A question that came up during NPC character creation: If a mage had Multiple Personality Disorder, could each personality have a different astral signature, spell lists and possibly even tradition?

Concept is for a corporate wagemage having had a mental breakdown from guilt, resulting in MPD; one personality, call him Prime, is the perfect wagemage employee, who eats, sings and craps the company line, and the other personality, call him Deuce, is a hooding-happy shadowrunner, who is trying to make a difference; Deuce knows about Prime, but Prime doesn't know about Deuce. The scenario plan is having Prime, in his ignorance of the real situation, take out a wetwork contract on Deuce.

So, before I get to designing this guy, I wanted to get some feedback on feasibility.

As a GM I had an issue similar to this come up once, we had a player who's character had Schizophrenic Multiple Personality Disorder-six personalities in his case. I suspect by the rules as written it'd be one aura with some significant variations that would make it look different to the casual observer. I suspect that these variations would be significant enough that it would take some pretty serious reconciliation by a talented magic user to reconcile the differences.

Whoa. Dude.

It depends on how magic works, what's a soul, what MPD actually is… Messy. I'd say definitely, 'screw it, weird coolness'.

Interesting thought and I see where you're coming from since the Mage's subconcious plays a big role in the fluff of how magic works for each magician. But realize that no one really knows if spirits are constructs of the psyche or if they really are separate entities (or both).

MPD could mean that some or most of the personalities aren't even magicians at all (or have any knowledge of how to use magic anyway). Much more likely than each having a different tradition.

In the end, the multiple tradition thing would probably cause too many problems to be played fairly, and it's highly unlikely to find a nice middle ground for things like bound spirits and who controls what personality is manifested and when. Worse, whats to say one personality doesn't keep selling off the library/fetishes/ritual materials for the ones favoring the currently used tradition. Even if they don't, how the hell will you upkeep those costs. Plan to track initiations separate for each personality too?

My advice would be just use a Chaos Mage tradition and explain it as different traditions "fluff" wise without actually giving a single character access to all spirits and separate astral signatures.

Still, on a lesser level, this would be an awesome concept for an NPC handled by an experienced GM in a magic murder mystery.

Nah, the hell with that. Be bold. Play it. Not every concept ends up being successful, and what's the fun if you don't take a chance here and there?

Go ahead, but just embrace the assumptions. You're assuming that MPD actually means 'different whole people', that astral sig is related to consciousness at all, etc. That's all fine. The rules don't cover this… and rules don't matter for NPCs anyway.

This is a fantastic idea, and I love it.

You may wish to use some combination of Deep Cover and Amnesia qualities - and take it a bit further, statting up different personalities with the same point total.

Hey we're playing science fiction, not hard core science fact. It's gotta have some fun, otherwise what's the point of playing?

My apologies, for some reason I thought this was a player concept. As an NPC, definitely try it.

For bonus points, run Mr. Johnson as having multiple astral signatures. Then throw in a news story about a mage being convicted of this or that crime based on his astral signature, but plead out on an insanity defense based in DID. (For those of you interested, "Multiple Personality Disorder" is nearly as antiquated as referring to a person who cannot speak as "dumb." It's called "Dissociative Identity Disorder" these days. See if your players catch on, maybe give somebody a knowledge roll to connect the dots.)

Edit: Went totally crosseyed after typing "personality" and "identity" over and over.

Wow. Okay, I guess I'll go with this. I have to say, I like Udoshi's idea of using the Deep Cover mechanic; the Prime personality would have the Uncontrolled version, while Deuce would have Controlled. I'll see what I can come up with and post it here after I'm done.

As a person with experience with a person that has MPD (which is called DID (Diss-associative Identity Disorder) now). I can personally testify that each alter is a completely separate person, abet that some of the personality's tend to be more focused and 2 dimensional.

Although the premise of the background for the NPC to develop DID is inconsistent with how all known confirmed cases of DID are formed. DID is in 90% of all cases female, and they have been systematically abused as children, both sexually and emotionally. This causes the young forming personalty to fracture in-order to protect the whole. One personality could be formed to cope with sexual abuse while one could be formed to cope with the emotional abuse. There's also a psychophysiological effect that can manifest (I think I have the term wrong) where the different alters even have different allergies, from common allergies to medical allergies.

So I would say that viewing such a person would CLEARLY standout in the astral as not-normal, now whether each alter could have enough focus to be a completely functioning awaken person would be up for debate. Typically there's one or two dominate alters with several sub alters that perform certain functions. At least in a person with DID that is fully aware of her condition.

So, to a Magician that's never seen it before, it might appear like a strange form of possession? Just a thought...

Psychosomatic effect, the mind altering the body.
DID is really interesting and one of the reasons I wish I had been able to take more psych classes.


I would personally treat an awakened DID sufferer as having similar but distinctly different auras, highlighting emotional colors based on the role of the personality.
As for the talent itself, remember that magical study is very time and resource consuming. If two or more of the personalities have found how to access the talent, you still run the problem of how much of the day each is in control and how much of their time would be spent studying/practicing.
Though I guarantee you, a mage with DID would become a priceless research specimen for any corp. No matter how the talent is distributed amongst the personalities (if they're all equal, have different ability levels, some completely mundane, or different traditions) just studying the person would advance magical theory by confirming/denying many of the questions already asked in this thread (nature of the soul/magic/auras).

At this point we're quibbling. So tell us what you settled on home skillet?

I'm getting a very strong Fei / Id sensation from this (For those that know Xenogears).

Without going too deep into the psychological mumbo-jumbo that can ruin a perfectly good character idea (DID / MPD makes for great writing at least) they should share their spell list, but given the dominant personality (in this case Deuce is technically dominant if Prime is unaware of him) simply limit some of the spells Prime has access to but that Deuce can access freely; Or potentially allow access to them for Prime for some interesting bits.

For the aura, anyone who is good at reading would probably note the strong similarity in the auras, but they would likely be different enough that casual observation would not pick up on it. After all, the aura is related to the persona.

That's my 2 nuyen on the matter at least.

(that said, the DID discussion above was interesting, but lacks some important information as well, because while yes, 90% of them are female, a significant portion of those are also coached by psychiatrists into believing they have multiple personalities).

It really depends how detailed you want to be.

If you're talking about someone with Dissociative Identity Disorder, that person has multiple "alter egos" inside them. These other individuals are, or at least appear to be, wholly separate entities that often have no knowledge of each other. These individuals have completely separate memories, personalities, and ways of interacting with the world. It isnt unconceivable that these other personalities could have picked up other knowledge or skills, but depending how realistic your GM wants to be with it, this will cause some major problems.

This is generally not a condition that goes very long without being noticed as the switching between personalities is not under the control of the person with the disorder. So if you have a wagemage with this disorder, he may be in the middle of a meeting when someone does or says something or something happens to trigger him to flip and then go post office because this emerging personality has no idea how he got there, he may not recognize the people around him, and he wont know why he's there.

I'm not aware of any fluff dealing with how magic might work in this instance so you'd essentially have to make it up.

Additionally, this is a very rare disorder. There are some famous cases, but beyond a handful of people this is not a common problem.


DID is part of a family of disorders called Dissociative Disorders, which is a fancy way of saying the person has trouble dealing with the real world. There are other DD's where you have pseudo-persons emerge that are not complete personalities and the person with the disorder knows about these other people. They tend to be archetypal and come out at predictable times (often during some emotional intensity) to do a certain job and then recede back once the person calms down.

TLDR: It's completely up to your GM, but DID is VERY hard to hide long enough to get anywhere.


And yes, I work in mental health I'm actually trusted with the welfare of other human beings!

*Is* the aura based on the persona, or the genetics? When you change your aura (metamagic?), are you changing your mind or your 'body'? I didn't think this was in the book.

For my money I'd say both. Everyone has an aura. How that aura looks is greatly influenced by persona.



But it's been touched on in various formats in the "fluff" as it were. I'd say yes, metamagic and other things can change the mind and/or the body

You can perform medical diagnosis through assensing, so it's very much a mutable thing based upon one's current physical, mental, emotional, etc. state. The question is if something as dramatic as DID would affect one's Astral SIGNATURE. It certainly affects their Astral Form.

Read Julian May's Galactic Milieu Trilogy the main villain is essentially the character you are talking about.

The question is, more precisely, would this affect the astral signature/form enough to confuse people? Emotions affect these, but certainly not enough to confuse people. I see a lot of people assuming the answer is yes, but I don't know why.

That's my general philosophy about everything in the game, as is true of many of Paul's posts. (I'm almost convinced he's my more charismatic not-so-evil twin.)

In my eyes, the problem is that the game is designed with a vary narrow mindset; the people who create(d) the rules rarely consider all the angles or possibilities. Just look at the Psionicist tradition as a prime example. Concepts that go outside the box, even a little, will get people kicking and screaming around these parts even when it's perfectly sensible and rational. And this is certainly one of those outside the box scenarios. The rules simply don't address the topic adequately. Sure, part of it is that MPD doesn't work the way it does in the movies, but considering that Shadowrun is very much a cinematic type of game, who the Hell cares? Go crazy with it, have fun, and if it works it works. If it doesn't, you can alter it or just flat out skip it in the future.

If your players end up having a problem with it, you can always change it on the fly to where the poor schlub, Prime, was simply being possessed through some new metamagic technique or some such. Why couldn't they sense that? Deuce was a bad ass magician with a high initiation grade and the right Masking techniques.

Anyway, that said, people have already given a few ideas about how to handle it. Going with the full-blown cinematic take on MPD, I'd just create completely different characters for each personality and then institute triggers for how they're altered as an NPC, and should a PC want to do it, I'd ask them if they'd be okay with me controlling the triggers just to keep things unpredictable. The only things I'd keep the same between them are the obvious stuff, such as Physical Attributes, implants, and so on. If you want it to include astral signatures, let it include astral signatures. If I did, I'd make sure that someone assensing those signatures could pick up on it if they got enough hits (say 4+), but I have no problem with them being completely different, either. Since, in effect, they really are different characters who just happen to be sharing a single body.

'Course, there is a positive quality out there (Deep Cover) that covers what you're after, too, but that's already been brought up.

Ha! If you ever end up in West Michigan stop by, we'll toss back a pint!

A good twist to throw on this might be a spirit with a dream pact.
Perhaps made by one of the other personalities.