I had to back and reread again to find the reference. Not Vlatch in SM, its spelled Vatch pg 93 having an interesting metaphysical argument. Got a kick out of that when first saw it, actually pg 92-93 great insight into spirit thought process's. Is the Vatch referenced from something in SR?

The Vatch are creatures from The Witches of Karres. Aliens who live dimensions differently than we do and deny our existence.



There is a mailing list, and direct email, and IM chats, and there's a secret host where people can upload files that anyone on the team can read.



Thank you.

-Frank

Actually communications and development have seen some significant changes since Frank was on board. The shift to Catalyst allowed us to modify, updated, and upgrade procedures. While a lot of communication still goes on via mail and messaging, we've taken to organizing author conferences/chats during development and have implemented an internal development forum to structure discussions.

Even though we have freelancers spread across the globe, we have a very organic and team-oriented development process, more so than is typical in the industry. Authors still develop their own drafts or collaborate on writing, but they do so in a team enviornment and get team input. This give and take is sometimes offputting to some authors who are used to more "compartimentalized" approaches to development and storytelling, but I've been a strong advocate for discussion and integration since back in SoE.

Cool.

-Frank

The fiction vignette that leads into the chapter was actually intended as a teaser regarding the Oxford Grand Circle - and has some clues on what's been happening in the United Kingdom.

This chapter has some extremely good and extremely bad things (in my opinion).

*Extremely good:
- We finally have answers to questions every GM faced at least once: what can I get if I try to discuss with a spirit, how "intelligent" a spirit is, how does metaplanar travel exactly works, and so on.
- Unification of spirits rules instead of having one ruleset for each kind of spirit.

*Extremely bad:
- New spirits types. I liked how SR4 chose to cover everything with a few generic spirits template instead of having different stats for sea and lake spirits. So I didn't see much use in adding new spirits type, except if they were really missing.
So Plant spirits, I could accept, we had elements: fire, earth, wind and water and "living": man and beast. Plant is an ok addition to the "living" part.
But the guidance, guardian and tasks spirits don't bring anything new: guidance and tasks are conceptually quite close to man spirits and guardian spirits could be any kind of combat-oriented spirit of any different type.
Besides, combat spirits isn't a good idea, in my opinion, spirits were already good enough at combat without the need for spirits with combat oriented stats...
But the task spirit is the worst of the bunch. "Hey spirits are already extremely powerful, what can we do to make them even better? Let's make them able to do everything a metahuman can do." I'm not saying it's broken (though it can lead to some nasty effects) but I don't see the point either in game balance or fluff.

The rest is okay, even if Posession can be seen as too powerful (I haven't seen it in a game yet so I can't tell).

Meh, that's just one of the really bad thought-out rules. It reeks of pure meta-gaming: "Oooh, look, I'm stealing your Karma!" "My what?" "Your Karma. Your Experience Points, you know... " "What? What is this? D&D? What are you going to steal next? My 'Fighter Levels'?"
Next time, the game designers should just unify the rules for Essence Drain and Energy Drain. And the very dumb Energy Drain rules make Bloodzilla possible. I really can't believe that they oversaw this...

Bloodzilla came about due to a misunderstanding during proofing. Should have been corrected, was not.

Re: Energy Drain -> It's all pretty arcane from most standpoints. Unlike, say, oWoD, nobody has definitively identified the Essence point from an in-game perspective, so there's still a good deal of debate about what exactly a vampire or similar critter steals-but even if you don't know exactly what's going on, you can still feel it. You may not know /what/ was stolen, but you definitely mark its absence.

Hindsight being 20/15, it would have been nice to have Energy Drain in the core book. But, little flaming ship down the urinal trough, now.

The Energy Drain rule is missing one short line that was mistakenly dropped in editing and which imposes a limit on the boost to Force that a spirit can recieve from Energy Drain. It will be added back in in the Street Magic errata coming in the next few days.

Speaking of Street Magic errata, is Catalog getting a change? As an Active spell, it really isn't any different than a generalized Detect(Object) spell, thus making the Drain F/2 rather than F/2+2 (the same as Manaball! What the heck!)

Besides, the spell make more sense as a Passive spell, something like a limited (objects only) Area version of Clairvoyance (final Drain F/2+1). Catalog has never had to contend with Object Resistance as long as I've seen the spell. Further, it works based on more of an observation/object recognition motif (automatic writing) rather than the magically-cramming-information-into-skull kind of deal that you get with the "Detect X" line of spells.

Er, Physical and Technical skills are not the only types of skills a metahuman can have, you know. True, it does allow a high-Force Task spirit to be an extremely good hacker or medic or artist, but they still are incapable of fighting, driving a car, or negotiating. I still say Spirits of Man are more broken; any spell in the book? That's pretty powerful.

Is it not any spell the summoner knows? Any spell in the book would be well borken.

Still you could pull some pretty cool stunts off with spirits of man...

"Possess this pistol and cast lightning bolt at whatever it is pointing at every time I pull the trigger until I tell you to stop doing so."

Pay Force in Karma to keep it doing that for a year and a day.....

Fighting can be handled with other spirit powers/spells, spirit hardened armor and high spirit attributes.
Driving a car can be done with a movement power combined with a guard power and the high spirit reaction.
Negotiating can be done to an extent with the influence power. (I agree it won't be as effective as a real Face).

By the way, spirits of man can have any spell the conjurer has, not any spell in the book while the task spirit has no such restrictions.

But as I said, I don't consider them broken, but I don't see the point either in the fluff or in the game. They keep saying that spirits won't like interacting with tech and now we have hacker spirits, spirits using mundane healing science, spirits mechanically fixing cars...
Some people on Dumpshock were talking about how movement power should be used by everyone for transport. But what about these? Forget metahuman employees, you just need to bind a rating 6 spirit and he'll work until the mage's death with a rating 6 skill and rating 6 attribute!

Once again, that's just my personal opinion.

Yeah, I don't like the way spirits can use technological stuff. Too much "mundanes still can't use magic, but now magic can use (and replace) mundanes" attitude.

No task spirits in my game. I prefer a more limited area for spirit use, and more stuff magic is not good at.

They have technical skills, they still can't perceive VR. Giving a spirit Hacking is severely suboptimal. Demolitions or Lockpicking is pretty sweet though.

-Frank

Simply give them old-fashioned touch-screens and keyboards. They'll easily overcome the penalties. But whatever, in the end, Task Spirits just are another group of superuber-things that are no-brainer. The more things the game designers put out in those books, the more power creep begins to slither back into the game. Shame, really...

Something else from the erratta that I saw that I think was a long time coming.


Gives adepts a lot more bang for the buck. I would've liked to see that in the first draft, but better late (a couple of editions) than never.

Yep. That little change makes my little heart go pitter-patter with joy.

I don't think a spirit can read any kind of screen? They only see astral right? They'd be trying to interpet the emotional impact of the matrix? In other words they'd be interpetting an interpetation of an abstract concept that doesn't translate at all into something you can understand on the astral. I also don't understand how'd they'd overcome the penalties of hacking without VR or hot simming. I'm getting this all from the fluff that says reading street signs while astral is a hard to impossible and that anything not alive is just kind of a grey blur. And if you have a GM that isn't applying massive "Working on a grey shadow" penalties... well he's just giving you the uber.

I think similiar limitations would apply to anything else a spirit tried to accomplish in the mundane world. Trying to fix a tire? Hey no problem. Trying to make some sort of serious repair to your vehicle? Doesn't your vehicle use a lot of complex electronics to manage fuel air mixtures and distribute power? Wow, too bad your spirit can't jack that info into his brain and adjust it on the fly, in fact he can't even use AR so that's another bonus that goes out the window too. I think demolitions might be one of the few mundane tasks a spirit would be any good at. I don't see it taking penalties for analyzing structural models (all just basic physics right?) and zipping around to place shaped charges and run wires. I would however imagine it would have a hard time interacting with the software that would coordinate those charges but it could just relate that to it's mage to input by hand.

Spirits can see shapes and physical objects, so it's a solvable technical problem. The big problem is that Task spirits only get 1 skill per optional power. Having Hacking by itself is pretty much useless since a Matrix Perception test is Computers, targeting a system for hacking is Electronic Warfare, and actually getting paydata is Datasearch.

Hackers are completely replaceable in SR4 rules, but with Agents, not with Spirits. Giving a Task Spirit access to Armorer or Lockpicking or First Aid is all pretty amazing. But trying to get them onto the Matrix is a waste of time.

-Frank

You are not the only one. The GF is rather enthusiastic about it.

You know I really like the idea of a spirit picking apart a lock and having it just slide open. Or the image of a gunsmithing shop springing to life and a spirit zipping around fashioning mods. I'm still not sure I buy a spirit with the "Electronics" skill though.

I want to do a bump and find that I still owe a comment on the spirit chapter. How fortunate

"The nature of spirits" is nice, even if nothing new for older players.

I like how the "The form? of spirits" mentiones the use of mundane items by spirits. Many players tend to overlook that option in my experience.

"Free spirits" offer the chance of Shadows vs. Protectors face-offs. It´s nice that the existance of unclassed spirits is stressed, the new magic system is really done with a write-your-own-fluff attitude.

"Battle of Will" is still worthless, unless one absolutely has to find a use for banishing. It is unfortunately not usable by mundanes, at all (As in dumb, not as in forbidden).

I like all the new "PC" spirits - and only partially in a munchy kind of way. I´d love to have a creative player with access to sage and guardian spirits.

Ally spirits, AKA "the waiting game" AKA "time measured in 8 karma periods". You shall definitly count farther than 3 in this case...

The next session is Astral Space and the Metaplanes, or "Jay Levine Goes Insane."

No, I'm kidding. Jay was a very late addition to SM and we love his stuff to bits, but there are a few things in here that are pretty weird for both new and older players.

The opening fiction, natch, is a continuation of the Ares-Bug Spirit plot, just don't ask me how it's supposed to actually work from a rules perspective.

Personally, I think Astral Topography came out exceptionally well, and the new background count rules are much simpler and easier to understand than in previous editions-if also a bit harsher and more unforgiving.

The On Location bits are the true strangeness in the chapter. I wouldn't have done some of these, so it's a good thing they got Jay to do it or else we'd all have missed out. Some of these are no-brainers: Dunkelzahn's rift, Crater Lake, the Cermak Blast Zone. Others pertain to Jay's particular interests (the Maya Cloud-he wrote Tibet in SoA) or are just plain weird (the Hive, Crystalwell). The Deep Lacuna was the result of a brainstorming session or three trying to explain the inundation of the California coastline, particularly in L.A.; this was developed a wee bit further in Corporate Enclaves.

Ah, one thing to note: especially in the core book, there was an initial attempt/guideline to use a standard stock set of characters in the examples-characters you might see as shadowtalkers or in the chapter fiction. Furthermore, efforts were made to make sure the characters had "realistic" skill/attribute/dice pool. Of course, with tons of freelancers, that kinda went out the window (guilty!) though some authors do tend to re-use certain characters for examples.

The astral security bits tie in with the development of "manatech" in Arsenal.

Oh it's pretty simple. The bracelet thingy is actually a masking focus and is there to make it harder to follow a ritual link to the space station. The magicians are Insect Mages who work for Ares and they have a free spirit on tap who has Astral Gateway. The magicians can send an Astral Gateway to Klandathu, and then the firewatch team run through and start shooting things.

-Frank

Just out of curiosity (and if I missed this in another thread [or this very one] I apologize) but is there any listing of official cannon Shadowrun metaplanes? In the SR4 rulebook it mentions Avalon as one. Are there any details or is this just one of those GM's discretion things?

Metaplanes for each of spirit types? Some metaplanes in "black boxes" in Street Magic. Really limitless possibilites. Lots of examples in past edition material as well.

There's no real official list of metaplanes, no. I think we all sort of prefer it that way, because when we put out a canon list of metaplanes, it limits GMs a bit. In my games, I always used a very exotic metaplanar world (as you can probably guess from some of the things I put in this chapter of Street Magic). Some GMs play with a more standard, logical division of metaplanes. I think either style is fine.

I really enjoyed writing the "On Location" bits. And yeah, I had to put the Maya Cloud in there because it's probably the only chance I'll ever get to put out official SR4 material on Tibet. Besides, it is probably the largest astral/mana phenomenon in the Sixth World.

If there is one portion of the chapter I wish I had had more time to think out and playtest, it'd be the wards. That was a difficult section to write, since there were definitely things we wanted to fix about wards, but we had no clear way to fix them. I did a lot of last-minute improvising and I'm not sure the playtesters had enough time to truly put the ideas through the wringer. I think it came out okay in the end, but it has been revisited in errata and rightfully so.

Even in previous editions, I added special metaplanes, like a plane that according to the legends of the "residents" there, was where the magically active population of a past age of Earth immigrated to.