Hi all

I'm looking at introducing my PCs to Insect spirits in my next session.

I have one very important question -

how long does it take to invest a human with an insect spirit?

History has shown the process takes several hours at least. Universal Brotherhood and Double Exposure suggested this process took a few hours. A hard and fast (and loose) rule could be Essence of the victim in hours).

Has this changed in SR4? Vessel Preparation under Street Magic indicates it is an Enchanting + Magic test (Willpower, 1 day). So you're look at one day MINIMUM. The Inhabitation rules don't provide any timelimit, suggesting that the vessel preparation is the most costly and time consuming part of the process. Is that accurate?

- J.

"The process of inhabitation takes a number of days equal to the spirit’s Force."

Pg. 101, Street Magic...

Wow. I don't know how the fark I missed that. Don't I feel special.

Ok. So for a given individual, there's the time it takes to prepare the vessel"

"Preparing a living vessel requires a successful Enchanting + Magic (vessel’s Willpower, 1 day) Extended Test and two refined
or one radical reagent. " - p. 86
"The process of inhabitation takes a number of days equal to the spirit’s Force." - p.101

That's a bit longer than I thought but makes a lot more sense than what I was originally thinking.

I'm trying to work out now how powerful this shaman is, what force spirits he's likely to be conjuring, etc.

The backstory I have so far is that the PCs are tracking down a missing kid on behalf of one of their contacts. The shaman who has kidnapped them is a convicted paedophile who was a mundane but recently awakened inside prison (Latent Awakening) and has had a crash course in magic. He is now planning on building a hive, using kids as his vessels.

The details of how he learned are up for debate -
I was thinking he originally learned off his totem while inside and has spent considerable time/effort learning more when he got out. I was toying with the idea of a group of insect shamans that were co-operating together while inside the prison (worshipping the same totem with the same agenda of summoning an uber Queen by working together) but I'm not sure that works.

In any case, I'm guessing his Magic attribute would be no higher than a 3 but I plan on having him fight the PCs on his home turf where there will be a background count and he'll be using a focii of some sort (although his ranking in Sorcery/Conjuring would be relatively low - again, no higher than a 3). If he's outclassed, the shaman will flee with the intention of fighting another day.

- J.

I think the group of shaman working together works as long as they're a hive species. The Universal Brotherhood managed it, don't forget! Just make them initiates with the Great Ritual metamagic and apply the same rules to Summoning as you otherwise would to Spellcasting...