Hello! I'm pretty new to 'running; I've got the basics down, but that's about it.

Anyway, I was thinking about LOS spells, and how it says that if the character can see the target, the spell works. Does that mean that if the character can see the target on, say, a video feed from a spy drone, they can cast a spell on them?

Thanks!

I'm afraid not, MidnightHobo. Direct spellcasting requires a line of sight; specifically, there must be an unbroken stream of light going from your target to your eyeballs. Now, if you get cybereyes and pay for them with Essence, those become a part of you for the purposes of spellcasting; however, even if you get a detachable drone cybereye, you can't cast spells from it if it isn't in physical contact with your body. Mirrors, however, are acceptable (although I suspect the impose a small penalty).

Now, if you want to cast spells on people you can't see, there are two options. First, use an AoE Indirect combat spell. Indirect combat spells only require LOS between where the spell is going and you, so a fireball you throw can hit people around the corner you can't see.

However, if you want to cast spells on people who're very far away, look into Ritual Spellcasting (in the basic book) and Sympathetic/Material Links (Street Magic).

Good luck, and welcome to Dumpshock!

Nope. Line of Sight for magical works has to be established through purely optical means. You can target people through fiber-optic viewers and binoculars and stuff, but not through rendered images like video. As far as magic works, there's an important symbolic disconnect between a video image and a "real" image. Or, alternatively, it's because they're not the same photons.

Thanks, McAllister! I was thinking about a magician assassin who made use of spy drones to do his dirty work, but I suppose I'll have to try something else. Maybe an infiltration-based one who steals something and then does the deed... not quite as effective, I think, but I'll work something out.

This is definitely an approach with more flavour than optimization, but you could dose your victim with Shade, a drug from Arsenal. It costs 1,000 a dose (though an accomplished arcanist/enchanter could harvest their own orchids from southeast Asia and produce it) and has an 8R availability, so it's not cheap, easy or legal, but anyone who takes the drug is forced to astrally project. The benefit is that you could dose your victim, then also astrally project while your victim is on the drug, and snipe him with a mana spell.

Otherwise, you could just summon a spirit, form a mental image of the guy you want him to kill (perhaps because you can see a picture/video of him...mwahaha) and tell the spirit to go kill him. It counts as a Remote Service, so the spirit would depart as soon as the combat was over, but as long as the guy's within a kilometer, a force 5 spirit will find him within 20 minutes using the Search power (found under Friends and Foes in the basic Shadowrun book). It won't kill everyone, but it has a great chance of working against non-Awakened opponents, especially if they're at home asleep. Against tougher opponents, Bind a bunch of spirits and send them all at once.

Here's another useful perspective; summoning a Force 6 spirit takes one turn, and will hit you with 4 drain on average. If you have a score of 5 in both Drain attributes (Willpower + either Logic, Intuition or Charisma depending on tradition), the Centering metamagic and a Centering focus force 3, you have at least 14 dice, which will usually soak 4 drain down to 0 and even has a chance of working on 6 or 8 drain. Therefore, it would be very effective to keep yourself hidden, summon a spirit, and tell him to kill the guard around a corner that you can see with your fly spy. The building's security will know there's a spirit in the building, but with luck (and a good hiding place) you'll be able to remain hidden while it does the dirty work. Also; invest in Masking. Very useful metamagic.

I all you rely on is having the target go outside, you can levitate up very high and then focus in on your target with a telescope you thoughtfully brought up with you. The altitude limit for levitate is roughly 100 miles (~160 km) so you can see quite far away when you are up that high.

Of course, you'll also have to watch out for your spell signature, which is left behind, kinda like fingerprints, when you cast a spell.

To say nothing of getting up that high... a Force 6 levitation spell with 4 hits on the test will have you floating at 29KPH or so, so it'll be more than five hours of straight climbing to get that kind of altitude. The descent will be just as long, unless you brought a parachute.

Yes, but an ascent to a (lower) altitude can still get you some large horizon limits.

You don't need extra O2 up to around 4500 meters, which gives you a horizon of around 240km.
You can use a 'simple' O2 setup up to around 10,000 meters, which gives you a horizon of about 357km.
A (space suited) ascent to the limits of the manasphere (~160km) gets you a horizon distance of around 1438 km.

Haha, I really like the spirit assassin idea; it sounds like it'll work pretty well. I don't know about the viability of dosing someone with a drug... it sounds like he'd have to get closer to the victim than I'd like... I also hadn't thought of the astral signature thing. Do spirits take on your astral signature when you summon them?

You might be able to use the drones as spotters. Equip them with optical magnification (binoculars or telescope), have it feed through fiber optic to an optical lense you would normally use to view fiber optic transmissions, then yourself use optical magnification (again, binoculars or telescope, etc.) to view the fiberoptical display. Longer distances, or every corner you need to cast around might require another retransmission drone. Simpler yet, mount mirrors on the drones and use a telescope to get your optical view. Of course, lining up all these drones perfectly to get a magnified view is going to be difficult, but so is remote spellcasting.

Have you considered a rigging assassin who made use of armed spy drones to do his dirty work? Or, if you want to go for the forces-beyond-human-ken thing, same deal with a technomancer?

Has no-one else here ever been in a Camera Obscura? They really are very impressive - like have a controllable TV in front of you. Build one of these high enough, say on top of some tall building on the edge of Redmond, and the magician could sit in his comfortable chair, in a comfortable room, pot of coffee by his side, zapping people miles away.

You want my thoughts on this? Forget all this assassination nonsense. Killing people is a horrible way to earn a living. Sit in your Camera Obscura, zoom in on anyone wearing valuable looking jewelry, holding credsticks or whatever and with a little Magic Fingers, a Little Levitate and Clairvoyance if you must, you'll have pricey little nick nacks winging their way across the city toward you all day long. No human eye can track a gold necklace very far into the sky and no radar will track it. It's what we call a "nice little earner".

K.

A human eye with astral perception could track them (or, more acutrately, the glowing spell transporting them) rather easily. And pretty much any patrolling spirit would see the spell.

Actually, you can use those images to cast spells.

Ritual Spellcasting using the picture as a Symbolic Link.

Sure, but the World isn't populated by PCs and Prime Runners.

Doesn't take that many astral sensatives for the guy to get caught. Somebody yells because an invisible force pulls an item of value away, anybody who knows magic is gonna get suspiscious; somebody with astral sight may look on right then. Even barrinf immediate response, if it happens a dozen times, the cops (or local crime syndicate / corp who the mage unwittingly stole from) are gonna set a mage or spirit on patrol to keep an eye out for the source of trouble. And that's barring the chance of some random "good citizen" astral traveler or spirit seeing what happens and dropping a dime on the guy... or a bad one wanting a cut.
Magic may not be common, but astral space isn't so empty that you can just fling spells at long range across the city all day without anybody catching on, or that people won't try to defend themselves when they know there's a rash of magical thefts going on.
Of course, all these issues hold doubly true for killing people with magic from long range, but that tends to be a less often repeated crime.

Sound to me like it would be easier to use a combo of vision mag and invisibility if you wanted to be a magical pickpocket. Murder is probably better left to ritual magic, however then you have to worry about the target figuring out what is going on and seeking help.

You can make a Palming test using Magic Fingers. Your agility is equal to the hits you got on the spellcasting test (which may well mean it's higher than your body's agility) and you suffer a -2 modifier for doing it through a spell, but if you were really determined, you could probably pickpocket people from a distance without them realizing until it's too late.

But it's never too late to complain to whomever you look to for protection. Lone Star would have spirits patrolling for odd stuff on the astral, so unless this type of pickpocketing becomes normal, they will notice. If it becomes normal, Lone Star is going to get flooded with reports and actively patrol for those spells and floating abjects which are astrally visible.

Might work on an irregular basis, but not often enough to support a nice lifestyle.

Doesn't a camera obscura produce an image on the wall? So you'd be casting using photons that last hit the wall/screen/whatever, rather than the target you're "looking" at?

Doesn't have to be. It would make a nice way to spend a Summer evening. So one day, Martin the Magician, and Frank, Freddy and Ferdinand his friends grab their cheap telescopes and set out a few deckchairs on the roof with plenty of cigarettes and cherry pop. Freddy spots a man with a gold rolex watch, nudges the magician. Everyone finds the target with their telescope and shouts encouragement as the Martin furrows his brows and carefully undoes the rolex. A moment later, it's zipping through the atmosphere toward them amid applause and whooping. Ten minutes later, the Marting the Magician spots someone leave their commlink on a table by an open window. At the end of the evening, they stop by Pete the Pawnbroker's Pawnshop and cash in a bundle of trinkets for a couple of hundred Nuyen which they proceed to blow at Barry the Bartender's Bar.

Of course Lone Star is going to try and stop this with a spirit of some sort. That's how we get stories, dramatic tension and interesting events! Is it something an ice-cold Shadowrunner would do for a living? No! Is it something fun and interesting and possibly a good background detail for what he did when he was growing up or where he got that Criminal SIN from? YES!

K.

EDIT: Yes - a camera obscura projects the image on the wall or (in the one that I visited) a large round table. But I think if a mirror works, then this ought to. I suppose it could open up some dangerous possibilities if you could create some sort of mobile reflector for runs, but I think it would be okay.

AFAIK, the only restriction is that they have to be the same photons that came off your target. It doesn't matter what else they hit between the target and your eyes, or else fibre optics and telescopes wouldn't work for targeting. Technically neither would plain old LOS targeting, because there's a tiny amount of atmospheric refraction over any distance due to photons colliding with molecules in the air. And, as previously mentioned, mirrors.

So it seems that any form of reflection or refraction is legit for spell targeting.

Lone Star would have spirits patrolling for stuff on the astral, but then again, they'd also have squad cars patrolling for stuff on the physical. You'd look both ways for a cop car before you stole an old woman's purse, wouldn't you? So you'd also look both ways on the astral before magical pickpocketing. Besides, Lone Star has at least 50 times as many mundanes as Awakened cops, so you're probably about 50 times more likely to be stumbled upon by a cop car than a cop spirit.

And as long as you do your pickpocketing well, nobody's going to go to Lone Star and say "Help! A rogue magician-pickpocket has been levitating away my valuables!" They're going to say "Help! A pickpocket has absconded with my valuables!" Your average citizen who's just lost his wallet is going to look around at people who might've grabbed it, or on the ground to see if he dropped it, not up to see if it's flying away.

Here are more helpful ideas; you could always use the same strategies that real pickpockets use. For example, have an accomplice on the ground distract people (by hitting on them, asking them for help, anything you can think of), and use your mojo while the mark's attention is elsewhere.

Also, valuables might have RFID tags on them, but here's my suggestion for that; put a Tag Eraser on a nearby roof and turn it on. Then, when you've stolen a watch, commlink or other item that might be tagged, fly it to the nearby roof and run it next to the tag eraser before flying it over to yourself. EDIT FOR CLARITY: the benefit of doing this is that the owner of a tagged watch/commmlink/etc. will have a record of its movements until the tag is erased, so it's better to lead him on a wild goose chase. Worst case scenario he leads Lone Star to your tag eraser, they take it as evidence, and you buy another one for 150 nY.

Hummm murder is best left to a go-ganger with a shiv, but that is just me. Wetwork seems so passe'. If I were a rich johnson type I would not bother to hire a set of Prime runners to whack someone when 20 worth of soy and novacoke will get the job done.

Yes, but the possibility of failure using a streettrash to hit a valuble and protected mark is exceedingly high, neccessitating the use of 'runners.

Or they can just be used to prove a point; "I can hit you anywhere, any time I want to, and I have the resources to do it."