A few questions from a complete SR4 newcomer with regard to magic. I have Street Magic, but am still working on a firm grasp of the basic rules in the SR4A book.

1) Shapechange vs. Critter Form: Why would anyone take Critter Form, when its a) more limited, and b) only has a one lower drain value? Or am I misunderstand the premise there?

2) Quickening spells:

• Levitate: does is only allow you to levitate one thing (designated at time of casting) or can you use it as a permanent telekinsesis spell?
• Petrify: Does this essentially equal death to someone, barring another mage coming along and dispelling it?
• Armor: Ouch! Can this really be quickened? Mystic Armor adept power, plus decent combat armor, plus getting a mage to Quicken this on you... tank?
• In SR2, you could drop spells from the Astral Plane onto the real world via active foci and I assume Quickened spells would qualify... does this still work?

Thanks for your help, oh SR4 gurus!

Grounding, the transferring of spells from the astral to the real world, by targeting a focus, is no longer part of the magic rules with SR4.

In general, the problem with quickening is that the spells get taken down by wards, and then you have to spend more karma on them.

Yours,
Joel

If your concept or commonly used tactics only require a single form, why take an extra point of Drain, which, on average, requires 3 more dice to successfully soak? The difference in Drain is minor, but still significant. You will see the same difference between the Invisibility and Improved Invisibility spells. The more generally useful version will likely be taken a lot more, but the limited versions are still available for mages to take.


The text for levitate seems to indicate a single item or person, and I would be even more likely to take this interpretation for a quickened spell, which is sustaining itself without any concentration from the magician. There is still a lot of room for interpretation here, though, so I would ask your GM.

A quickened petrify spell would keep the victim alive but unconscious indefinitely, but keep in mind that this is an active spell that can be traced back to the spellcaster. So petrifying someone and then leaving them like that is a very bad idea. It's like shooting someone and leaving your business card on the body.

Quickened armor gives you more armor, but it is a bad idea to have it quickened on a character. The armor spell glows - do you really want to be lit up with a glowing aura 24/7? And JoelHalpern has already mentioned wards. Not only do you have to worry about a ward taking out your spell, but if the spell wins, then you have just alerted the mage who created that ward.

JoelHalpern is correct about grounding spells from astral space not working any more. It didn't even make it into SR3. Which is good, because it had a lot of potential for abuse by creative mages.

I've always found sustaining foci to be more useful for buff spells than quickening. There are a whole bunch more limits on foci but they're a lot more permanent than quickened spells and have a lot more versatility for their Karma cost. In terms of effectiveness of spells, I'd say Turn to Goo is a lot more effective than Petrify. It's the same spell rules-wise, but it makes the body unrecognizable to non-awakened investigators and you can steal the victim's cyber-ware without outright killing them. Plus it's a lot funnier than just turning someone to stone.

You can even flush them down the toilet afterwards and drop the spell once you're fairly sure they're in the sewers somewhere. The sewer ghouls will thank you

Unless they need it to survive. Maybe you could also stick something else in there, like a cranial bomb?

That's actually an interesting threat. You steal some necessary cyber from them and then threaten to drop the spell, which can happen at will and will happen if you die. I don't know how you'd do the cranial bomb thing, how would u find their head?

Hard to make a threat to someone who is unconscious.

Not to him, to his friends or anyone who tries to stop you. Hostages whom you can threaten from anywhere and who will die if you die or even fall unconscious seem pretty valuable.

Yeah, but if you turn someone to goo and they have a cyberimplant that they need to leave, it will already have left them. There isn't going to be any way to get it back into the right position to keep it working. And if there was, there is no reason that they couldn't get another cyber and use it to save the guy.

I think if you hit someone with that spell and they have cyber that they need to live, then you've killed them.

Maybe not. If his friends can get him to a cyber doc in time and can get the cyberware he needs before you drop the spell he still has a good chance to live, but if you drop it before they can make those preparations he'll definetly die. So it's in their best interests to have you keep sustaining the spell if they want their friend to live.

How are they going to get any kind of cyber installed on a pool of goo? The doctor can't know where the head is, and even if he did, just putting a piece in the right area of the goo most likely won't cause it to be installed correctly. So like I said, if you hit someone with the spell and they need a piece of their cyber to live, they're dead as soon as the spell is released, regardless of anything that is done.

If I understand the spell, the victim returns to his previous state. If he wasn't dead already, then you can infer that damage done to the 'goo' doesn't carry over, but if he's missing a pacemaker, for instance, he's in a lot of trouble. So you would have one naked, panicky guy going into cardiac arrest (forgive my lack of medtech points, but you get the idea) who is otherwise healthy - a competent emergency room should be able to stabilize him and install a new pacemaker. If he wakes up in the Barrens, however, he's probably boned.

More interesting to me is the implications for cranial bombs. If somebody had one, and you hit him with this, could you just scoop it out and cancel the spell?

I don't see why not.

This spell does however create alot of controversy as far as I can tell. It is the only spell in the game that distinguishes from the whole like it does. Most people figure that since cyberware is paid for in essence, it is part of the body, and as part of the body, it should go goo just like the rest of you.

Even if the GM goes by that ruling, you could still use the spell to remove Cranial Bombs, as they are not paid for in Essence in any way, so they wouldn't go to goo with the rest of your body.

I suppose so, but I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if that caused it to blow up. Not that that would do alot of damage.

The spell specifically says that "Non-living material - Including clothes, gear, and cyberware - are not affected." The only thing that might theoretically cause you to be unable to just reach in and scoop the move-by-wire system out of their gooey head would be the armor/barrier rating that the person would have from the spell, and all that means is that you have to push harder.

No I think the real question (pulling out cyberware is only so so) is can I put a security tag inside before cancelling the spell?

Yes, everyone knows what the spell says. The problem is that spells usually can't distinguish like that. For example you can't create a barrier spell that only works on cyberware and use it to instantly kill people that drive through it.

But yeah, don't see why you couldn't slip an RFID in them. Where exactly it would show up on their body is anyone's guess, but that's another issue.

My mages in SR2 had multiple small foci (force 1) so he could throw a bound foci in a room (or attach it to a rat) get in astral space and blast the room with manaballs and other combat spells. So my master at the time was really happy they removed that in SR3 ...

Minor addendum:

Why is it called Quickened Spell when it has nothing to do with being fast?

I've always kind of wondered that too. I thought maybe there was some older definition that it was going off of for quick. Like quicksilver isn't called that because it moves fast. I don't remember what it actually did mean in that regard though.

It refers to "Quickening", which is a word that is often associated with birth and the formation of life. You are essentially "breathing life" into the spell. The wikipedia link will direct you to reasons why the word "quick" was synonymous with "alive" some time ago. "Biting one's nails to the quick" has a similar meaning, where quick is a point of origin or birth.

Edit: That is probably also the reason the word quicksilver was used for mercury (Wiktionary Link here), since it behaved like "living silver" at room temperature.

"Mercury, the element acquired the name "quicksilver" because of its liquid, fast flowing properties."

I've also seen some references to being related to "erratic" (a "quicksilver character" being "as fast and erratic as mercury").

There are also lesser used definitions of the term "quick"

#If someone bites their nails to the quick, they bite off all the white part at the end of each nail. PHRASE V inflects
*Her fingernails are bitten to the quick.

#If something cuts you to the quick, it makes you feel very upset. PHRASE V inflects literary
*I once heard her weeping in her bedroom, which cut me to the quick

But the dictionary doesn't explain where those definitions came from or what they mean.

Oh, of course. Check another dictionary.

quick

Main Entry: 1quick
Pronunciation: \ˈkwik\
Function: adjective
Etymology: Middle English quik, from Old English cwic; akin to Old Norse kvikr living, Latin vivus living, vivere to live, Greek bios, zōē life
Date: before 12th century

1 : not dead : living, alive

Still, "Quickened Spell" meaning "Spell Given Life" is a pretty obscure meaning.

Ah, yeah, that was it. So quickened spell would mean a spell that is alive on its own, no longer needs the mage to sustain itself. So yeah, quickened spell does make sense in that way.

I'd classify it as "obscure" if I need to hit up Wikipedia and two dictionaries before I can figure it out though.

(Seriously, wikipedia had no mention of why mercury is called "quicksilver")

I only knew this definition of quick because "the Highlander" series refers to the central event that happens to the immortal characters as "The Quickening". Which, of course, comes with a crazy light show that rivals mega rock concerts, to the tune of Queen. *grin* Any parents who have ever freaked out over a pregnancy also probably knows the term, although it takes a bit of a leap of logic to connect this Quickening to the Quickening metamagic.

Not so obscure. It is the reason why it is called quicksilver (Because it moves like living things do, not like metals do), and a few people knew it. I knew but couldn't remember it, and someone else had the answer fairly quick.

Then again, I'm a chemist (in training), so I guess I should know this sort of stuff

I had to connect the dots from "cutting to the quick" (which I remembered and googled the definition for "quick"). I don't even know what prompted the thought, something my mother said, probably. The first dictionary had it as an entry, but with no etymological roots.

I also added it to the discussion page on Mercury on wikipedia (because the page itself is locked).

I'll admit that its "not so obscure," at least in that the usage is common, but that the meaning behind that usage has been forgotten (also, being a single guy with no children, I haven't encountered the usage with reference to pregnancy).

Yes, but you can make a spell that only affects a particular metatype such as Slay Human, and you can also have a Sludge spell that only affects drones. Plus mana base spells can only work on living things and people are explicitly said not to have auras surrounding their cybered parts with holes in their auras where living parts used to be that were replaced by 'ware. Cybered parts are definetly different from natural parts in the eyes of magic, essence cost be damned. Even though Turn to Goo is a physical spell, I'd still say it makes sense that it only effects living tissue as a specific target type.

Well, not going to discuss it here, as I'm fairly sure there are plenty of other threads about it already (And isn't the scope of this thread anyway). Just wanted to point out that some people dislike the spell.

Hmm. Just looking around for usage of the word "quick" to mean anything other than "fast" it appears that its literal definition is closer to "moving" or "movement." Given that the etymology is from Old Norse, this is likely true. The only things that moved on their own at the time (and from the perspective of viking barbarians) were things that were alive. Which also allows the same word to mean "fast," fast being "more movement." Sort of a compounded adjective; "quick-quick."

*Finds a previously unknown interest in etymology*

"the quick and the dead" -- "the live and the dead".

I was going to mention that. It's a bit dated, but hardly that obscure.

The last time I heard that was years ago and at the time I thought it did mean "the fast and the dead."
Of course, in some cases (zompocalypse) "fast" and "living" are synonymous.

Of course, dead also means "immobile"...

Ummm not in shadowrun . Or rather not necessarily in Shadowrun .

True, it does. Isnt etymology fun?

It's Quicken + ing, so the root word you need to look up the definition of is quicken, which does have a common meaning. And that meaning is more pertinent to sustaining spells then the word quick.

Totally. >.>