Cool so even Shadowrun Psionic Mutants Adepts can be done

Bah, I want an ubermensch!!! And I'm sure those super-awesome totems will come up in Street Magic.

The difference between hermetics and shamans, to my mind, is just a differing view on the nature of magic. Hermetics manipulate magic; shamans invoke it. To hermetics, magic is a separate entity, an outside force. To shamans, it is the blood of reality; magic is a part of everything, and everything is a part of magic.

For shamans, mentor spirits obviously tend to be primordial archetypes. Wolf, Coyote, Raven, Shark, Sun, Moon, Dark King, etc. They are all forces of nature, the very stuff of creation.

For hermetics, I'd be more inclined to "name" the mentor spirits; instead of them being forces of nature, they are entities that guide mages. Michael, Gabriel, Azrael. Asmodeus, Beelzebub, Belial. Pick a mythology, and select a named servant a god, that would make a good hermetic patron, imo. (Personally, I think that it would be... incorrect to let most PCs {or even most NPCs} select a god as a mentor spirit. That is the realm of prophets, and true prophets should be *rare*)

How about;

Machiavelli

Advantages: +2 dice for Binding, +2 dice for manipulation spells
Disadvantages: -1 die for Health spells. Magicians of Machiavelli must make a Willpower+Charisma (3) test to openly act against those in power.

Well, let's step back a bit here. Why should hermetic have any less link with magic? The mentor being a form of link into magical realm..You are being talked to by something magical, after all... Oh what the hell we are talking about the world where some relions have magical power and others don't.

I don't see a problem with hermetics using animal mentors.

I also don't see a problem with renaming any given mentor, in either tradition (or homebrew ones), to better fit a character's mystical philosophy.

For instance, I've got a hermetic cyberdoc right now who has Dark King has his mentor spirit; he views DK as the Jungian incarnation of the Grim Reaper himself. So, my guy comes off with this whole "Dr. Death" thing. I could have just as easily reconceptualized Dark King as Pluto/Hades, or as the unknowable "Void of the Afterlife," or whatever.

Or, I could have taken a different route with him and used Snake instead. He could have still been hermetic, but I could have played up the "snake oil vendor" motif or gone with the Egyptian serpentgod theme.

My point is that all shamans don't need to have animal totems and all hermetics don't need to be into idol worship. Heck, you could do the old psionicist tradition and have each psychic draw power from a subconscious template based off of animal traits. "I have conditioned my mind, using the cultural archetype of resilent Bear, to perform these wacky psionic tricks."

I don't see why mentor spirits for hematics could not be treated like familiars.

Supposedly wizards made pacts to gain power and knowledge and in return they got a imp, quasit or what have you and it could be done in a simular way here.

Wizard does a long summoning ritual (and pays some karma) and calls forth a spirit from the depths that matches his views and helps him out in his works.

Tweek it some, give it stats like a real spirit and it boosts him like a mentor spirit as long as it lives and if it gets killed in combat, the hematic takes some really nasty stun damage which in combat could cause some really bad issues.

That way it works like a spirt and boosts him at the same time but yet he may want to keep it back some do to what may happen if it gets killed.

If you make it like a real spirit, you might want to make them so that they only show up as force 3 (with a logic and will of 6) spirit so that they can't be kick ass and have the great effects of a mentor spirit combined. That will make it truely like a familiar and somthing to be looked after and not just used as a tweeked combat spirit.

Time Cube
Followers of nature's harmonic simultaneous four-day Time Cube (who refer to themselves as cubicists) reject the corrupt singularity brotherhood that is taught by traditional religious and so-called "scientific" teachers/dogmatists. Realizing that those who ignore the implications of cubic creation are by definition evil, cubicists are on very solid moral grounds while dealing with everyone. They know the peril of failing to recognize their rotation of 4-day life, and refuse to bow to those who would idict them with stupid-logic that would cut them off from their antipodal existence.

Benefits: +2 to Counterspelling, +2 to Banishment, +2 dice to resist any attempt to convince the character of anything - even (especially) if torture or drugs are employed.
Penalties: Cubicists find it difficult to interact with others, and suspect them of being part of the Big Brother conspiracy to eradicate knowledge of the opposites that prevent the universe from ceasing to exist. A cubicist must make a Willpower + Charisma (3) test to trust anyone, and is at a -1 Dicepool penalty to social tests when dealing with people who don't acknowledge their cubic creation of the universe.

-Frank

Sounds like the perfect mentor for an uncouth hermetic.