Voodoo dolls aren't Voodoo. They're Hollywood.

All written by the same freelancer, though, as I mentioned above. There was no behind-the-scenes decision about the significance of Voudoun, it was just a particular writer's favorite. Much like when I worked Tibet into a number of the things I wrote or when Peter worked in the Vatican.

What ends up being significant in Fourth Edition will largely depend on the signature sprawl settings and the plot lines. Though Umbanda, an Afro-Brazilian variant of Voudoun, did play a role in Ghost Cartels. Not because of Voudoun's past significance, but because it just worked for the plot.

Voodoo nearly caused an all-out war in the Carib League, and dragged Aztlan and the Yucatan into it. So, despite the fact that you personally like Zorastrianism, it didn't have nearly the impact that Voodoo did.

And while most of the Voodoo appearances are due to one freelancer, he's a very famous and prolific one. Voodoo has had a major role in the Sixth World, while Zoratrianism (and many of the other traditions) have had little to no effect at all.

I would argue that that is because the focus of SR up to this edition has mostly been concentrated on North America (mostly)... with SR4/SR4a, we now have a more global outlook... I would bet that Voudon has little to no effect in Hong Kong or Japan, or even Russia for that mattter... as such, it would be worthwhile to have a more global outlook on magical traditions, rather than concentrating on a small section of the world...

My two cents

Actually, I'm not particularly fond of Zoroastrianism. I only defend it because you keep attacking it, and I only mentioned it at first because it was the religion I was LEAST familiar with. However, no, "almost causing a war" isn't nearly approaching the vast importance of Zoroastrianism in the real world. Without Zoroaster, no current religion would likely be anything remotely similar to what we know now. It was the original monotheism and many of the religious practices common to almost every modern religion, both eastern and western, stem from it.

Well Said...

We're not discussing the real world, we're discussing the Sixth world, where Voodoo wars nearly caused a meltdown across the entire Carib League and much of South America. As for real-world Zorastrianism, you vastly overstate the influence it had on Judeo-Christian and Islamic thought. I'd love to see how you argue that Soka-Gakkai Buddhism was influenced by Zoraster.

I think this discussion is getting a bit distracted. It's really not about "such-and-such tradition is more important than another." The diversity of traditions in Street Magic represents two aims of Fourth Edition. The first being streamlined mechanics that are more modular; which makes presenting many more traditions more feasible than it used to be. The second being a more global setting approach, even though that global perspective is focused on particular signature sprawls.

To be honest, regardless of which traditions may have been highlighted in past editions, no one (not even the writers or devs) know which ones will end up being emphasized in Fourth Edition storylines.

Which includes 100% of the real world's history up to the 1980's or 90's, including 100% of the history of the Zoroastrian religion. It's also not a dead religion, as you claimed earlier; it's a minority religion for sure, but still practiced in several places in the world, with the largest concentrations being in India and the US.

As it should be...

Minus about 5000 years of Earthdawn history, of course. And whatever happened in the second world, and however long that took.

For the record, I never said Zorastrianism was dead, although you are correct that it's an extreme minority. And while its philosophy was influential, so's Buddhism. Buddhism deserved several more paragraphs, at least visiting some of the other esoteric sects. Personally, I would have loved to see more on Ryobu-Shinto, although I agree that it's not significant enough to warrant its own writeup. So, I'm happy to see its wordcount go to more significant traditions. I just think they should have gone farther.

I also stand firmly by the point that Hermeticism and Shamanism deserved a full-page revisit in SM.

[nonsarcastic, curious]What hinders you to go dive into the vast space of information called internet and dig something up to flesh it out for Shadowrun?

In the small corner of the world upon which you choose to focus, this may be true. After 20 years, Shadowrun is increasingly widening its perspective, and poking into corners of the world in which nasties and beneficents have been around for millennia before the Christian roots of Voudoun, which Christian roots are themselves derivative of Zoroastrian archetypes.



?Because it is too much work to do it oneself, and it is more fun to snipe at those who facilitate such personal research?

Its not only widening its perspective, its rewriting itself. The unifying of magic is a part of that rewrite.
The above statement is not an attack. People need to accept that Shadowrun 4th ed is not Shadowrun 1st or 2nd. The game that was once focused on the "New World" after the birth of a New World, is now about the entire planet. Part of expanding that view was GURPS-ifying magic. After 3 years, I have just come to accept the mechanical changes as a necessity of Marketing to the entire world.

There is no way we are ever going to see a Shaman Archetype in leathers or have a "Tribesman" archetype finish out the main books again. Complicated, and delicious, mechanics are a thing of the past. If you want that, play Second Edition. Tom Dowd's era was a fine era.

As part of that modular aspect, I think rather than just presenting a bunch of different traditions it would have been cool to have some guidelines for choices.

For example, some symbolic or meaningful links between spirts and their connections to different spell categories. Or even what kind of traditions would utilize certain types of spirits.

Just a thought.

I'm thinking about that, but I can't think of a way to present symbolic and meaningful links between spirits and spell categories without talking about a specific tradition. Because really a spirit type can be linked with any spell category, depending on what makes sense for a tradition's belief system. Similarly, talking about what kind of traditions utilize certain types of spirits sounds to me like basically talking about different traditions.

This I can get behind. The rules for designing a new tradition are missing one major piece of information: WHY the spirits in the example traditions were chosen. Why are spirits of Man assigned to health for one tradition but manipulation for another? Why does a tradition have Beast spirits instead of the Fire spirits used in a similar tradition?

The idea of the tradition viewing various elements in particular context makes sense from the fully constructed standpoint, but how did you get there in the first place?

Well one thing that could work might be to take each Spirit separately and just give a list of common associations.

The associations themselves don't have to be thematic or coherent throughout the list either.

Example

Fire is often associated with: chaos, war, destruction, passion, love, hate, determination, purification.


Or something to help define Fire's place in a tradition.





Yeah, that would have been very cool.

A small rundown on why those associations are made for each particular tradition could give player's ideas when creating their own.

Actually, if you'd read what Demonseed has written in this thread, magic has ALWAYS been universal in the fluff. It's only the mechanics that have insisted on making magic arbitrarily different in each previous edition.

It depends on what you mean by "Magic is Universal".
Magic as a force, yes. The fluff has always been big on magic as a field.
Magic in use, no. The fluff had attacks on Shamanism as a "weaker" form one where the practitioner needed a crutch. The fluff knew they were differnt.

Different forms , different mechanics, same fluff. None of that is exclusive and since its about fluff, its not relevant.

I don't think magic was "arbitrarily different" between the two in previous editions.
Arbitrariness
Are you sure you wanted to use arbitrary?

I thought the earlier editions were fantastic and written carefully. Not comparing them to Fourth but stating they were fantastic in their own right. So much so, they may have spawned a long time following.

Who's to say I haven't? I'm playing a Ryobu-Shinto Miko right now.

The point is, the book traditions are supposed to be more fleshed out. SM did an okay job, the BBB did a sucky one. But fewer traditions with more information would have been more useful.

Unless, of course, you want to play one of the traditions that got dropped.

In My View... The BBB Traditions are VERY generic, while the Street Magic Traditions are a bit more focused... For even more focus, you will have to take the format introduced in Street Magic, do the research, and apply that knowledge to the given format...

Viola, A NEW Tradition...
Looks like you have already done that in the case of your Miko...
By the same token, I did it for Necromancy...

The way in which it was approached lends itself to unlimited customization, if you are willing to do the work...

I think that this was the design intention provided in Street Magic... Give a few examples and then allow your players to go wild... Would it have been nice to get a little more guidance, Sure... But we have what we have... we should use that to the best of our ability rather than complain that we got "take-out" instead of "Gourmet"

My Two Cents

Then you use the rules to invent your own. If you have guidance in creating traditions (by putting more detail into the ones you get) then it should be a breeze.

That street goes both ways.

Yes it does. But, i think i go with Cain from now on. Changed my mind. Less Traditions with those that are there more wordcount but with the option to expand the scope in future books like Digital Grimoire would have been a better way. Or some smaller write ups about the traditions like MitS did. Or expanding local traditions in the Location books where they are important.
I acknowledge that the way it was done is okay, not ideal for everyone, but okay. I can live with it and i can work good with it. In the aftermath, everyone can whine about something and it's hard work to please everyone.

Doublepost!

Ultrapost!

M-M-M-Monsterpost!

M-M-MULTIPOST!

M-M-MULTIPOST!

Yeah, the topic of few traditions versus more has basically reached its end. Cain has his preference, I have mine, Zurai has his, etc. Any way you cut it, a player who wants to detail his magical tradition in depth will have to do some work, whether he's using a tradition from the book or a custom-created one. But it was never the design intention to eliminate player research. Hell, I love player research.

Yeah, the topic of few traditions versus more has basically reached its end. Cain has his preference, I have mine, Zurai has his, etc. Any way you cut it, a player who wants to detail his magical tradition in depth will have to do some work, whether he's using a tradition from the book or a custom-created one. But it was never the design intention to eliminate player research. Hell, I love player resea♦rch.

I think what he is driving at is the core book should provide concrete examples with detail while the source books give additional options / rules to add to what the core book offers.

If that is in fact his point, I would agree with it. The BBB should contain everything needed to play and be sufficiently detailed to answer questions. The source books would provide additional resources and options.

I think what he is driving at is the core book should provide concrete examples with detail while the source books give additional options / rules to add to what the core book offers.

If that is in fact his point, I would agree with it. The BBB should contain everything needed to play and be sufficiently detailed to answer questions. The source books would provide additional resources and options.

And how are you meant to know that the tradition even exists? You've been avoiding this question. The tradition writeups in Street Magic are the first introduction a lot of players have to many of the traditions. You can't search for information you don't even know exists. There is no big list of knowledge you don't possess, and people don't look for things until they have a pressing need.

Their pressing need is created by the fact that they read the short writeup and say "this tradition is cool beyond belief, I need to learn more to make my character truly awesome". Two sentences cannot do that (or else, you've failed to prove that it can, still waiting on your 2 sentence Ryobu-Shinto writeup that'll drop my jaw), and you lose out if that awesome tradition isn't covered by your smaller selection. Birdshot is more likely to hit the bullseye than buckshot, and we only care about hitting the bullseye (which is only painted on after we finish shooting).

You invent them. That's the strength of the SR4 system, it's designed to invent traditions. The ones presented should show the building process, instead of just a two-paragraph overview.

Let me rephrase.

"How do you know the source material you use to create a tradition exists?" Surprisingly, not everyone knows about Buddhism, Sikhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Zoroastrianism, etc, etc. If you don't know these things exist, you've got nothing to search for.

What, you just want a list of all the religions?
Here's a start.

Although I wonder why one would have a need for religions in their game that they'd never even heard of.
Maybe i don't understand the question.

We're not talking about knowledge-obsessives like myself. We're talking about normal people - who won't ever look these things up for themselves because they seriously don't want to learn things that have no bearing on their normal life. Yes, you are an oddity, a rarity, for learning things beyond the bare minimum you can get away with. Don't make the assumption that other people are like you.

They don't look up lists of religions that they don't follow, because they're not in the market for a new religion. They don't want to know. Unless you expose them to religions they can use as a tradition, they will never discover them. Same goes for hedge magic and chaos magic. Without a wide variety of tradition writeups they will just trump for playing a Hermetic or Shaman again. They might be happier playing a Shinto kanmushi, but under Cain's proposition there's a fence between them and Shinto they don't care to hop.

My argument against Cain's two sentence writeup idea is that you can't get a full feel for a tradition in two sentences. He's yet to indicate that he finds the sentences I picked out of his previous posts about Ryobu-Shinto an unsatisfactory example of the worth of the style. I was completely unenthusiastic about the tradition on the basis of those sentences, since I knew basically nothing about the tradition. Meanwhile, a number of the writeups in SM piqued my interest and I can see myself doing research if, in future, I decided to play a magician or adept.

Research is what keeps it fresh... I too Love that particular aspect of creating custom traditions...

You could always search the internet (Google is good, as is Yahoo) for "Religion" or "Magic", you will get a very large number of hits for each... Pick and choose from there...

Design as you see fit... Viola, New Traditions

I would say that these individuals are not the ones that are interested in creating their own traditions in the long run anyway, so it does not really matter for them does it?

Of course, if they really WERE truly interested, they could do the research themselves, or ask someone else to do so...

So providing them with more traditions maximises their utility from the product, since at least one is going to hit the nail nearly straight on for them. Unlike us, who are willing to do research and therefore don't need exceedingly long writeups.

Actually, it's the opposite. The more you write on a tradition, the more likely you are to set someone's imagination on fire. Information junkies with a lot of imagination were probably developing their own traditions long before SM came out. The writeups are for those without; and in that case, the more detailed, the better.

Exactly...

Yes and No...

Some writeup is good to fire the imagination, too much information given as Cannon will tend to suppress the imagination, as you now have no room to maneuver if you disagree with what is written...

Excessive information is for those who do not want to go through the effort of creating their own information... and in this regard, yes, the more information the better...

However, for those who like to add their own flair, a smaller writeup is infinitely better as there will be less information that will need to be altered to fit the ideas that you may have discovered because of a single paragraph with minimal information.

Neither approaches is wrong, but with a limited word count, the developers decided that it would be better to provide many smaller writeups than a few detailed writeups...

Works for me...

Rifle in the dark. A powerful shot, but if you don't hit then it's completely worthless. I'd rather take birdshot and be assured of hitting near the bullseye.

I also agree with the point that too much information becomes not a road, but a rail.

Imagination is a curious thing. Reading a detailed writeup on one thing might light your imagination on fire for another. And the rules do support tradition creation, so who knows what might result?

...All two of them.