Emphasis mine...
So how do you get your Essence higher than 6? Well, normally you can't. The only way is to use the Essence Drain power and it's typical partner Essence Loss, both seen only in Infected and various Critters, making 'ware hard to get (you need Delta grade) and even harder to keep (you need to constantly refill your Essence so you never dip below 6). But there is another way.

Street Magic details the creation of Magical Compounds (p. 88). These are Unique Enchantments which operate like drugs that grant Critter Powers. Digital Grimoire details how to create your own formulae for them (p. 9). If you have the skill and the time, there is nothing stopping you from taking a few months to research a formula for a Magical Compound that grants the Essence Drain power.

After acquiring the appropriate exotic reagents (perhaps a few units of a natural animal radical taken from the various HMHVV I Infected) and successfully completing an alchemical circulation, you receive a single dose of the Compound, which when you ingest will temporarily grant you the Essence Drain power. While under the effects of the Compound, you can drain 6 points of essence from others, capping out at twice your natural maximum per the power's ruling. Once the Compound's effect ends, you lose the power, suffer "crash" effects for an equal duration, and at that point have 12 points of Essence, 6 of which you can freely sacrifice in exchange for cyber or bioware.

Discuss.

~Umi

Where does it say you get to keep the extra Essence after the compound wears off? The power Essence Drain allows a character to have more than 6 Essence. If you don't have the power, you can't benefit from the power.

The power Essence Drain doesn't ALLOW you to have more than 6 Essence. It merely gives you a method for OBTAINING more than 6 Essence.

Also, please note, Essence Drain has a listed Duration of Permanent. Its effects thus operate in the manner of Permanent Spells, id est, the power must be sustained for a short while, but thereafter its effects are permanent.

~Umi

In terms of strict RAW, I'll give it to you. If you were a player in my group, however, and you brought this to me, I'd call it an example of two different writers failing to compare notes (of which Shadowrun has numerous examples), and tell you to stop being ridiculous.

The permanent duration refers to the victim. Otherwise, I agree with Tanegar.

When you Drain Essence, you produce two effects. 1) The victim loses Essence. 2) The attacker gains that lost Essence.

Both effects become permanent, and losing the Power doesn't undo either of them. If a magician burns out, do any Healing spells they've ever cast suddenly undo themselves?

~Umi

So you have 12 essence... then get captured by a megacorp and become the ultimate cyberzombie!

*Evil cackle*

Wouldn't having 12 Essence make it almost impossible to be cyberzombied? There's just not enough 'ware to drop you below 0, is there? You'd have to be drained of your excess.

Either way, the only thing that matters is how far you go negative, not how much you lose before crossing the 0 threshold.

~Umi

You can always install redundant copies of pointless 'ware if you need to burn extra Essence for whatever reason. Twenty or thirty spare datajacks, for instance.

Fight a rules lawyer with a rules lawyer.

p.177 Magic 2nd paragraph.
"Anything that reduces a character's Essence will also reduce Magic. For every point (or fraction thereof) of Essence lost, the character's magic attribute and her Magic maximum rating are reduced by one."

It doesn't care what the 'starting essence' is. It has nothing to do with the character generation rules. It's completely agnostic if you've somehow gained essence. If it's 12 and it goes down to 11.5 congrats you lose a point of magic. The only other section deals with character generation.... and only character generation.

The chargen section does leave a loophole... given it's exact wording. It only deals with essence loss under 6 during character creation. If you could find something like a true drake which starts with 8 essence... though true drakes aren't allowed any cyber/bio or anything which costs essence. And nothing else pops off the top of my head with a higher starting essence than 6.

Also allowing for the original idea to be one of the absolute worst I've ever seen posted on these boards. Even with theorycrafting.

Just to clarify, since I'm kind of sensing hostility and some negative assumptions, this is purely a theoretical exercise. I'm not the kinda guy who'd try to play something like this. It's obviously a broken concept, it obviously circumvents the intended operations, and it allows for absurd levels of power like a mage with full cyberlimb replacement replete with augmented attributes, increased condition monitor, cyberarmor, increased IPs, et cetera.

Falconer, nice find on the Street Magic snippet. Just the sort of thing I was hoping someone would dig up.

That said, you could still benefit from this with a Latent Awakening. Start cybered, take the Compound to gain the power, drain the Essence, then Awaken, resulting in Magic 1 and Essence 12.

~Umi

Which does nothing really except raise the magic cap assuming you get no more cyber/bio and don't get any initiations.

You'd still need a rediculously large amount of karma to take it anywhere. If a magician even more for skills... (adepts get off easy since they don't need to buy magical skills to use their abilities... they can just buff existing abilities with a touch of magic).

Your magic would still start at one... if you somehow lost more essence you'd lose that 1 point and lose all magical ability.

But lets face it... you're going to want the initiations and metamagics anyhow.

Make a full cyberlimb replacement adept instead, then.

~Umi

Move-by-wire 3.
Muscle replacement 4.
Titanium bone lacing.
that's 10.5 essence gone already at standard grade. Add rating 4 cyber eyes and ears and it's 11.5 out of your 12 essence gone fairly darned quickly.

Cyberzombies have to get Delta-grade. They just don't have a choice in the matter.

Of course, since for a cyberzombie the idea is to get your negative essence as low as metahumanly possibly, you can always take a few of those negative qualities that make augs cost more Essence.

I think you're confusing the fact that only a few Delta clinics have the capability to produce cyber zombies with a requirement for the implants to be Delta-grade.

"Easier" way to whore cybermagic.

Initiate a whole fuckton, leaving your current magic and number of initiations equal (any extra would be wasted).

Install 6 points of cyber.

Magic = (6+N) - 6, max N+(6-6)
Initiations = N, max (6+N) - 6

Essentially:

Magic = N, max N
Initiations = N, max N

Cybered up renfield addict, thoughts?

I hope that Catalyst gets rid of this loophole.

In my mind a mage or Technomancer should have at least one point of Essence. In fact I think that Mages/Technos should only be able to initiate/submerge only as many times as they have whole points of Essence. You lose two points of Essence... congrats you can only initiate 4 times. This would take care of the power creep of mages.

It's not a loophole... Draco has his rules wrong. The rules explicitly state you lose BOTH a point of magic and a point off the maximum magic. I quoted it above.

Max magic == Essence + initiations. (BBB)
Max initiate grade == Magic. (BBB)
Max known metamagics == Magic + Initiate grade (street magic)

The rules in the magic section are quite explicit... for every point or fraction thereof of essence you lose both a point of Magic and a point off the maximum.

So if his Magic == 6 and his Initiations == 6... and his known metamagics == 6.

He gets 1 point of essence loss... His magic drops to 5... he LOSES an initiate grade. His known metamagics are still within the limits.
He loses 4 points of essence. His magic drops to 2... he loses all but 2 initiate grades... He loses 2 out of his 6 known metamagic techniques...
He loses 5.01 poitns of essence (6 and he's dead). His magic drops to 0... he loses all magical ability whatsoever and can NEVER get it back.


So congrats you wasted a ton of karma to initiate and lost nearly all your magical abilities so gained. Even if they raised their magic to 7 then did this... they are now Magic 1. Initiate 1. with only 2 of their metamagics left and will need a lot of karma to ever get back to where they were. They will always need to initiate before buying another point of magic. (fun BGC's will cause them to lose magic, initiations, and metamagics... at the most inconvenient times).


Really about the only way to game the system is to buy magic as low as possible.. keep getting it reduced to 1... then buying it back to 2... a point at a time. Which is till a karma sink... lets say you get 1 point of augments at a time... by the time you have 5 essence worth of gear you've spend 50karma just to keep your magic attribute at 1 and prevent burnout. So no, there is no 'cheap' path to cybermagery.


Also there is nothing in the rulebooks about cyberzombies needing delta... I pointed this out when I joked a while back that you could recycle your cyberzombies with secondhand cyber from the last one.. and make 'cheap' zombies who aren't quite as scary as the delta ones... but would be a hell of a lot cheaper in parts. (who knows how much the magical rituals cost though; if that drives the costs... then alpha, beta, or delta might be cheap in comparison).

Lionhearted brings up an interesting point, one I honestly should have thought up since I made a thread about it recently - Renfield.

Renfield addiction inflicts the Essence Loss and Carrier (HMHVV I) negative qualities, so it seems that for a Renfield addict, there is no loss in magic when losing Essence (except when it lowers your Magic max to less than your current Magic value). Combine that with the fact that you do NOT gain Regeneration from Renfield, allowing you to implant non-delta grade 'ware.

Now, since you don't actually have Essence Drain, the upper limits on your Essence value are somewhat indeterminate. Normally, Essence Drain allows you to achieve double your natural maximum, or 12 Essence (even for Infected who normally have 5 Essence (according to RC, p. 77). Renfield isn't actually Essence Drain, however, and may not allow you to exceed that natural maximum, instead only refilling you to 6 Essence. However, this just means you have to implant in chunks. Get 'ware, Renfield for more Essence, repeat as long as you like. Assuming you have a small magic value and never dip your Essence too low, you can freely invest in your magic once you're done adding 'ware.

There is a potential limiting factor, however. (Again, according to RC, p. 77) any drop in Essence which is NOT caused by the Essence Loss or Essence Drain powers will be subtracted from your Maximum Essence value rather than your current value. So that would impose an effective limit on how much you could invest in 'ware, as each point spent would reduce your maximum magical potential. The saving grace is that, as mentioned above, your Maximum Magic is based on Current Essence + Initiate Grade, and since you can Initiate as many times as you like (modified by your current magic level), there is theoretically no upper bound and you can keep pushing your Magic Maximum back up.

~Umi

Actually no... this doesn't work. Read the text of the Carrier quality...

"The character is HMHVV-positive BUT NOT INFECTED, or the character is Infected but carrying multiple strains. Her bodily fluids carry a virus THAT SHE CANNOT EXPRESS...."

If you read down through the second part deals only with something like a Vampire also carrying the virus to create ghouls or fomoraigs in his blood. The ghoul virus can't express because the vampiric one already has... though the character can still spread it.

As per the quality, someone who is ONLY a carrier is not Infected (caps used in the rules).. it suffers magic loss as runner's companion only applies to Infected.


All the actual infected with variable essence rules have special rules for their own magic levels making their actual magic score go up and down as their essence does. (which leads to the utter cheese that is vampiric mystic adepts and the like altering their powers on the fly). Hence the maxim in shadowrun that all infected are sparkly.

Whoops, my bad. Start with 6 more magic than I originally stated.

15 magic, 9 initiations, 15 max.

Lose 1 essence:
14 magic, 9 initiations, 14 max.

Lose 5 more:

9 magic, 9 initiations, 9 max.

I was recalling things off-hand.

Which is the most expensive way to do it Draco...

You pay top karma for every rank up to your max... then burn them off....

No matter how you dice it... cybering up costs a magical type a good deal. Your best bet is to simply burn your magic down to about your initiate grade is.. then buy a point of magic... then get another point of ware... to minimize your repurchase costs. (losing an initiate grade could be cheaper long term too in karma depending on the exact numbers).

So if you're Mag6... init3... you let yourself go down to Mag3.. buy to 4 for 20 karma... lose it... buy to 4 for 20 karma... losing the initiate grade... lets you buy to 3 each time instead for 5 less karma... so it's a limbo thing. How low can you go to repurchase what you've lost.

Well your cyber side don't care much for that karma anyway

Point is:

It works. I didn't say you had to burn it all at once.

(In fact, the previously discussed version of this method is to burn down to 1 each time, then buy up to 2 until you have 5 essence worth of implants, then initiate a bunch before burning your last point, at which point you're frozen)

Fair enough, I can accept that argument.

So Renfield probably doesn't work out to allow you to be both cybered and magical. I can live with that. It does, however, seem to allow you to have unlimited amounts of cyberware, though. Buy 'ware, refill Essence, buy more 'ware, refill Essence, et cetera.

~Umi

Actually, it has to do with vampire mages casting Alleviate Allergy on themselves, which gives them a literal healthy glow.

You're a terrible person, lol.

Good thing there's a bounty on vampires then

Hey! I didn't come up with the idea.

And I sure as hell didn't name my vampire character Ed.

Suuuuure you didn't. It's too late now. Your secret is out.

I'm actually needing to come up with a mage. For a mage game. No-vamp.

No, he's right.

I pointed it out in another thread but I'll throw it here just because...

Max Magic = Essence (round down) + # of Initiations
Max # Initiations = Magic

The real caveat here is that so long as the Cybermage keeps a minimum of 1 Essence, he can initiate and continue to progress magically for as long as he can spend karma.

The only time a cybermage has a problem raising magic is if his Essence drops below 1.0. If it does, then his max Magic is equal to his number of initiations.

In your example, the mage had 6 Magic and 6 Initiations. Should his Essence drop to 0.99 or less, you are correct, he does in fact burn out. But you also neglected to point out that his Max Magic was in fact 12 (6 from Essence and 6 from Initiation).

I propose that we now call this "browning out."

Not to be confused with Bring My Brown Pants or Brown Note.
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