Just a little story I wrote for my GM to illustrate my mage's first (and costly) (but totally worth it) augmentation, as well as to account for a shift in the way I'll be portraying him from now on...

» Shadowrun - Synaptic Awakening - Eric Vinyard.pdf

Edit: Ugh. Just posted an updated version. I really wish I had proofread it before uploading the first time. Fixed a couple of glaring errors and typos.

Wow. Great work! I laughed so hard when I read the german accent of the Cyberdoc Cool storyline... makes me want to know more about that guy.

What spell was cast on him to turn him into an American?

An extremely fictional one.

Something akin to Influence, perhaps, but much more complex, crafted in a way that made it self-sustaining or semi-permanent. Certainly not a common spell, something the caster would have written himself.

[double post]

influence IS permanent. It's effects are instantaneous hypnotic suggestion. If you used it on yourself to make yourself "an american" you couldnt change that until something happened that allowed you to confront how wrong it was. In this case, it was the character's medically induced dream state during cyber-ware installation.

really loved this fic. As a fairly new to shadowrun, like to see and "feel" how the thing in SR univerze look like, how the streets and houses and warehouses look like, what do the people who arent runners or corpsec... I played a lot of fantasy themed RPGs before, and I know that lacking of certain details of SR background can be a bit confusing for me.

Good story, thanks for sharing. The screenplay bits were an interesting touch.

I assume Synaptic Booster level 2.

Yep, Synaptic Booster rating 2. I only lose 1 point of essence, and therefore 1 point of magic. I was at 5, now I'm at 4. I'm planning to initiate, but as a consequence - if I live long enough - I will max out at 10 total and never be able to reach a full 12. That's if I don't get any other implants, and I don't think I shall ever need to. Of course, if I can ever afford it (unlikely), I'll get a Rating 3 SB in deltaware and have a bit of room left over for a datajack...

Thanks for the compliments. I've always wanted to be a screenwriter but I've been lazy the past couple of years, so I took this opportunity to try and get myself back into the spirit of it. I thought that putting it in cinematic terms might help to illustrate things visually...

Influence. Unfortunately, the rules for Influence don't bode well for its casting against a mage. I actually tried this in our weekly game, as part of a ritual spellcast with the leader at 5 magic and 5 ritual. It, uh, didn't stand a chance of working at all, even when the rules were bent to allow for resistance tests at hourly intervals instead of combat turns. Ha.

But -- for the purposes of this story, I left the specific spell to speculation. I can only imagine that it was something special that the other student cooked up for the purpose of removing the "natural charms" of an otherwise charismatic individual. In this particular case, it led to the loss of his accent and a shift in his personality.

[sigh. Double post again...]

Maybe it was a quickened Decrease Charisma spell?