so for many societies there's an overarching magical paradigm or religion that you can see many mages slotting right into. sioux wildcats have shamans, japanacorps and the imperial marines have shinto casters, etc. but the good old UCAS, melting pot that it is, doesn't seem to have a dominant religion of any real kind. this seems like a problem for magicians in the military in particular, as i can't imagine this bullshit with hermetic circles goes over very well. better than waving around a stick like some fucking keebler in the forest, but not by much. i sort of don't see many academic or corporate magicians going for that whole hermetic thing, but that's a different thread.

so what does UCAS military magic look like then? i'm thinking it's something like the fairbain and skyes knife fighting manuals from back in the combatives era. lots of precise formula diagrams titled "MAG-100012-A SUMMONING OF ELEMENTAL, FIRE" and like that. standardized foci color-coded to force and function. lots of chanting about how this is your rifle instead of invoking ancient gods. hermeticism with a government-issue stick up its ass. with the occasional adept going out and getting a BORN TO KILL qi focus of a big dagger in a bleeding heart tattooed on his arm that is not at all regulation.

does this sound rightish? thoughts? i'm thinking about making an adept sniper with a sweet cyberarm, and i want him to have flava. tastes like kubrick, shoots like zaitsev kinda thing.

at least CAS military has Christian Theurgy

You can't really foist a tradition on someone. If you could indoctrinate them properly from birth, maybe, but for the military? The mages they get are already have their tradition, and there's not changing that, so the military just gets to deal with it.

I see ucas being non-denominational like you said. You would probably be able to find pocket manuals in very fine print detailing the standard uses and counter actions for magical threats. Out side of that it seems hard to pin a tradition on it since having a totem isn't a choice. Any training basic soldiers had would be very cut and dry. Hmmm.... As a sniper there are tons of military traditions with them. Only one I can think of now is the boars tooth. That's when u kill a man and take the round he had chambered for you as your boars toothnecklace. Proof that u are a hunter. Or something like that.

I am SO using that for a character's foci now...

despite the disturbing implications of the symbology, the nordic runes are used by modern day scout snipers... don't google that picture.

the necklace thing is awesome. i like it.

this does bring up the interesting question: when exactly do you get your tradition? again, in other cultures it's already part of, well, your culture. but in the UCAS and some of europe, it's not like there's a dominant tradition to latch on to, exactly. so do you turn out to be talented and pick up your tradition in your teenage years (in which case enlisting and learning a "milspec magic" would be plausible and also awesome) or is it burned in even earlier than that? same with corporate mages; i imagine if you're recruited in your teens you probably learn the tradition that the corporation likes. i wonder what ares magic is like? everybody else it's almost too obvious though. except evo.

oh, oh, goddamn great idea. CAS throwback war between the states shamans! i want my totem spirit to be robert e lee! i know, stop with the confederacy jokes, but that would be epically awesome.

It's not about the culture that's around you - it's about your own beliefs. Those may be shaped and influenced by the culture around you, but they may also turn out to be contrary to it. And given that wild technomancers are a thing and wild mages aren't (or at least weren't in SR4), it seems its already there when you Awaken.

Jrotc for all your milspecmag needs. The might have something for various traditions like the chaplains for religion. They can help ubfindyour tradition.

Robert E Lee was an intresting guy. Was asked to head the union army, abhored slavery but refused to take arms against Virginia. Resigned and well we know the rest. II'd take him as a mentor spirit.

that's the thing; as soon as you want to totally hate the other side, they always have that one cool guy. lee, richtofen, rommel, yamamoto. i notice the one cool guy often tells his government that they are being dumbasses shortly before being ordered to be a dumbass on their behalf. sigh.

in all seriousness, i could see there being something of a movement on both sides of the mason dixon as far as founding father figures and totem spirits; they're as close to genuine ancestor spirits as america or the confederacy get, and i just sort of dig this idea both for the hilarious "tea party shaman" idea it gives me and also as a serious sort of invented cult of personality-cum-magical movement. to top things off, at least for the yankees it's not like there's not the masonic imagery already baked in with the founders. columbia would be a sort of appropriate totem for military/nationalist magicians in the ucas too. don't know who the canadians would worship, though. probably tim horton, them's some damn good donuts.

Where do you think that Spell Shaping Metamagic came from originally? Sure it's described as having an unaffected bubble in the middle, but then you realize its a doughnut shaped aoe spell.

You could certainly make arguments for George Washington or, yes, even Robert E. Lee being the "voice in the head" of someone who followed Wise Warrior, for instance. If that's how the mentor spirit manifests to them, if that's the form it takes...well...that's the form it takes. It's a personal belief thing, though, not a "the military TELLS you to imagine a Founding Father helping you cast Manabolt" thing.

It's a HOG's tooth. Stands for Hunter Of Gunmen and they get it out of sniper school. While in school they are called PIG's or Professionally Instructed Gunmen.

Well, the official story is that it does, because hermeticism offered a home to all those who abhorred "keebler in the forest" magic (and because one of the original authors practiced it ). Since the only way to change one's tradition is by becoming a bug shaman, the consequence for corps and governments is "suck it up or leave it" -- magic users are rare and coveted, accordingly they get a lot of leeway.

In the UCAS, you find more followers of the Hermetic way, including the military.

In the CAS, you find more followers of the Shamantic way, inlcuding the military.

At two-thirds the size, the CAS military has a magical arm that's about on par with the UCAS (Possibly a tad higher, possibly a tad lower), which is generally chalked up to the simple fact that UCAS mages get snatched up by the corps more often than CAS ones do. Totems, of course, pick the mage, not the other way around, so by the time the military gets them, the mage already has his tradition down; learning more spell formulae is where the training comes in. You can bet your sweet dippie that the Army has some interesting combat spells, and the CAS military's well known for ritual manipulation spells.

so i always kind of thought that was the difference between logical and charisma traditions, i guess; if you manifested earlier and more intuitively or in a culture that had charismatic traditions, then perhaps that's more of a shamanic "beloved by the spirits thing", whereas if you manifested later or more systematically you erred toward a logical tradition (hermeticism, chaos, whatever), but i also figured that you had a bit more choice in that tradition. so are you more "born" a hermetic then? or could you "adapt" to a different logical tradition and its trappings? it's harder to see a shaman jumping ship from speaking with the spirits of the desert to talking to kami, those are whole other gods*. it seems like a hermetic could adapt their formulae to incorporate another culture more easily; chinese geomancy is just ley lines in a different language, arguably. (probably glossing over important difference, but in principle...)

one interesting split i could see as a result in the UCAS military or even a corporate force would be between the logical mages and the shamans; if the logical mages sort of "converge" on a standard military tradition they get to be promoted and assigned regular support duties, while your shamans tend to end up being assigned to less desirable tasks. also, i just like the image of someone spraying down magical symbols with that classic military stencil style, i guess.

*i'm sort of hoping official rules for this sort of thing come up eventually; while i think spirit domains were a little restrictive in e.g. 3rd ed, i do think that water spirits probably don't like the desert and walks-the-river might have a bit of trouble talking to aoikawa-no-kami if he heads to japan.

in the novels at least, you seem to awaken with a tradition, and that tradition will not necessarily be what you grew up surrounded by.

twist, for example, is christian, grew up in japan, is specifically noted as having a very logical mind suited for decking, and when he awakened... became a dog shaman.

his sister who presumably was also christian, and who also grew up in japan, eventually becomes a wolf shaman, as i recall (although there are some pretty screwy circumstances surrounding that, it certainly was not a standard awakening).

I always put that down to Twist being dyslexic and thought the spirit contract said God Shaman.

Also rumors had it his parents never let him sit up on the furniture.....

Except that Hermeticism is, canonically, the tradition of choice among wagemages and academics. It's logical (and Logical), based on clearly defined laws and principles, as close as magic can get to being a science.

Indeed, I belive the classic quote of why so few shamans join the corp grind was 'YOU tell Coyote he only gets a 15 minute coffee break.'

Awakened, especially those useful in the military, are a fraction of 1% of the total population. The fraction of THAT who would be interested in the military versus opening their own business, joining the corps, turning to the shadows, or just exploring the astral is even smaller (I would suspect physical adepts would be over-represented as a share of the total adept population). You could probably put every single magician, shaman, and adept in the UCAS military in one large room. As they are a high-value asset the amount of money lavished on them is probably quite high measured in nuyen/spellcaster, but a pittance in the greater scheme of things.

Most mages and shamans are probably going to be used in an ISTAR (ISR) role, working at an upper echelon level unless specifically detached for a mission. There's no real controlling or standardization among the assets you will have available at any time so this is probably ad-hoc and determined on a case-by-case basis with the (probably mundane) commander consulting his Awakened staff. Most soldiers probably have limited exposure to magic, but it doesn't need to be pure book learning. You could have a few mages on training teams that show troops what to look out for with anchored spells (the post-Alamais material will be particularly fresh and relevant), what it feels like during a Mind Probe so you can sound an alert, the capabilities of elementals and countermeasures, binding and control of Awakened prisoners, etc.

(I wrote about this years ago, but the rules and the setting has changed quite a bit since then.)

In some areas of the globe where open magic is still frowned on, military forces still utilize such individuals under a 'Don't Ask, Don't Spell' Policy.

i think i worded that poorly; i meant more that i don't see them going in for a bunch of monastic robes and arcane formulas written in ass-around crowley* ciphers. hermeticism as such, sure, but i imagine the trappings to be much more power suit and excel flowcharts, and each company having its specific flavor to the magic that you kind of had to adopt to be part of the team. sort of hermeticism if the apple design team got its hands on pentagrams, you know? just as arcane, except sleek management-speak and not succeed and suck eggs so much.

side note: mystic bureaucracy would be an awesome tradition. rituals consist primarily of consulting the org chart of hell and filling out forms to requisition spirits.




*probably not techically a hermetic, but i don't know enough john dee to make any jokes about him.

cool, i'll check the link.

however, this seems to be one of the things where the background is at odds with its own numbers. UCAS is what, 180 million people still? so 1.8 million awakened, at least. even if 1% of those go military, you're still looking at 1800 military awakened. i guess it depends on your definition of large room, but that still seems like enough that the higher-ups would prefer to regiment and control their tradition rather than let do their own non-regulation magical thing. officially, anyway.

Awakened are WAY over-represented in the shadows for some reason, which distorts the perception of their ubiquity. It's actually 1% Awakened, and then a fraction of that even develop their talents. It's never been quite clear why an Awakened would bother with the national militaries much unless they were really patriotic or something, if you want combat experience you could probably get more as a Lone Star wagemage.

There's probably regulations and guidebooks about magic, but I can't imagine it being anything that a shadowrunner wouldn't already know or common-sense type of stuff. Most doctrinal publications would include section on magic, and there are certainly lessons-learned that would be applied to military mage (I like the term "warlock") training.

The guidelines for military Awakened are probably pretty loose. What would even be the point of trying to lock things down? One of the nice things about the way Shadowrun magic works is that you don't need to invent weird "military only" spells or restrictions (yes, I know there are some "military" spells in War!) so they would get trained much like everyone else. Depending on the nation they may be a separate branch of service (or de facto separate) and have their own recruiting and initial training courses, or they may try to integrate more - so Joe the Dog Shaman goes to UCAS Marine boot camp with everyone else, then gets sent to Applied Thaumatology for his A-school. Probably depends. We don't really know a lot about Shadowrun military stuff, much less military magic.

YMMV, here. I can very easily see a guy in fatigues drawing a Hermetic circle on a battlefield, albeit some ways back from the front lines.

oh, i can too. i just imagine him doing it in spray-paint with regulation-approved stencils for hermetic symbols and reading from a spellbook written in that stilted FRONT TOWARDS ENEMY step-by-step kind of style.

ithe thing that i'm thinking about when i'm thinking military magic and standardization is logistics; if everybody uses the same tradition, it's the same reagents and foci, so no need to truck in live chickens special to the middle of nowhere for major houngan's binding ritual. nobody calls powerball the smiting fist of asura or something weird like that, they call it the "M462 Physical Damage Incantation, Area Effect" so you can call in an M462 over the comm if you need to. diversity of magicians is in some ways a significant disadvantage for UCAS troops and corporate armies that have culturally diverse Awakened forces. all renraku has to do is keep its mages stocked in o-fudo and fresh cherry blossoms, not try to get the night moss to the wiccan at firebase alpha and the rat skin to the shaman over at firebase delta. i concede that perhaps this is one of those overthinking the whole gandalf vs. terminator things, i guess,

As to Awakened ratios, IIRC, 1% of the population is Awakened but only 10% of them ever learn to express it.

Of those, 90% are aspected in some way (Astral projection only, physical adepts, sorcerers, conjurers), with only 10% being full-blown mages.

(That's about 1 in 10,000 people is a full mage, which seems off by a factor of 10. Hrm. OH! Wait! Initiation!)

Only 10% of the Awakened population ever manages to Initiate, it being more than most can really focus on. So, you have about 1 Initiated magician per 100,000 people, so Seattle (3 million-ish people) has around 30 Initiated magicians, *roughly*.

There are about 3000 mages in Seattle, split pretty evenly between Hermetic and Shamanistic, with the Hermetics largely working for big institutions (Corps, military, etc) and teh Shamans largely working otherwise. (Council Island, crime syndicates, etc) ... this isn't a hard rule, mind you, as you'll find Aztechnology Shamans and Hermetic street magicians, but it's a good rule of thumb.

Logistically, mages don't require much special support. In appearance they are unlikely to be much different from their compatriots unless you see them flying around. Government-supplied telesma will be marked by tradition, but there's not that many they have to worry about (a whopping two, in most cases).

The flashy fireball stuff is so tactically insignificant I doubt it's considered very important (and marks you as a priority target for heavy weapons). Just issue the mage a standard carbine and train him how to use it, especially since combat zones will probably have more than their fair share of background count issues. Many mages may never leave the wire, and sit in heavily warded areas surrounded by drones and heavy weapons while they summon, create preparations for the command staff and special forces bubbas, and patrol the astral.

holy crap. mages definitely overrepresented in player groups, then. is that 10% of all awakened initiate across the classes, or just 10% of full mages?

with numbers like that, it seems like the priorities for magic are way too generous in character creation. almost like D needs to be shifted up to C or even B and shove the rest of them up or out accordingly. or are the 10% of 1% numbers "official" census numbers, and a lot of the shadowrunners are missed in the official count? with only a thousand full mages in seattle, it's hard to believe any of them would be in a situation where they wouldn't have steady employment and have to do shadowrunning jobs. absent criminal history, of course.

-- It's a setting conceit. I think people really underestimate even street-level Shadowrunners because of how their opposition and other NPCs are written up.

-- Shadowrunners are murder-hobos, but they tend to be extraordinarily skilled murder-hobos for the most part.

I don't see shadowrunners as fitting the demographics on a census. In the shadows you either thrive or die young. These mages have a nice tool to help them thrive. but yeah... there do seem to be a bit too many awakened around. That and elves. no one likes elves.

it's not the number of awakened shadowrunners so much as the skew towards full mages that's odd. now i know the archetypes were the victims of rule changes during development and other things, but there's three casters and they are all full mages. not a single aspected magician of any kind. i realize shadowrunners are special snowflakes, but it seems like there needs to be a lot more cost to play a full mage or a lot more encouragement to play an aspected mage going by those numbers. also, how does a full mage get away with crimes? you can pretty much count the number of them that don't have the alibi "hey, i was at my actual job" on one hand. when the witness says "it was an elf with salish tattoos" and you establish he cast a spell and summoned something or was astrally projecting, you got a pretty good lead on eats-the-leaves down in the barrens, don't you? i mean, he is the one elf shaman that isn't working for a corp in all of seattle, more or less.

Yeah... looking back it always seemed to be a huge loss of power to go aspected for not a whole lot back. Maybe it needs a bit of an adjustment in character Gen.

yep. looking at the numbers, it seems like bumping priority c and d up to priority a and b makes the most sense, or using street level character creation and moving the resources column down one notch (so 450,000 at B, 275,000 at C, and so on...). seems like it would match the statistics given a lot better, anyway

Yup, Shadowrun groups have an established conceit that "real teams have mages", despite the in-universe rarity. If you go back to the original novels, the team that Sally Tsung lead was special in that they had a mage ... she singe-handedly made them players in the scene. (As for Aspected Magicians, I know at one point Initiation required astral projection, since you had to draw some power from the metaplanes. I confess that I'm not certain about this currently. If still teh case, then aspected magicians who can't go astral aren't able to Initiate.

Priorities could stand to be jiggered for a "Less common magic" game, easily. Back in the day, it was A for full mage, B for full mage if Metatype (Since Metas were all Priority A), minus a step for Aspected.

For SR5, you could reasonably say something like:
A) Magic 4 Magician with two skills at 4 and eight spells OR Aspected Magician with Magic 6, two skills at 6, and either 12 spells or two more skills at 6.
B) Magic 2 Magician with two skills at 2 and four spells OR Aspected Magician with Magic 4, two skills at 4, and either 8 spells or two more skills at 4.
C) Aspected Magician with Magic 2, two skills at 2, and either 4 spells or two more skills at 2.
D) Aspected Magician with Magic 1
E) No magic.

This makes the Aspected guys a touch more powerful in their focus, but my off the top of my head numbers likely don't match the correct numbers. (Spells and skills aren't equal cost, for instance.)

Aspects are, of course, 1) Adepts (Usually physical but not always), 2) Sorcerers, C) Conjurers, D) Astrals

I'd probably go ahead and say that Aspected Magicians could Initiate too, just to be fair. *handwavium* In the 60 years of magical research and refinement, eventually a way was discovered to allow aspected magicians to briefly contact the astral plane, pulling enough power to properly Initiate. These low levels are useless to nromal magicians, but due to the laser-like focus in their area of specialization, it serves quite well for Aspected Magicians.

Note that this results in weaker general mages as well, which is to encourage people to weigh the alternatives. I did it first with a 1 point difference, but Magic 5 that can cats spells, summon spirits, and astral project, vs Magic 6 who can just cast spells isn't a large enough gap.

(Oh, as for Astral Adepts, those with Magic 1 can Astral Perceive. Those with Magic 3+ can Astrally Project. It's not a popular aspect, but Astral Perceivers are a *great* wat to round out a security force. Those guys never hurt for employment.)

thanks; i'll play with these numbers a bit, but at first glance this seems to work nicely. initiation is for everyone in 5th ed, so that's cool already. given how easy it is to bump up your magic with special attribute points i think i'd whack full mages down to starting magics of 1 and 3. the discrepancy is just huge otherwise. or play it street level and let b be the highest priority anyway.

i do hope something like this makes it into actual errata at some stage; one of the worst things about the current character creation system is that there is literally no benefit to playing an aspected magician that outstrips losing the abilities of a full mage or mystic adept, despite the fact that they should be the dominant type however much the shadows skew the ratios. you're just punishing yourself to play one the way things stand. i don't want to be all "magic needs a nerf!" but if you pay any attention to the setting there's just way too much of it going around.

Two things I forgot.

One, Enchanting should be on there as an Aspected option, with "Preperations" in place of "Spells" as an option.

Two, Mystic Adepts are like Magicians, but with 1 less magic, 2 less spells, and each skill lowered by 1. That, combined with the "5 Karma per Power Point" should bring them in line with everyone else. (Thus, Magic A gives you a Magic 3 Mystic Adept, while B gives you a Magic 1. Thus, if you want a mage who also has Adept powers, you pay on the yinyang for it.)

Player groups have NEVER been expected to be representative - they're completely extraordinary by nature, and any attempt to enforce the statistical distribution is a Bad Idea. Offering Aspected a greater advantage, sure, but boxing out the Magic 6 option is uncalled for.



Sure, there are reasons why they would want to do it - but they can't. Even that whole "spray-painting" route is a bad idea. There are other logical traditions, though - a character who doesn't go in for the Hermetic thing could be a Chaos Mage, for example.

in terms of game mechanics. it's in no way boxed out by doing this. you can still boost your magic up to six with your special attribute points or karma. it just has a cost that is commensurate with the power and rarity of the character. the mage has the power of three types of character and he can astrally project, while the mystic adept has the power of four types of character. they're ridiculously underpriced as compared to aspected magicians as is. the priority table is completely fucked, i think other threads have discussed that to death. if you're going to be a full mage, that should be all you get to be, because that's more than enough advantage. also, i think it may be worth recalibrating the concept of average magic. remember, average magic was 6 until 4th ed.

in terms of internal setting consistency, if wakshaani's numbers are in fact canon (can't find a reference myself for the exact distribution of types), then a full mage or mystic adept is about as rare as someone with deltaware. yet every shadowrunner team has one and there are no aspected example characters, yet no starting character gets deltaware? while i realize these are not exactly equivalent for various reasons, the corps probably keep as hard a lock on full mage employees as they do operatives with deltaware. 30 initiated mages in all of seattle? you literally should never meet one unless he is attempting to fry you for breaking into the top-security corporate headquarters he is tasked with protecting.
why he would ever work on the street is incomprehensible. either magic is more common than the setting supports, or the distribution of characters isn't just unusual, but skewed beyond any level of believability for the setting.

Wak is taking his numbers from Street Magic and a few other places.

Just to be clear: Charging a player for "rarity" is one of the dumbest design decisions you could possibly make. As for commensurate to their power, I disagree with that statement - having to allocate your A priority (or B+Special Attributes for a lesser version) as well as having to set something else to E is one hell of a cost. I think, perhaps, that you're not looking at all the interactions here.

don't forget military draft. Every Awakened will serve at some point. And don't forget, that the military has a lot of experience in sweeting the pot for valuable assets in order to make them stay just a little while longer. Free education comes to mind.

and every kind of awakened will be useful. Astral aspect? great at scouting. Knows only one spell? Still more than 99% of the population.

Note that the modified chart I have above is intended to lower magical occurance to resemble an in-world commonality. It's obviously not for everyone. And, yeah, Magic A + some of your special points from race *is* a huge cost. It's supposed to be for this. It's designed to encourage aspected magicians and make full magician be a huge investment.

As for the official numbers Tzeentch grabbed, man, 3 million-ish worldwide? I guess I never sat down to run the numbers on a more global scale. It'd be about 1 million mages per billion people, roughly. Hrm.

Back to military casters, it's more likely that they'd be aspected (obviously), and probably kept back for support and elite roles: PFC Johnson doesn't get to have a buddy beside him to counterspell and toss fireballs. Command does, but that's different. You *might* have a mage at the Company level, but I doubt it. Odds are that you only get them at Battalion sizes and, then, they're organized into a "Magical support platoon" (being generous! More likely "Magical support fire team".) The real juice won't happen until then regimental level, where you have a nice remote casting circle lead by an initiated mage and some astral scouts/spirit support.

(IIRC, current US theory is to go from Regimental levels of deployment/engagement to something more akin to a reinforced battalion. Offensive magical units are going to be of less use than defensive ones, however, as you need to protect the C&C from, say, ritual mind control. The UCAS is rightly paranoid about such things since the Ghost Dance war.)

Not only in player groups. Honestly they are overrepresented in every source of fluff you open. I actually think those numbers should be changed. If you can't stay true to your own numbers, you should change them. Magical active persons in novels take up about 10% of the characters, some in offical stories. (Probably even more)
So saying: 5% magical active, 2% full mages, 0.5% initiated, and the rest may be adepts with or without initiation and aspected or something else.

But only 1% magically active and of those only a fraction mages... Sorry, does not work. Then you can't give every corp team spirits or a mage. And if you crack down on initiations even harder, well.... But for some reason they opposition just has this guy...


No, the point is: If you are an initiate you probably know them all by name. Thats how freaking small this group is.
There are probably more initates described in publications than there should actually be after this calculation.
This magic is so rare does not fit the description of the freaking world.

@Wakshaani

Shadowrun has a world population of about 20 billions. 3-4 millions would be mages. (Well, thats at least a bit more than shinryu came up with)
But still. Thats one in 5000. That not even close to the description of the world.
It gets obvious if you run it on a smaller scale.
If you take novels and "runs" you might come up with 1 to 50 at best. Now, of course that would not be representative, but unless you have a real good reason coming up with concentraitions a hundred times over the avarage is a bit much.

I'm aware that I'm coming off a little harsh, and I do apologize for that, but I simply do not understand why people figure that PCs, who are completely exceptional by their very nature, should be expected to model the actual demographics of the setting.

The point most people have is (I guess) that it is not only PCs. The whole world changes. If every group of 4-5 players has at least 2-3 magical active runners the opposition needs magical support too. The problem is not explaining why in a group of 5 there are 2 mages and one adept. Thats maybe possible. But due to the effect magic has on the game itself (namly that magic can actually only be countered by magic) the opposition will need mages too. That means that every streetgang (even in the descriptions) has at least 1-2 mages. It does not matter that those gangs have at at most 1000 members (mostly maybe around 50 to 100) putting them far above the avarage.

There are two possibilities to really make it work. The first one is to increase the number of mages in the game world (from 1% magically active to around 5% etc.) the other is to restrict magic.

The only reason street gangs are a threat to professional runners is the "any idiot can get lucky" principle (seriously, PR0 and 1 grunts, which are identified as being your thugs and gangers, are pretty firmly in "steamroll" territory). They do not need magic for this to hold true. That said, the mages that are around WILL be radically overrepresented in some areas, and incredibly underrepresented in others; there's no way the spread of mages is anything approaching even. If you're a gang and someone Awakens in your territory, you do whatever you can to recruit them. As far as magical security goes, one mage acting as a sort of "astral dispatch" can secure many sites by dispatching spirits as needed.

Demographics are just that: Demographics. It's one of those things thats ome people like to have more than others. For example, grab SR 1 and count how many black or Asian folks are in the archetype section. Getting a little more 'proper balance' helps keep things feeling more in line with the world. (You can, as noted, also change the world. Eventually, something like 99% of the population will be magically active once the mana levels get high enough, so a slowly increasing number of magicians makes sense, but it'll take a LONG time to get there.)

From there, it's a matter of making the more common things more appealing. There are supposed to be something akin to 10 Aspected Magciians per Full Magician, so some mechanic to reflect that would seem to be in order. Similar steps were taken with Metatypes. Back in SR1, it was Priority A if you wanted to be a Troll, Ork, or Elf, which are clearly not equal levels of 'power'. It was later changed to make Trolls and Dwarves higher than Orks and Elves, a trend which has continued to SR5, with Troll, then Dwarf, then Ork, Elf, and Human as your priority drops. This winds up in a selection not too far from actual demographics (Trolls and Dwarves being about 1% each of the population, Orks and Elves being about 30%, Humans the rest.)

It's world building given mechanical support.

It does not matter if they are a threat or not. The point is for mere "representation" they will be there. And as soon as you go for the steam rolling there will be more of them.
Like I said, if you read novels, adventures and so on you will find you have probably a ration of one to 10 or even higher.

And in any RPG the way it is played always plays into the question how the world is described. If only 1% of all groups ever use drones, than writing a run you probably won't assume that the players use drones. But if 90% of all groups have 2 or more magically active characters, well you will take this into account.

And again with 30 initiates in seattle you have quite a hard time explaing why "Mr. super mage" just happens to come along. (And why with him there are not at least 100 swat)

If you assume that out of 10 mages 1 works in military/security or anything involving fighting thats quite a high number, the numbers keep shrinking.
30 initates are down to 3, and 300 mages are down to 30. (If out of those fighting mages the runners allready are two of the initiates and have met around 10 mages who are doing something else...

so, tired, apologize if this is less cogent than i would prefer:

1) regarding charging a player for rarity being a dumb design decision; actually, no, going to disagree there. not respecting rarity is how we get an entire party of d'rizzt clones and true brujah and drakes, retarded shit like that. there are like, four centaurs in the entire world, and three of them are in your shadowrunning team? i mean, if that's your story, i guess that's cool, but if we are going to base the game on "typical" shadowrunners, the very fact a full mage is handy is almost a defining trait of the team not being typical. going by these numbers, a mage is much more ars magica scary dude in a tower than a typical rpg wizard. full mages almost shouldn't be player characters.

2) it's not just charging for rarity, more importantly it's charging for capability. again, a full mage or mystic adept is as good as FOUR aspected magicians in terms of potential. right now, the priority system is screwed beyond belief in terms of making aspected magicians completely worthless as opposed to just taking a full magician and not learning what you don't want to learn. that needs to be fixed, badly. just being a full mage is easily worth priority A and magic 2 to start, in my opinion, but i think magic 3 is fair.

3) i think one of the problems that's plagued the transition from 3rd to 4th and 5th ed is that magic 6 used to be the default rating, but now magic 3 is actually average. people still think you need magic 6 to be any good at anything, and unfortunately the game retains some elements built around that assumption. but if you're going to take the distribution of attributes seriously in light of the supposed rarity of uber-powerful magicians, you need to recalibrate your expectations of what a magic user should look like. having a 6 in any other attribute costs a lot, and magic is a hell of a lot more valuable than any other attribute, period. by the sheer diversity of their talent pool, a full mage should be paying three to four times the cost per magic point of an aspected magician if we really want to be balanced about their costs.

4) it's kind of hard to believe full mages don't all know each other, not just initiates. i guess it's explained by the differences in traditions more than anything; i wouldn't imagine elite shamans have a lot to say to elite hermetics about how awesome coyote is or whatever they talk about, and even then there are divides in the groups other than tradition. there's shinto japanacorp mages, military or government hermetics, etc. of the initiates, i am reasonably convinced that 25 or so of them are high-level officials in something (corporation, tribe, crime family, whatever) and the other five are living way off the grid doing magic whatever the hell they do. there's almost no reason for a mage of this level to do anything like the street-level shadowruns that comprise most games, except maybe to laugh at the pitiful mortals. also, every intel service for every government or corporation probably knows most of these initiates by their name, favorite color, their anal circumference and astral signature, so good luck getting away with anything.

5) the idea of a street mage is laughable given these statistics. street alchemist, street sorcerer, sure. street conjurer is iffy just cause spirits are so scary, but full mages are so rare that they are really the opposite of a good idea for a shadowrunner, as well as the people least likely to actually need to earn money via low-level mercenary terrorism. i suppose you could explain some of them as street people or late awakenings that were missed, sure, but even still the appearance of a new full-blown mage of any power on the streets is a huge, huge deal. escaped corporate mages or criminal mages? that's the kind of manhunt they don't let up on, even across borders. they might be the only full mages with a good reason to be shadowrunners, actually, since it's not like they can pop their head up and apply for a real job or anything. there's just too many ways for an awakened character to make a living outside of a shadowrun for it to be a good idea except for lunatics and criminals.

which is a long way to say that you basically should have to put every drop of character creation juice into being a full mage if they're that rare and that powerful, especially considering there is no good goddamn reason for someone like that to be hanging out in decrepit titty bars with chromed-up samurai when you could be making six figures just scratching your magical balls in an office and occasionally warding something.