It really isn't as bad as that. Honestly even drain soaking machines normally can't invoke up a great form spirit of enough power to do anything on the quake table so it is pretty much just in GM plot device land.

Dice can clatter every which-a-way. Getting 6 or more hits on 12 dice isn't unheard of.
Good GMs don't let mental case PC mages play dice with with the universe.

If it's just relegated to GM plot device land, I'll employ fiat rather than wacky rules.

6 hits is in the piss people off but no huge damage category, 7 causes some death but not widespread you need 8 hits to really devastate a city. Sure you could get that on a force 6 spirit but it is highly unlikely. And even failed attempts bring in hit teams against you, so I'm not too worried about this power. And even a force 6 spirit isn't east to make a great form, sure odds say its only 12 drain, but since its x3 the hits when that spirit rolls 12 dice 15 drain is not unlikely which can knock quite a few players out so now its free. Add in the possible use of edge on the resistance test and the drain can be pretty much impossible to handle. I'm not saying its a perfect power I'd of reduced the area by like x10 to start or made it a magic test not magic+willpower but its not as bad as I think people are implying. All in all great form spirits aren't well thought out IMO. They aren't horrible but they are not great either.

As a smart French guy once said: one can laugh about everything, but not with everyone.

Don't know if there is an equivalent for that in English.

Well, in my opinion, your potentially Summoned, Bound, and Invoked Force 8 Great Form Spirit would have used 3 Karma to resist the Summoning, the Binding, and the Invoking, likely killing the Summoner very, very, dead... And perfectly within the rules, so you should be rather happy...

So no real problem at all in my opinion...

Keep the Faith

Actually, that was what I was thinking.

Really, with the powers available via magic, why doesn't this sort of things happen quite frequently...
...Maybe not in the metroplexes, but in the small towns outside there.

My main response is there are too many other things already in place for this to work - guard spirits, astral travellers, wards, mix of domains, etc.

If it's not allowed, I'd rather it was via the setting, not me just saying so.

"So you're about to do something that will level a whole city. You're about to kill thousands of innocents, severly wound a lot more and destroy the lives of a lot of people. Do you have a 'sociopath' negative quality or something like that? No? Roll Willpower*2, threshold 6."

I'd see 'earth' spirits as being too happy to do such things. Humans have been raping the earth long enough, and grinding it up, putting it in the air, in defiance of gravity for way too long now. A little payback would be appreciated. At least depending on the exact tradition of the summoner.

Also with regards to getting caught. I'm not sure how easy this would be to do if they didn't catch you in the act. If you clean up the astral signature of the spirit at the location the power was used, and the spirit returns to its native meta plane, cause using it again on this plane would be likely suicide, tracking it back to its home plane should be impossible. The investigators would know its gone back to 'a earth type meta plane', but given there are an infinite number of meta planes, and as such an infinite number with possible earth spirits in them....

There is no sociopath negative quality, and there are plenty of humans alive today who would have no problem doing such a thing. I think a few of them flew planes into buildings a little while ago.

IIRC it's possible to create your own negative quality (though it might not be possible inside the SRM scope) and my point was that any character who wasn't lacking empathy (which could be the result of some negative quality I don't remember) wouldn't be able to decide to destroy a whole city just like that.

Sure, you can get people to do it under some circumstances, such as obeying orders, not knowing the exact nature/extent of the actions, conditioning... These would be positive modifiers (or might lower the threshold). But I doubt many sane people would do it just "for fun" or "because they can".

Unless the character had previously screwed his spirits rather profoundly in the past, they won't even use edge, let alone burn edge. Now where do you get the spending Karma to do, or not do something? As I don't see that anywhere. Gm's being asshats and blatantly breaking the rules of spirit summoning without cause would actually get me to try something like burning down a city, or killing all the ceo's of his favorite corporation.

Lets say one of the mega's in NYC did something really terrible to you, and you've got a martyr complex on now. You're taking them down, and don't care who else come along for the ride. Maybe you're just naturally a sociopath. You'd likely have to have some motivating factor, but even just crushing the polluting decedent mortals and allowing nature to reclaim the land could be good enough. Maybe you're a native american shamman who's still upset about the fact Manhattan Island was bought for a handful of beads, and feel a need to 'adjust' the realestate value. There are dozens of reasons I can think of, most of which are not even a 'mild' stretch for some of the nuttier groups SR has in it by cannon.

Motive is certainly there, but there's the means and opportunity that have to be considered. I'm not very good with the magic system with SR4 - chalk it up to laziness on my part - but it takes a lot of power and time to summon a greatform spirit like that, yes? Very few people are going to be able to do that alone, and the time and training it would take for someone to be able to do that alone is going to make one wonder if there was an easier way to bring down an entire city (or at least have enough time to cool the hell off and realize there are a lot of innocent people in the way there).

On top of that, I'm going to throw forth the assumption that said spirits are rare, and perhaps one's inthe middle of an Astral Plane tea party with a free spirit when he starts getting summoned, and that free spirit might have a few contacts of their own. Hell, maybe it was an Evo exec.

Let's say we do have someone who is powerful enough to summon and control a spirit of that magnitude, has the opportunity to do so, and has enough of an axe to grind to level a city along with the wherewithal to get it done. Wouldn't someone like that be watched? Wouldn't that require a few ritual components that would set off alert flags if purchased in sufficient quantity?

Wouldn't that spawn one bad ass runner campaign to stop the crazy guy before he levels a city?

I would say yes to all of the above.

A blood magician can cope with the drain. So anyone from a magical background where blood sacrifice as even conceptualized, this could even include some of the more 'extreme' ends of the christian spectrum.


There is one problem with this assumption of 'rareness' people keep floating about. There are an infinite number of infinitely large metaplanes. This means there are an infinite number of spirits of any given description. They may comprise large or smaller proportions of the population, but there is no limit to their number, so that even the tiniest fraction of them would have any known connection to earth is absurd.


It would require a magic of maybe 6-8, so a grade 1-2 initiate. It would need whatever standard binding materials are needed for that tradition, and likely access to blood magic, as well as some cows, or clones, or kittens, and any tradition who's great spirits have earthquake, and endowment to get the powers needed to do the binding and invoking.



So would I, except that none of the needed materials should actually be rare enough that they will attract attention. It would be like trying to stop someone from building a nuke using materials found only in hardware stores and garage sales. Ya it would be a great idea to stop them, but nothing they're buying is adequately regulated to attract the attention that would justify looking into their activities.

Perhaps.. and this is just a perhaps.

Arcologies, NYPD inc, DPF, have Mages whose job it is to do assensing for Force 8+ spirits of ass kicking?

What bothers me is why are there no rules for ritual wardings.
I would think that Spirits of that level of Force would throw off serious residual magic.

A blanket warding that warns who ever is in charge of an area when some force 12 Greater Spirit is summoned and manifested.

As I recall, blood magic is still outlawed and the Draco Foundation has a standing bounty. This is going to make it more difficult for a blood mage to operate in the UCAS (or anywhere else, really), especially if it's in a high-population area. There are going to be people looking for things that blood mages want.



But it's still a possibility. If you want to handwave it and say that someone can completely stealth cast a magical WMD, that's fine. I'm trying to provide a theoretical framework that a GM can use to foil the attempt, but I can just handwave it and chase you from the table until you come to your senses as well, that's fine.

Mind you, this is the 'you as game-wrecker', not you personally.



Clones require gear that can be tracked - and cows I believe would be rare enough in NYC to raise some flags if a private citizen is trying to get them in suffificient quantity to attempt something of this magnitude. Kittens as well - I avoid kitten bandoliers as a matter of course.



What kind of garage sales are you going to where you can get the radioactive materials needed to start a nuclear pile?

If the materials aren't rare enough to bring in a greatform spirit, perhaps they should be. Or rather, not all of them, but perhaps something specific to bring in that kind of power. Were it me I'd houserule it, and if the player really wants to go through with it, then someone is going to get wind and realize the threat for what it is.

Honestly this thread still leaves a bad taste in my mouth but I have to say that all the people suggesting the spirits wouldn't do this out of some moral conviction are both using dubious logic at best but flat out contradicted by the in game story, spirits are often convinced to do bad things by bad people on a horrific scale in the Shadowrun universe. Anything else is the GM painting their own morality on amoral beings.

The capability for large scale destruction exists. The counters also exist.

The capability for large scale destruction exists. The ability is relatively rare, it is rarely used, if it gets used, it's unlikely to be used again by the same person. There's little motivation to use it. The possibility exists.

The counters also exist. The counters are diverse. The counters are frequently used, they counters get used again, and there is a great deal of motivation to use them.

Sources of large scale desctruction are tracked and monitored by society. Large scale destruction has consequences.

Nuclear weapons, biological weapons, chemical weapons, powerful explosives, invoked spirits with earthquake powers. Not only are the traditional methods used, but there are even new powerful methods available.

Nuclear, biological and chemical materials are tracked and monitored. So are mages. There is a reason besides fear of the awakened to register and track them.

All it takes is one mage with divination asking if NYC is going to have something bad happen for the machinery to counter the threat to go into high gear. The rest of the machinery already exists.

So why does a corporation not have a mage doing a divination every day?
Is This building going to be run against today.
Is this Corporation going to be run against today.

I'd go with economy of time. Most projects in a particular building aren't going to be worth the effort - why would Corp A spend time and nuyen sending a mage to divine threats against Sharon in Accounting?

Then you get into the broad spectrum divinations that you're suggesting - every time you divine seeing 'is Aztechnology going to be the victim of a crime' (which is what a run is),you'll get a yes every time. Corporations are huge.

Do something to the scale of 'Is there a direct, city-destroying threat within the city limits?' and you can send your mundane folk to gather information when the spirit alarm starts screaming.

Presumably because deviniation is woefully short on actionable intel and doesn't add a whole lot to your preperation planing unless you've got enough initiated maged to ask very specific questions constantly.

To put it bluntly there is no counter to quake Dire. The existance of Shadowrunner mages proves that some mages do fall through the cracks, now amongst the the hundreds of mages that do in any given city the very small percentage that posses the invoking magic, then the very small percentage of those who see earthquakes as a viable tool in their arsenal. Of those it is statistically unlikely to get one that can do major damage to a city and a failed attempt will likely result in hunt down and death for the caster, but even then since many buildings in new york are likely designed to be earthquake proof it might not do nearly as much as one would like.

Basically what I'm getting at for that tiny percentage of mages capable of doing such acts there is little or no front end preventative. If Harlequin (to use an example of someone who could invoke, and survive because you know Harly can do anything) wanted to level new york there's no way to stop him. He invokes and binds a force 20 great form earth spirit and sends it towards new york and then goes back to watching the cubs play all the divination in the world won't help you if he does this from Seattle.

Yes but to assense you have to see, and to do that, you need to have an LOS. I don't any group which has an LOS to every point in space in an entire city.

All you need is a box full of kittens and a spirit with the powers of endowment and sapience, and you've got all the blood magic fuel you could ask for. I won't deny its illegal, but its not like you can detect that someone knows the tricks with anything short of an eye witness, or a mind probe.



Its no more noticeable then any other summoning or binding. I'm not denying the player doing it is being an ass, but I've pointed out numerous possible motivations which would certainly allow any number of crazies to justify such an action.


Point is, any living creature which has blood, and can be endowed with sapience is a perfect target. The more common, and less likely to be traced, the better.


Remarkably enough a kid assembled a functional reactor using uranium from old white paint, and deuterium from anti-glare coating on lenses. So its possible.


Its a standard great form earth spirit. You'd be better off replacing the power with the ability to shape several cubic meters of stone/earth/dirt/sand per force point. Really earthquake is just a ridiculous power and shouldn't have been introduced. As it stands however, when combined with blood magic, is a very easy way to destroy a city.

Is it really that easy?
You need 24 dice to have a decent shot of getting your 8 hits. 32 to be sure it's going to work.

So that spirit needs 24-32 dice when activation the Earthquake power.

That's not exactly easy.

Can spirits even get 24-32 dice
What Force spirit would you need for that.
What's the drain on that.

And honestly, the rules are like the Pirate Code. More of a suggestion really.

Wonderful, so the mage finds out the city will be hit by an earthquake. As divination says you can NOT ask about personal details or anything like that, you now know about the earthquake, and possibly even the date and time if you do good enough. So now you do what exactly? Search everywhere in the entire city looking for a possible cause, and busting down everyone's private wards, and shooting people who refuse? I'm sorry, but I don't think a response to this sort of even could even realistically exist. There would simply be too much ground to cover, and the spirit could be in any of the millions of warded shops, homes, and bathrooms dumpshock seems to insist riddle every city on the planet. There is simply no way to find it before it does its thing. Hell the mage could be a prick, and have himself given the power via endowment, and conceal himself with invisibility/improved invisibility/extended masking/concealment/aura masking all at the same time, while in a warded area making him as close to impossible to find as the laws of physics and magic allow, hell throw on the endowed power of materialization, and his hidding place doesn't even have to in the city, he could be floating 2 miles over top of it, and arrive exactly one combat turn before he levels the place. Really, I have no idea how you would counter something like that.

For a 1 shot? Ya about that bad. IF however you don't really care about coming out of the even alive, and are willing to spend Karma on a long term binding of said spirit to shake the ground for a year and a day? A lot less, as 1 good roll will do it. Now its not likely the spirit would be able to get in too many tries, but it does decrease the dice pool needed. Give the spirit in question the extra IP's and a well cast improved reflexes spell, and it could potentially initiate 4 quakes per combat turn.


Given this would need blood magic to pull off, assume a box load of sapient kittens in a wine press will pay for the drain. Assuming that, making a force 12 spirit will on average inflict 16 drain, with up to 20 not being unrealistic, so having 6 sapient kittens bled all at once should pay for it. The spirit in question will have 24 dice to roll, and will have a 25.3835%
of generating a 10 on the Richter scale every pass, with 4 passes, per turn, and as many turns as it takes for people to find it, you're likely looking at a 24km circle being flattened.

Homer, I didn't say you couldn't deep-fry you shirt, I said you shouldn't deep-fry your shirt.

There are some issues with the magic system in Shadowrun :0

Sapient kittens? Are kittens really enough for a ritual sacrifice? ANd kittens are not usually sapient. That's a pretty rare item.
You'd be better off with a room full of humans.

Theoretically a great form spirit could be Guarding the city it is a bit shaky but people always talk about masking a building because its an object the spirit just calls the city an object and guards that. I'd consider an earthquake something like an accident that a spirit can protect against.

note 1. I would not allow a spirit to earthquake multiple times a CT, it has a duration of minutes I'd say once every few minutes since the spirit is getting it up to steam.
note 2. Bloodmagic is one of the worst things written in the game and requires a DM not to be a dumb ass on things like sapient kittens. But hey even at its core blood magic is a box full of stupid, SR4 should of followed the earlier games and made in NPC only if they wanted it in the game.

If it was a naturally occurring quake, I would fully agree. However protecting against an induced quake is like guard trying to prevent a sniper from shooting you. It prevents accidents, not intentional acts of destruction. Also I seriously question any honest reading of the rules to all for a 'city' to qualify as an 'object'.


Nothing mentioned about needing to pick up 'steam', is simply a normal complex action, nothing in the rules would prevent multiple overlapping quakes.


There is no reason to make it an NPC only power. To be honest I really HATE games that do that. The problem in this case isn't the blood magic, is the 'quake' power. That should be taken out of the game. As for sapient kittens, its just a spirit using endowment to bestow sapience on kittens, and don't blame for this one, it came up in a vampire thread some time ago.

Well, I suspect that the prevalence of Blood Magic in SR4 is potentially a hearken to Earthdawn. Where everyone and their dutch uncle did blood magic, often with spectacular result. Entire Cities committed ritual suicide in order to trap Horrors.

But the whole Sapient Kitten thing is stupid.
The Earthquake power as written (and tsunami) is trivially too easy. Or perhaps the problem is that Force 12 Spirits are not hard enough to summon.

It is no worse than calling a building an object IMO and if you want to get picky just assume every building of note the city streets etc has a spirit guarding it. And guard guards against accidents whether natural or magical in nature. It even specifies accidents form thew accident power so whether the quake is natural or magical I'm for it.


Not specifically but I'd say it was implied and you do have GMs for a reason and that is usually to handle things like this.


No I'm pretty sure blood magic is a much bigger problem than earthquake. Earthquake is only a problem with a dick player going out of his way to try to break the system. Blood magic from start to finish is broken.

Honestly it says no spirit like to be bound. It is not GM dickery to say every spirit past force X resists binding attempts with edge, X= to whatever the GM thinks a spirit is powerful enough to really want to put up a fight.

Force 12 spirit or force 8 maybe with multiple attempts, it rolls 24 dice with exploding 6'sx3 hits equals drain, I see a dead mage in your future.

The capability to utterly destroy the world is in someone's hand's right now. Today. It'll be there in the future. It''l be there in SR4.

Why is this particular method of invoked spirits with earthquake power problematic? Is it more common then household chemicals?

BTW, what's this Great Ghost Dance thingie that's an integral part of SR Lore? Is it an instance of such use of such power? World's still here.

Edit: It can happen that we are all nice and loving and all get along, but does it happen. Just because it can happen doesn't mean it will.

Not to take off on a tangent but.... if there were 2 mages, one has geomance (I think that is the one that lets you aspect BC) and the other is the one to summon the Spirit. Can't the mage with geomancy (and Invoking becuase they work so well together) do the binding and invoking inside the BC that is favorable to him? It would reduce the spirit's force temporarily and also increase his magic. This should make the binding / invoking easier (fewer dice rolled by the spirit = less drain)

Mage 1 summons the base spirit Force 12 or so. And has it go into the BC where Mage 2 is waiting to do some binding.

Mage 2 (in his friendly BC of 3-4) binds the spirit and Invokes its greatform. The Spirit will be down to F8-9 and Mage 2 will be at +3-4 Magic for his dicepool.


I apologize if I have the mechanic wrong, going from memory since I am AFB.

Using endowment to make sapient kitties is stupid yes. Its also not my idea, as I said I stole it from a thread about vampires. It is however rules legal, which is also stupid, and I again take no responsibility for it.

Problem is, a quake isn't an accident, its an attack. Guard prevents 'accidents' not attacks. If Guard prevented attacks, every runner and their dog would be under the protection of that power 24/7



I don't even see it implied. The duration of the power is instantaneous. Meaning as soon as its used, the magical effect is now over. What you have left is the earthquake equivalent of a house on fire after someone fireballs it. Nothing says or implies you have to wait for the fire to go out before you try to burn the house down again.



a power capable of leveling a city isn't a problem? I'm afraid the power has no other use then to be employed by high level spirits for the purpose of destroying cities. If you can't think of another I'd like to hear it, at best I'm coming up with avalanche control, and I can almost guarantee the developers didn't have that on their mind when they thought this little nightmare up.

double post

It says spirits will do so if abused in the past. So unless the caster has been doing so, there is no reason for them to act that way. Also, those kittens I'm sacrifing have ~8 boxes of damage each, as they are sapient, each box grants 1 die on the drain resistance test. I use edge as well to get exploding 6's too, and I'm looking at 60+ dice to resist drain with without breaking a sweat. So unless you've abused the spirits in the past, this really shouldn't even happen, but if it does, just make sure you have enough kittens lined up.

Looks about right. Should also be the last time mage 1 tries to summon anything like that again, as I could easily see spirits using edge on all summoning and binding tests after that. Especially cause he did it to a force 12

Mordinvan has proven that there are incredibly badly thought out giant loops holes in the magic system

Endowment power
Earthquake Power

blood sacrifice power.

I fully agree with the first 2, the 3rd I don't think is that bad. But its a matter of personal taste really. But either way, actually having a power who's only real use is to level cities is beyond stupid.

I think the real question everyone avoiding is why the Azzies haven't used it in the Yucatan yet.

It can also be used to defend against an attacking go-gang. A honest to the spirits mistake, yes? (Slightly off-topic since Barcelona took the hit.)

Accident power is an attack as well. This is specifically the type of thing the power was developed to protect against.



Fine, but I can't see this as anything but a separate service for each quake so how many shots do you really expect to get?



I did not say it wasn't a problem, I do not care for the power. But in general it is only a problem in cases where you have a player trying to break the game. It would be like saying the chemistry skill is broken because you can take out a subway system with gas. It should have worked like the storm power, powerful but even with a dick player probably not breaking the game.

Where as to me every single use of blood magic is there to break the game. The one non-GM discretion check on magic is drain and this removes it. Summon spirits of stupid power so the GM always has to have a godawful backgorund count to make things doable or have you face absurd foes all the time go for it, your one check on power is gone. I guess you can say the same for quake but I think most people who used it were expecting to shake things up and scare people or cause a distraction and not to take out a city since 8 hits is almost impossible on what great forms most people could summon.

As for spirits using edge, there is very few guidelines on when a spirit is allowed to use edge. It is not only when you abuse spirits though if you want to play it that way you can. Spirits do not like to be bound, a spirit with a 8+logic, willpower etc why the hell wouldn't they use edge to resist the binding. They don't want to be bound they could be stuck there for a year and a day which they really don't want, explain why the spirit is not using edge other than you think that means the GM is being a dick. Trying to resist something you really don't want to happen seems like the classical place to use edge to me.

Uh... no it's not. I don't see anywhere under "guard's" description that it defends against magical attacks other then "accident". Guard may protect you from catching a stray bullet in a fire fight, but won't do a think if the barrel is in your mouth when the trigger is pulled.



Long term binding. A use of a power is not a "Service" a fulfillment of a task is a service. This has only been gone over a dozen times. So tell it, I want you to continuously use your quake power here for a year and a day. So barring intervention (which would happen reasonable soon) you should expect about 42163200 uses of the power, or a little over 1/second.



Give me a use for this power which is not game breaking? The only one I can think of is avalanche control, aside from that, you either level cities, or accomplish pretty much nothing. It doesn't leave a lot of room for middle ground.


If you think that in the middle of a fight you're going to slit someone's throat, while casting a spell to help with the drain, and not be in whole heaps of trouble, then I think you could be not thinking it through enough.




For a very simple reason. If spirits commonly used edge to resist binding, and especially long term binding, it would not be common for spirits to be bound to corporate property for security purposes. But according to street magic, this is a very common application of long term binding. Now if I was a spirit and angry enough to use my edge, I'd spell the whole year guarding the broom closet, just to mess with the summoner, or I'd use my most destructive combat abilities at maximum force to cause the most collateral damage possible just to keep them from ever using long term binding again. But since long term binding is actually common in the security world, one should assume this isn't happening. So obviously spirits can't dislike it as bad as you think they do.

You continue to say that, but I have yet to see a RAW Rules Quote that supports that line of reasoning... Anywhere within the Rules... Nor is it in teh Oft maligned FAQ to my knowledge, nor any Arrata...

The simple fact is this... Spirits have Edge, They can use Edge in the same situations as a Character can use Edge, Nothing stops them from spending their Edge to resist the Summoning/Binding/Invoking a a Summoner... Because they have a Edge Attribute, they are allowed to use it just like any other character with an Edge Attribute... There is absolutely nothing wrong with the Edge expenditure, nor does it blatantly break the rules...

Simple and case closed... It cannot be refuted within the rules... All that is left is preference... Apparently your preference is to not allow the Spirit to Use their Edge as they see fit... that is definitely your perrogative. Please do not say that I am breaking the rules by allowing the spirits to use their Edge as tehy choose, because you are blatantly worong on that point...

Keep the Faith

It actually does say in the books the spirits will not normally use edge unless they have been abused by the summoner. So ya it is in there. As I said above however, if the DM is the sort to have them use it whenever he feels like it, especially during summoning, or binding, if I haven't been abusive to them, then I'll start, and likely burn down a city or 2.

Well guard came out before quake so it wont be specifically mentioned but it protects from things like avalanches. It never says it protects against an avalanche unless it was caused by a spirit.




If you want to allow spirits to do that, it is your game. But I don't think it follows what you need to do by the letter of the rules.


1-6 successes count as a distraction will set off vibration sensors and a wide variety of other ancillary effects.


Hard to do in a fight, but farking easy to do every single time you summon up a powerful spirit for the day and every time you bind. So yeah it is broken from start to finish and if manage a way to do it in combat, broken as hell there to.



It would stop high force binding yes. And I do not have a problem with that at all. A force 4ish spirit probably could still be bound and force 3s would probably still be common. And I think in most cases long term bound spirits do follow the letter of the instruction giving as little as they can, because again they find it distasteful.

Page Number please...

And not bloody likely at our table... And for a Table Reference, ALL Force 3 or lower Spirits do not spend Edge... unless you piss them off... Any Spirits Force 4+ ALWAYS spend Edge unless you have taken great pains to actually appease the spirit... Pretty much within the rules...

Keep the Faith