The adept in my group has an "heirloom" katana that he would like to upgrade from force 1 to force 4. I couldn't find any rules for or against. Anyone have an answer?

-- I don't see anything in Street Magic about it. In fact, this got me wondering, and I even checked the original Grimoire. Nope, not mentioned. I assume you can't do it.

you can do almost anything with a unique enchantment, i think.

so the question really is, do you want him to be able to? if yes, you now have an excuse to allow it, if no, you just tell him no.

Since there's no rules expressly forbidding a focus from being upgraded, I'd say it'd be possible. With GM's permission, of course. Personally I'd consider it to be something more difficult since you're taking an established enchanted item and changing it.

I really see no reason why not. As long as he's paying for the difference, why not?

Its down the GM really and I like the idea of an item 'growing' like this, sort of like Earthdawn items and their history.

I would look at developing a unique enchantment where one of the ingredients would be the foci in question.

Probably going to need someone with master level smithing as well to reforge the blade during this process.

Or if don't feel like melting it down and recasting, make the ritual involve carving a series of runes along the blade. All the normal costs and ingredients apply but uses the sword as the base so to speak to build on.

You have to learn key knowledge's, then threads into the items' pattern....wait, never mind.

I've never allowed it, for the same reason you can't 'upgrade' your WR2 to WR3. You can rip them out and replace them, but you can't upgrade the existing item.

Except, you sort of can: You can credit the essence lost against the (now removed) WR2 towards the essence cost of WR3. You cannot do that with the karma spent on a focus. (And since you can buy WR2 second hand, it stands to reason that you can sell your old WR2 to offset the cost a little, like trading in a car.)

So I don't really have an issue with upgrading a focus from a balance point of view. Also, with the new Qi focus tattoos, I like the idea of adding to a tattoo to make it more powerful. Just make sure you have enough Legend Points to....never mind.

Actually, you can't.

Well, I may be behind on SR4/5.

In SR2-3, optional rules allowed you to have essence 'holes' from removed cyberware, which could be used first before losing more Essence. But that came later, and was not RAW in any of the corebooks IIRC.

Pretty Sure that Essence Holes are RAW in the SR4A Core Book.

I'll defer to that, I'm not digging out my hardcopy SR4A


Maybe some kind of rules in the magic splat book to 'disenchant' foci you've bonded and recoup some of the karma to spend on new bondings? But only by losing the old focus.