The rules seem fuzzy to me on this but maybe someone can clarify. My PCs are about to attack a mage who has a spirit watching over him. So the pc's appear in the room and the Guardian spirit was holding his action, then whacks the party mage based on his astral signature. My question is can the spirit attack from the astral plain and hit the mage if his is currently in the real world? Or does he have to manifest?

Unless the mage is dual natured, the spirit must manifest to attack or use any of his powers upon him. If the mage is dual natured, all bets are off.

Of course this works both ways so the Spirit is probably better off waiting for the the Mage to go dual natured so it doesn't have to deal with the rest of the team.

Thanks for the quick reply. Hopefully combat goes to round 2 and that mage is owned

The only way an ordinary mage is going dual natured, is if he has a reason to start assensing, or some other form of astral recon. Once the action is finished he will stop being dual natured as well. So unless the spirit is quick, it will be tough to catch the mage with his proverbial knickers down. On the plus side, however, if the mage never assenses, he will likely be completely surprised by the initial attack of the spirit.

How bout if guardian spirit is holding his action for when the mage astrally percieves?

Might work, might not; again, if the Mage does not astrally perceive or project while the fight is going on, then the spirit becomes fairly useless...

Also, Materialization takes a complex action if I remember correctly (similar to Atrally Projecting) so the spirit will not get an action the pass that he materializes, if there is significant opposition, the spirit will then immediately become discorporated from the overwhelming response of the team in the room... there are ways to make this less of an issue, but you will have to remember it if you actually want your spirit to actually do anything...

Best bet is to have the spirit materialized and Concealed (he is at least Force 3 right?) and Magically Guarding his summoner... this will give you the most bang for your buck, as the spirit will likely go before the team if he is fairly powerful, and Fear against the teams Mage is probably a very powerful option, as it will remove him from the fight for a bit while the Spirit (and his Summoner) takes care of the rest of the team......

Keep the Faith

The mage should give the spirit concealment, and then have it wait materialized and covering itself and the mage with concealment in a large room, where the very heavy furniture covers the area where they hid (away from the entrance), and there is no cover where the PCs enter. The mage uses trid phantasm (of himself) and a couple of (real) combat drones with (real) heavy weapons to keep anyone from spending much time looking for him while he manballs, machine guns and HE grenades the team, the guardian spirit uses his silenced panther cannon loaded with EX to shoot whoever looks the most dangerous (as in carrying heavy weapons), then hits with fear whoever still looks most dangerous.

They both use teamworked counterspell to shut down any magic directed at them.

See, no need to wait for assenssing.

I'd also ward the room to keep out nosey PCs.

Silenced so that it doesn't burst everyone's eardrums, not as in it isn't going to be heard.

First, Manifesting isn't going to help. Materializing is what you want, and probably what you meant. And even holding the action will probably not negate the effect of losing IP's when going from the Astral plane to the Physical plane, along with the Complex Action that Materialization requires.

This would go something like:
Held Action
PC's enter > use held action to Materialize > Pc's act (probably getting ready to dispatch a materializing spirit)

You need another plan as it is hard to pull off a good ambush on the physical plane from the astral plane.

I'm figuring that the drone firing as large a machine gun as the mage could find at cyclic and the other drone firing HE grenades will tend to make it somewhat harder to for the players to figure out that there is an invisible spirit shooting them with a panther cannon. By the rules it becomes threshold of 2, perceiver is distracted (by being shot up) -2, and interfering sound/sight (the machine gun and grenade firing drones) -2, so that should give a threshold 2 -10 dice to notice anything.

they avoided the room entirely. seems the PCS try to do the opposite of what I have prepared. Ah well, we each game we learn more

...Edited to remove a stupid question that was already answered...

This logic makes sense, however when I posted, I was thinking you can't silence an assault cannon (did 4th ed. change that) and Ex (I thought all assault cannon rounds were the same) to top it off. It seemed particularly silly an impossible.

By the way, if you do have a Spirit sitting on Astral, ready to work, and a Mage comes in that is not dual-natured, you do not necessarily have to wait for them to Astrally perceive to be effective. You can start whacking any sustained spells they might have in the area. If the spirit has Magical Guard, they can dispel the spells using Counterspelling. If not, the spirit can attack the spells in Astral Combat. This does mean that they won't have a held action ready to pounce, but it's better than just sitting around waiting. Nothing pisses a Mage off more than going from 3 IP's to 1 IP because their Increased Reflexes spell has gone offline.

To the OP:
Have the spirit materialize on his last astral pass (3rd IP). Then he'll get both his attacks the next round and even the high speed PCs won't have much time to realize it (especially if he's concealing himself prior and during the materialization). Any changes in initiative and passes don't register til the next combat turn. (so if the mage were to cast increase reflexes on IP1 of the first combat turn, he wouldn't gain any benefit til the 2nd combat turn... after the street sams and adepts have already gone a few times).

If it does materialize on the first IP... since it's going from 3IPs -> 2, it may still get it's 2nd pass... but I'm unclear on that.


No they can't twilite.

One, any mage worth his salt probably has masking and extended masking... now which one is the mage?

Rules are quite clear... you can only counterspell physical spells if you're physical yourself. I originally had this wrong as well.

There are no rules for attacking those astral forms either. Rules designed for busting high force wards, work very poorly for attacking low force foci when people try to adapt them to that purpose. Astral combat never applies to any of this. If it's a spirit of man, then there is one spell which can be used to attack and deactivate foci which it would have to have as an innate spell.


There are only 2 spells I'm aware of... deactivate focus, which is a direct mana spell 'attack' which temporarily deactivates active foci. And an indirect attack of casting 'mana static'. An astrally cast mana static doesn't target anything, but does raise the background count in the area of the spell. (any spell w/ less hits than the background count is automatically disrupted and goes away though after a handfull of combat turns (not IPs), mana static raises BGC by 1 point per combat turn).

Assuming that you are a grade 2 Initiate, then you are indeed correct, however, many mages worth their salt are not initiated in any way, so your position is a bit misleading...

Keep the Faith

I think a direct attack will work. Otherwise foci get a free pass.

Falconer-

I may be holding onto misconceptions brought forward from previous editions. It used to be that a cast spell was a physical astral form which was present and could be attacked or dispelled. After your comment, I went back and looked- please help me understand the current (SR4A) situation correctly, as I still have some questions unanswered.

Spells are no longer astral forms, they are astral constructs, which have no solid presence on the astral plane, only an aura that can be seen either independently SM p.112 (has a reference to spells cast on the astral- does that mean that purely physical, not even astrally perceiving, casters' spells cannot be seen on the astral?) or as surrounding the aura of a being they are cast on SR4A p191. Is that a correct assessment?

Spells cast on physical beings can only be dispelled by physical beings, not astral ones. Is this the right reference- in the book p.185 it says that you must be on the same plane, it doesn't discuss physical spells v. mana ones. Where does that distinction come from? This is confusing- if spells always have an astral presence which can be seen, and never have a solid astral manifestation like an astral form, why couldn't an astral form be on the same plane as the spell and dispell it?

Spells cast on astral beings can only be dispelled by astral beings, not physical ones. Is astral perception enough for this? That would make the perceiver dual natured, and so seem to count.

Do spells stay sustained if the target changes from Astral to Physical or back? Does it affect who can dispel them?

You are saying there is a gap in the rules on astrally attacking active foci? Because they are astral forms without all the stats given to other forms, like spirits and projecting magicians? If you did treat them like a ward (astral construct, not form), why do the rules not work well?

You can indeed break foci, which will tend to destroy the enchantment...

There is still a lot of argument on whether you can affect the aura's of spells from, the astral plane... (thank god they eliminated Grounding of Spells through foci)

From what I understand from the books, I have come to the conclusion that you cannot affect a spell that was not cast on the plane of effect... whether it is a mana or physical spell, it will be visible on the astral space, but not be affected in Astral space (assuming it was cast in the Physical)... Spells do not cross boundries after all...

Keep the Faith

As far as counterspelling to reduce/eliminate existing spells goes.
Just base it on the target, if you can hit the target w/ spells. Then you can dispel his magical effects attached to his form.

If the target is an astrally projecting mage then an assensing or projecting mage should be able to dispel.
If the target is only on the physical, then you need to be physical to dispel.

I'm pretty much against, anything astral being able to affect anything physical. It smacks far too much of the grounding out abuses. (here we have a whole army of street sams... I order a fire spirit to materialize in the middle of them, then cast a high force fireball grounding it out through the fire spirit, cooking all of them on the physical, and they can't sense me or do anything to me. If another mage shows, I can run away on astral at astral speeds.





I have no animus toward this position EXCEPT that all attempts to use barrier busting rules are badly broken. (they assume constructs w/ far more force, and moreso, constructs which will regenerate themselves, and attacks which only create small TEMPORARY holes in them and don't utterly destroy them! And that's for items WHICH DON"T TAKE KARMA TO BUILD/BOND and only limited connection to a physical 'anchor'). In theory, it sounds great, in practice, there's a whole can of worms that the proponents haven't addressed. See above, at best I see deactivation as the only thing an astral critter should be able to do.

Until they actually PUBLISH (and they have not in any book to date) rules for attacking foci. You cannot by RAW. (do whatever you like by house rules, but don't tell me it's RAW)

Tymeaus: there are rules for physically attacking objects to break them... we're talking about astrally... and a lot of this smacks too much of the grounding out abuses if it's allowed to go too far.


There would be no low force foci at all if they were that ludicrously easy to break. It also really bones adepts who may not be able to do anything on astral... look a force 5 weapon focus (pretty buff)... except this force 3 spirit just destroyed it by attacking it astrally and the adept may not even realize it.

See the point... the only spell which does, does not do permanent damage to the focus. It only does temporary damage which deactivates the focus until the focus's PHYSICAL FORM regenerates it's magical aspects.

Even failing that, materialized spirit w/ a sword adept in his face... how exactly does the materialized spirit attack the sword focus leaving the adept now unarmed and facing ItNW? Astral combat would be used to attack the form... adept has no ranks, the skill can't be defaulted.... you see where this is going.

I see why you wish to not let foci be affected, but saying they can't be attacked is also conferring a huge bonus not stated anywhere. I would use the breaking through barriers for the test and the outcome. Let them be deactivated, not destroyed.

Forgive me, I was not clear here... I was talking about Physically breaking Foci, not doing so astrally... I agree with you that it is an abuse (this from having a Physad who could not astrally perceive having his foci destroyed in Astral combat... it was very sad)

Keep the Faith