This came up and still undecided. Would the target of a petrify spell still age normally?

An Npc was petrified for several years so need to know this one for continunity.

I wouldn't think so. I've used it in other games to "time travel".

Who's sustaining it the whole time?

The spell was quickened

It's magic. A wizard did it. In other words: Why care? Just decide on what's best for the story

Spell: Petrificaton
Limited Target: Self
Range: Touch
Force 6 Sustaining Foci (3rd ed)
Force 6 Spell
Caster wears Sustaining foci
Sealed room, opens from the inside and is warded.

Fourth edition would be an Ally spirit locked in the room with the caster sustaining the spell for all time.

So.
You are Stone.
You can't do anything.
You can't eat, drink, see, hear, taste or feel anything . .
You are wide awake. How long untill you go crazy then?

If you cast it on yourself, when do you stop? I thought everything auto-dropped when you go unconscious. If not, I guess your plan could be 'forever, unless someone deactivates my focus'? Anyway, I was more asking about the OP's specific (which he stated was quickening).

Stahl, you're not awake, you're unconscious.

ah, you are not?
ok, i thought you were.

Thank you.

I will now add that part as an exception to the regular spell - and allow them to hear and see things.

A wonderful spell to use on ones enemies and keep them as conscious statues in the garden with a sustaining foci down in the vault.
May I introduce my new magician character NPC - Medusa.

Hey, it worked in Farscape...

The Jopp, this is just my personal stance, but altering a canon spell (even a horrible one like Petrify) in that way seems wrong. How are they seeing, hearing, and maintaining consciousness while also being literally calcium carbonate?

But more importantly do they age while ensnared by the malign corp wizzer supremacist that petrified them and quicken the spell in the first place?

And were are talking over a decade here not months.

I can spin the story both ways, argue it both ways so am looking for a tie break game balance.

Thank you.

You can also survive being decapitated.

i was thinking of Stanislaw Lem actually.
the man who built the soul . .

Aging is a metabolic process. If there is no metabolism, there is no aging.

But calcium carbonate does weather like any other mineral, and woe betide the victim if he's left out in the rain.

I get the reference (love it), but I'm pretty sure damage to the Petrified form (beheading) hurts the character. I don't think you can avoid this by trying to reattach.

Spell Says he gets an Barrier-Rating equal to his Body or Force of the Spell right?
So there you go. You overcome Barrier-Rating, you do Damage as per normal.

Right, and beheading would qualify. Even if the character is not 'living' (aging), he can definitely die.

Gains barrier armor rating equal to body + net hits. (doesn't say how many boxes damage... so it's probably like solid stone... structure rating 13 (13 damage blows a hole 1m^2, 10cm deep in the statue).

I'd say that yeah, you can chop off the head... but he's not dead until it's unsustained and he bleeds out has the nerves severed... and that you could concievably reattach the head prior to this... and pray that when unsustained you got it back on right.

All grey.. but I'd go with... he's a status alive and unconcious... but no damage really comes back to him until he's unsustained. Brings new meaning to the... yeah grab hoffa turn him into a statue... quicken it... (so it lasts until the mage dies IIRC). Break him up and then mix him into the concrete of Giant's stadium.

No, I don't see that you could reattach (can you reattach normal stone?), and the rules specifically say he takes damage in real time:So he takes normal damage and just gains 'a barrier Armor rating'. Normal boxes, no Structure, etc.

Assuming the spell continues to work on fragments (which we've discussed before, to no real conclusion), you can use it for really bad FTL communication! Hehe.

Good catch!

Yeah... OFF WITH HIS HEAD!


As far as stone repair... it's the 2070's... who knows what they can do... wouldn't surprise me if there were some nanites which might be able to do it...


*sniff* one of these days I'll find a GM who'll let me research a 'Turn to C4' spell... (oh the fun and drawbacks of that one... yeah you need to capture the target... he has a cranial bomb... turn to c4... small boom sets off the big boom wiping out half the team... oooops!).

Haha. Yeah, it's not the reattaching per se that's the issue, it's just that (RAW) he'd be a dead reattached guy. Now, I'm fine with a house version of Petrify that is totally unlike the canon one, and *does* work as some people have described here… though it does pose sticky questions for magical theory.

I think it might actually be interesting.

Technically speaking, all that's required for a metahuman to continue to live - for given values of living - is for oxygenation to continue to reach the brain. See also: Jarhead.


So in theory, this could make the Petrify spell a 2070s version of the Schlockian Nanny-bag. "Oh drek, Oscar just got his head shot off. You call back to base, I'll petrify his head."

So the question then occurs, with a sufficiently-motivated and top-funded medical facillity and a wimp body, could the physicians of the 2070s successfully go from "decapitated head which has been petrified" to "decapitated head successfully placed on life support" to "whole metahuman?"

The rules don't really cover any of this, though. Damage is abstract, and even the Severe Wounds rules don't include anything about decapitation. So, the petrified character can take boxes of damage, and that's all. Presumably, he gains immunity to certain other now-irrelevant things, like drowning. We're assuming that the number of boxes of damage associated with breaking off the head would inherently be enough to kill the person, though, so it doesn't matter.

I agree it's a kind of interesting question *aside* from the RAW, though. Petrify (and Goo) are weird features of the magical theory canon, at best, and there are a lot of odd consequences like this. Can you heal someone by Petrify + Shape? If they're not dead, can you use the head/parts for other kinds of magic (does anything useful affect unconscious people?)?

Yes, but technically speaking, a person isn't dead until their brain is non-functional, no matter if they got their chest basically liquefied by an assault cannon round or just got double-tapped in the heart. Both things which are fatal, of course, both technically (just not immediately) and under game rules, but technically, there's not reason you shouldn't be able to resuscitate someone reduced to a head, provided that (a) emergency medical treatment that prevents their head from expiring, and (b) the ability to affix said head to a brand-new, functional body.


Heck, that might be a good Jarhead background. Got shot up to the point of death and then petrified by a friendly magician, taken back to medical intervention and they decided to stick you in a jar rather than fix you up with a new body. Bastards.

So... assault cannon leave a massive sucking sound in your chest... burn edge

Mage petrifies and decapitates you (still taking the damage)... you're well into overflow burn edge... you magically survive despite the damage to the statue and you...

Now it's up to the GM for the particulars... CCU install... new body... full cyberlimb replacement.... etc.

There is no 'technically speaking' in the abstract game rules, is the point. So we're already outside of the rules, and now you don't have to convince me in the first place. We're now talking about a house rule, so it can do whatever we want, 'technical', realistic, or otherwise.

Note that the RAW for Petrify also stipulates 'living tissue', which (given the definitions available) excludes a person who has taken the damage you suggest (if you're shot 'to death', it's all dead). So that's more house rules (which is fine), or you have to get them before overflow.

As for the rest, sure. It's a normal (if unlikely) possibility that a damaged person *near* death could be rebuilt as robocop or a jarhead, after all, without resorting to Petrify as a clever preservative.

Pendaric, it occurs to me to ask: would 10 years of aging even matter? Maybe to a troll, but even a human wouldn't look much different, and SR4 doesn't have D&D aging effects. Just checking.

To the OP: I’d say no the victim would not age. Ageing is a cellular process and once turned to stone there are no cells. I would also agree that the victim is unaware of his/her surroundings and is unconscious for the duration of the spell.

In my opinion Quickening is the best choice for long-term sustaining of the spell as a focus would need to stay on the person to whom it is bound, as soon as it is placed in a vault or other “safe” location it would shut off. Quickening would make the spell effectively permanent as it would last until dispelled or the mana level in the area changes enough to cause the spell to fail.

I do not have a problem with an NPC having a special version of the spell that makes the victim aware of his/her surroundings. I would not allow the characters to have such a spell. I would force the spell to be either Blood Magic or Twisted Path Magic (probably the latter). Of course I have no problems bending the rules for a good story.

On a side note, because the effect is being maintained by magic, I would not allow normal weather-based erosion to cause damage to the “statue”. Normal environmental factors should not damage them because magic is involved. Intentional damage is another story of course (as others have already discussed).

Just my 2¥

-D

The severed head of stone could be reattached with a Fix spell.

There are also chemical means for generating the substance and precipitating it appropriately. A clever character should be able to repair damage to the calcified form. Whether the magic of the Petrify spell would carry that repair through to the affected character is unclear.

I think the problem is that it is clear: per Petrify, damage transfers, and nothing else. The crucial stipulation is that decapitation is inherently beyond-overflow damage, though. By the 'strict RAW', I think you could still use Heal on this person to deal with non-fatal damage. The issue is that decapitation is presumed to be fatal.

I agree that what you can do is just *say* it's not for Petrified things. I don't think this would work out with the Barrier rating and normal Barrier-damage rules and all, but if it made the story really good…

Would radiation still be a threat to a petrified person? Obviously, stone doesn't really degrade much if at all from being bombarded with radiation. It can, however, remain irradiated after such events. What would happen if the irradiated statue was turned back to flesh?

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So uhhh.... you get petrified but you end up with a statue that has skin, hair, and nails? This creates some more quirky behaviors.... Nerves and brain tissue dies rather quickly once death is achieved (assuming by death you mean no long capable of breathing). So up to 5 minutes after "death" you can still petrify the whole body (skin, hair, and nails excluded of course). Many other parts of the body can go hours without oxygen before that tissue also dies.

While alive : Statue with hair, nails, and a layer of skin.
Just after "death" : Statue with hair, nails, and a layer of skin.
Just after "brain death" : Statue with hair, nails, a layer of skin, and grey matter sloshing about in the head.
After full body death : Nothing petrified.

God, I just got a good idea. Petrify and Shape (Stone) or just Petrify and get a great stone carving artist. Bam! All new body. That would have to take into consideration that the outward appearance of the body dictates all of the inner workings of the body as well. If I somehow added 10% mass onto the person in all the right places and sculpted it to look exactly like muscles, would that increase their attributes accordingly? I mean, I am basically shaping the statue to have more stuff.

Min max opportunity. Get a mundane character and shove as many skills and mental attributes as you can into them. Have someone petrify you, then shape you up to have a body, strength, and agility that's max for human. Drop petrify. Profit.

I would have to rule that decapitation would be fatal to a petrified character in my game. Fix spell might re attach the head but it would not perform the micro surgery on a cellular level on arteries, veins, lymph and spinal column.
The last of which even regen can not repair.

The NPC has been stuck for 16 years. Though no stat change consider the difference between a 25 year old and a 41 year old in appearance and this is why I need to call this for description purposes.

No, StealthSigma, I meant that the spell requires 'living tissue', but SR4 has no definition for that except 'the character is alive, or not' (determined by condition monitor alone). My point was more about the abstraction of the game than a biological argument. So no, I didn't mean death = no breathing, I meant death = SR4 says you're 'dead', 100%, everywhere, at the same instant.

Note that because Petrify is a stupid and horrible spell, this *would* lead to crazy things otherwise. Cyberware is not affected by the spell, because it's nonliving, so you're exactly right: RAW+biology would say that hair/nails are *never* affected by Petrify (they're as dead as cyberware). This is obviously dumb and not what we want. Instead, magic views the whole character as a living thing… except for that inexplicable cyberware proviso.

I would say that RAW says the statue-character takes normal damage from physical attacks, and it doesn't say anything about drowning, tasering, toxins, (radiation), etc. For some people, that means it *isn't* immune, but making a statue drown is just too much for me. So, we have to fiat some immunities in there.

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CrystalBlue, that is total nonsense. Love it. Hehe. I assume that any shaping would cause damage, just as Corrode or physical attacks. You definitely couldn't add mass (it's not part of the spell/target to begin with), and I can't see how physical stats are shape-based. It is very creative though!

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Yeah, Pendaric, it seems fair to treat it like we would cryogenics (sci-fi style) or other suspended animation.

Your call in your game. But by RAW you have just created an artistic and sadistic way to torture the poor pretifee

Just pointing out the absurdity, however radiation is something that I find curious. More or less because the statue can remain irradiated with enough radiation, obviously without suffering any harm. Would that consequently mean the cells remaining irradiated after being restore and the radiation toxin then takes effect?

I like that StealthSigma. It's a very technological counter to the magic, heh.

This makes sense. Damage only begins after reconstitution of the victim into flesh form.

There's multiple questions that could be raised regarding various toxins in this sense. Depending on how permeable the stone that you were turned into happens to be, various toxins could soak into the stone. Assuming they do not go inert after a period of time, those toxins would then be present INSIDE your body when you're depetrified. Perhaps the drawback being that toxins that normally take effect sometime after immediate instead take effect immediately and you only get you base toxin resistance against it.

Just rambling on thinking through the logical consequences of such actions if they were feasible...

Don't forget the semi-sealed tube running through the middle full of bacteria and partially digested food

If the brain and neural tissue has been petrified, my default assumption would be that the character would not be aware of his surroundings or age; it is magic after all. It is entirely possible that a character coming out of a years long quickened Petrify would be weak and disorientated for days, though.

As for using Fix or a Shape spell to heal or improve a character, just say no! ... Saying that, I could see the fear factor in the community when a twisted mage Petrified targets and then used Shape Material to create grotesque creatures with arms coming out of their foreheads etc. Bring out the gimp!

Oh nice. So you get petrified just after having that very fine 3 course meal. You're depetrified 28 days later. Suddenly you have rotting food in your stomach.

I would assume that everything contained within the targets aura is petrified, including clothes, equipment and armor.

unless that little part is part of a custom spell [Restricted target: NOT contents of intestine]

As with targets being conscious, The Jopp, that's a bad assumption. Those things are specifically not petrified.

It could actually be a quick way to remove toxic substances from the alimentary tract.

1) Petrify the subject and sustain

2) Attach a vacuum cleaner to stony anus

3) Evacuate the bowels of all contents

4) Remove the vacuum cleaner, then the spell (order might be important)

Some minor tweaks.

1) Knock out subject.

2) Strip subject and position him like the Statue of David.

3) Petrify the subject and sustain.

4) Attach a vacuum cleaner to stony anus.

5) Evacuate the bowels of all contents.

6) Put "Statue of David" with vacuum cleaner in art exhibit.

7 )???

8 )...Profit!

Hehe. This is exactly why magic can't (i.e., isn't supposed to) affect or selectively affect subparts of a (living) whole. Petrify started the mess by not affecting Essence paid 'ware, which is probably more 'living' than the stuff in your stomach.

And Turn to Goo/Petrify can just be fixed by affecting the whole target... (Essence paid 'Ware, etc).
Easy peasy...