My players love Spirits. They LOVE Spirits. One of them is a Possession mage (had I been as wise then as I am now, I'd have said no, but c'est la vie,) the other is a Hermetic.

They prefer to use Spirits as the answer to everything. Need to fly a man eight hundred miles to infiltrate a ship? Have a Spirit of Air carry him. Need to bring something washed ashore on a beach in mid-CalFree to Seattle? Have a Spirit possess it, shapeshift into a crocodile, waddle out into the sea, shapeshift into a dolphin, swim it back.

I put the kibosh on that last one by telling them outright that that wouldn't yield the desired macguffin in usable form, thus making them actually do some Shadowrunning for a change, but their answer to everything is Spirits. It's starting to get to the point where spirits seem to be the Omnihammer, and the world, the Omninail.

What can I do/what factors in the world are involved to make that kind of shenanigan (long-distance Spirit couriering/spirit theft of things) unworkable as a solution to most problems of that nature, that don't royally fuck Adepts (like a background count will,) or everybody (like a majorly-twinked combat drone fleet will.)




As a side note, is a Possession Spirit inside something still Dual Natured - IE, can it be attacked by something on the Astral, such as another spirit or a magician?

Yea, possessed means dual natured.

Beating spirit abuse isn't too hard if you remember the rules. 1. Never let them play possession based. But if they do, remember that the spirit is in charge. They don't "command" it, it's possessing them. At least they can't be sent out to do things

Also, remember, sending a spirit on a remote mission uses all of it's services, and if it's not bound it's gone at sunup or sunset.

What other characters does your group have? Only the two mages? If so, of course they are going to use spirits, they're literally 50% of their class features.

They don't let the Spirit possess themselves! They let the spirit possess the Driving Adept who otherwise isn't much use in a fight. I let the DriveAd's player play the spirit they summon, since otherwise that would suck for the player. Or, more typically, they have it possess something that they want to steal, like cars.



Yeah, but they don't have a problem with that oftentimes. I mean, burning the services of two Bound Force 3 Spirits (one to possess the crate and shapeshift it, one to use Movement and Concealment on both of them,) to retrieve a 600,000 nuyen nanofax from where it washed ashore on a beach is a pretty damn good deal, financially speaking.


It seems to me like it's nothing but extremes. Anything which stops magic stops it cold in an hilariously sadistic way, such as a glowmoss-triggered hand grenade full of FAB3 rigged to detonate if something comes close enough to make the glowmoss light up.


Like... Here's an example, from the published adventure On the Run. The players need to steal an up-and-coming rockstar's commlink from his backstage dressing room at a barrens concert venue. The group are expected to physically infiltrate the warehouse somehow, sneak in and acquire the commlink or tap it and acquire the data from the commlink in his dressing room, overcoming bouncers, gangers, and drugged-up groupies waiting for their rockstar hero to come back and rock their world until they see stars. The possibilities for their doing this that the adventure accounted for are sneaking in, buying their way in, bribing their way in, talking their way in, seducing their way in, or ninja infiltrating their way in.

There is no Astral security whatsoever. For that matter, it's explicitly said that Nabo's commlink has no matrix security whatsoever, either, making me wonder why a hacker can't just hack it remotely, but, assuming the group's AI is busy (half the sessions she doesn't show up, which I reckon neatly represents the character's media addiction,) and the group jack-of-all-trades is derping (or wants to see the concert and just forgets about the 'run,) I just know that their solution is going to be to send a spirit to steal it. Either sending a Spirit of Air to Materialize in the dressing room, take it, and tear-ass out of the warehouse with it, or send a Possession spirit to settle into it, shapeshift into a mouse, and take it for a walkabout.

They wouldn't have to go to the concert. Hell, they wouldn't have to leave their home!

On the other hand, anything that impedes magic - Wards, for instance - stops them utterly, making them of absolutely no use whatsoever, and if I apply a Background count (because it's, you know, a riotous rock concert,) then that royally butt-fucks the Adept.

There's the hermetic and the custom tradition (whose tradition basically boils down to "I am awesome because I have a self-actualized view of magic that lets me take all the features I want" - I know, I know, if I'd known what I do now, I'd have put the kibosh on that,) mages. An artificial intelliegnce who lives in a Nexus in the DriveAd's Citymaster and has an anthroform drone she very occasionally uses. The DriveAd is an Adept focusing primarily on mechanical and driving skills. There's an amnesiac neotenous elf who's a little good with guns, little good with hacking, really good as a Face, and has both Electrosense and Magnetosense. And a cybered-up former Renraku company ninja who was Hung Out to Dry.

If you stop letting the phys-ad control the spirit, and follow the rules about how he's nothing but an impotent witness, maybe he'll stop letting the spirits possess him.

I'm not sure how a spirit can possess something and make it change shape into other things, or do anything other than what it was originally intended to do. Maybe I'm just behind on the rules.

Short answer: magical security.

Medium answer: spirits will absolutely walk all over anything and everything without magical security. The whole point of magical security is to stop spirits from waltzing all over everything. If adventures featured megacorporations who wrote their passwords on postit notes and run Windows ME, then the hacker would solve all their problems, too.

Long answer: Wards do not completely make magic useless. Wards make mages work around them. You can of course just bash a ward down and then do what you want, but that isn't subtle. You can also, for example, turn you spells off, go through, and then do stuff. Saying that wards make magic useless is like saying Firewalls make hackers useless.

Also, spirits should be defending any place that seriously gives a shit about security. Just having medium-force bound spirits on patrol will cut down on the shenanigans a lot and make things actually take effort.

Street Magic 103.

Also, they were presumably having a Spirit of Man with Innate Spell (Shapechange) do the thing with the crate.

You could invite social repercussions against the mages by not letting the DriveAd play while possessed. That should get him annoyed at the mages. If they want to, say, steal a car with possession, remember that if the spirits don't like their summoners, they will interpret orders as much against their desires as they can.


"What is a commlink?" [explains] "What does it look like?" [explains] ... spirit arrives, fails to find the commlink because it sees things astrally instead of physically. This can be either deliberate failure (it did not look as he described it), or unintentional (I could find nothing that looked similarly to what I was sent to bring).
Also, having a spirit tear his way out of the warehouse would be a good way for cops to get involved. I imagine that the spirit could leave an astral trail right back to the mage.
I also suggest a rule that a possession spirit shapeshifting while possessing a non-living object destroys or renders inoperable any fragile parts, of which there would be plenty inside a device as advanced as a commlink.

The problem with these is that they're only applicable if the group is doing a standard Run on a standard-issue megacorp facility. So far, they aren't. They were first hired to beef up the physical security of the Plastic Jungles, and as part of that got sidetracked into stealing an AK-147 Nanofax and five pallets of clean feedstock from the Vory, on behalf of the Ancients, who promised to then use the Nanofax and non-tagless feedstock to arm the Plastic Jungles with plenty of guns (and a few tagless ones for the group itself.) This started with me preparing a truckjacking, but then they decided that they'd rather fiddle the manifest of the container vessel bringing it into port so the Vory got some bullshit container offloaded to their smuggling sub, and the real container was put on a truck coming straight to the players.

The AI bollocksed that up right properly by royally butt-fucking the manifest hacking portion of it, by tampering with something she had no reason to tamper with, setting off alarms, triggering a fight with a security spider who terminated the ship's connection to the outside world, ending the fight. Then the captain of the ship decided that he wasn't going to keep such hot cargo aboard (they knew what she had done because she hadn't erased any activity logs,) and promptly dumped it in the drink. The ship actually had some astral security in the form of a mage and some Watchers, but their plan to tamper with the containere's RFID chips involved simply using a spirit to fly the ninja out and back.

But now, the container is simply sitting ashore on a beach. They convinced a sea captain with a fishing trawler to take them out to get it and then sail them to Seattle. But you get the idea - everything they've done so far has involved enemies who do not have megacorp resources to put up Wards and biofiber panels and all that other good stuff.




Correct on both counts.

Does shapechange allow you to change a box into things?
I really think they're SOL there.

Yeah, I'm not going to intentionally formulate out-of-character conflict between my players as any kind of a 'solution' to in-character tactics. That is, quite frankly, absolutely retarded.

As for the 'spirits not liking their summoners' thing, a Spirit can't. They can demand that any and every little thing the Mage asks be counted as a service, but if the mage says "Retrieve the thing and bring it to me," the Spirit can't decide to bring it to him by circumnavigating the world, thus intentionally making its journey so long that its duration (if Summoned) will run out and cause the object to be waylaid even farther away.

Besides, my players aren't exactly mean to their spirits. They don't send them into suicidal situations or anything.




Spirits are not Exact Wording Genies. They know what you intend them to do, and can't choose to intentionally fail in their task. (That's the kind of thing that gets pissed-off mages to Bind them to the remote task of scrubbing the Seattle sewers until every square inch of it is concurrently decontaminated, with a toothbrush, or some other Sisyphean task which is practically impossible yet technically possible, thus compelling them to attempt it.) They also tend to have the Search power, so it is very easy to tell a Spirit (in the Nabo concert case, for instance,) to find Nabo's commlink, starting its Search in the dressing room, and return it to them.



Cops? In Redmond Barrens? In the middle of a massive rock concert where the module explicitly states the cops have been paid off not to interfere?



I'm thinking about this. I was thinking of instituting a rule that Possession - any Possession at all - completely wrecked any electronic components of anything which was possessed, but then the player of the Possession mage pointed out to me that this would result in Possession spirits being used as magical EMP weapons.

Again, spirit doesn't know what the commlink looks like.

Also, try using the optional rule on page 187 of SR4A. Page 188 and 189 also have bits on how the spirit-magician relationship works.

You're right, spirits are smart, and will do the best they can (unless ill treated) to accomplish this task...

BUT

Spirits are creatures of the Astral. They deal with emotions. They are alien.

A free spirit *might* know what a commlink is, from their interactions with metahumanity. A newly summoned one likely will not. If they'd been asked to find a plant? Great. An item recently used by the summoner? Quite likely. A commlink in that room over there, that the summoner's never seen, can't identify the make/model and or decorations of? That spirit might just bring them a plastic spork.

Spirits see the world very differently from metahumanity. Even manifested. A spirit of man might have a better shot of all this, but in a crowded room, with people potentially shooting at him? That's a big crap shoot. The spirit's not going to likely find the commlink while on the Astral, as things are just shadows and vague representations. They'd have to manifest to find it.

---

I seriously doubt the Shapechange spell was meant to be used on inanimate objects. The spell itself states that gear and equipment does not transform. So if the spirit did manage to possess a box, all the items inside said box would not shapechange (possibly killing said critter?).

Dude, you took the single biggest balancing drawback to Possession Spirits, the vessel becoming an impotent passenger in his own body, and effectively removed it.

And you're surprised that your players are now abusing the hell out if it?




-k

Street Magic 103. The drawback is not meant to be making someone not get to play. Now, if the adept isn't roleplaying the spirit appropriately or whatever, sure, talk to him about that. But annoying your players out of game is a stupid, stupid idea and I congratulate you for not trying to do that.

I think what it basically boils down to is that your PCs are going up against relatively weak adversaries who don't have and can't afford magical security. Such adversaries are going to get stomped, and I think your solution should, pretty much, be to send them on more serious runs. Don't be a dick or anything, but yeah, a team with 2 mages should be going up against people with some reasonable level of magical security.


Did...did you read your own quote?



It doesn't matter if the spirit has seen a commlink before. If the summoner can provide a mental image what it's searching for, the spirit can find it.

I said the commlink. Does the mage know what Nabo's commlink looks like?

Presumably, yes. Nabo is a rock star. If I want to know what Paris Hilton's cellphone looks like, it's not exactly hard.

The player actually roleplays the spirit to the hilt, playing it up as a brutal celtic warrior who's one order from her summoner away from snapping and getting her murderboner on. The player also likes describing the tatoos that said possession makes glow on her skin.

One thing that occurs to me, though; I forgot, earlier, that Spirits don't actually get to use Force for all skills, don't they. A Spirit won't actually have Automatics equal to its Force, would it?




Well, I'm throwing them up against a (homebrew) Threat magician that the gang they pissed off called in due to a family connection. (She summons Shadow spirits.) She's also really powerful on the Astral, with a WF Katana and a lot of Astral Combat. I plan to have her simply demolish any Spirits they summon from the Astral, giving the meatgang a chance to do something while the mages are busy trying to stop her.

If a crate with a nanofax inside it turns into a dolphin with a nanofax inside it, the dolphin will die a cruel and painful death. (not that a crate could, by RAW, shapechange into anything since it doesn't have a body rating.)

If a force 3 spirit wants to possess an unprepared vessel (the nanofax) which is highly technologically advanced, then it has to get 5+ hits on 6 dice and only gets one attempt per 24hr period.

Basically, you're missing something here. Pretty sure its the possession test.
Also, calling on the spirits to do every little thing for you is spirit abuse. Make the spooks roll edge to resist summoning.

Final thoughts: BC it. If your driving adept is suddenly useless from losing a point or two of magic in a certain scene, then he is built completely wrong. Then again you've already established that he's built completely wrong with the whole "He's best used as a power bottom for ghosts" thing.

Spirits have the skills listed in their description at Force. A guardian spirit can indeed have Automatics F, although it costs an optional power selection to do that.

Even if they don't, though, they could just tell the Spirit they send in to gather all the commlinks in that room. Then they'll get Nabo's commlink along with those of his squeezes.


That might raise the alarm, but it's unlikely a handful of orc gangers armed with Ceska Black Scorpions and a mighty dice pool of six are going to be able to even scratch such a spirit. They'll just get beaten down and get their commlinks added to the pile.

The spirit wouldn't be able to see a commlink.

It's just a shadow on the astral, which is all it sees.
The astral is all wispy smoke and emotional meaning. Unless Nabo had a deep emotional attachment to his cellphone, it wouldn't appear distinct from the desk it's placed on.

Easy fix: Security uses stick-n-shock, since they don't want to kill people by mistake.
A long wide burst of stick-n-shock will mess a ghost up but good.

I think an answer to something like this is that something really valuable will have other groups gunning for it. Really valuable stuff washed up on a beach? Probably some mega-corp / mob / triad / runner group is also trying to get it's hands on it. The other groups can have their own teams arrive before / at the same time / after your group gets the mcguffin. Hilarity ensues.

It's not exactly common knowledge, but there will be other groups to contend with. Well, one, at least. The Vory hired a team of SeaRunners out of L.A. to get it back, but they didn't have a mage to have a Spirit use the Search power to find the container. So my players will get to the container before the other Runners do.

They're going to be confronted with a dragon telling them to get dunked because the container is its. (By reasoning of 'I got here first.')

Of course, if they can manage not to piss their pants long enough to successfully make a Knowledge (Parazoology) check, or a Knowledge (Modern History) check, they'll remember that Dracoforms cannot produce metahuman speech. It's a phantasm. A group of Pixies want the container. Not the contents, just the container. If the players react to this with bullets, the pixies will leg it (wing it) and send some Boobries to attack them instead.

Once they're sailing for Seattle, the group of SeaRunners (smaller, in a boat rather than a ship, but well-armed,) will suspect they may be up to something. They're experienced pirates, so it should be interesting to see my players try to deal with them.

But really, a box or a cyberdeck can't be shapechanged into a dolphin.

True, but at least the AI has some Data Search to bring to the party, and the spirit alone isn't the InstaWin button ... and that's only if the PCs think of doing it.
"What mental image of Nabu's commlink are you giving the spirit?" is a valid GM question, and arguably something not closely matching the mental image provided would result in failure, as in "Sorry, I couldn't find anything like the image you gave me.", or net the PCs a groupie's commlink which happened to match the mental image better than Nabu's commlink.


Good pick up, SS.

ShadowDragon, remember that rock concerts are one of the examples of things that generate temporary BGC, so for On The Run mages, adepts and spirits should be nerfed a little at the venue while the concert is in progress and for a few hours afterwards ...

A spirit sees the world as is is on the astral plane. It's all emotion. Everything not living and not bearing a really strong emotional ties is a generic grey shape, with no color or texture. A spirit cannot read anything and cannot see any images produced by electronics.

A spirit cannot "search" for something unless it has seen it before or the summoner can supply a mental image of the commlink. Has the summoner seen THAT comlink? What exactly does that comlink look like on the astral plane? How does it differ from every other comlink in the building?

For your particular group, I think youre going to have to tailor every module to challenge them a little more - and by that I mean adding in magical security more often than it might usually be. Adepts guards. paracritters. glossmoss. wards. watchers as alarms to trigger proper spirits. And drones - lot of wiz drones to challenge the spirit herd.

This thread is also a good example of why possession mages should not be allowed as PCs. They make great bad guys. But too much headache as PCs.

Technically it can, Bearclaw. When a Spirit possesses something inanimate, that something becomes a gestalt creature, which is a valid target for spells that target creatures, IE, Shapechange.

I think I'm going to rule that Shapechange is ruinous to electronics, though. They shapeshift back completely wiped, and I'm not even talking about 'factory settings,' I'm talking about everything from the processor on up is a tabula rasa of zeros, putting it beyond repair without a facility and an uneconomical expense of nuyen to get the programs and equipment needed to flash it back to factory specs, and completely beyond any hope of data recovery. (Anything paid for with Essence is exempt, of course. Hey, now you have a reason to take implanted commlinks!)




Yeah, but as was said, this is the kind of thing that they can overcome simply by looking up an image of Nabo using his commlink to get a crystal-clear idea of what it looks like; he's an up-and-coming rockstar and Horizon have been sucking his dick, probably literally, for weeks now, so you bet your ass they bought him a brand-new commlink blinged out the wazoo, so not only is going to be physically unique, he likely still has that "my new toy" emotional attachment to it. Or, they can just tell the spirit to scoop up every commlink-shaped device in the room.





The problem I have with that is that a rock concert will inconvenience my mages and their spirits, but it will annihiliate my Adept back into being an unaugmented mundane, and her mundane stats are pathetic.

Unless I rule that PhysAds are immune to background count (which is not an unappealing notion, I'm of a mind to concede,) background counts as a means of inconveniencing the mages administer a wholly unfair message of "sit in the truck and masturbate so you don't get hurt or give us away" to the PhysAd.




A Commlink is a highly-personal device. People keep it on them nearly at all times, so it's not remotely a stretch to say it has an empathic link to its owner. Additionally, as I mentioned above, Nabo's commlink is likely to be of a distinct shape as well.





Oh, god no. Paracritters? The possession mage is a paracritter trainer with animal empathy, he'd be able to coax them into letting him walk right past. Glowmoss and biofiber boards might work for some places, but not this one. Though I guess someone could have thrown up a ward.

*sigh* I need to reread the magic rules. Again.

I hate trying to come up with stats for mages to oppose my PCs.



If I had bloody realized that BEFORE he had asked for it, I would've said no!

There's always the trusty old counter to characters you don't like. Sniper in the next run.

If you are going to make them deal with BC, I would suggest that it only have half its normal effect against an adept's non-mage powers. The reasoning behind this being an adept's body would naturally resist outside influences.

Thus mage/mystic adept spellcasting abilities get reduced point for point while non-casting abilities only get reduced by half.

Just a suggestion for a house rule.

BTW, I would not let a crate of stuff be shapechanged. The crate could be shapechanged upon possession by the spirit. The stuff inside just falls out. The crate is a separate object from the contents. The spirit would need to shapechange into something that can hold the contents, like a truck for instance.

You could, in theory, have BGC that is aspected towards the Adept's tradition. If you do this more than once every now and then it is going to get kinda lame, though.

here's a nice house rule addition, that might help you: http://forums.dumpshock.com/index.php?s=&a...t&p=1106460
This way, spirits will sometimes not exactly behave as the player wishes.

Didn't read everything, but one thing comes to mind...

How do those spirits actually find the places they are sent to?

They sure have their Search power, but if it is tens or hundreds or thousands of kilometers away, it is rather unlikely, that they will succeed. The distance increases the threshold by one for every kilometer between the starting point and the target. And another +5 for nonliving stuff.

The suggested way to do extended tests, that should have a chance of failure, is to remove one die for each additional attempt, making the number of dice you roll finite. A glitch means -1d6 hits or some inconvenience happens. A critical glitch means you have to start over.

They don't have GPS or something like that. They cannot simply find a real-world location that easily. Astral space does not look like the real world.

"Go to california." is something a spirit cannot comprehend. They cannot read maps. They do not know how the physical world looks like. It simply doesn't work.

And even if they manage to find the place, probably being guided by their summoner (who also needs to find it first, which isn't an easy task for a magician either), how do they know it is exactly the item in question, if their summoner has never seen that item.

Physical items are not easily distinguishable to them. I don't think (but I might be wrong there, didn't check it in great detail) that spirits that materialize gain physical senses, like humans have. They still see things in their astral fashion. A commlink is just a little, unremarkable shadow there, barely discernable.

Most importantly, they cannot find anything with Search, that they or their summoner hasn't seen before. First-hand experience. Without that, the Search simply fails without any roll whatsoever.

I think you might be making all this way too easy for them.

Bye
Thanee

There's also the optional rule of decreasing dice pools for extended tests. We use it for the Search power.

Yeah, I edited that in in the meantime. Please, read my post again, it has changed quite a bit by now.

BTW, that is not really an optional rule. It is the suggested way of handling extended tests that should have a chance of failure.

Bye
Thanee

My current campaign that I am GM'ing has two magicians as well, one of them being a Possession shaman. While initially it took some adjustment dealing with a Possession-based shaman, he's integrated into the game quite nicely. Powerful though spirits are when possessing, they still have a couple draw backs, some of which are obvious and others that are not so obvious. For example, while in our game drones cannot perceive spirits when they are materialized, they sure can see a spirit possessing some security guard and can act accordingly. Further, a powerful spirit possessing a metahuman is going to be quite noticeable to someone (a force 7 earth spirit could have mineral formations popping out of its skin).

I also encourage the idea that certain types of spirits will prefer to possess certain types of objects/persons/critters (Spirit of Man prefers Metahumans or Metahuman-associated objects, Fire spirits might prefer a tree thats on fire or a hellhound, etc, etc). This leads the shaman to think (correctly) that its a good idea to remain on good terms with your spirits because the amount of harm they can do (i.e. if a bound spirit were to break loose) can be quite catastrophic.

If spirits are walking over the opposition have them be attacked on two fronts; the physical and the astral. A couple of corp security drones throwing full auto at a Possessed Troll with an astral Spirit of Beasts clawing his dual-natured face into soyburger is sure to at least give it a little pause. And an astral security spirit is going to be able to follow/pester/attack a physical-based spirit wherever it goes.

If the PCs are coming up against opposition that lacks the ability to give them a challenge, then what kind of risk are they running? I probably wouldn't distribute as much Karma to them as a result.

But..I wouldn't disallow the player to play a Possession based character. I WOULD think about Possessing the Possession-based shaman and see how he likes it

Well, there is good evidence that a Spirit can Read (seeing as how Buttercup can read the comic books Dunkie left her, and actually runs a Corp IIRC), as long as the media is physical and not an electronic image. And it is arguable that they DO get Normal Senses when Materialized.

There was a rather long Thread about that very thing at one point, not too terribly long ago.

Just wanted to mentioned how I worked around the following:



There is never any reason not to tweak scenarios as written, since players will try -anything- once, and often more times I added a disgruntled wagemage having a few spirits around but being too confused to prevent astral shenanigans while still giving an enjoyable challenge. As for the matrix side of things, I added a royal negative modifier to finding Nabos commlink, figuring that everyone was recording, chatting and scumming around with their gadgets at the show - AR/wireless pollution is a big hindrance to hackers, which is why a hacking PC gots to know their trade. Also, one might argue that Nabo is a prime target for hacking, even if it's just fans, so he might have disabled his signal or had a more tech-savvy manager do it for him, thus needing you to get close.

GM'ing is about thinking on your feet, if you see a problem in advance, plan contingencies. Time doing so is never wasted, you can always use a trick at a later time, or even make sweeping strategies for security. Doing so can save a while in the other end, too.

Yeah there is a big difference between a powerful Free Spirit and a run of the mill summoned spirit.

Same for length of time on the physical plane.
Buttercup has had decades (or more) on the material plane while the summoned spirit may have had a few hours worth of experience on the material plane.


I could see a familiar being able to read if they have a form with eyesight, but not a summoned spirit (Maybe a powerful spirit of man from library).
Also a possession spirit in a creature with good eye sight....


I mean if a astral human spell caster can not read a computer screen, then why would a spirit be able to?


But you could make the player teach the spirit how to read

Is there a reference for this "gestalt creature" thing?

Your game so your way, but IMHO while I can totally see a drone not being able to see an astral mage (since only living creature and see or hear the astral mage and only if he wants them to), if a spirit is manifested if would be fair game. Still an unmoving spirit would be hard to detect if there was a suitable place to hid(say a bond fire for a fire elemental).

I admit that I never thought of this before, but an unrigged drone might not know to target the moving trash pile of a spirit of man or the dust devil of an air elemental, but it would be able to see it through the sensors.
And they have had 40 years plus to program targeting software for manifesting spirits (not that they can do much to a powerful spirit).


The difference between the two is that the Astral Mage is totally unable to interact with the material plane except that he can communicate/appear to living creatures. The astral mage is all mana based, while the manifesting spirit is physically on our side.

How has it worked out?

This here is from Street Magic.



Bye
Thanee

Its worked out well. In the way I've been running the game, a spirit is "seen" by a metahuman (mundane or not) because the spirit is consciously (or subconsciously?) telling the subjects mind "there's something here" via magic, giving it a form to go with any physical interaction. A drone on the other hand, just doesn't registers there's anything present, even if the spirit is beating the bejesus out of it, though depending on how advanced its programming is it might try to attack anyway. But...I also have it cut both ways. Just as the drone can't see the spirit, neither is it fooled by powers such as concealment. A shadowrun team trying to walk by a Doberman drone with a spirit providing concealment to the team would be spotted by the drone and things would go from there.

Its one of those checks and balances things that for the most part has worked out. And since the team uses drones it works for and against them.

A manifested spirit won't be seen by a drone - just like a mage projecting and manifesting, the manifestation a nothing more than a visiible and audible mana construct akin to an illusion spell. It has no physical interaction with the material world. If the material wolrd is a room and teh astral outside, the spirit is merely showing up through a window.

A materialized spirit acquires a tangible presence and will be spotted by a drone. He's no longer mooning you at the window, it has actually stepped in the room and you can kick it's butt.

1. Any run that requires them to access a terminal (that is not connected to the rest of the matrix) to steal data or place a program inside and run it could require them to go in person.

They might choose to have a spirit possess a commlink with the AI inside so then they can travel with it (I have no idea if that is even possible but I'll assume it is) or some other method. If so then you can keep the room filled with toxin (I don't think spirits are immune to toxins and there are certainly some spirit specific toxin like things) that would need to be drained off first through accessing a node or have people going in chemsuits. Or add biometric scanners to the terminal. Even if you do nothing else the hacker is getting to hack to accomplish the task.

2. When in a firefight against something they cannot hurt, guards should retreat/call in aid/report back their findings.

They may hunker down and call in aid from their headquarters when it goes from "some well trained guys with guns" to "there is some demon-man thing that our bullets bounce harmlessly off". HQ may send magic aid of their own which could arrive in seconds astrally and focus on all dual natured and astral targets, laser armed shock troops, or off grid artillery fire from a scrambled Yellow Jacket depending upon the location.

3. As other people have said, wards.

They don't have to all be force 12 wards either, a series of force 3 wards that have to be passed through over an entire run can still be annoying but very vincible. Also most magically active things can make them, not just mages. All it takes is the occasional failure to make it worth it.

4. As other people have said, use the suggested rules on extended tests for the search power, with watcher spirits as the exception (as they only have 2 dice to roll).

Yes, I know the text. And yet, there is Canon Evidence that Spirits can Read. It is in the Novels, and it is in Canon World Books. I do not remember the ones specifically (all mine were stolen) but the reference to Buttercup reading is located in Dunklezahn's Will. Buttercup likes to read classic comic books.

Technically, possessing a car wouldn't be all that helpful if you're trying to steal it. The spirit can only do things that the car could do mechanically, and most cars would have maglocks, no? The spirit can't access the car's computer to disengage or engage the maglocks, so they'd still have to break into the car (but once they were there, the spirit could drive them someplace).