, Counterspelling 6, and a counterspelling focus.

Alternately, summon 1-3 small spirits and keep them on hand to act as subduers for group astral combat should the big one get loose.

Thor shot.

FAB III, a vampire?

Do what every decent mage who summons insanely powerful, probably malevolent beings who risk running loose would do :

Create the best mana barrier you can find around the conjuring circle.
Preferrably several.
Even better : offensive mana barriers.

Use an additional mage for that or quicken the spells, if you have karma to burn.
Spirits of man with natural spell might also be an option, but if they are not of similarly insane power, will only slow the Force12 monstrosity down, so i'd go for the assistant mage, who is overcasting, hit with stim patches and on psyche.

Get a ward or lodge around the place.
Again, it is better if the ward is able to strike back, there's an option for that, but it requires an advanced metamagic.

Attach a long rope to the mage and pull him out of the mess if he goes unconscious.
Put an autoinjector with traumapatch contents on him.

To avoid it from happening in the first place, bump up your drain stats up to augmented maximum by increase willpower and increase [other drain stat] spells if they aren't there already (willpower won't, so you'll need at least that one), upheld by sustaining foci or cast by bound spirits of man.

Take wudu'aku beforehand to maximize your successes in the binding test.

I'm just wondering wether an aspected domain increases or decreases the power of spirits summoned by a magician of the same tradition?


Recommended anti-spirit weaponry :

Anything that can fire wide bursts with as many rounds as possible to prevent the spirit from dodging and that has a good AP value, preferrably with AV or at least APDS.
Called shots may be helpful.

Best bet is a gyromounted Barret-121 modded for full-auto.


If that's too cheesy for you, use an LMG or multiple assault rifles and hope for the best.

Make sure you know what time of day it is and what time of year it is...

If you summoned that spirit at noon, you are FUBARED. The ritual will take longer then sundown. And if it is deep summer or winter and you summoned it at the wrong time. The time from terminator to terminator might not be 12 hours...

Waiting for it to disappear because it is still unbound would be a risky, but cost-efficient choice, but doesn't the ritual prolong the presence of the spirit until it is completed?
I thought i had read something like this...i'm not sure, though, i might be confusing this with something about binding free spirits by their true name.

If the latter is the case, this would imply that binding sufficiently high force spirits would only be possible under very specific local and seasonal conditions and with excellent timing.

Hit it with an elemental attack. Some people want to say electricity shouldn't work. But by RAW it does. And I like ghostbusters anyway.

Any elemental attacks will put their fancy armor down to 12. Still high, but runners can do it.


Also, drones. Have them firing something like +4 called stick and shock or something. In actuallity with the new recoil rules they might actually be able to really do something. But it doesn't matter. As long as the spirit dodges every shot whittles down it's dodge pool

The runners can hold their actions until after the drones. Then hit it with everything you got.

And yes, some background count is all sorts of good.

Under Binding is says
"Binding is used to compel long-term service from a spirit the magician has already summoned. Binding requires a ritual of a number of hours equal to the force of the spirit. The ritual materials, available from a talismonger, cost 500¥ times the Force of the spirit. Magical lodges are not required for binding,
but they are often used out of habit.

At the end of the ritual, the magician makes an Opposed Test pitting her Magic + Binding against the spirit’s Force x 2. The magician may receive additional dice from a spirit focus or a mentor spirit, if she has one. The magician requires one net hit to bind the spirit."

The spirit isnt bound until the end of the ritual. No mention of the spirit being "forced" to stay for the duration of the ritual, if it lasts past sunup or sundown. Given that, it would take specific times of year and specific local conditions to bind "big" spirits. And that seems very appropriate for binding powerful beings.

Indeed.

I just read up on binding free spirits and the part i thought of does actually come from there.
Sorry for that.
The free spirit is forced not to do anything against you and stay in place until the binding ritual is finished when you call it using its true name.

Find a sturdily constructed building somewhere out of the way. Cover the interior of the walls in Foam Explosives and set them to detonate at the same time. Prepare a door, prepare some heavy cover, too.

Time for some calculations.

We assume a 10m x 10m room, armour 24, a body of 14 (dunno what the likely Body of a Force 12 spirit is) and thus need to do 15 boxes of damage reliably. The spirit is summoned in the centre.

5m, directional explosion, 1 barrier rebound.
d = 2 x (Rating x Sqrt( Kilos) - 5)
d > 24
d - (24 + 14) / 3 >= 15
d >= 28

(28 + 5) / 2 = 16.5
16.5 + 5 = 21.5

Rating * Sqrt( Kilos) >= 21.5

Round it

Rating * Sqrt( Kilos) >= 22

C = 100 * Rating * Kilos
Rating <= 15

Assuming Rating = 15 (higher ratings are always better for explosives)

Sqrt( Kilos) >= 22 / 15 = 1.466...
Kilos ~ 1.25

C = 125 * 15 = 1875

Fudging costs of detonators and det cord... 2000.
Adding a 'runner premium of 25%... 2500
Fuel costs and other things... add another 500 to the budget
That takes it to 3000 nuyen.

It's a little generous, I admit. If you want to be more careful, budget a few thousand more for other 'running expenses. Overkill is not accounted for in this budget, either. Remember what you teachers told you; always bring enough for everyone.

Check everything over with your GM first, though. He may not like it when you do the explodo because you are clever.


Explosives are elegant, right?

Now accepting criticism!

you forgot the cost of 1 mage powerful enough to actually consider binding a force 12 spirit, since the mage is also going to die (and how!) if you use this emergency plan.

also, if you're gonna go to the effort of using explosives, then you really should use chunky salsa effect.

Burn Edge for critical successes. Since a critical success equals 4+ net successes over what you need, you're guaranteed a kill.

Better yet, have the binding mage burn the Edge on the binding test. And hope he's got another point for the drain.

You can work it into any other set of plans as plan Z. When everything goes to shit, a few thousand nuyen of explosives might save a few of your team members. It is also assumed that you can find some walls sturdy enough to contain one of the blastfronts, so hiding behind those walls should save you from most of the blast. The necessary barrier rating is dependant on how many walls you can spread this over.

You're doing somewhere in the range of 22P, share that between 2 walls and you can get by with brick walls (Armour 12).


This does use the chunky salsa effect. See that 2x multiplier? That's for rebounding off the wall you sprayed the foam ex on. Though I've now noticed that I made a slight mistake (forgot to double up the distance degradation to match the double blastwave). I'll revise the calculations in the post, it'll probably require a little more explosive (less than a kilo more, though).

If you're doing this in a standard building, that much foamex might destroy the walls instantly, and I suspect that reduces Chunky Salsa FX. (Anyone here really know demo and have comment?) I'm guessing that a good method is to dig a deep hole, lay down a thick cellar-type layer of reinforced concrete, then coat that with foamex; the explosion will be contained, and you can configure it either to maximize or minimize the outcome of the hole collapsing and burying the post-explosion remains. (I imagine a huge plume of incandescent, expanding gasses shooting up from the hole. Debris may get tossed around in unsafe-to-bystanders combinations of mass and velocity. Also, it will be loud.)

Now then. If the binding fails, the mage has the option of pointing out to the spirit that it is in a reinforced container at the bottom of a deep hole, surrounded by explosives, with the mage's buddy looking through sensors and holding a deadman switch. "You can kill me, but do you want to kill me so badly that you're willing to get blown up? How about you accept my apology and leave peacefully?"

if the binding fails, the spirit is still under the magician's control (provided it hasn't changed from day to night or whatever). it's not the failed binding that is a concern, it's the "oh hey look, 20P DV for drain" that's a problem. seriously, there's still the flaw that the magician is going to be lying unconscious in the same area as the spirit, and is going to die horribly if you set off a bunch of explosives. it's much easier to ensure the survival of the rest of the time by sending them somplace the spirit won't bother going than it is to blow up the mage to protect the rest of the team. any attempts to contain/control the spirit should be done in the context of hauling the mage out of there and trying to revive him, because a failed attempt that doesn't KO the mage is nothing more than a conjured spirit. it's when the mage gets KO'd and you have an uncontrolled spirit that you have to worry.

Take your existing team and head for an area with a high background count. If the spirit decides to follow, you have a much better chance of actually taking the thing out. More likely than not however, the spirit will decline to enter an area with enough magical energy to drastically reduce its force. Due note however, that the caster is legally responsible if the spirit rages out of control and decides to smash a bunch of stuff. So, you may need to leave town for a bit afterwards, or at the least have everyone dump their fake SIN's and have a hacker do some coverup.

Sucking down 20P drain is going to be difficult.

Drain stat tailored speedballs, drain spirit pacts, platelet factories, trauma damper.

For drugs, I suggest Loco and Nitro. +3 Willpower, +1 Intuition, +1 Logic, +1 Charisma, HPT 6. Coming off Nitro is painful, but probably better than losing control of a Force 12 spirit (once they're bound, I assume they won't go psycho even if you're dying of a heart attack), and the +4 dice on drain is going to be handy. Course, you'll probably be called on to make an addiction test, but what's an addiction for a Force 12 bound spirit?

Don't try it with mundane issues:

Best ways:
Ki Adept with max critical Strike, Killing Hands, counterstrike, max combat sense, improved Unarmed etc.
Mage casts Force 12+ Stunbolt with Edge.

cya
Tycho

Best bet for this would be any long-ranged firearm with Stick-n-Shock. 6 + 4 (Called Shot) + Net Hits must exceed an Armor of 12 (24 / 2). You need 3 Hits, easy enough for a decent firearm user - Spirit cannot dodge due to surprise.

Second, Barrett loaded with APDS. 9 + 4 (Called Shot) + Net Hits must exceed an Armor of 16 (24 - . Requires 4 Hits. This begins to get difficult with the -4 from Called Shots, & any other visual modifiers.

Third, haul ass & wait for it to go away.

If you have access to Heavy Vehicle Weapons, the Itzcoatl Gauss Cannon works nicely, as long as you are not concerned about the building you are in (if any). Spirit has 2 Hardened Armor vs. 18 + Net Hits + Called Shot Damage.

I gotta side with Tycho on this one. Mundane ain't gonna do jack against a force 12 spirit. It's gonna take a team or maybe two to handle this rabid beast. Background count or Mana Static would help, FAB III also a delaying factor, summoning it near a bug spirit hive in Chicago might get rid of it fairly easily except that you then have to deal with the bugs afterward.

For teams, it's gotta be heavy with Adepts with killing hands, reflexes, and astral sight. If not Adept, standard street sams with melee weapons and a strong willpower (magical enhancements should be added for them). A magician or two (or more) would not go amiss either. Spirit Bolt, astral combat with magical weapon foci, astral barriers and wards, activated magic lodges are all good. Several spirits for added combat support and a strong familiar spirit with some useful spells could be a great help.

Otherwise, it's time to call in some favors and dig up a ritual team to chase the sucker down with a ritual mojo banish/spirit bolt of a force to really whammy the thing.

Not cheap, but if you're trying to fry your mage by doing something this dumb, it shouldn't be a cheap fix.

Once again, that's what burning Edge is for. Look at it this way: you can burn Edge on the drain roll, reducing it to nothing, and keeping yourself up and active; or you can burn Edge on an Escape Certain Death clause, because 20P is almost guaranteed to put you past your overflow, and will likely leave your unconscious body helpless and in the hands of a hostile spirit.

A Force Twelve Spirit has 12 Edge, too. She can roll 36 dice on most tests. If she is PO'ed, she will! (Does anyone know what happens when both opponents burn edge for a critical success?)

Don't make her angry! You don't want to be there when she's angry.

Be ready to move fast; her initiative could be 36, 48, or 60. If the Spirit rolls 36 Dice against your Willpower + Edge in an opposed Fear test, you most likely will be running.

Hardened armor 24 against mundane attacks, 12 or 24 dice against spells, munchkin-territory close combat skills. "No specialist builds" = ranged combat or explosives. Collateral damage will be sidestepped:

- Desolate part of the barrens
- Mana Static at force 4 (provided by a sustaining focus of the conjurer)
- BioMonitor on the conjurer
- Rigger with a platform for a GE Vanquisher (aptly named), holding one IP back ("I fire once the mage goes down")

Idea: The spirit will be taken by surprise, and the rigger just needs five hits to beat immunity 16. Full Auto = affected spirit dies.
Cost: 50k¥+ for something the rigger wants anyway, one avail 20F item
Risk: If you don´t get those five hits on the first try, nothing will rescue you.

Adept
Killing hands
Elemental Strike
Maxed Cyberarm - Redlined
Maxed Unarmed
Martial art skills

Say STR12 cyberlimb
Martial arts +4 damage
Penetrating strike -3 armour

Elemental strike ignores immunity so it has 12 armour that is halved to 6 and then to 3 and the base damage of the limb will be 10P

Added to that we have a sustained iproved initiative on the cyberadept and he is in an ambush position to attack the spirit...

summon force 6 spirit, let it possess you to boost you up, THEN summon Force 12 spirit? O.o

Cant spirits assist in spellcasting and suchlike with their force.

Waitaminute...

Summon F12

Spend one spirit service and have it AID the summoner in the binding ritual.

It would give the Spirit a DP mod equal to rating to any test involving Magic.

Spirits resist Binding with Force, RAW.

Pretty sure it says in Street Magic that spirits don't have to aid (or won't aid) in their own binding rituals. Also that spirits can have any magical skills except summoning related skills.

I'm pretty sure you can't use the Aid Sorcery service for any sort of Conjuring test.

What, casting a spell is different from conjuring a spirit? No way!

Other ideas for killing a mad Force 12 spirit:

Lead it on a (hopefully short) wild goose chase astrally into Aztechnology corp territory or most any other megacorp territory.

Get together an initiate group and do a combined metaplanar quest to either destroy the spirit or gain its' true name.

Or the cheaper but way longer haul....Have your mage initiate repeatedly, only raising his magic attribute max and then raising his magic as high as he can get it, until a Force 12 spirit is merely a trouble and not instant death.

20 drain will probably mean unconsciousness and therefore potentially berserking spirit, even if you have 12+ magic to convert it to stun (and a whole lot of physical overflow, most likely).

you would need to have something to keep you conscious long enough to send the spirit back to the metaplanes or you're still pretty much gonna die =P

Once again, if you're facing 20P drain, burn edge and get yourself a critical success. You're going to end up burning that Edge anyway, on an Escape Certain Death, since 20P is enough to completely kill your character.

I've been wondering about that. Can you buy a critical success on a Damage Resistance Test? It doesn't have a Threshold and even one net hit is a success. Similarly what happens if you buy a critical success on a Stealth test? The number of hits required for success vary from observer to observer many of whom have not observed you at the point you burn the point of Edge....

On Topic.

A Mine.

Find, drill or Shape (Material) a shaft 600m deep/long. Create a chamber at the end big enough for your spirit. Lay a fibre-optic line to the outside and then fill in the shaft.

The mage can use mage-sight goggles (and possibly a telescope) to Summon the Spirit into the chamber and Bind it there. If he mucks up, cap the fibre, and leave.

Pressing through the Earth from there is going to be an Extended Magic + Charisma (600, 30 mins) Test.

It'll take over two days to escape assuming it doesn't get lost...

I'm not sure how it works on Stealth tests, but on a Damage Resistance test, your goal is to soak all the damage. Since a critical success is defined as 4+ successes over what you need, it's pretty clear that the damage would be reduced to zero.

On a Stealth test, burning Edge for a Critical Success means you will always have 4 Net Hits over the observers, regardless of how many or few hits they get; depending on who is looking for you, you may only have 4 Hits, or as many as 20+. The exact number of hits is irrelevant, and would change as the observer's change.

If one of your observer's decides to burn an Edge to spot you, you then resolve your Stealth vs. Perception test normally (for that specific observer - you still have 4 Net Hits over everyone else).

I'm not sure the wording of Critical Success supports that position, I suppose you could define the damage as your 'opponent.'

It's not very well worded. Shock.

On the other hand you must have a DP at least equal to the number of boxes of Drain you're trying to soak. You can't buy a Critical Success if you have no hope of succeeding.

That's not necessarily true. If you spend Edge, the dice explode, allowing you to have a theoretically unlimited number of successes. When you burn Edge, we can assume that the dice exploded.

Can we? You know what happens what we start to assume?

By that 'logic' there is nothing that you have no hope of achieving because you could always roll an infinite number of sixes.

You're reading stuff into the rules that they don't say. Certainly not explicitly.

You only get exploding sixes on certain uses of Edge. All uses of Edge describe exactly what extra dice, re-rolls or exploding dice you do or do not get. The description of Burning Edge for Critical Success is silent on all of these matters.

May i suggest a tap of the main powerline connected to a Tesla device that at the flick of a switch will send a veryveryvery high current through the location of which the spirit occupies?

Not sure what the power of lightning does in damage code but it should be well above that of F12 lightning bolt...

Add the elemental effect and its immunity is moot.

Also, foci. lots of foci for drain.

Use a logic based tradition - dwarf or exceptional attribute
Fetish for summoning (+2D6 for drain)
Biware to boost logic (+2D6 for drain)
Focused Concentration (+2D6 for drain)

Power foci to offset magic loss from bioware.

Thanks a lot, you just helped me discover the only useful application for the adrenalin pump!
I think it's actually the only way to stay conscious when your stun track has been filled out.


Okay, you need a Magic of at least 12 to keep the drain from getting physical, but besides that, it works.



As far as drain stats are concerned, under normal circumstances, i'd go for a dwarf with cerebral boosters as well.
These aren't normal circumstances, however, i think we need more drastic measures...

The best would be an elf following a charisma-based tradition with sustained Increase [both drain stats] spells.
If we assume a truly maxed-out mage, with one Exceptional Attribute and Metagenic Improvement, along with genetic optimization for both drain stats, the maximum unmodified DP would be 26 ( 11(16) for CHA + 7(10) for WIL ).
This would include casting a Force11 Increase Charisma spell, but if we're already trying to bind Force 12 spirits, why not?
Just make sure you cast the Force7 Increase Willpower spell first and you can already throw 21 drain dice.

And no, all that does not include mentor boni and foci.

I have to correct that : in fact, the best would be a pixie or nosferatu.

Edit : and of course, all three would have to be changelings with at least class II SURGE.

[whispers]

Uh, Eagle Shifter?...

That's...30 dice max.
Wow.
Impressive.

Why in the hell did you do this in the first place?

Shadowrunners are in the business of living, remember?

Add in Centering and a Centering Focus....

The thing is that after a certain point Drain stops being meaningful. Because spellcasting is F/2+x, when Force greatly exceeds 2x, Force isn't such a big factor in the final Drain code. Force only increases the maximum number of hits for spellcasting so beyond a certain point it exceeds what you can reasonably expect to get from a humans Sorcery Dice Pool.

Trouble with Binding is that Drain scales quite differently. A spirit has a max of 4 Dice per point of the Magicians Magic stat. So for every 3 points of your Magic you can expect to suffer 8P in Drain. Your Magic is uncapped but Skill and DP mods start to run out at about 18 Dice. After Magic 6 Binding Max force Spirits gets more and more unbalanced in favour of the Spirit.

It's x+18 vs 4x. You can see how that's going to play out...

My suggestion... Don't.. but if you have to... either wait until your at least level 6, Initiate with 12 Magic... and the Centering Metamagic, to reduce drain further... or get a group of mages/adepts to back you up.

If you want to try something this suicidal from the get go, however, I suggest starting the game with a Spirit Pact, or trying to hunt down a level 12 Free Spirit, and starting a Magic Pact with the thing... however, there are other options.

A few Foci might help, as could a few anchor spells.

Alternatively, hunt down the Spirit Formula for a level 12 Free spirit, then you only have make the Binding Test, though... concidering how hard that is, and how ticked the Free Spirit will be when/if you fail... plus the shear number of powers a Force 12 Free Spirit is going to have... this might be concidered more suicidal then the summoning.

Yeah; like several applications of Edge, it's not properly thought through.

But there are plenty of things you have no hope of achieving; you just need to rely on other rules, and not massive amounts of successes. You can't shoot a satellite out of orbit with a pistol, because the pistol doesn't have the range to do it. If your Magic is 6, you have no hope of summoning a Force 20 spirit, Edge or no Edge.

Given all that, rolling 20 successes on a Drain test isn't impossible. If they spend even one Edge on the test, it's within the realm of possibility, even if it's improbable. I've seen enough improbable rolls come up in games to not let things like this bother me. I've personally rolled over thirty successes on a roll, although admittedly I had 20 dice to start with, before I spent Edge. And in that game, I was one of the unluckier players.

When it comes to Burning Edge, I personally am very flexible on this rule. After all, they're essentially sacrificing a stat in order to succeed. That amounts to the same thing as if they spent Karma. Thus, their character is going to be handicapped, since all the other players will be spending their karma to improve, instead of spending it to catch up. That's just me, though. As always, YMMV.