I don't see any bit of fluff or rules that disallow having multiple ally spirits.
The rules are heavily slanted towards getting one and making them as powerful as you can at the start and sinking karma only into one. But I don't think there is anything stopping a mage or mystic adept from having 2, 3, or many ally spirits.

Someone in another thread said that they would turn on you but I don't think they would necessarily. As loyal as a trusted companion can be ally spirits are more so, because it is in their nature. Like a loyalty 9 contact instead of a loyalty 6 contact. Granted you would need to yo treat them well but that is the case with anyone.

Having multiple allies may mean the older ones get jealous of the attention the newer ones get, and also be unhappy that the karma has one more mouth to feed. But like any a family with multiple siblings this does not need to lead to Filicide, Mariticide or Parricide.

So what would be the advantages and disadvantages. What justification would you have for doing this. Has anyone done this?

Like my example above I could see a mage treating his allies like his children. Someone might try to raise an army of loyal solders. Another might try to build a harem. Another would just seek more allies to help them day to day and in a fight.

It's a little fuzzy, tbh - I went digging on the subject in response to the other thread. Technically the Ally Conjuration metamagic talks only in the singular and they use the word "unique" a lot, but the meaning is left a bit unclear.

On the practical side of things, spirits ramp up in power pretty steeply, not quite exponentially, but along those lines. Having multiple allies in most cases will be considerably less powerful than building one really strong spirit.

It's *very* infeasible to have multiple spirits, but it's not clear if the metamagic limits you to one.

The book specifically says ally spirits can turn on you. They don't *necessarily*, but it's a definite possibility. You're certainly right that they are extremely loyal (Loyalty rating 6), under normal circumstances.In addition, an ally spirit can become a reluctant servant, hindering you without actually escaping.

Yeah, I just don't think it is impossible. Each formula is unique and each spirit is unique but I have not actually read the chapter in detail.

In situations where you just need more bodies or load a materialized spirit up with military armor and heavy weapons, or have the spirit possess a lot of combat drones it could be useful maybe. Also I am not really familiar with the rules on group casting but there may be some use there to look into.

But really I just kind of like the idea of raising a lot of little ally spirits. It may take a century for them all to be supper powerful but there are a few ways to live forever in shadowrun and a few species that do live very long already. It would not really happen within the scope of a very long campaign but the idea is just kind of neat.


well here I guess is one tweekish reason to have many allies. If you have more than one you can enanger each one of them less often. Though I don't see that actually going over to well.

Here's a disadvantage... Lose control of your Ally Spirits, and, well, they are kinda pissed off over being former slaves...

I mean, what would your typical 'Runner do if the Corp Suit that held the control to his Cortex Bomb have it fall out of his fingers and shatter on the floor?

Yeah. It'd be the different between having your Iron Giant master-blaster buddy, and having your little wolf-pack or Huginn/Muninn combo.

Well, that's why you'd be *super* nice to them, CanRay.

I will hug him and squeeze him and love him forever and call him "George" and feed him Long Island Ice Teas and...

Slaves don't get paid. Servants get paid.
You pay allies in karma, luxuries, and probably newyen too.

Of course if they become an unwilling servant the distinction does become blurred.

Well, honestly, I don't see anything in the rules stopping it =)

You don't pay ally spirits in nuyen. Hehe.

Well there are probably things in the world they want.
None so much as karma maybe, but money buys a lot of stuff.

Materialized spirits can eat, go to a club (if they can get past the wards), drive a fast car.

By the way: an ally can attempt to break free during a rebinding ritual. But when do you have ot rebind an ally? They have unlimited services.

can be used to buy Long Island Ice Teas.

Or Coffee like a certain Free Spirit in my stories.

I'd write their formula so that they wouldn't want those things, but sure. Zoom zoom!

to increase their power, you have to do another binding ritual, no?

There is some fluff regarding this topic. The Leader of Winternight had two ally Spirits, but he was "one of the most powerful magicians of his generation." (System Failure)

Even if they are an Ally Task Spirit with "Skill (Poledancing)"?

We know from his last will and testament that Dunkelzahn had at least 5 Ally Spirits.

There's no reason a player couldn't have multiple Ally Spirits.

Can you have an Ally spirit inhabit a weapon focus? I got a wierd idea last night for having a spirit inside a weapon focus and the mage constantly polishing and fawning over his magic sword.

Or an ally Guardian spirit with "Skill: Weapon (Poledancing)"

Hm. The reasoning that since an NPC had multiple aspects of a special ability doesn't always work as a rationale for why PCs should too. Take AI PCs vs NPCs for example. AI PCs don't have access to all the fun qualities NPC AIs do, like code flux, designer, codivore, emulate, spawn, snooper, etc.

Now, I don't really see anything wrong with a mage having multiple ally spirits, tho its potentially a hefty karma sink that they can never get back if something happens to the spirit, which may become more likely if you split the pools in order to have multiples. 8xForce isn't cheap, plus additional bells and whistles. Investing high makes the ally potentially more resilient, but also means a longer interval between summoning a new one. Figure a decent 50-something Karma for a Force 6 ally with some other stuff attached to it? Raising mid-level force ally spirits up to higher levels is even more expensive than just summoning a powerful one at the beginning.

In older editions, you could have multiple ally spirits. Thing was, you generally only made one because you had to spend a point of magic to give them life. But there was no hard and fast (let alone a soft) rule saying only one ally spirit.

Though multiple ally spirits may suffer from sibling rivalry, on the bright side the pain gets spread thinner.

An ally possessing your truck can take A LOT of drain for you, but if it's always the same spirit then that loyalty will start to slip.

If a player wanted to have multiple ally spirits... those things are expensive. Given that personal improvement will yield more power than a second ally spirit, I'd allow it.

you guys have obviously never heard of the drain karma power

Ugh. That's the kind of power that would cause me to lean over the table, slap the player and go "No. Bad. BAD. Sit in the corner." Yeah, I'm going to have an ally shadow spirit, and while I'm not on a run, he's going to run around town bad-touching everyone, I figure he'll have 13000 karma by the end of the week.

Obviously, the existence of the drain karma power means that all PCs should have arbitrarily large amounts of karma to spend on everythahahahahahahahahahaha

Better luck next time.

Go ahead, ask him how he's going to get his ally spirits to have that power...

I know players that would have a 10 page writeup on why they should be allowed to summon shadow spirits and turn them into allies. Or, 'trust me, it'll make great storytelling, me having a demon I think is an ally spirit but is really a demon!'.

Wow multiple ally spirits that is even more dikoted fun.

Number 4 and 5.

EDIT:

I have heard of it and I know about it, but I also know the only way to get it is through GM Fiat.

@Voran and Emy - a knee-jerk reaction like that damages your validity as a GM more than anything. You need to know how the rules operate and disallow things from a rules standpoint, not a "I don't like that because of X" standpoint.

As I said above, the only way for a spirit to get that Power is by the GM assigning it to him. There is, however, a much easier way for a player to get massive amounts of karma for nearly no work. Play a free spirit, take Drain Pact, get yourself a 200+ person group contact with 6 Loyalty and massive magical resources, and enjoy an income of 200+ karma a week. You could do daily, but a week sounds good; you still can't spend it fast enough.

In comparison, Energy Drain isn't nearly as bad now, is it?

pun-pun or omnificer builds in shadowrun are sort of a fun mental excercise, but I think some people put a little too much effort into them.

Hm. Not as bad. I'd still go with the rolled newspaper though.

I think vetoing obviously stupid things is what gains you 'validity as a GM'.

I roll my newspaper over a lead pipe, myself.

One wack tends to be more than enough.

Then again, the rolled up newspaper is pulled from my hand and turned on me...

I'd like a little angel ally spirit for my one shoulder, and a little devil ally spirit for the other shoulder..

"**** ***. **** *** brains out. You know ya want to..."

Can't remember the angel's response....

"Lawrence, For Shame"

I am such a Geek...

"Obviously Stupid" to you is "plainly within the rules of the game" to myself and many other people. The Pact itself tells you you can do it. I'm conservatively saying 1 karma each per week - you can do 2 a day and they'll still pay it at least once, maybe more if you really push it.

EDIT: Actually, they'll probably pay whatever you want them to, as often as you want them to. If you use their karma (yours now technically) to raise your Force, they get more Drain Resistance Dice. Everyone wins.

Well, they'll pay you whatever the GM decides they'll pay? As a player, you still have no mechanism to A. guarantee that your group contact members will enter into a pact with you, or B. determine how often and for how much the pact is invoked. So there's still a huge amount of GM fiat involved - just no rules outright broken in obnoxious ways.

At Loyalty 6 they'll pay what I want them to pay when I want them to pay it because of this.

I'm sorry, I'm not clear on the exact rule mechanic you're referring to?

Neraph has a point. This plan may fail and backfire in the long run but that does not mean one can't attempt it.

1 karma a week per person is a bit much. I don't think an average person makes that much karma a week and to give it all away does not seem like something you would do forever. 1 per month seems like something people would do, or 1 per week or a few days but only buy there service every so often. You could work out a payment plan.

One downside that could come up is that some people might come after you as a more available target in an attempt to get at one of your clients, who might be some important people.

--If you have a life pact with someone then they are very hard to kill if they have the karma to spend. This is great for you but someone trying to kill that contact may decide to try to kill you first to make the other kill easier.

--Also people can become addicted to the drain pact. A group of 40 junkie mages on the path to burnout would be a terrifying thing. You would have to cut them off to prevent it from getting out of hand.

--Some of your clients may already be junkies for this kind of pact and get violent when you cut them off, or they run out of karma.

Running this kind of business could be kind of cool. It would be something like having an enemy, dependents, and a day job that you get no money for or karma as flaws, instead you get some karma per week. But there is probably some overhead too in the form of bribes and such. A GM could stop this from being too good with out totally stopping it.

I was thinking about some of the jobs a weak free spirit might get paid to do. Impersonating a lost loved one, "body" guarding a VIP, or projecting mage. Renting out various powers seems like a reasonable thing to do. You just have to be ready for heat to come down on you if you sell your powers to someone who gets in a lot of trouble.

If your group contact were a wagemage group for a Megacorp they can afford 1 karma per week.

My main point though was to point out the feasibility of this RAW (albeit much more Rare) method of karma production to contrast the ability to gain karma through using Ally Spirits to get a GM-fiat Free Spirit Greater Power. You don't need the knee-jerk reaction that Energy Drain evoked - you need simply to look at the rules.

So, by that interpretation of the Friend For Life contact, I could just buy a whole bunch of super rich friends-for-life at chargen, then demand all their money, homes and possessions as soon as the game starts? I might as well sell their organs while I'm at it...

That's some nice fluff; the fluff also says that anyone with skill 7 is "Someone who's expertise outranks all others in all of known history."

In spite of that, we still have rules on how things are handled; someone with skill 7 doesn't get to say "well clearly I can kill that guy before he draws because I'm the best ever." No, they roll their attack, just like anyone else. Likewise, there are rules for handling contacts and loyalty ratings:

SR4A pg 286

That's all that loyalty rating does in the context of the rules.

I wholeheartedly agree that there are plenty of rules to stop a character from using energy drain (karma); in fact I pointed them out (ad neaseum) in this thread.

But what you're proposing, while not outside of RAW exactly, is still going to require ruling from your GM and his cooperation in setting it up, even by the rules.

Indeed because you would need clients. Even if you had contacts the gm would have to say when those contacts seek your services.

One way you might work this is to say it is like a dayjob except that that for every 2,500 you would get paid it is instead 1 karma. But I think there is some ritual to do the karma transfer so with that you have an overhead in the form of time and labor that prevents you from getting to out of hand with this.

Congrats, I've decided its a legal approach. Bad news, I've also decided an NPC has thought up this idea before the PCs, and there's an over 9000 karma spirit heading your way to wipe you out.

That's why I said there would need to be bribes. Organized crime would probably be doing this, or at least running some kind of racket. But if organized crime were doing it they would have the free spirit captured with a copy of its formula. Still I could see territories set up and the PC will attract some attention if they start doing it too openly. It seems like most spirits try to play it safe and keep their freedom and their lives. They are immortal, but you don't live forever by taking stupid chances.

A spirit doing this probably knows one Jonson or Fixer who is the only person that knows how to set up a meet with this reclusive entity. Occasionally when a special client strikes a deal good enough the Jonson sets up the meet and the spirit grants one of the two temporary pacts for a limited time.

PC free spirits go the other rout. Rather than playing it safe forever and slowly growing in power but being vulnerable to just about anything that notices them, PC free spirits take more risks and gain more karma over a shorter amount of time until eventually they are hard enough to kill that they will not at some point just die by chance; hit by a bus, struck by lightning, a collapsing building, or killed by some badass mage or spirit wandering through astral.

That is the motivation my PC would have.