A thought I had for a new magician path.

Alchemists are tool users, magicians who disdain using their own power and instead use that of foci to do their work. An alchemist is a full-magician. There are no aspected magicians. They start with the usual 25 magic points but may use them only to bind foci.

Game Mechanics: An Alchemist may cast any spell or summon any spirit regardless of magical tradition if the alchemist has a focus for that particular spell or spirit type. Alchemists cannot learn conjuring or sorcery and instead use the foci's rating, plus up to the foci's rating in spell pool die for the conjuring or sorcery test. Drain is calculated normally.

Alchemists may use more than one focus to cast a single spell, for instance an alchemist may use a specific spell focus to cast a spell and a spell catagory or expendable focus to add more die to the spell test. Or an alchemist may cast a spell with a spell focus and sustain it with a sustaining focus.

Alchemists never suffer from foci-addiction. They may otherwise take geasa as any other magician may.

edit: nevermind.

Too strong. I'd go as far as to say Broken. They start the game with a force 6 and a force 1 power focus (buying extra spell points to bond both). In return they effectively have a sorcery skill of 7 and can cast any spell and summon any spirit. That strikes me as being BROKEN AS HELL. Ahem.

Umm... how do you figure that, Lilt? A force 6 power focus costs 630000 and costs 30 spell points to bond (bringing up the price to 755000 for the five extra spell points). This is impossible to attain with a starting full mage.

He said you use spell points to bind foci, not to acquire them. He also said that to cast a spell you have to have a focus for that specific spell... I'm thinking "specific spell focus" here, unless I misunderstand.

So... lets say you want to make a very combat oriented alchemist, giving him powerbolt, manabolt, stunball, and lightning ball. Getting spell foci for those 4 spells costs 45,000 per force point per spell... so, if you wanted them at force 4 each, that costs you 720000 -- still impossible. You can only afford 8 force points of specific spell foci at chargen. So... you can either cast 8 different spells using 2 dice each, once spell with 6 dice and another with 4 (a force 6 focus and a force 2 focus) or somewhere in between.

My take? Far, far too underpowered at chargen, with the potential to become vastly overpowered later in the game (if they survive).

If you drop the ability to use spell category foci then I don't think it's all that bad. but with full resources and all five spell categorys the mage can cast any spell in the books and can upgrade later. also maybe half of the foci's power in spell pool dice? just a thought, cool idea though let us know how it turns out

make the foci degrade over time, so that the mage has to constantly make new ones.

As long as the alchemist needs a focus for the specific spell or spirit, letting it get the normal benefits from other foci types seems fair.

Manabolt 3 focus + combat 4 focus allows a 7 die manabolt at force 3.
Combat 4 focus does not infer the ability to cast any spell, just supplimentary dice.

I like the concept a lot but I'd do it somewhat differently.


The Artificer

Cost/priority as much as an aspected mage, gets 35 spell points at chargen. Buys Sorcery and Conjuring as usual. Focus addiction applies normally. Chooses shamanic/hermetic path as normal.

Bonding foci to this character costs 2 fewer karma than normal, with a minimum of 1.
Spells: Buys spells as normal. Must use a focus of some type to cast any spell (category, specific, or expendable; power foci do not satisfy this requirement). This mage may also use a specific spell focus to cast any spell he doesn't know using the focus' force dice in lieu of his Sorcery skill.
Conjuring: Requires a spirit focus for all summoning.


New Metamagic: Attuning
After learning Attuning, the initiate may attune himself to a number of foci equal to three times his grade. The attuning takes only a few moments and can be dropped at any time. A focus which has been attuned may be activated or deactivated at will, requiring only a free action. Multiple foci may be activated and deactivated as part of the same free action.

Possible other ability: The artificer may use any focus without bonding it for (force) hours. When that time elapses or if the focus is deactivated before then, the artificers special link to the focus is broken and he is prevented from repeating this ability on that focus. He may still bond it, however.


Please note that this is an out-of-the-ass writeup after a long day at work, so be kind

Ive been thinking... and here is about the most efficient way to acquire spells.

Now lets say you use the sum-to-ten system (the only way to get any reasonable amount of money) and set money and magic at a, race and skills at e, and attributes at c. (you can come close with point buy, but you end up with lower attributes). The absolute most efficient means of acquiring dice for spells would be to buy specific spell foci at 1 force 1 and then buy spell category foci, but doing so pretty much requires that you limit yourself to a single category of spells. As a starting character, you can get a force 6 spell category focus for 450,000 This does not grant the ability to cast any spells. Each spell costs an extra 45,000 nuyen... so lets say you get 7 of them. That costs an extra 315,000 . At this point the mage has used up all of his starting spell points. He no longer has enough money to get better than a force 2 spirit focus, so he decides to get a couple of sustaining foci, using up the rest of his money buying the foci and the spell points to bond them.

Thats not too terribly bad. The alchemist knows 7 spells, with the ability to throw between 11 and 13 dice into each one if he needs to. It is certainly not great, though. Each additional spell will cost the alchemist 90,000 at the very least... and if the alchemist ever wants to learn a spell in another category, it will be *much* more expensive. Furthermore, the alchemist can not summon any spirits, and each die he wishes to use to summon a *single* type of spirit will now cost him 120,000 nuyen and 2 good karma.

This is all assuming that the force of the spell is not limited by the spell category focus. I would say that limiting the maximum force of a spell to the alchemist's magic attribute would be a reasonable counterbalance to the incredible limitations they have on learning new spells (do NOT allow the alchemist to cast spells at any force whatsoever). If the maximum force of the spell is limited by the force of the specific spell focus, the max number of reasoably good spells a starting character could have would be around 4, and thats also not including the ability to summon spirits.

Finally, if the alchemist is ever deprived of his foci (captured, for example) he will be all but worthless until he acquires the hundreds of thousands of nuyen to replace his losses.

Its certainly an interesting idea, but its not one that I would ever use. The flexibility implied by being able to cast any spell or summon any spirit is mostly illusory, as very few characters will come close to gaining any real breadth of ability until after years of play..

I was thinking the Alchemist would use Enchanting to get the Foci, actually. Foci are so hideously overpriced in Shadowrun I've yet to see a Magician who buys them after chargen when they can be made during your downtime between runs for pennies on the Nuyen, particularly the lower-power ones.

Also I've been in several groups that house-ruled that Spell Pool can be used on any magic test (outside of Enchanting) so I left that bit in there.

@Jason Farlander: It's possible if you're using the points system where you can but full mage and 1M resources. It's also possible in Becks and sum-to-ten.

If you do need specific spell/spirit foci then they do become less powerful but they could till start-off reasonably powerful if they were allowed to use points-based or sum-to-ten (I'm no expert on Becks). !M nuyen may cost a lot but they don't need the skill points for Sorcery or Conjuring so they can probably afford it.

Knocking-together a quick character:
I was able to create a character with a force 5 power focus, Specific spell foci for 4 different spells, a force 1 sustaining foci (your choice of invisibility or increase reflexes +3) and a spirit focus. I had enough cash left (45k) for a conjuring library or possibly another force 1 sustaining focus (or a trauma dampener if I was that way inclined).

This may seem similar to the starting packages mages and shamans get but bear in-mind the fact that the spells can be cast at forces of 7+ without risking physical drain thanks to the power focus. The character can learn any spell at effectively fore 12+ for 1 karma and 45k , even less if they get the chance to make the foci themselves. Rather than needing to spend 28+ karma to raise both his sorcery and Conjuring skills by 1, it costs him 5 karma + 105k (again, less if he can enchant). IE, it's still seems overpowered if you consider how it can be tweaked.

Since specific spell foci cost Force x 1 Karma to bind, the mage ends up spening the same amount of karma/spell points as a full magician, while spending huge amounts of money or lots of time to 'get' his spells. Add to that the fact that his spells can be stolen and/or destroyed and I say he is vastly UNDERpowered as a full mage.

Remaking him as a type of Aspected Mage (with the 35 spell points usable to bind foci) will be more balancing - and limit him to Astral Perception as well.

I like the Attuning idea for metamagic, and instead of stating the Aspected Mage is somehow 'immune' to focus addiction, maybe add a metamagic that helps against focus addiction?

Or, if you want to deviate totally from SR canon, have him HAVE to use a Power focus - it will be his effective Magic Rating. His 'actual' magic rating is only used for determining focus addiction and things like that. For determining drain, area of effect and such, use the rating of the power focus.

I think I'm going to play around with this idea though...

SnowRaven: There is no limit on the force of spell you can cast limited to the rating of the focus. If there was then I would agree that they were underpowered. I think that the alchemist (artificer being a better name though) idea is a good one, however, but it's very definately hard to balance.

Of course, my above reason is limiting the force of the spell to the force of the spell focus. To me, that is the most sensible way to do it. It also opens the posibility for the mage to get expendable spell foci for one-time use spells...

The only other viable limits on force would be:
- Force of the Spell Category Focus
- Force of the Power Focus
- Magic Rating

Magic Rating would be too powerful imo, since after a few initiations he could easily toss around any spell of his/her own choosing at really high force ratings, and never worry about physical drain.

Another option would be for the mage to have to cast spells from spell formulas - this would limit him to spells he could design or buy, saving him the karma of learning them and the sorcery skills, instead bonding foci for the dice. This has the potential to become too unbalancing after awhile, though.

to me it looks like whatever foci the person have active at the moment not only define what spells and spirits he have available but allso theyre max force (for the spells atleast)...

allso, one could limit the person to only one power foci at a time so there is no way to buy say 3 level 6 power foci and get a effective level 18 mage (alltho i think that may be available to other mages so what the hell )

hmm, this sound like a burnout on the way to hell...

Yeah... you really do need some mechanic for limiting the maximum force at which the alchemist could cast spells. If you limit it to the force of the specific spell focus, he will always be ridiculously underpowered. If you limit it to magic rating, then with a decent power fous the character can get any spell at force 6 for 1 karma and 45-90K which is a bit too powerful. I'm not sure what else you could really use to determine the limit. (Lilt: if you noticed, I used sum-to-ten in my second calculation, but for some reason I ruled out power foci from consideration. Sum to ten does work better than point system in this case, assuming you're human).

I kinda like the basic idea, but this particular implementation would need quite a bit of work.

Heres an alternate mage idea I just came up with that kinda capture the same general idea, though with a less drastic implementation.

Tool mage

The tool mage is similar to your run-of-the-mill hermetic, with the problem that something prevents such mages from casting spells on their own. These mages learn sorcery and conjuring just as normal mages do, and learn spells in the same way, with one important difference. Such mages need fetishes to cast their spells, and, furthermore, they need a separate fetish for each and every spell they learn. This limitation is not without some payoff, however. The tool mage applies the fetish modifier to both karma cost and drain power for their spells. Tool mages can still choose to learn exclusive spells, but only gaines the normal modifier for doing so.

Tool mages do not have any difficulty conjuring elementals. Hermetic magical theorists believe that whatever psychological problem is blocking tool mages from casting spells on their own does not apply to conjuring, because the standard conjuring ritual already includes the use of material trappings. (They also generally believe that tool mages could be *cured* of their reliance on fetishes through intensive psychotherapy, but so far there are no recorded instances of this happening).

Okay, I've been doing some thinking, and I think this is the best I can come up with:

Another interesting idea for this type of character is a technocracy-style mage from white-wolf's Mage. They'd be hermetics that need to build quasi-technical tools through which they power their magic.

You could make one very simply by just saying that they take all of their spells fetish-linked. Being one of them would be like any other hermetic except that they have a flaw meaning that they need quasi-scientific fetishes/contraptions to cast spells/summon spirits, they might even get a bonus for designing the tool well. That is to say, more of a bonus than using a fetish/focus usually would. Perhaps they can apply the fetish limitation to both the cost of the spell and the spell drain?

hey Lilt... did you even read my tool mage post?

Well, sort-of.

The idea for the technocrat is that they create quasi-scientific artifacts and get a bonus from doing so. My original idea was somewhat more drastic, the technocrat would need to have chemistry, physics, engineering, ETC sufficient to actually make a working item of the type. I then tried to cut that back to make it less extreme and came-up with the dual effect fetish thing. Although I may have subconciously borrowed it from your post, I came to the conclusion that a dual-effect-fetish was balanced through the logic that simply using fetishes like any other character made them a bit weak.

the "tools" of the technocrasy is there to help them better glide past the problem of paradox (the fact that magic goes against the general definition of reality). as in, it looks like a gun, its used like a gun but shoots some sort of beam, must be a prototype laser gun some say the military have...