No, things that are transparent on the material plane are transparent on the astral plane and things that are opaque on the material plane are opaque on the astral plane. It's basically the same no matter what. I think it's in the basic description of the astral plane in the main rulebook.

I guess the psyché on the Astral is limited by physical barriers as much as vision is on this plane of existence, whether walls, doors, pillars of smoke or anything of the sort. Only when you send your mind outwards, through those barriers will you be able to perceive what lies beyond them.

I figure that astral perception is a fully separate sixth sense... it works more or less like vision, but what the mage actually experiences is something totally outside mundane experience, to the extent that trying to describe it to a mundane is not just like trying to describe a rainbow to a person blind from birth, but trying to do it in a language invented and spoken entirely by people who have been blind from birth. You might say an aura is "bright" or "dim", but that's not really what it is; that's just making do with inadequate terminology. I tend to lean heavily on metaphor and strongly emotional imagery when describing auras, and use other senses than vision in my descriptions, sometimes even mixing and matching them; saying that an aura feels red or tastes sad, for example. Or, as in one case that made the assensing shaman go, "Oh, drek. Don't piss the Johnson off.", that the aura was calm on the surface, but contained underneath was the feel of steaming deer's blood on moonlit snow.


On a rather different tangent... if physical objects affect LoS normally in the astral, is it possible to use lenses or the like? Could an assensing mage, for example, use a telescope to target an astral form?

Since distance isn't an LOS consideration anyway except at truly extreme distances, yes.
If you're talking about at these extreme distances, I don't know; probably a GM's call.

~J

Every canon description of the astral is 100% visual down to colors, specific descriptions of objects ect. Does anyone have a book quote of a description or impression that's anything other than visual? Or are people just pulling this out of their bootay?

The last time I checked, you couldn't touch or hear things with vision. But maybe that's just me.

And they're touching things with their astral hands, and hearing things exactly as they sound on the physical plane. But that's neither here nor there.

Yet they're all encompassed by the same single sense. Those terms are simply used because we have absolutely no frame of reference on how better to describe them. Astral Perception Tests are made no matter what, as opposed to visual Perception Tests, touch Perception Tests, and hearing Perception Tests. If it was truly a visual sense, you'd still make visual Perception Tests when "looking" around on the astral for someone or a hearing Perception Test to "listen in" on an astral conversation whether they used your meat organs or not. But alas, you don't. You use a single type of Perception Test because it's a single, unique sense that defies description in conventional terms.