Shadowrun Traditions Are Nothing Like Real Life
Let's be clear: real-life magical traditions have very little to do with the mechanics of magic as it works in Shadowrun. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of the elements of real-world magic in SR: summoning spirits, enchanting magical tools, casting spells, all good. The thing is, all of these traditions are horribly impractical. Not even kidding, some of the ceremonial magic from the Medieval and Renaissance grimoires is ridiculous in what it's supposed to do, even the ones that aren't obvious forgeries.
I should mention at this point that magical traditions are syncrestic as hell. You get to a point reading through some histories where it seems like at the best of times a couple magicians are stealing everything they can from everyone else. Hearing about umbandistas using the Grand Pullet is strange and bizarre on the best of times, and then you read about some of the really strange shit the OTO got into...really strange shit. Anyway, you should all be thankful for the New Age shit because they're the ones that really started the idea that "All paths are valid," and that it's belief in your system, as opposed to the Age and Validity of the Ancient Tradition.
Anyway, point being: in real life, plenty of magicians begged, borrowed, stole, and invented whatever they needed as needed. In Shadowrun, I reckon pretty much the same thing happened; it took damn near sixty years but we've arrived at a point where pretty much every tradition can do what every other one can do. Hey, that segues into my next ramble:
SR4A Traditions Are All Alike
Some explanation for the history-impaired: Shadowrun started out with two magical traditions (Hermetic and Shamanic) and two flavors of magical ability (magicians and physical adepts). Things quickly got complicated as Shadowrun's collection of traditions grew, because the early game authors were following two separate principles (it should be mentioned that these are entirely hindsight observations, and I have no idea what was actually running through said authors' heads):
- Every tradition has to have some unique and special mechanic. They are all perfect little snowflakes.
- Every tradition has to borrow from the existing traditions. Players should feel comfortable with all of them.
What this means is that Hermeticism and Shamanism quickly became the "default" traditions and all the other traditions either had some mechanical advantage (or just completely different mechanics) or purposely had some quirk (often stolen from another tradition's mechanics) to set them apart. This was especially noticeable in the location books - every damn country seemed to want at least one unique magical tradition of their own, to the result that Britain had three flavors of Druidism and Tibetan buddhists were using hermetic circle rules to draw mandalas. The very worst of course was the Tir na nOg sourcebook, but it was far from the sole offender. By the time SR2 came to a close, the Shadowrun traditions were a mess.
SR3 wasn't much better. Magic in the Shadows took a stab at sanity and organization, but you were still stuck with, roughly speaking two camps - those traditions that had totems (idols, loas, etc.) and those that did not. Beyond that, the main details were in what type of spirits you could summon - nature spirits, elementals, loa spirits, or "spirits of the elements" (If you're asking yourself what the difference was between elementals and spirits of the elements, you'll note that this is part of the reason SR4 doesn't distinguish) - and even then there were internal distinctions such as who could summon ancestor spirits and who could not. Things continued to get muddier with every book, though the general shaman/not-a-shaman divide remained.
Hermetics, it has to be said, got the short end of the stick; while shamans or related traditions got to play with a couple new options - ancestor shamans, pantheism, totemists and obeyifas - hermetics were stuck with the old (but reliable) elementals which pretty much defined them as a tradition. On the other hand, pretty much everybody loved totems of one stripe or another. You had idols, loa, animals, elementals, paracritters/mythological...granted, most of them were some variation of "shaman," but the options were there.
Okay, skipping to the chase: SR4A collapsed this shit down. The number of spirits was cut down to ten, largely by removing a lot of redundancies (Water Elements, Undines, Lake Spirits - yeah, no, all Spirits of Water), and now everybody can get a mentor spirit - but believe it or not, those were pretty minor changes in the scheme of things; it was the changes in summoning that really killed one of the most fundamental differences. Used to be every hermetic needed a hermetic circle and - y'know, fuckit, just take my word for the fact that the mechanics were a lot more different and complicated than they are now. Most of the minor or incidental mechanical differences - the ability to collect animal reagents, summoning a spirit that can possess you, being able to stuff a spirit into a little widget - were opened up as options to most everybody.
Which is where we (finally) get back to the point - SR4 traditions don't have different mechanics to really enforce the fluffy differences, and decisions on what to play are less based on what you can do mechanically (okay, some munchkinny bit with drain attributes aside) than what you actually want to play. Or that's my story and I'm sticking to it. Honestly, I think the consolidated mechanics help make the game run faster and smoother; it's not that I don't understand the appeal of having different mechanics for each tradition, it's just that now yo can write your own tradition for whichever magical system that hasn't been covered yet without making up a bunch of new mechanics, and it'll be compatible with every other one in the game. Hell, you could try to build a tradition around the Simon Necronomicon if you really want to.
Not that you would want to. I mean, have you read The Necronomicon Files? Jesus wept.
Bringing It Home
Shadowrun's magical system is actually fairly flexible enough that with a bit of imagination you can mimic most real-world magical traditions to a surprising degree. Even necropants fall well within the range of unique enchantments. Of course, that doesn't mean you're literally going to be summoning up demons out of the Lesser Key of Solomon, but there's no reason why you can't go through the same motions and get that Spirit of Fire you really need. So for players and gamemasters that really want to get into the meat of their characters' traditions, for all the fun role-playing potential that exists there, go for and shine on you crazy diamonds.