Short question: i have an focus made of e.g. wood. This wood-stick is broken = focus completely destroyed or could it be repaired?

Nope, Focus is done for.
Physical or Astral Form destroyed means all the Karma and everything else in there is gone

Hmmm...what does that mean? SR4 makes the usage of magic-wands unpleasant.^^ Thank you Stahlseele.

Maybe wooden. Nothing makes plasteel, diamond or dragon-bone incompatible with magic wandification.

Nothing except your tradition. I have problems picturing a Druid with a plasteel focus. But AFAIK by RAW there is no hard restriction.

Maybe i have to houserule this, but i would allow to regain the usage of the focus if it is repaired and reactivated with a ritual.

Use Steel, or stone, that will break bone. No brittle Wood.
Or Copper or Silver or something

ANYTHING can be made into a focus. even you own liver... just don't go and challenge your GM to "try and take that away from me"...

my default foci form are bracelets.

canbe destroyed too. Karma is expensive and rare. I just want to prevent some "accidents" because i choose to have an old-fashioned magic-stick instead of the standard metal-amulet.

Why don't you make a magic stick into a fetish that's a lot cheaper and the foci into bracelets amulets, tatoos.
On the other hand you could ask your GM if he seriously wishes to deliberately destroy your foci through the opposition or if it is more in the interest of the opposition to neutralize the person using the foci. Even a wooden stick should be safe from most accidents.

Make the wand from ironwood so it doesn't break so easy.
This way you can have your magic wand and it's not nearly as easy to break.

If you want to use a magic wand, that is fine and dandy, but my advise would be to have the wand as a fetish rather than a focus, and have more durable (and less obvious) items as your foci. At least that way you aren't out any karma if your wand gets broken, on the other hand, you won't be able to cast spells tied to the fetish use until you replace it, but "them's the breaks, chummer" (pardon my pun).

Or, you could have the magic wand be made of wood, but the only enchanted bit being the granite carved rams head and copper prongs that attach to length of the wooden stick/handle (or whatever).

It always bothered me that mundane telesma are much harder to enchant, but don't cost any more.

THey are mundane, easy to aquire, but not as pure, so harder to magic, but easy to get, so cheap.
Also, the part with only the head being the focus would work, if the head is detachable.
If it's one piece, the whole thing is the focus. Even if you chip of a bit from the handle, the focus is still broken.
If you simply screw your focus onto something else, that's something else entirely.

I've been toying with some rules for repairing foci, but I don't know when or where or if they'll be published.

Maybe something like Digital Grimoire but for Arsenal?

I could also think of some special enchantment that gives the focus a higher durabilty. Maybe something like "indestrucible".^^

While possible a strict GM could cause problems if you actually want to use this focus. To be able to benefit form the focus it must either be on the mage's body (in a pocket counts) or in his hand. Technically if the mage does not hold the stick at the enchanted part such a focus would not be in his hand.

I'd allow you to repair an item, but it would cost you, and require a least one session depending on how powerful it is.

This is something which i could accept. Like i told before, it is only to encurage PC´s to get away from the logical solution of chosing an already hard to destoy form of focus, to the more original forms.

ah, right, forgot about that.

Semi-related question, what exactly happens at the time when the foci breaks and the magical energy is released? I know that some game systems (D&D comes to mind) has the magical device go off like a bomb. There is nothing in RAW that state that this happens in SR (just that it becomes useless). How do you play it out?

Hence the copper attachments running the length of the stick. So as long as you tough the copper, you are in contact with the foci.

Nothing indicates anything spectacular happens, but from a flavor perspective, I'd make it flash and have mana come streaming out.

But no, there's no rules saying if a focus is broken, anything BAD happens. Other than being out a focus.

One addendum: about destructability and foci...

Even the Elemental Scrolls of Ak'El'Ar could be destroyed, and they were a relic from the fourth world. Granted, trying to do so would royally piss off the spirits that guarded them, but the scrolls themselves were quite destructable. So i think any "indestructable" enhancement on a focus would have to be pretty immensely hard to work.

Learn Reinforce and then use Quickening to make it permanent on the focus. You don't need many hits before your hazel wood wand is hard as a brick wall.

Of course if you don't have Quickening, you could use a Sustaining Focus. Which you could use to sustain the Reinforce spell. On itself. Or, er, learn Quickening.

I would ensure a PC had a reason to reinforce an "item", something that happened. Some lesson learned. If they just tried to walk through the door with a titanium plated wand with no background then I'd likely say no. (Well actually I'd say "Why do you have this?" But you get my point.)

The main reason I can think of for having a fragile wand you wave around is to convince the "Norms" that if they break or steal the stick they have crippled your magic. I'd surely dress up the stick with all manner of feathers and beads and hells yes I'd wave it around alot. If its big and fancy enough I'd go so far as to put a stun baton in it...

Now I know what I'm doing with my next mage... clubs all the way. Just cause I'm a druid don't mean I ain't got a tazer in my shillelagh.

As far as fixing a broken focus it sounds like something I'd allow as a GM, Enchaning tests between easy ( a small chip on a bracelet) to comperable to or harder then the initial creation test (bracelet shattered, a couple of small pieces missing), salted to taste - harder to break matterial being harder to repair sounds like fun/ "balancing", with bizzare reagents often being nessasary. Whether I'd require some additional karma costs... probably but I'd try to keep it light to nill depending maybe on some astral questing and other non-sense. I'd be running any such things seat of my pants and would generally refuse to "rules it up" for my players past the above.

I've always point people in the direction of "Geas" if they wanted to use wands and such "breakable - stealables" for flavour and to make their powers lean on it. People tend to feel less hosed when I do break or steal it it (I WILL have some idiot/ genius break it if its fragile and the campaign runs any real time) and they *can* replace it, though its a pain in the buttocks.

i would recommend a cost of 1 karma to repair the focus. after all, it's only 1 karma to build it in the first place.

I was more thinking karma cost to "re-bond" the focus as it was "non-magical" for a bit there. Though a cost of one to fix it would cover my "light" karma requirment.

Just keep this in mind Ancient... before you make rules to repair things. You need rules to damage/destroy them.

In meatspace, that's easy. But in astral, there are none. And those there are only deal w/ deactivating the astral form until it self heals.

Then you have people who actively claim they can break any focus at will using the same rules as for putting a TEMPORARY hole in a ward (which costs no karma to generate and exists at much higher force than a focus typically, and which again regenerates in a single combat turn).


Not expecting a reply, just pointing out some of the mines in the field ahead of you.
(quite frankly, given all the difficulties which astral entails, I'd say it's best if a purely astral form can only ever deactivate a focus by disrupting it's 'astral form' allowing it's physical form to regenerate it, unless the physical form gets broken).

There's always Bull's new pdf magazine.