Please note: My GM allows 450-point characters.

Joseph Glass-Walker ("Joe Glass" to palefaces)
Salish human custom-tradition magician
Glass-Walker's first, last, and only concern is the will of the spirits. He followed their call from his native Salish-Sidhe Council to the urban wilderness of Seattle, and now seeks his destiny in their whispers. A mostly genial Amerind man in his mid-thirties, Glass-Walker has a slightly distracted air about him: the spirits of the city murmur to him almost constantly, and the words of other metahumans sometimes pass him by. His hair is long and worn loose, still black but showing threads of gray here and there. Glass-Walker typically dresses in sneakers, jeans and a t-shirt, his only concession to the weather a slightly shabby olive trenchcoat patched at the elbows. When he feels the need for visible protection, he carries a Hammerli 620S on his hip; otherwise he relies on the goodwill of the spirits. He feels it an irresponsible waste of his gift to use magic to inflict harm, and will do so only when severely pressed.

Joseph Glass-Walker
Metatype: Human (0BP)
Attributes:

Attribute total: 260BP

Skills:

Skills total: 153BP

Qualities:

Qualities total: -10BP

Gear:

Gear total: Y114695 (23BP)

Spells:

Spells total: 24BP

Tradition: Glass-Walker's Way
Concept: Glass-Walker hears the voices of the spirits like any other shaman, he just doesn't hear the same spirits. Instead of the children of the Earth-Mother, Glass-Walker heeds the offspring of Her half-sister, the City. He hears them in the wind howling down plascrete canyons, he hears them in the rumble of a train moving through the earth, he hears them in the dead air between trid broadcasts, he hears them in the buzz and hum of sixty-cycle current. He hears, and calls to them, and they answer.
Combat: Guardian
Detection: Guidance
Health: Water
Illusion: Air
Manipulation: Task
Drain: Willpower + Intuition

Mentor Spirit: Architect
Concept: Architect is the builder and creator. Where Artificer loves tools and tool-makers, Architect is the patron of cities and city-builders. She commands her children to make her cities beautiful, to tend the worldly and spiritual needs of the people who live there, and to combat urban blight wherever it appears. She appears to Glass-Walker in the guise of a bespectacled woman in a business suit and hard-hat, with a roll of blueprints under her arm.
Advantages: +2 dice for Manipulation spells, +2 dice for Task spirits
Disadvantages: -2 dice for physical Combat spells, Architect magicians must make a Willpower [2] test to knowingly damage a road or building.

Any relation to the Glass Walkers of Rage? (The card game, don't know much about a role playing game.)

APDS Ammo has a too high availibility for character creation. You only bought "restricted gear" once. But besides that, nice shaman...or glass walker.^^

I'm curious to know. The backstory seems to place his relationship with spirits at a premium. I can see how that might lead him to eschew Binding and Banishing. Why does he not have a Summoning Skill higher than his Spellcasting Skill, though?

..as RAW Addiction to tobacco is not valid negative quality (SR4A pg. 93 ..note that nicotine, caffeine and sugar do not count)

@pbangarth:
The name Glass-Walker is, indeed, a shout out to the Glass Walker tribe of Werewolf: The Apocalypse (the RPG on which the Rage card game is based). As for why his Summoning skill is the same as his Spellcasting skill, I knew I wanted him to be a highly skilled sorcerer as well as conjurer, and I didn't want to pay the 25BP to get Summoning 6. I was going to go for a Summoning focus in addition to the Power focus, but it was too expensive.

@Machiavelli:
ACK! You're right. I will edit the APDS out.

@Stingray:
You are also right. Addiction changed to hallucinogens.

You don't have to pay extra to get a skill to 6. That's only for attributes. Skills just have a character creation limit of either one 6 and the rest 4s or lower, or two 5s and the rest 4s.

Also, Binding doesn't have to be about forcing spirits to do things against their will, just like Summoning. It's simply a means of allowing them to function past the dawn/dusk threshold, and a way to let you interact with more than one at a time, by reinforcing your connection with them.

The 2BP for the spirit is for bound spirits I think and not summoned ones. And really just summon the damn thing as soon as play starts as your first action.

Everything else is technically right, but doubt I'd let the tradition fly. The newer spirits are just flat out better so a tradition with 3 of them I am shaky on. And why intuition, yeah I can make some city folk need intuition more argument, but if he is basically a Shaman of the city spirits I'd think he'd still use charisma. I'd try to wrangle a 4 body since it effects how much armor you can wear, with a 4 you can have a line coat and level 2 form fitting for a total of 10 armor or 14 dice to soak before armor penetration, instead of your current 9.

Prejudiced (Biased, Caucasians) (-10BP) I'd watch out for, depending on the group. I generally don't want any prejudice against other player characters. I think it causes unnecessary conflict and all to frequently ends in a player kill, but every group is different, some people actually like that stuff. And who knows your group idea may be team Salish-Sidhe.

Why are the new spirits necessarily better than the old? A fire spirit, for example, has a huge initiative advantage over a guardian spirit: the fire spirit's Reaction is Fx3, while the guardian's Reaction is only F+3. Their Intuition is the same as their Force. So a Force 4 (let's say) fire spirit would have Initiative 16 versus the guardian's 11.

It's really just Guardian Spirits and Task Spirits, and only because they can have any Combat or Technical Skill at rating equal to their force. People seem to perceive that as grotesquely broken. I don't see it myself. I think Great Form Plant Spirits get Regeneration, too. I personally don't see the issue, but c'est la vie. It's not the player's fault that the newer spirits make more sense than the lame-ass elemental ones, though. I'd much rather deal with ghosts or visages of the past than try to talk to a pillar of fire. Powers be damned.

"Equal to their Force" being the operative phrase, IMO. How often are you summoning F12, or even F8, guardian or task spirits?

Why do you need such high force ones? A Force 6 spirit would have 12 or more dice to throw, which is 3-4 hits on average.

Force 12 not so often, force 8 I summon them fairly often. Spirits in general are absurdly powerful when you overcast. But yeah its mostly the skills and for me its mostly Task, access to every technical skill is fairly bad ass. Think how expensive that would be via skill wires. But even the stats are generally better than the previous spirits stats, while a fire spirit might have more reaction the guardian spirit has overall better stats. As far as I know there isn't an example of a tradition that can summon a Task spirit without it being a possession tradition. Not saying its impossible, but just that so far they all are possession.

Edit to add, look at your character
Magic 5+summoning 5+power focus 4+2 dice for task spirits. You roll 16 dice vs task spirits, do you think summoning a force 8 spirit will be hard. it might hurt, but it wont be hard to pull off.

The tradition does actually sounds more like a charisma-based one, just like that of the Garou or Dreamspeaker of Mage - The Awakening would be.

Actually, it just comes to me, if he has no Binding Skill, how would your character be able to start with a bound spirit? I suppose it could have been loaned to him by another conjurer, but that seems a bit of a stretch.

I went with Intuition for the drain stat because the "tradition" (if you can call one man's idiosyncratic Art a tradition) is unique to Glass-Walker. He's got a firm handle on the basics, sorcery and conjuring, but even he doesn't know how everything works. He's kind of feeling his way along his path, intuiting what to do next. The task spirit following him around, I dunno. I just couldn't think of anything else to do with those last two points. I guess I could have bought another Y10,000 worth of gear, but Joe isn't really the type to have a lot of stuff. His power focus is the only thing he owns that really matters to him; everything else is just a matter of convenience.

I understand the logic you follow, but just because he is practically autodidactic it isn't automatically an intuitioon-based tradition.

The drain stat is a reflection of how this tradition handles magic, intuition-based ones are - in most cases - the ones where the magician "feels" the magic around him and forms it without pesky rules as would a Logic-based tradition whilst the charisma-traditions go more along the lines of "Magic stems from the spirits, i have to handle spirits to do magic". For example Voodoo and Shamanism where botch Juju-Thrower have to please the spirits to perform magical feats.

Any spirit with a multiplication sign next to a base stat (not initiative) has since been hit by the errata hammer. Spirits of fire get a Reaction of Force + 3. Believe me, this is a good thing. A force 6 air spirit should not have a Reaction of 24. I'm pretty sure the ones in street magic are up to date, though.

I'd pull alot of those specializations out. They cost two BP at chargen, and two Karma after, so they are a better deal afterward. Keep a couple if you feel that would be best, I've always been a fan of specializing Assensing (aura reading).

Drop running to 1 or completely. Drop Survival 3(urban) to Survival 1(urban) - It's mostly for living on the street or the woods and since you purchased a lifestyle, I'm guessing you're not going the "homeless crazy street mage" archtype. move points from unarmed combat or dodge to pistols and the other skill.

An edge of 3 is still pretty good, you could probly use those points elsewhere.

The other thing is that you WAY overpaid for your English language skill, it's BP equal to the rating, not rating x4 like a skill. So 3bp instead of 12.

I'd take the BP from those, get A contact - fixer, or perhaps a free spirit? Pick up more spells, particularly manipulation since you have a mentor spirit. Influence, alter memory, control thoughts, and turn to goo are all pretty fun. You need a way to get rid of the opposition that isn't magical so, unarmed combat or pistols.

Interesting advice, particularly the bit about the language skill. Is that new in 4A? I also pulled a point from Survival and dropped the spirit services altogether for a total savings of 15BP, which allowed me to pick up five new spells. I think the character is better for it, thanks.

The knowledge /language cost equivalence was the same in SR4.

Sure you don't want to pick up atleast one contact mate?