As a companion to a post about making up non-shadowrunner posts, and as an extension to a post about jobs, I wanted to talk about magic in common use.

What are some creative uses of existing (written up) magic? Could the mage use stuff to make his life easier, or help his community, or make an honest buck?

How about a hermit mage with his cabin in the snowy woods? A brick firebox with a giant slug of iron in it could be heated by a force 1 fire elemental over time, and provide both a stove and a space heater. But why stop there? How about a steam engine powered generator? With a sealed system (shouldn't be hard in 2070) you could just tell your spirit "heat that part up past boiling point, but not hot enough to melt steel". Electricity galore with no unit cost!

Got a creative idea?

Thorguild

build a wind-farm: sustaining focus for control wether to always have a stiff breeze going on there.

build a hydroelectric power plant somewhere, have control element sustained to make water go in a circle through the turbines

build a boiler and sustain firewall underneath it to create steam with which to power a turbine again.

build a lightning rod, control weather again to constantly have it be struck by lightning to immediately siphon the electricity into batteries . .

Also, solar cells seem to be pretty damn effective in the SR Universe.
So, build a solar array, then use a sustaining focus to create light above it.

basically, you have to let go of stupid ideas like the laws of physics in general and thermodynamics in special.
all magic is creating something from nothing. be it energy, matter or even just, technically, information . .

if you go with BOGOTA!
there is an actual spell to charge batteries.


Now, away from gathering electric energy:
see that ship over there?
Have a strong enough spirit use movement on it to get it over the ocean in record time.

same with aircraft and even spaceships . .

I would say Mana qualifies as Energy.

can you measure it?
and even if it does, indeed, count as energy, then it's FREE ENERGY.
ready to be siphoned from the warp into usefull stuff. forever. for free.
and at a better than 1:1 conversion rate of energy to matter to boot!

technically, seeing how there is a create food spell (or at least used to be in SR3), there is precedent for adapting that spell to create anything you like.
yes, up to and including anti matter.
And the wealth power is the same.

Yeah really about the simplest incarnation of any of these perpetual magic machines is the 'Alter temperature' spell.

You simply cast it and quicken it to make a hot sink and the environment as the cold sink. Then put a heat engine like a stirling between it and the environment and collect the energy. You could alternative cast it twice to create a hot and cold sink in the environment for even more power. It requires no spirit, no mental control by the caster... it simply carries on.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but there isn't a 'control water' spell. There is a shape water spell... and if sustained without mental control it will keep the water in a shape... such as a sphere with an air bubble in it... but it will not keep currents in motion. That latter effect requires caster's concentration. Replace water with earth and the spells work identically and you'll see what I mean... the caster shapes a trench in the sand... and can hold it's shape... but the sand doesn't stay in motion once it's where it belongs without the caster expending mental effort to keep it in motion. So the net result is those spells don't quicken... but you need a caster or a spirit actively controlling the magic to function.


Stahl:
My only take with the anti-matter is that it would create a very small amount enough to create a indirect combat spell blast effect of appropriate force/damage as it instantly annihilates itself.

that my friend, depends entirely on how you wish to interpret MAGIC.
it sounds logical, as you say, but it is nowhere written. and you can't apply logic here, for obvious reasons.

If you look at the dead magic zones in Aztlan it's very likely that mana is finite and is either expended to be whisked away to wherever it was hiding in the downtime or behaves like energy and is simply transformed.
No I don't think it's empirically measureable, which is why thaurmaleugical research always struck me as odd, how do you predict and replicate what you can't measure?

now, bear in mind, the dead zones are an anomaly that has nothing to do with how much mana is there.
else they would (and probably will) simply vanish because the ether all around will simply swallow them.

keep in mind:
Magical Cycles are 3000 to 4000 years long.
The PEAK is in 1500 years, untill then, it's an incline in Magic.
From then on it's a decline in Magic.
Magic has been back for about 50 Years in Shadowrun. 100 TOPS.
So it will only be MORE from here on, not less.

Remember earthdawn?
Their Mastery of Magic/Magitech?
That's where the 6th World is headed again.

Yes but the zones in Aztlan has several times been speculated that they were created by extensive use of blood magic.
It might be that because there is still mana flowing in constantly we don't notice the draining effect except with really powerful spells that completely deplete the ambient mana in an area.
This is pure speculation of course.

then, if anything, they are somthing like a plug or probably rather a scar that stops the ether from leaking into our world locally.

How about things other than energy? What could someone do with existing spells that's not on the power grid?

all the things i mentioned are perfectly well suited for supplying a small outpost like a hut or something with energy.
else, technically, there is no reason ever to need clean water. conjour up a water spirit and take a bite . . err, sip out of it, presto . .
wealth power is, i think, a once a day power, but i am not sure . . if so, get some food from that if you are in dire need.

spells are pretty limited in their usefullness outside of their niche, aside from getting energy.
spirit powers are much easier to abuse.
get some really seldom critter, cut it apart for telesma . . get a plant spirit, have it use or endow the poor thing with the regeneration ability.
bingo, you can get as much telesma as you want forever!
and as i mentioned, the movement power.
a high enough force spirit will get a super tanker or container ship across the ocean in a day.
and similarly, get something from cape carneval to space in minutes for a fraction of the needed fuel.
and this means you have a higher payload you can carry. which both means space travel should be hellishly cheap compared to today.

That makes some sense, I would personally love to know more about the nature and origin of mana, yes it's an hermetic view... They're the only ones that tries to figure this shit out, the rest of them just have their baubles and mumbo jumbo that doesn't explain anything.
Also Stahl, I thought you were all about the steel and chrome... When did you learn the first thing about magic?

remember fallout?
the "living anatomy" perk?
if i know how it works, i can stop it from working better.
for example, take a cyber-zombie-torso as a backpack on a troll and you are suddenly very hard to fuck with in terms of magic.

and making money from it is good too, i just don't like playing with magic in my own characters . .
i have good/horrible ideas about what to do, but i have no idea how to do it usually and it'd pretty much break the game too.

Actually it is written Stahl... magic is dumb and cannot make any decisions on it's own. It must be wielded by the caster and directed by his mind.

It is part of the big rules of magic bits. Right up there with no teleport and the like.


The closest magic ever comes to making any decisions on it's own is limited target spells.. and those are merely a case of construction. You can cast them on non-limited targets and take the drain but they simply don't work. The magic doesn't choose the target it merely only works as constructed on certain limited targets.

That's where I get that 'shape' spells cannot keep things in motion without their caster 'moving' the materials with his mind. It requires the spell to act with a consciousness it cannot posses by the laws of magic. You can put the water into a shape... and the spell will sustain it in that shape even if it defies gravity and the like within the area of the spell. But you need to exercise mental control to continually alter that shape and keep things in motion.


As for the other... the rules never quite state how the create and alter material spells function. If I turn a 200kg orc to goo... I end up with 200kg of goo which might not be the same original volume as the orc. In the case of the magical hobo gold... some people jump to that the hobo now weighs 20x mroe than he did in life... as opposed to simply 'atom smashing' the mass of the hobo's atoms into gold.


A lot of this reminds me of why Mage was no fun to play with other physics types... as soon as you got control of entropy... you were a god fully capable of producing subtle quantum effects with limited paradox. Then again mage was the only of the whitewolf games I ever found in the least interesting. (the whole fight over the nature of reality bit... go go technocracy!).

http://what-if.xkcd.com/3/

Quote by Virgil

and other materials are even better/worse in this . .
molten gold? 17,3g/cm³, probably around 2GIGA WATTS

Quote by another guy from the Den:


and the most obvious use of the spell CONTROL WEATHER:
see that desert right there?
well, let us just make it rain there, presto, instant farm land world hunger problem solved!



In Effect?
Magic breaks Physics
Physics ALSO break Magic.

Zero-Point Energy for the Win.

Actually there is no control weather spell...

There is a spirit power... and even more to the point...
"The weather must be possible in the environment where cast" and it only simply summons the weather but provides no control of it.

So nothing in it states you 'create' farmland from desert without creating another desert somewhere else.
In fact, the GM is fully within his rights to state... this weather is not possible during this time of year because there is insufficient moisture in the air to precipitate rain. Advocatus diaboli.

Magical Air-Nuke

1. Stand under the open sky.

2. Cast and sustain the Shape Air spell.

3. Use the Shape Air spell to move all of the air within the radius of the spell's effect (minus an air pocket around yourself) into a central point.

4. Air from beyond the radius of the spell's effect will flow in to fill the vacuum.

5. Repeat steps 3 and 4, continually compressing more and more air into a single point of space.

6. After a couple of days, release all the effects of the spell except for the pocket of air around yourself.

7. Revel in the glory of destruction as the expanding ball of plasma levels everything around you.

~Umi

Umi that's . . that's . . that's absurd . . i love it! o.o

except . . no, wait . . where does the plasma come from?
if you compress air, it liquefies into cold stuff right?

Stahl--my understanding (and it's a rough one) is that the sudden drop in pressure will cause an equally sudden increase in the velocity of the air particles. The energy will create a huge wind capable of massive damage. The velocity would also cause an increase in temperature and thus lead to the plasma stuff Umi talked about. That part I'm taking on faith and XKCD, but the rest is Bernoulli and Newton.

No as he compresses it further and further fusion could result.... as he forms a mini-sun. Nitrogen and oxygen still undergo fusion as high enough pressures and temperatures... and as things are compressed they automatically heat up. At another extreme if he can force it into a small enough space a black hole. The problem is that plasma isn't a good explosive... as it expands it cools just as it heated up as it compressed that's why the fusion is kinda a necessity to get more energy into it to get it even hotter than mere compression can provide... :(.


Only the catch is the spell doesn't necessarily bring or shape new air into it. He moves all the air at force m/combat turn into the center by controlling the spell. That doesn't mean the process continues automatically if he merely sustains the spell. Similarly the spell states moves... not necessarily compresses. Not that a mage who just sat there and kept mentally reshaping the compressed ball at the center with new air from the area of effect couldn't do some nasty things with this.

Again just playing advocatus diaboli.


Overpressure bomb like a thermobaric comes to mind at the less extreme ends though. Shape the air into a big ball like this... then move the area of effect as a complex action with the ball in it inside a structure, and let it go. Blow out half the windows and doors as air pressure inside shifts to 10x normal... (as well as maybe a lot of eardrums! and quite probably even structural walls think about it... 9atmospheres of pressure pushing on one side of a wall not designed to contain pressure).


Though this idea is also a nifty one if you think about the 'plasma balls' that they were tossing about in that Sorcerer's Apprentice movie.

Deserts don't really work that way. The major problem with desertification is that there's nothing to hold the water in place, so it mostly sits on top of the earth and evaporates back up into the air almost immediately. Most of the African and American deserts are actually quite capable of sustaining arable land, but there's no way to keep that moisture in the ground long enough for it to do any good.

ah, i see . .
but the spell would not need to bring in new air.
the surrounding air would do that on it's own.
because the pressure in there is lower

Magic fingers and clairvoyance are a great way to nuke a burrito and get a beer without getting out of the Lay-z-boy.

It's amazing what you can get magic to do when you have even a passing understanding of physics.

~Umi

You're mistaking what I'm saying Stahlseele...

Caster uses the spell... concentrates the air in the 10m diameter into say a .1m diameter...

The spell prevents new air from entering the area of effect... as the caster has intentionally shaped that into a vacuum by vacating the space. And the spell will maintain an 'unstable structure' such as a vacuum as per it's text. Which will immediately collapse when the spell stops being sustained.

Or new air rushes in... the caster has already shaped the air subject to the spell with his mind... the spell cannot decide to act upon any new material in it's AOE to make the process automatic by merely sustaining the spell. Until the caster acts to do the compression again.

Or the caster uses a complex action to 'slide' the AOE to affect a different area of space... the vacuum might move with the AoE or might not... giving access to new volumes of air.


Under 3e rules you remember the 'exclusive concentration' actions? And those that required concentration? That was done away with in 4th.

Remember I'm simply playing devil's advocate here.

I can think of another devilish use...

Simply cast it on people in a room, compress the air into a vacuum... and then apply the hostile environment vacuum rules to them .

Umi:
Yeah... like i said... Mage: The Ascension was the only white wolf game I had any interest in... and we had to draw a hard line when it came to entropy control and quantum physics.

I think you've been reading a bit too much Larry Niven - this is the Sixth World, not The Magic Goes Away.

It's still very early in the mana cycle at this point in the Sixth World, and there's only going to be a lot more magic coming around, not less.

Also, thaumatology is the study of mana and magic. I have no idea what "thaurmaleugical research" is.

Hmmm.. thaumatology is the study of miracles. Thaumaturgy might be the better word.

A quick check of Dictionary.com backs up your definition. A keyword search of my SR4 PDF library (pretty much all books published for SR4) does not turn up a match.

Must be my GURPS roots showing - that is the explicit term for it as per GURPS magical rules, and I've gotten used to using it over the years. That said, in the Sixth World, that would be the logical term for the study of mana and magic. For my part, I'm coming up with "miracle working" as the literal definition of thaumaturgy, so I think I have a better case for thaumatology in a world where functional magic is verifiably real.

I love the ideas in this thread. I might be playing in a SR game in the near future. I'm going to have to file some of these away for later use.

One of my characters used a spirit with animal control and a terrarium with leaf-cutting ants, to tidy up his completly messed up room. He told the spirit which things in the room were not trash, and had the ants cut everything else to pieces and carry it into the trash bin.

I pretty much assume that all summoning characters use Spirits to do their chores for them. Just look at The Sorcerer's Apprentice; it's virtually foolproof!

Thorguild

I think a summoner could make a good living as an exterminator. Tell the air spirits to kill any rodents in the building with engulf and then move the bodies to a bin outside. Tell them to squish any roaches or insect eggs. The hard part would be getting up early to get on site right at sunup.

Fireman has been mentioned, and spirits with Search would be perfect for Search and Rescue operations. Also, tell a water spirit to spray any open flame it sees on the way.

Thorguild

It's not always easy getting made-up science disciplines right, especially when it's not in your native language nor is latin used at all outside of science curriculum, even then there's laymans words for it.

Also that were constantly getting supplied new many doesn't mean there's no mana going away just that we're experiencing a net gain.

I'm guessing any serious perpetual-motion-esque stuff would have progressive negative effects on the background count all the way up to creating a mana warp.

why?

Because magical activity raises the background count.

Says where?

At the very least, in Magic in the Shadows.

Don't have it, but I know others who do. DO you have a page number reference?

Not on me. There's a detailed section on background count and mana warps. The essentials are that disturbances (emotional, whatever) can cause slight increases, magical activity can cause increases, great/terrible events, et cetera. Since we're off on the far whackadoo end of perpetual-magic-motion machines, I think it's fair to consider that there's at least something in the books that might be inclined against it (e.g., to explain why a power plant really isn't just a mage with a sustaining focus). If a few mages tossing fireballs can alter the background count for a couple hours, a mage trying to indefinitely suspend the laws of thermodynamics is going to rack it up.

Also, it's sort of cool, anyway -- magic has its own form of entropy in Shadowrun, you can burn it out.

So you note that it doesn't quite state how the alter material spell works, yet you go on to propose that it works in a specific way that, to me, doesn't make sense. The turn to go example, I see no reason the goo can't be the same mass/density as the ork, thus the same volume. It seems intuitive to me that it would be the same volume and the goo could certainly be the same weight and volume, just goo instead of flesh. Turning something specific, flesh, into something specific, gold or stone, doesn't make sense that it is going to alter the size of the target. It makes more sense to me that it transmutes the flesh to gold or stone or whatever the spell states it turns it to. I realize allowing turn to Gold breaks the game, or at least removes the monetary motivation for PCs to engage in shadow runs. However, I do not agree with trying to make a spell work in a way that makes little sense in order to break the spell. In the case of the hobo to gold, even your version is going to break the game, just at a 5% rate.






From what I have tried to figure out, at least in SR3, it is hard to raise background count via magic use above 2. If you employ background count to help make Magic a bit harder, just like recoil. As far as I could tell, it looks like it caps at 2. It's not like every spell cast or sustained adds 1 to the background count every combat turn, every hour, or anything similar.

If sustaining a spell over time creates a mana warp or void, then Great Dragons and immortal elves should be surrounded by them from all the spells they supposedly have anchored and sustained. Or binding an elemental to sustain a spell for a year, or even having a Force 6 ward in place should be as damaging to the mana level as having a Force 6 spell sustained. Too, since a magic circle or lodge is in effect a Ward of the same Rating, they should be creating mana warps according to your reasoning.

...Again, I think the opposition is that the tactic breaks the economics of the game.


As far as creative uses of existing spells... I always thought the way the armor spell making the target a spectacle was silly. I know people just hand waved it and said create an 'invisible' version of the spell, but that seemed a bit like a 'cheat'. Anyway, there are the variants that create the Armor against a specific type of attack. I thought creating a specific version like Armor vs. toothpicks would make a good target designator. You have that invisible adversary, the friendly mage casts F1 Toothpick Armor on the adversary while astrally perceiving, and the gun bunnies see a nice, hollow, glowing target. Just as long as they aren't attacking with toothpicks.

tisoz:
Did you note the numerous times I've stated advocatus diaboli or devil's advocate.

I was not saying that's how they are definitively played, but giving other ways a GM could play them which don't contradict the text.

Petrify says it turns them into calcium carbonate (limestone) it doesn't say how much. It could be equal volume or equal mass. Either way makes sense and is a matter of GM discretion.

I've always treated it as equal mass. Thus if you were 70 kg of metahuman and turned to goo, you were still 70 kg regardless of your material state.

It should have NEVER said that in that description.

Now, i a like the idea of "creating" and "transforming" spells but the way i have them work (And, i think, the only way they SHOULD work) is that they don't turn something into gold, paper, calcium carbonate or anything but into a magical construct REPRESENTAING the IDEA of a material.

Magic and technology, magic and science don't mix well.

In my group, when someone turns something into gold: Sure it's is heavy, it is golden, it is mallable. but it is NOT gold. Like with the Heisenberg stuff: You can either see it not that accuratly and it is ssurely gold... or you can measure it, analyze it... and it's becoming more clear that it is not.

Unreliable melting point, unreliable half-life, unpredictable breakdown, wonky conductivity. It will react to magical effect as if it MIGHT be gold (First "Create" then "Shape"- Versions for example) and for random use it MIGHT be good enough... but it truly ISN'T real (hits while casting will help alot though).

If you do it any other way EVERYBODY would just have a load of "CREATE Blabla"-magic and the world would be a weird one.

Oh. P.S.: I had in SR3 a japanese paper-magician who had a create Paper-Spell... it was fun just having HUGE blocks of pretty much compressed wood crush people and block ways... but he also made his own REAL paper with a press out of perfect wood etc. for fun and profit.

It often happens in films or novels that someone is turned to stone, but he is always the same size afterwards. I never saw the variant that someone shrinked in the prozess.
Since this spell is clearly inspired by the usual fictional stories, I would go with the version were the volume stays constant.

Also, remember that cyberware stays normal. What would happen to your implanted comlink, when the body cavity it is fitted into is suddenly half its usual size? The spell description doesn't mention that all the internal cyberware in the target is crushed during the transformation, so I would say that the size and the volume of the target should stay the same.

Once again... I'm playing devil's advocate.

The internal cyberware could sit in a pocket of stone same size it normally does... the stone could displace around it. Or it could poke out through the 'skin' of the statue even. The spell does not necessarily create a limestone heart, lungs, internal organs... nor keep them in any order. Petrify is merely a non-fluid version of turn to goo.

For all you know the statue could be hollow... same size and mass... but just have a bunch of empty space on the inside.


You've entirely missed my point. When the spell doesn't specify the details it's up to the GM to make them up as he sees fit. Rather than under the most expansive reading possible under the rules (which is normally a boring exercise)... it's more interesting to play devils advocate and see what's possible under a more conservative reading of the rules and how a clever GM can toss monkey wrenches into the works without invoking rule 0.


That's why I pointed out under shape air example... more air from the outside does not necessarily come into the space vacated by the air subject to the initial area of effect. The spell specifies it will maintain even an unstable structure until the caster decides to change it's shape again. A vacuum with nothing between it and air not subject to the spell is about as unstable as it gets. Not because I don't like the idea, but because I'm thinking about how can a GM get creative in the same way you're getting creative.

I could see this being way to easily abused to remove cyberware from adversaries. <just playing devil's advocate to yours>

In most of these cases, I think if one is going to make an interpretation that departs from known examples of similar phenomena, then the person doing the departing needs to state that things are not going to work as anticipated by those examples.