In the world of Shadowrun, Magic is real. The only sacred cows are teleportation and time travel and even teleportation is not necessarily beyond the pale. Spells that exist work by manipulating the power put off by lving creatures. The spells that harm, mana and power bolts manipulate life by overloading a living creatures body, like blasting too much electricity through a circuit. Even Toxics use the power of life. They twist it and warp it but they still use the power of life, just seen through their particularly twisted spectrum.

But what if there’s another sort of way to perform Magick? Something that does not manipulate the power of life but is attuned to the lack of it. Not to the flow of life but its absence, the empty void at the edge of night, necromancy.

This would be completely different from existing schools of thought. You could not cross over and the outlook of the caster would be seriously demented. I mean the only things that exist like this in SR are the infected and the ability to create zombies.

The sort of spells that came to mind were:

Drain life: which does not ‘wound’ like a combat spell but takes health from the target and gives it to the caster.

Speak with/command the dead: The summoning of ghosts, not nature/elemental spirits.

Decay: The entropy that wears down material

Form a zombie, but one that encases and entraps the soul of the person.

Raise the dead, but is coming back always good?

Any other thoughts?

Drain life is best represented by Drain Essence, which the vampires already have.

Decay, I'm fairly sure, is already in the game -- the ability to speed up the aging process is well within the game's reach.

The rest are probably the domain of the shedim or the houngans, although I don't think there is any way to control shedim like spirits. But I may be wrong.


Of course, that's just my knee-jerk reaction.

Possibly doable under the current spell design rules by making it a mixed combat/heal spell, certainly not outside of the realm of plausability.

Different view of spirits. Some traditions even point out that their spirits are believed to be ancestors and the like. Certainly not a big stretch that a tradition could run on more recently dead souls.

This spell is in the game if I recall correctly, it's in street magic. Erode maybe?
Well, technically you can manage this by having a possession tradition and possessing a dead body with a spirit. You could also emulate this with something like animate object done on a corpse.

I thought raising the dead was one of the 'can't do it with magic' things? If not... well, I suppose it would be a super high drain heal spell, possibly requiring a metamagic or two, or ritual spellcasting.

I like it, seen it tossed around a couple times, (maybe even once by myself, don't remember exactly). I suppose my question is: are you making a tradition, or an entirely new branch of magic? The latter is going to require a ton of rules and work to be properly viable. The former of course is cool and fairly easy to work out. Really it could be a sub-tradition of any regular tradition, as basically every tradition will have alot of things related to death and the dead.

If you're talking an entirely new set of magic rules, good luck with them, and even better luck getting a GM to let you play with them.

It's just a new tradition, but cool new spells are always welcome.

The quick way is to take voodoo and make it a logic tradition. design a couple spells to go with it and you are done. If you see it as more spirit of the dead summoning and not putting a spirit in a body summoninf change it to a non-possession tradition. Style the water spirit as a spirits from the river stix or something, or make the the spirits of the dead lost at sea.

Also give them a quick writeup as an Inituatory group/group contact, maybe a neat spirit mentor to go with it - things like this are easier to introduce if there's someone showing people the ropes.

§I'm not sure he means it in the D&D sense of resurection. Getting the dead to walk again as a self-willed zombie is possible - it's close to what cybermancy does by anchoring the soul to a not-quite-dead body. The fluf on cybermancy mentions the azanian using something of the sort when something important enough goes unfinished through untimely demise of a participant, at least on a short term basis.

True undead are impossible in Shadowrun. While you can have a spirit possess a corpse, this is no different than spirit possessing an inanimate object. It is the spirit that is alive and it is bound to a dead object.

While spirits may be seen by practitioners of certain traditions as spirits of the dead, there is nothing in the books that confirms or denies this as truth.

Other beings classified as undead in other fantasy games and literature are "only" infected with a virulent disease. Contrary to popular myth vampires do not have to die to initiate the change.

Cybermancy isn't creating true undead either, since the soul of the patient is trapped in the moment of death and not returned from the land of the dead into his former body.

While I'm all fro new and interesting traditions, they should not change the paradigms of magic in general.

I've wondered at the lack of true necromancy too. Interrogating the spirits of the dead, hauntings by actual dead people, and possibly raising the dead - all interesting things to do.





So we've got anecdotal evidence for spirits of the dead existing, to some degree. These might not be the actual souls of the dead; they could be a moment-of-death psychic imprint onto the astral plane coalescing into a spirit however.

Drain Essence is a form of the Drain Energy spirit power. Instead of essence you can drain magic or even karma and the effects are very necromantic as the target also suffers physical or stun damage and the more that is taken the more the target loses vitality.

Depends on your thoughts on Earthdawn/Shadowrun crossovers. Wizards can raise the dead, but that's more because Death is locked up with nothing but a toasty warm couch, toasty warm TV and toasty warm nachos until the end of eternity (or, alternetely, the end of the mana cycle). There's some obscene circle spell (again, wizards, I think Nethermancers have something similar, and Illusionists too) that let Wizards punch back through the time stream to have a look at things, so time travel isn't necessarily beyond the pale - but expect it to be damn near impossible, for good reason. Otherwise you'd have whichever IE manages it turning into Ultimecia, spouting hilarious dialogue as a plucky bunch of manic depressive meth addicted shadowrunners managed to squash him/her with the power of friendship.

Besides, wasn't Urdli capable of calling up spirits to torture people for giggles, or was I misreading that novel?

There are ways to drag and bind back the soul into a body it has departed (that's the point of cybermancy). There are several steps necessary to extend that into undeath, but all of them are within the realm of he possible

1) improve the binding ritual to a point wher the body no longers needs to be alive (in the purely physiological sense)
2) animate the body through magic and prevent decay
3) give control of the animation to the bound soul

point 2 is the easiest, there are already ways to make spells permanent (at least until someone actively tries to ruin them)
1 and 3 are where the real problem lay, but it seems to be doable within the current understanding of magic. Obviuosly, the older the corpse, the harder it will be.

Wetehr the results are worth the effort is anyone's guess, though it might have some appeal as a way to cheat death. It woul probably saddle the happy subject with the sort of problems that plague a cyberzombie (astral hazing, beacon for nasty astral critters, psychological problems), though he wil be spared the disease and cyberware malfunctions. But will probably have a whole new set of problems to make up for that...

Got a mage who made an heusoterism type of tradition - the mage believes in ghosts and even renamed his spirits partly based on people who once existed (like Da Vinci whose a Task spirit link to Manipulation). The tradition is Intuition based.

Role-playing wise, we develop the thing to the point where the mage wants to free ghosts by completing what they failed to do during their life (much like the Ghost Whisperer series if you want) - a way for them to see 'The Light'. He managed to form a magical group and added the stricture Oath saying that the group must do whatever they can to free spirits.

To be more specific with the thread, look at what the blood mage can do. While he's using blood to boost his power, I would see some form of sacrifice would allow the mage to create animated corpses without the use of spirits. Also, always as a suggested idea that needs to be balanced out, if the mage has access to the drain essence power, that could be another means to create zombies after the poor soul lost his last drop of essence. In both cases, it's something that takes time to prepare, which is another balance factor.

However, giving something like this in the player's hands ... it's like allowing them to be a toxic/blood shaman.

Street Magic names necromancy as one of the twisted paths (and cybermancers as the most prominent example besides petro houngans and people who make bargains with the shedim).
As such, it would likely be differentiated from existing traditions by access to unique metamagic, instead of certain unique spells.
Necromancers would likely have access to such metamagics as Sacrifice or Cannibalism.
Note that cybermancers also have to learn (among others) the toxic metamagic of Corruption to acquire the Cybermancy metamagic.
Some crossover between the various magical threads seems indeed possible.

A lot of the effects here could be put to use in the game by turning them into advanced metamagic as well, particularly Drain Life, which bears similarities both to Sacrifice and the toxic Drain metamagic.


Regarding ghosts, Running Wild has some information on them in the spirit chapter (in fact, more than any previous edition).
Most mages do not view them as spirits of the dead, but as wild spirits with the psychic imprint of a deceased person (Ethernaut claims that no ghost he has ever assensed had any astral similarities with the deceased person whose behavior it emulated).

They cannot be summoned by normal means, but in theory, it would be possible to bargain with them using an Offering ritual (this is an option for all wild spirits, including shedim). If you are particularly suicidal, that is.
If a ghost also has the Chains power (basically, Hidden Life), possession of it's chain allows to summon and bind it like a free spirit.
On the other hand, they do not seem to have a true name, so without access to the chain, you are dependend on an Offering to utilize them.

IIRC Blood Magic, Invoking Blood Spirits, Sacrifice, Cannibalism and even Cabermancy all manipulate some kind of life force. they would not work on dead tissue and bones, which corpses are. IMHO in SR the game always ended with death contrary to some other games where death is merely a transitory state (D&D) or even the beginning(Vampire, Wraith) and I like it that way.

The other probelm with resurrection, cadaver animation and necrocommunication is that there is no mechanism to summon a specific spirit. Animating a corpse by some foreign entity may not be in the intrest of the necromancer, and this is already easily achieved by any other possession based tradition.

Decay and entropy are actually more functions of life than of death. Decay is the breaking down of tissues, almost always by micro-organisms. Entropy is the chaos of complex systems acting in unpredictable ways (and order is frozen stagnation). This feeds into my pet peeve about TOG - infections are functions of life, not death. Remove disease should be the necromancy spell, and cause disease the health spell.

There are two ways you can go with this (IMO):

1) - Death is the transfer of life from one form, body, entity, to another. Death is not bad, it's just change, and must be dealt with respectfully. Certainly the petro voodoun traditions fall in here, with the understanding that good and bad are two sides of the same coin. This study of death requires also an intensive study of life.

2) - Frozen order, the forceful cessation of all life, change, transition, entropy. By binding the life force, we cause it to stop functioning. We trap the soul and destroy what makes it human, by binding it to a single form. With this form of necromancy, it is intentionally unbalanced. The subject does not decay. He does not 'die'. He simply ceases to be alive. This magic truly is 'evil', because it is intentionally unbalanced.

What's TOG? I agree with your opinion though.

The Other Game.

Agreed. The way necromancy could be seen is to take the life force of someone and transfer it into a prepared dead vessel - much like inhabitation needs. Build some rules about duration based on transfered essence, et voilà, you just created another awaikened threat sucking the life of the homeless into zombies you control.

Well in D&D healing and necromancy or disease and remove disease are linked and primarily tied to the handwavium planes of positive and negative energy. It has been a long time but I think in earlier editions all life force/death force magic fell under the schools of necromancy for both mages and clerics.

All of this evidence is from SR3, though, not SR4.

I did broach the subject on the Freelancer boards about 2 years ago because I was fascinated by the idea myself and wanted to contribute a fiction story to an upcoming SR book about the subject. The consensus was "We don't want to wade into that territory right now, so we're deliberately leaving it vague. The only way you'll get away with it in official material is to have a bound spirit pretending to be the ghost of the dead guy."

So, if you want to play with it using House Rules, feel free, but I doubt CGL will ever actually publish anything concrete about the issue unless there's a serious sea-change in the way this particular matter is viewed.

I'd forgotten cybermancy but there is something along those lines as the soul/spirit of the person is unnaturally bound to the body when it owuld liek to leave it. It's an unnatural thing. By comparrison Blood magic is bound to life-the spilling of someone else's but it is still the power of life that drives the spell.

The infected are close to it, but life drains out of them so they try to replace it. Like a bucket with a hole in it, to keep the water lever constant you must add water to match what drains out.

The point of this with spirits is that it goes against what is known of magic in the SR world. There are no 'undead' just means they havn't been found yet and that wasn't where I was heading anyway. I meant decay on non-living things, entropy that wears away all things, but not disease. All disease is is life-not the sick person but the thriving life of the happy little microbes.

Another spell I thought of was emptying a mind. Like the normal spell of mind probe the necromancer can know what's in another's head, but unlike a normal mage who is just reading what's there and putting the book back on the shelf, the necromancer would empty the mind leaving the target drooling and doing a darn good impression of a cabbage.

Some rules talk about spirits but you can never be sure about who you have. that is like what people say about RL ouija boards. You never really know who's knocking, but what if you did and could? truely KNOW about it? Think of the effect you could have especially in eastern cultures with ancestor worship? Not only do you look good bringing the ancestors for a chat, but the other side of the coin is what if you could threatened the ancestors. "Bring me that code disc or I shall torture your beloved grand mother's soul." Cultures with reincarnation "I will not only kill your boddy if you don't obey me, but i shall lock your soul into it's rotting corpse in the ground until it is no more."

I'm only partially looking at this from a number crunching scenario and far more from a role play mind set. not just someone twisting the rules of magic as they are known, that's the toxics and co, but someone using an entriely different system. Where would they learn it? How? What sort of people would thrive on the empty void?

most spirits would run from such a being.

I imagine necromancy might involve causing an astral haze where it is used for a short time...or perhaps only work in such places (like in space).

If these spells do not rely on life/mana/biosphere to work then they might be even more powerful in space. That might be how the Corps found it. Didn't they say that a mage who looks into the astral while in space can go mad? Maybe it was someone like that who discovered this system. Someone completely and utter mad, who looked into the abyss and saw how to use it.

Have I ever told you, that you are a deeply distrubing woman?

Freaquently, but your kids love me.

Otherwise I really do like the idea of the whole thing being casue by 'space' the the void there causing insanity. These are spells and an outlook that by its nature is twisted and wrong.