Mages conjuring spirits of Man?
Nature spirits not limited by domain?

Huh??!!??

Welcome to SR4. I had the same reaction when I first flipped through the magic section.
Once you get used to it, it works pretty well.

-paws

I think with the flexibility of Traditions they had to break the old formula. Otherwise everyone would make their own traditions and hermetic and shamans would become a minority.

I heard they let orks and trolls vote and a dragon became president....

In 2067, A team of Research mages, in concert with the Great Dragon Schwartzkopf, Introduced the Unified theory of Magic.

It was so awesome that it changed everyone's view of magic forever.

Take Geasa against various things. Tada, tradition flavour restored. And you can do much more! You can use those other traditions in Street Magic. Like Shintoism, or Buddhism, or Chaos Magic! And they didn't need to build entirely new magic systems to do it!

You might be able to tell that I prefer the unified SR4 system to what I assume is a nightmare of conflicting systems.

Sorry, don't know if this is meant ironic or serious, but that's a complete different shoe and has nothing to do with the rules change, AFAIK.

its the canon justification for the rules change, iirc...

and while i loved the voodoo chapter in awakening, being able to fit 10+ traditions in the same space is a win imo...

Okay then, blame it on the fluctuating mana level. Old boundaries are being broken. New ones discovered.

And there you go.

-paws

If you want to observe those old limits you have to use a mix of Geasa (which incidentally are different in that they no longer deal with Essence lost) and voluntary self restraint by the player.

A better wording would be "To name 10+ traditions in the same space". All of the traditions are really the same but pick 5 spirits. They all use the same rules.

This makes things easier on new and old players. There is a cost though.

Yeah, it's flavor. Yes, the new system is very flexible and allows for more real-world traditions to be brought into Shadowrun. The problem is, there's so much emphasis on the new system, there's almost no description. Hermeticism and Shamanism get about four paragraphs of flavor each in the BBB. Of all the new traditions, they get maybe two. Fewer traditions, with richer descriptions, would have been a lot better.

I would agree if these traditions were invented and the only source of info on them was in the rulebooks. Fortunately, all but maybe one or two (chaos tradition is the one I'm thinking of) of the magical traditions are based on, if not taken wholesale from, real-world theologies. More information is a Wikipedia search away. In that situation, fitting in more traditions at the expense of making players research the ones they find really interesting is the better choice, IMO.

This is actually one of the strengths of the Shadowrun setting. Don't know enough about <insert culture, geographical area, tradition, nation, etc>? You can look it up in any half-decent encyclopedia. You simply can't really do that in any game set in an invented world.

Sixth World Hermeticism and Shamanism are only vaugely similar to their real-world counterparts. Similarly, Shadowrun Voodoo and real-world Voudoun have hugely different practices. The others haven't been as prominent, but those three at least deserve more than a couple of paragraphs; they deserve some detailed history, maybe even showing how they've affected the Shadowrun world.

Chaos Magic is a real world paradigm.

Yeah, but Shadowrun 4 Chaos Magic should be called anything but Chaos Magic.

I'm not really sure I agree with that, or at least I'd like to explain what you mean further. I know I personally haven't really run into many cases where I couldn't use real world research to apply to Sixth World magical traditions. Hell, that's how Peter and I wrote the traditions in Street Magic.

Yes, that real world research isn't going to include how those traditions (or any traditions) have impacted the Sixth World. But that's the responsibility of setting material in general.

Forgot to answer, sorry. In my opinion there was nothing new discovered, it was just a rules change and the RAW magic rules of different traditions became geasa (if you would want to take them). There was no real distinction in magical traditions in third Edition, it all came down to what the magician believed and wanted to do. Fourth Edition just made that clear for itself and that's how the actual magic system came to be.
That's how i explained it to myself, be free to think something up for your groups. I'm just not happy with some In Game Justification of Tradition Mixing because "this and that happened and we learned from each other blurb". Not even the Unification Theory was that unified.

so what is a tradition, if not a collection of geasa?

Simply put, in the real world Hermeticism and Shamanism encompass hundreds of different practices. In Shadowrun, those practices have more or less been unified for simplicity's sake. An Enochian is treated the same as a Golden Dawn member. There could have been more, much more, describing the unique Shadowrun flavor of the two major traditions.

I would prefer to have less to describe the flavor. After all, I have access to wikipedia if I want real world data.

Mechanical differences were more interesting to me, as they would be unique and important for the game.

The point is, if you want your Enochian to be different from a Golden Dawn member, you just take different geasa. They didn't need to release an entire sourcebook fill with page after page of geasa templates for half the players to just ignore and make up their own stuff anyway. You know your character much better than Catalyst does, so who's the better candidate to dictate what that character can and cannot do?

I'm actually with cain on this one. The street magic write-ups are a really poor length. Either they should have been a sentence or two or a page or two. Why? As the mentioned Wikipedia. I don't feel like paying for the sound bit version of a magical tradition when I either know it already, or can look it u in a heart beat.

So how would a two-sentence description have helped you? We did what we could with the word count we had available, balancing trying to provide a general idea of the tradition as well as trying to present a number of different traditions. I think they do a good job of presenting the basic idea of what the tradition is about, which is the goal. Because, honestly, when you start getting into the deep details of a magical tradition, they will vary from one practitioner to the next, so it's either useless or overly constrictive to get into that sort of detail in a rule book.

For the record, I think the Street Magic profiles are just about the perfect length. They give you enough info on the tradition to know whether it's something you'd be interested in playing. Two sentences would be useless from any standpoint, and two pages would be far, far, FAR too much when about 90% of the info they'd possibly put in those two pages is available for free online. Every page they waste duplicating stuff like that is one less page they can use to provide new rules.

And it's not like they've gone that in-depth into any other specific bit of Shadowrun rulefluff. Cain wants to know how Voodoo impacted the world, but if we give an impact statement for every tradition, why don't we get one for every piece of cyberware? I'd imagine Wired Reflexes have had just as much, if not more, of an impact on the world of Shadowrun, so why not two pages of backstory on that too? Where does it stop?

Besides, If you want more flaver, these differences can also be modeled on Magical Initiation Groups for more in-depth coverage...
Seems to be an easy fix to me... Besides, I like that kind of thing myself, as it lets me integrate those "tradition" that I care about into the story on a more personal scale...

My Two Cents

The mechanical difference in previous versions of SR added more fluff to the traditions than 20 pages of fluff would have in 4e. I don't even know why they bothered to enter any traditions.

They could of just put:

Insert Real world religion here.
Insert Drain Stat here,
Insert Spirit
Here
Here
Here
Here
And Here.

And this would have been just as informative and had about the same amount of fluff as the current street magic layout.

I prefer the "less is more" approach. Fewer traditions, in greater detail. I mean, you're trying to overview an entire religion in two paragraphs!

I like the suggestion that the Initiation group writeups would have been a better template. SM goes into more detail on those groups than it does any tradition, including Hermeticism and Shamanism.

I disagree. I know absolutely nothing about Zoroastrianism (outside of the historical perspective). The paragraphs in Street Magic give me enough of an idea of what the tradition is about to know whether it's something I might want to build a character around. If I didn't have those paragraphs, I'd have no idea what the actual practices of Zoroastrianism are, and I'd be forced to do research to determine if it was even an idea I wanted to pursue. That's silly. The current amount of information provides a good balance between doing it for you and not wasting dozens and dozens of pages on fluff.

Magic in the Shadows opted to introduce detailed mechanics for three different traditions (Path of the Wheel, Voodoo, and Wuxing) and reduce the remaining traditions to three sentence descriptions (that basically shoehorned the remaining magical traditions of the world into the 2 "dominant" traditions of Shamanism and Hermeticism). This was slightly at odds with the diversity of magical expressions and the metaphysics of Sixth World magic where belief does define the forms thaumaturgy takes (as exemplified by the magic of insane and insect shamans in Magic in the Shadows). Please, pick up Magic in the Shadows and try the flavor text for an Islamic or a Shintoist magician on for size. Or a Wiccan.

With SR4 there was a conscious decision to acknowledge and empower the diversity of magical beliefs and practices around the Sixth World (as well as introduce a system that allowed GMs and players to customize their own "ideal" traditions if they wanted) - this is also in tune with the intent to take the game to a more global level. This also meant streamlining the underlying mechanics so all traditions were (relatively) balanced. Obviously, many people preferred the mechanical differences the pre-SR4 traditions brought to gameplay and added diversity to the game mechanics - that's fine. We believed, however, that the mechanical differences were unnecessary complications and in many cases unbalanced play (ie.there were obvious mechanical advantages to taking Shamanism vs. Voodoo for instance, and Wuxing had many of the functional tropes of Shamanism with more versatile spirits). We thought and stll do that ultimately those functional differences could be (re)produced with fluff and roleplaying through the different paradigms, the rites and tropes, and (to return to the topic of this thread) the different individual take on spirits.

When we got to Street Magic there was never any question of whether we should provide 2 sentence blurbs or provide a two or three paragraphs that condensed the core paradigm, practices and beliefs of a representative sample of the most well-established Sixth World traditions. In fact, if you compare the actual fluff text about the beliefs of the three detailed traditions in Magic in the Shadows (as opposed to the drawn out mechanics), Street Magic contains most if not all the relevant fluff, minus embelishing fiction. Though I would have liked to have had the space Awakenings or Grimoire 2 assigned to fluff, this simply wasn't feasible - that's not to say you won't be seeing something like that in the future.

For the record we are very satisfied with the results; Shadowrun 4 presents a setting where the action is a lot more global in scope and a significant number of players are using non-Hermetic and non-Shamanic magicians (though those two remain dominant) and this is as it should be in a globalized society.

If ever a message was written in the front of the books for old timers coming back to the game, its mixed in above. The game is no longer focused on North America.

Good, bad, indifferent, many changes occur due to the wider scope.

Agreed.

As much as I love the Seattle setting (and have grown to enjoy Denver too), Shadowrun really needed a more global perspective.

While I would have liked to see a whole page dedicated to each of the SM traditions, I'm okay with what they came up with. Its just enough information to wet my appetite and make me want to do a little research on the side.

And the fact that there aren't pages upon pages of funky rules on particular traditions is a plus, for me. That's one of the reasons I strongly steered people away from Voodoo in the past.

-paws

This was one of the parts of 4th ed I truly liked. the spirit/elements/conjuring rules for the first 3eds were so technical and even contradictory that it was a muddle. This really cut it down nicley to believable leveles. I mean a mage believes she has used her will to shape the basic element of the area, and the shaman says she has spoken to the true sense of the place, but what they have functions the same, it's just they view it differently.
like to you want the squid or the calamari? red sauce or marinara? spegetti or noodles?

I really love how Shadowrun handles magic. Drain, traditions, geasa, spirits, Adepts, the whole bit. Insect and toxic shamans were a stroke of genius. Small details (like the pricing of certain Adept powers) are a small price to pay for dumping Vancian magic into a singularity with a satisfactory flushing sound.

I liked how Street Magic handled things, including length of descriptions. That book is soley responsible for getting me interested (academically, not spiritually) in Zoroastrianism. Some of the spirit choices are a bit unbalanced, and it does feature a bit of power creep, but I can live with that.

You made every tradition the same and slapped a different name plate on the door. How does everything is the same empower other traditions? Sure in 3e and previous there were basically 2 traditions with different name plates thrown on the door for all the other traditions, but now there is only one tradition. Roleplaying it out only takes you so far, it does not hide that mechanically they are all identical.

At the very least, Materialization Traditions and Possession Traditions are extremely different in practice, which is as much diversity as there has ever been. And that's if you only take the absolute most obtuse view possible.

End of the day you are mage who uses logic for a drain stat and summons Fire, Air, Earth, Guardian, and Man spirits. Its all the same, you can act differently but really the differences are small. Before there were at least two traditions now there is one with basically roleplaying totem like differences.

Summer Dress Tradition
Basic Concept: Women are totally hot in Summer Dresses and they should wear them more often.
Spirits:
Man
Guidance
Air
Water
Earth
drain Stats: Intuition+Willpower.
Description:
Mages of this tradition see themselves as a type of artist. They want to move the world toward a higher plane of female fashion the Summer Dress. Fashion Designers of a peculiar bent, they never the less have there fan base. This is largely due to the known fact that women look sexy as hell in a Summer Dress. The practice of magic is an expression of the art form they hold close to there soul.
Steeped in a mixture of hippie symbolism and over the top fashion designer attitude it comes across as a free form magic system with attitude.
Summer Dress magic is the art of forcing your world vision on others in away that lets them see to true path. Appropriate mentor spirits are Seductress or Sun. The spirits summoned are seen as parts of nature or fashion appropriate individuals. Water spirits are the essence of a beach on a summer day, Air spirits a cool breeze, earth spirits may come forth in a way that symbolizes are lush garden, while guidance spirits may appear as fashion designers from a bygone age spirits of man as the embodiment of what mankind should be appear as women in summer dresses.
Summer Dress is a minor tradition found throughout the world. The Tradition finds its roots in the Fashion Designer Luc Masson a designer born in the 20th century.

Now other than the fact I'd roleplay this character a bit differently how is this type of amge different in any significant way to a Zoroastrian? Is the difference any larger to how a follower of the Dark King would act compared to a follower of a Sun mentor spirit? We are basically down to one mage with just different totem options now.

I'll give you that possession is different. But there were possession traditions in 3e as well. So main book we dropped from 2 to 1 tradition, in street magic it went form 3 to 2. And I don't consider it an obtuse view I consider it not a not covering my eyes and ignoring what's actually in front of me viewpoint.

The difference is that i know no GM who would allow that Summer Dress Tradition. It's idiotic and lacks any real life reference nor a proper concept.

A real Tradition is a bit more, there's a concept behind about what magic is, how spirits are handled and those nifty things to roleplay about. I think that's enough difference but i can understand the want for differences in the rules system.
But it isn't really necessary in my opinion.

Your prejudice against Summer Dresses is duly noted. You will be converted to the true path one day.

Sorry. I am already occupied with several true paths to bother.

Are you Kidding Me?

Here is a real world parallel... What is the intrinsic difference between the mainstream Christian religions?... They have mostly the same beliefs, and yet, they are COMPLETELY different. Dogma, Rituals, Beliefs that have been formed over the last several thousand years... all from a very basic core concept...

Traditions in SR4 are no different in this regard... they all have a very core concept (Magical belief and ability) that is cast through a VERY different lens through Dogma, Ritual, Beliefs that have been formed over at the least decades, and in some cases over several thousand years or more...

There is an almost unlimited number of variant religious beliefs and dogmas that have been generated since mankind began to worship the things around him... why should the Magical Traditions be any different?

It will ALWAYS come down to the world View of the various Beliefs and Traditions... a ROLEPLAYING aspect rather than a mechanical aspect... the mechanics of belief are just that ... Belief...
Every thing esle is just one flavor or another...

My Two Cents

Well Said...

I disagree completely. You cannot ignore roleplay differences in a roleplaying game. A Zoroastrian will treat magic, spirits, the metaplanes, and life in general dramatically different from a houngan or a Shinto Priest. No, there's not much rule support for it (though there's more than you state), but rules aren't everything, and frankly forcing every tradition to be mechanically different is a bad, bad way to go. Why?

Because GMs would be forced to either memorize all the various traditions or ban them.
Because they would take up vastly more room in the rulebooks that could be used for other rules.
Because as you add more different rules you for the same rules space (traditions), the difficulty of keeping them all balanced with each other increases exponentially.
Because there's no reason to make specific mechanical rules when good roleplaying sense covers the differences just as well without causing any other problems. If your players don't have good roleplaying sense, then different rules aren't going to make the game any more fun anyway.

I could go on, if needed.

Well Said...

Zoroastrians take different Geasa. OH SHI-!

I mean, if you want to differentiate them in your game, find about 10 BP worth of gease for each one. Player starts with that geas when he takes his Magician quality.

More or less that's how it is. Although there may be a number of differing traditions and theologies that are based on differing views of the nature of the universe, but in reality (shadowrun reality anyhow) there's only one universe and one 'magic' even though differing cultures have varying views.

From a rules standpoint it also makes more sense to have two very generalized mechanics that allows the players to handle there traditions at the level they are comfortable with. In some cases a player may not desire to get to in depth into a tradition while SR 3's traditions may not have reflected the players knowledge of a tradition adequately enough.

Spirit choice can heavily influence style of play. Someone with access to spirits of Man, for example, will likely not sustain spells themselves - they'll summon a SoM with the ability to cast the spell, and tell it to sustain. Someone with Plant or Guardian spirits doesn't really need counterspelling for most situations (Magic Guard). And so on.

Also, Logic vs. Intuition vs. Charisma: Logic can be enhanced with cyber, Charisma can take advantage of Elven racial bonuses, and Intuition is an initiative stat and is linked to Perception. This will heavily influence how a magician character is built.

The funny thing about Shadowrun is that the earlier editions of Shadowrun explained the universality of magic repeatedly, but contradicted it mechanically. Let's take some examples from Awakenings:





And from Magic in the Shadows:



That's been the funny thing about magic in Shadowrun's earlier editions. It explained itself as a universal but then presented itself as non-universal mechanically. And as the Shadowrun setting grew out of the borders of Seattle and included traditions beyond plain vanilla Hermeticism and Native American Shamanism, it began to really show its mechanical limitations.