Could some schmuck Black Mage (or other tradition, I'm just considering tossing a gnomish black mage to my group) use Agony (since it does Physical damage) to fuel the Sacrifice metamagic, or does it require *actually* damaging the subject/victim? This could be an intriguing possibility, especially if he can intimidate an ork or a troll with his magical prowess.... The way I see it working is, cast Agony at a high Force on his "pet", and use the damage generated to cast a powerful lightning (or whatever) spell, then drop it, leaving the poor, whimpering ork curled up in the foetal position. The question I have is, does it work?
Oh, and seems appropriate here

It's called Blood Magic for a reason.

That does not matter, from a purist RAW position.

However, the above will not work for this reason:

(emphasis added)

That is the attack that gives you the bonuses from Sacrifice. It specifically calls for a normal melee attack, resolved normally.

I applaud your thinking so much like my own though

Ahh, okay. Must've missed that. Thank you very much.

Hmm, in this case I would throw out the book and design the mages own tradition into "black magic" instead of "blood magic" and make a call for the Agony spell instead of a melee attack.

It's all about flavor really.

After all, the mage substitutes melee attack (swing sacrifical dagger) to cast spell (overcome victim, resist drain) which balances things out a bit.

I think you overlooked two BIG differences :
First, Agony is LOS, meaning he could boost his drain resistance with a lot less danger than having to go close to it's intended power source, making the ability much more powerful without any counterpart.
Second, Agony is an Illusion. There is no actual damage done, and as soon as you stop sustaining the spell it's effects disappear completely and one IP later they're as good as new and can be re-Agonyse them to power up another Drain. Basically this gives Drain dices nearly for free, again making it much more potent.

Heck, go full steam and daisy-chain increasingly larger Mass Agony to tap multiple "donors" at once and finally sling an uber-spell without caring about drain...

If you are going to go this route, may as well use a Death Touch styled spell then. That way you *ARE* inflicting real damage with some sort of test (much like the melee attack) that involves the sacrificial lamb taking damage and then you get the bonus.

Perhaps a custom spell that specifically causes physical damage and spilled blood from the target. I mean if you are all out flavor, then ham it up and serve it with green eggs.

I've been toying with the idea of a mage (NPC) who uses personafixes to make people slavishly loyal to him and reinforces the connection with drugs (Bliss, etc.) so the body forms a mental connection (addiction) with good feelings to the mage. The mage then can use drugs that cause pain tolerance or a Pain Editor and sacrifice. Obviously, the mage would never want to go too far, keeping his "flock" tended to power all of the dark things he does.

This would be a long-term antagonist who never directly acts against the PCs, but stood in the shadows and just creepified the players. (Some of them are squeamish...)

If you want to use Sacrifice as a PC, be ready to go to the ropes with your GM since it is listed as NPCs only.

Yeah, those seem very important to the game balance. Another one that need be mentioned is that Agony is going to generate -way- more boxes of damage than a melee attack is for the average spell caster, and without the need for an extra skill being purchased. Not too hard to drop a force 8+ agony, get 3-4 hits, and only be resisted by willpower which will get 1-2 hits max, and end up inflicting 10+ boxes of damage through agony, compared to a melee attack which is going to do more like 2-3 boxes -if- the mage even hits in the first place.

So yeah, I think melee attack over agony spell is alot more than thematic reasoning, it is a balance issue as it would make sacrifice many many times more powerful. (And heck, you could throw agony at your opponents very easily without having to close to melee range, so casting agony might be something you want to do anyway, and now it has the added bonus of dropping a dozen drain off your next spell. And let's not even think what you could accomplish with mass agony.)

Edit: Even using a spell like deathtouch borders a bit on the balance issue, because it would be far easier to get high damage and wouldn't necessitate you learning an additional skill (Blades) in order to do the sacrifices.

According to what flavor text we have, the key to blood magic seems to be the actual letting of blood. So, if your player designed a spell that created open wounds on someone(that blood would flow out of), I'd probobly let it work.

Very true. Though there is perhaps some question of why you have to stab a person as opposed to say for example shooting them with a bullet to draw blood. After all, the rules allow for a bare fisted attack which wouldn't really draw all that much blood even if you do a considerable amount of damage (Well... internal bleeding I guess maybe). Like I said above, I'd think allowing other methods is more a question of balance than one of theme.

It's actually a combination of the blood and the intent of it -- you're making a ritual sacrifice. It's not simply about hurting someone and feeding off their pain (that's Essence Drain), it's about literally offering blood to the "gods."

Right, but the leap to a "black magic" version as seen in so many (read very rarely) fantasy novels and movies, where the caster uses spells to inflict pain and using that to power his magic to even greater heights, isn't really that far.

If you want to balance it with ShadowRun, then make a spell specifically used as the seed, which either does low damage, or the amount of boost to the next spell is reduced (eg 1 per 2 boxes instead of 1 for 1).

Does lead to an interesting idea though:

Lets name our spell Inflict Wounds, which does hits/2 boxes of physical damage (round up, limited to Force/2) and has some low drain cost. We'll limit it to targets in LOS and within Magic * 3 meters (for now we'll ignore the distance if viewed with magesight goggles, eg if you have a 30 meter cable but are looking at a guy 3 meters around a corner). Each box inflicted before resistence gives the mage +1 die to casting and resisting drain on his next spell.*

Caster casts a Force 4 Inflict Wounds and gets 4 hits: he inflicts 2 boxes (resisted) and his next spell gets a benefit of +2.
Caster casts a Force 6 Inflict Wounds (having 2 bonus dice) and gets 6 hits. Now has a +3 bonus.
Caster casts a Force 8 Inflict Wounds spell....

Mmmm....resonance cascade....

*I don't know what the actual benefit of blood magic is

As I pointed out, that's effectively what Essence Drain is. It's all about feeding off emotion, be it positive or negative.

Create a metamagic technique that mimicks that rather than trying to copy Sacrifice. Blood magic is the big bad scary magic type in the Shadowrun universe. If multiple other types of traditions gained the same power only with more ease and for more effect, it grossly reduces that fact.

The technique could do something like give you one point of temporary Essence for every three boxes of anguish you visit upon your foes in a turn (rounded down). You can then use that Essence to boost your Magic attribute by one per two points of temporary Essence on your next initiative pass. Effectively a +1 bonus for every five boxes of damage you do. The big difference is that you can only use this technique to boost your actual spellcasting prowess, not your Drain. You should also find a way to get a wasted Complex Action in there, too, though I can't think of a satisfactory way to describe one at the moment.

Just a quick nibble, Blood Magic isn't listed as NPC only, it's listed as "ask your DM".

As for the "Essence Boost", personally I think I'd have the "wasted action" come when the Mage actually transfers the Essence into Magic.

I would think the drain reduction would have to be based on damage -actually- inflicted, not damage that could theoretically be inflicted if the person didn't soak any of the damage. Both because we are dealing with how much blood is -actually- spilled, and because you could otherwise just get a big ass troll and use him as an infinite source of blood magic because he would soak all damage delt with the spell.

What you really need to do to balance it is look at everything that is done with blood magic to balance it.
1. You have to take a metamagic (Easy enough to replicate)
2. You need a weapon of some kind (Not really all that hard, so not a big requirements, especially as you can use your fists anyways)
3. You need a skill you aren't too likely to have otherwise (Melee combat skill in this case)
4. You need 2 extra stats to make the skill fully effective that you may not otherwise have particularly high (Agi and Str for accuracy and damage)
5. Your attack must be melee based
6. Your attack is defended against with up to a 3x DP (Reaction + dodge + dodge or whatever full defense is used) by the average person.
7. Your drain reduction is based on amount of damage actually delt.

The problem with replicating blood magic with -any- spell is that it unbalances points 2, 3, 4, and 6. 2 isn't a huge issue, but it can be when you consider that a weapon that will actually deal a decent number of boxes to help you resist drain with is going to be somewhat expensive and illegal. 3, 4, and 6 are much larger issues. Spells are -far- harder to resist for the average runner than a melee attack is, they also don't require any skills or stats that -any- mage wouldn't already have in spades. High melee skill + high str + high agi are things that most mages won't have, but a high spellcasting + magic i something that all mages will have.

So if you wanted an 'inflict wounds' spell that would be balanced for the purpose of sacrifice, it would need to go something like:
Range: T
That necessitates the use of a melee attack to touch someone. It is easier to manage than an attack to injure, but still requires some skill, and gives the person the full dice chance to defend against it
This spell does damage equal to net hits. This spell can act as the 'melee' attack required by the sacrifice metamagic. This spell can never have any other range than Touch.

Just my view on what would be balanced. As for what kind of drain it should have: I guess fairly low, but not so low that overcasting isn't an issue. Perhaps -2 like 'Death Touch' since it is fairly similar. It does less damage but it has the added bonus of working with sacrifice.

Just FYI, my Inflict Wounds spell was as an example of how crazy it could get--make it touch range or not--because Inflict Wounds would be a valid use for the benefit of the metamagic.

Right, but my version of it doesn't allow for that. Damage is based only on net hits, not on force of the spell (though that limits hits which in turn limits net hits) and the damage must actually be caused (after soak). Thus if you tried cascading it you would end up with a dead sacrifice in no time, which isn't very useful to you, and the cascading would be entirely useless after you hit a force equal to the most hits you are likely to get. And of course at that point you've killed your sacrifice and spent 4-5 turns to cast a single useful spell.

*grr....*

You can always cast on another target, it's a touch spell which makes it difficult to use it on your opponents, but far easier than stabbing them. But yes, you are limited by how many hits your getting, etc. etc.

Yeah, the limited hits is a big part, and most people don't just have dozens of people to go through to cast a few spells.

The fact is though, that with the drain only being F/2-2 you can likely manage as high a force as you need without too much fear from drain. I mean 8F is only 2 drain and if there is a mage that can't soak 2 drain by buying hits, he gets laughed at and most people are going to have a hard time reliably getting more than 8 hits on a spellcasting test, so there isn't really much need to daisy chain it anyway.

And really, what spell do you want to cast that has so much drain that you would need to do all that crazy daisy chain stuff that would sacrifice tons of victims to cast? I mean the biggest spell in the game has.. what, +5? Biggest spell you're likely to cast is F12. So at worse you're looking at 11 drain. Get maybe 5-6 points of that taken care of with a (regular non-daisy chained) sacrifice, and you can likely soak most of the remaining damage, so you take maybe 1-2 points for casting the biggest spell in the game at the max force you can manage?

Now, if sacrifice worked for summoning/binding spirits, I could see a desire to do some sort of daisy chain so that you could bind a F12 spirit without it turning you into bloody pulp.

You're not casting on helpless sacrificial lambs, I'm talking about casting them on the guy you want deader than a door nail.

Well, okay, but you could do way more damage casting -real- spells than daisy chaining up a sacrifice. I mean, realistically, as a spellcaster, if you are in melee with your enemy, you have done something wrong. And as a spellcaster, if the best you can do against an enemy you're in melee with is daisy chain something that does net hits damage and requires a touch attack to pull off, then you have far bigger problems than the sacrifice metamagic can really help you with.

Point. I was just highlighting a possibility that the regular sacrifice doesn't have.

Well, I could see "daisy-chaining" the spell like that if it was, say, take out a dragon before it notices that you're a (masked) mage, or blast it multiple times and get eaten.....

I have issues with the idea of the spell doing damage equal to net hits, when most melee weapons get (net hits) + (1/2 strength) + (x) where X is up to 3.

the reason its been purposely designed to be so weak is that it's intended use is to power the sacrificing metamagic, which by default, only allows for reduced drain after a melee attack has been made and damage caused from it. The spell would allow a mage to use his significantly higher spellcasting pool to achieve a result at range that would normally be required to be done at melee range, with a melee weapon.

Very well put. That is exactly why I did it that way. Also keep in mind that a spell is defended with a single stat, while a melee attack can be defended with a stat + 2 skills. (Not counting counterspelling, which most people don't have access to).

If you go back through my posts, you'll see where I list all the balancing factors of having to use melee weapons to do a sacrifice, and so tried to create a spell version that was in line with those balancing factors as possible.

So yes, you have Net hits vs Net hits + 1/2 str + k but.
For the spell, the opponent is going to have a smaller DP to defend with, which means that even a skill of 3 (fairly common dodge/melee skill) will have 2 extra hits. And also keep in mind that getting a high reaction is easier than a high willpower (Anything that increases IP which most people have 1-2 points in) and so that is another 1 or so extra net hit.

So what you end up with is Net hits vs (3 less) net hits + 1/2 str + k.

Now, you also don't need to devote skill/stats to getting a high melee skill/agility. So in the end I think it is fairly balanced with a melee attack for the purpose of a mage using it to preform a sacrifice. If you want to just plain do damage, there are much more effective ways to do so. Death Touch for instance does F + Net hits, so is obviously superior as far as damage output goes, but doesn't get the benefit of being able to reduce drain on the next spell cast.

If you want to use the melee method (Because you happen to do melee anyway for example) you can, was just offering up an option to do sacrifice via spell instead of with a dagger.