I recently started running a home game of Season 3 and came across a few issues with one of my players who is playing a Rastafarian mage who, on more than one occasion, decided that the corpses of the enemies the group had come across would make fine possession material. By the end of the session this mage had a zombie guarding him with incredible stats that could take a beating. This was all done with against a very low object resistance test since the player stated he had read that a corpse would be a 1. Now, we are all learning the game at the same time, and rules are still murky at best, but this seems a little off. So, question time!

1. First off, I've read elsewhere that possession magic and mind control spells were illegal in Missions. Is this true, or just a suggestion for the sake of the GM?

2. If possession traditions are allowed, where are the rules for handling possessing objects and, more specifically, corpses? Are there specific books I can look at (as well as sections of said books, if you are so inclined) to figure out a way to bring this player back level with the rest of the team?

3. Assuming everything was handled legally (and I apologize for being vague, I am still learning myself), what can be done to balance out this character's abilities? We were running Copycat Killer and the players blew through it with no challenge at all. This is a group coming off of W40K Dark Heresy, so they are used to death being a part of life. Not once did a player come close to dying with that zombie around taking hits.

Any other pointers some of you vets can throw out for this situation (or a new SRM GM in the first place) would be greatly appreciated.

1) They were temporarily banned, then unbanned, and they may or may not be banned again when the next SRM FAQ comes out. At the moment they are not banned.

2) Dead vessels are entirely different from and unrelated to inanimate vessels. The rules for both are in Street Magic on pages 86ff.

Mages are overpowered, and spirits are a large part of that; possession really has fairly little to do with it because materialization mages are also overpowered, just in a slightly different way. The main limitations that people tend to forget on Possession that make them think it is better than materialization (specific to dead vessels):
Cyberware and nanoware in the vessel don't work at all.
Bioware and geneware in the vessel work only at GM discretion.
It's very easy (6-F perception) to tell that something/someone is possessed. Walking around with a zombie is the equivalent of walking around with a HMG out and loaded; it's not very subtle.

3) Don't shoot at the zombie; shoot at the other players (specifically, the mage, if they can tell who that is). Remember that it's very easy to tell something is possessed, and it should be reasonably common knowledge that bullets don't work very well on spirits but that they do work on mages. Possessed dead vessels can be very, very tough quite easily, and if you let them tank, they will be really overpowered. If they just do the street samurai's job better than the street samurai, they'll be merely somewhat overpowered.

In general, remember spirits have trouble getting through wards, especially possession ones. The easiest ways for it to go through are to break the ward (which alerts the magician) or to de-possess, have someone else drag the body through, and re-possess.

Make sure you are properly enforcing things like task usage, spirits not spending edge at the summoner's command, and so on.

If only specially prepared corpses could be possessed that would counter its usefulness for manhandling objects and Control Actions-like mind control against the living.

If it's a home game actually ran at home my heartfelt advice is just to ban possession traditions and move on with life.

Possession traditions should be like toxic and insect ones... For NPCs only.

They really aren't that bad.

With the abuse I've seen, I will hold to my earlier assessment.

Well, they can be abused, but then so can regular spirits.

More or less the Missions rules currently say "you can use these, just don't be a dick about it".




-k

I could go into a long dissertation on why possession spirits are inherently more problematic then regular ones. The basic gist is while a materialization spirit creates a powerful combatant on the field a possession tradition enhances an already existing powerful combatant or turns an enemy combatant into a friendly.

So no I do not believe there is an equivalency, you are allowed to believe otherwise but there is a preponderance of evidence to the contrary. That is why in home games i recommend banning them, in missions I also recommend banning them, but that would take a FAQ update.

I started a thread some time ago for discussing how to use and how to GM possession tradition mages, and the discussion did not present a "preponderance of evidence" to suggest that possession was out of line with materialization. My opinion has been that magic as a whole overpowers the game if GMs don't make use of the many limitations built into the system.

I haven't found a way to prove that view to the community. Arguing opinions back and forth gets tiresome (for me, anyway) really quickly.

I like some of the flavor of the non-spirit portions of possession traditions so if they are banned I'd rather see "Spirits conjured using Possession traditions have materialization and not possession."

That way the variety and flavor can be preserved and existing characters grandfathered in minus the cheese of the possession mechanic.