What draft?

This i kinda have to agree, getting magic 6 two rating 5 skills and 10 spells for priority A is pretty damm powerfull, especially when you compare it to something like resources A that only gives piddly 450k nuyen.

bang on. for the sake of consistency, you almost have to have 80% or more of mages doing security work to make the situation work out as it seems to in most games. which is actually fine in my own head, since i can't imagine there's much "legitimate" work for mages. nobody gives two fucks about the metaplanes, and while magical healing is awesome and all it's still not nearly as valuable as magical security and magical intel gathering. independent magical security contractor is probably one of the few things you can do that is really rare enough to be viable as a business on its own that would keep you out of the corps, but even then it's a legitimate job that puts you up against shadowrunners, not working with them.

part of the reason you can justify uber-mages at a site a bit is that said uber-mages should probably only ever show up astrally. but that means that runners absolutely must be prepared to deal with spirits and that corporate security has to truck out a new boatload of preparations to every high-security site a mage is watching every night. pain in the ass, that.

furthermore, if i'm the street sam and i have a mid-level aspected sorcerer or adept on my team, cool, that makes sense; that's a level of magical goodness that's not at least as valuable as being a medical doctor and probably not that much rarer than being a chromed-up combat vet. if fucking gandalf joins my run, i got to start thinking about three things:

1) he's going after the one ring (cause he don't give a shit about the treasure/actual objective 90% of the time, and he shouldn't need the money), and i'm in the dark about what's really going on.
2) we are in fact going to go fight smaug (lofwyr, whatevs)
3) this man is too wanted to work legitimately or he's FUCKING INSANE (look at the beard, man! shave that shit, hobo!)

i think it is telling that of the three archetypes for mages in 3rd ed, two of them are a bug-fuck rat shaman and a tribal shaman that thinks a good meal is good pay. full mages on the street are either too weak to make it in "real life" or too fucked up to be able to do so, whether that is legally or mentally or culturally. or real bad shit™ is going on.

a yakuza mage or other criminally affiliated magician might be able to justify a bit of freelance work on the side, but the risk of exposure is so high he'd better be in a lot of debt or a lot of boredom to justify it. you can bet law enforcement keeps a real tight eye on keiichi the rengo-gumi mage, and even if they don't pop him after a run gone bad the bribes to keep him free go through the roof. bye, bye, keiichi's pinky (into the flash freezer and back to japan to sit and wait for him to misbehave again. oh, holy shit, bet the yakuza do that with EVERYBODY who fucks up! that's fucking awesome).

i do think the initation percentage is probably a bit too low, maybe closer to 10% across all the grades, with the 1% being initates that have done multiple grades. otherwise, there isn't really enough of a magical society to speak of. it's like vampire the masquerade's population problems. except at least there the vampires are all supposed to know each other more or less, rather than living in walled fortresses in what are basically mutually antagonistic countries.

The Sioux Nation has a mandatory draft, but I don't think they have any higher percentage of Awakened than anyone else (they do have a significantly higher percentage of trolls in the population, though).

I think it's clear that the "1%" figure is just a carry-over from Shadowrun 1 fluff text and hasn't reflected in-game reality for a LONG time (probably not even in SR1, actually). It's easy enough to weasel out of with the fact that accurate census information is practically impossible to get even in the North American countries (where up to 20% of any nations population isn't even registered), and the spikes caused by the Ghost Dance, Dunkelahn's little plots, and Aztlan Bridge building, could be accelerating the number of the Awakened being born, and the support and training network is more advanced so you lose less kids to madness or ignorance.

I was about to say something, then remembered I could simply copy and paste myself:

yeah, but a security mage isn't really equivalent to a beat cop; he's probably closest to a network security expert that might kill himself programming (ok, yeah, that is a network security expert in shadowrun, but you know what i mean). he's definitely SWAT caliber; even as a doctor, much more an anesthesiologist than a ear nose and throat guy. security mages make bank, if for no other reason than to insure as much loyalty as money can buy. maybe aspected alchemists and sorcerers only work for twice grunt pay, but a full mage is worth all the nuyen you can throw at him.

this is assuming 1% scarcity, of course. tzeentch's point is well-taken. i could easily see magical talent going up from 1 in 100 to 1 in 20 by the 2070's, and/or better training and awareness of magic bringing that 1% of 1% success rate up significantly. in 2050, a thirty year old mage grew up with echo mirage and people barely knowing what the fuck was going on with magic. in 2070, that same mage grew up with cyberdecks and a dragon president. shit's changed on the streets. it doesn't fix the game balance issues with the 5th ed system, but that's clearly it's own issue.

also, here is your personal horror for the day: child alchemists in vietnamese foci sweatshops. you make foci! you make foci faster! didi mao! or slaving away in the back of some talismonger's shop making illegal preparations that don't trace to any registered mage. and getting mercury poisoning. wouldn't that be hilarious? this huge chunk of poor awakened kids being burned out by being forced to work with toxic alchemy chemicals in sweatshops, their talent more of a curse than a blessing. i love it. and it's a great backstory for an actual street mage with a reason to be on the street. once he learned how to cast spells, the employer/employee relationship took a new, brief, very painful turn for the employer. but he's got no sin, nowhere else to go and a crime syndicate looking for his blood.

or child adept soliders. rare, but still cheaper than cyber!

The other point is, that mages would be darn valuable. This would mean that even if you just send the astral active guy, you woul send at least swat team of 50 or more guy with him.

So if the mage is coming for you, you will have your hands full (at least if the mage suspects astral resistance).

@Nath
One percent of 310 million is 3.1 Million.
10% of 3.1 million is 310.000. And that would be the number of mages you would have...(Looking at the age is not really called for, because a child won't be a full developed mage)
1 million full mages and 1 million adepts and 1-2 million aspected mages would be enough, I grant you that. But you end up far bellow that.

yep. one astral badass and probably a spirit or two, accompanied by two choppers full of swat/firewatch/red samurai soliders, including a couple of sorcerers or conjurers handy and a whole swarm of drones. HTR teams do not have room to fuck around, especially if summoning isn't fixed.

on the other hand, if he's got to just do the astral look around for the alarm going off, they probably don't call the HTR team till he gets back and says "oh shit." so you have some margin. of course, there's every chance he drops off a spirit to keep you busy in the meantime. i could see a lot of standoffs between runner teams and corpsec with a backup spirit happening.

Isn't an HTR team coming SUPPOSED to mean that you're screwed if you don't get the hell out of dodge? And isn't one of the core principles of teams like that overwhelming force?

BTW, the original quotes for the number of mages, are, as far as I can tell, the two following ones:
Awakenings was a 2nd edition sourcebook, so all Awakened characters started with Magic 6, and the difference between untrained and capable were skills and known spells. It seems "fully capable" encompassed aspected mages. It also suggests there are way more adepts than there are magicians. As a side note, the numbers given suggest a world population of only three to four billions (while more recently, The Clutch of Dragons used a seven billions figure).

The Sixth World Almanac does cover every major nation. The total population from that is 3,398,645,781. So The Clutch of Dragons is certainly wrong.

The Clutch numbers were before Lunch, the Almanac after?

Military mages are actually an interesting idea.

It's a sweet pot for a military mage, if you think about it. Everything that a mage could want that's hard to get your hands on in the Shadows is going to be something the chain-of-command will bust their ass to get to their military mages. Power Foci? They probably have a magical logistics corps busting their ass making the things for front-liners. Spell formulae? Even if you belong to some weird tradition, they'll bust their ass to get it for you, and it won't be hard for them, either. And once they have X spell for Z tradition, they have it for good. You want to learn to heal and you happen to be a Hedge Witch? Well, that's no problem, we had a Lieutenant Reinhardt who was a Wiccan back in '68. She's not with us anymore, but we still have the books all holo-scanned. Need to set up a Lodge with Force equal to your magic? If you're a camo-collar mage operating in a combat theater, chances are there's a shipping container with everything you need to set up that lodge with your name literally written on it, just waiting to be airlifted to you. There's also probably generic lodge materials available for the most common Traditions in various Force ratings.

(Buddhists might be hard to accommodate since their tradition forbids them from learning from materials, only from an elder.)

The downside is that, well, quite honestly the military isn't going to want to let you retire. You've got a great career track ahead of you, assuming your desired career is "Military officer-mage until the day you die." They'll sure as hell be glad to throw money at you - I wouldn't be surprised if any awakened characters automatically earned a pay grade or two above their actual rank, and full magicians probably earn more. Your continuing education in the magical arts will be quite clear.

The problem is that a magician's spells and an Adept's powers aren't something they can be ordered to turn in to the Quartermaster when they muster out. And even most military-type cyberware probably has legitimate uses in a non-hostile field, even if it is stretching things a bit, but there's basically no legitimate use for Mob Mind or Fireball.

So now you're on file as knowing this stuff, they know what you can do, and when it's being pointed at the enemy, great! But you tell them you want to resign and go find an apartment somewhere, they get skeevy.

And of course, you sure as shit know they have a ritual sample for you somewhere. Even if they arrange your own extraction, you're likely to be fried when you're not expecting it.

Yeah, but that's a solvable problem: Destroy the sample as part of the extraction. Hell, same problem actually comes up in Dragon Age: Origins (the mage origin).

Destroy a ritual sample.

In a military vault, which is going to be on a military base, guarded by military soldiers in heavy, mil-spec gear, supplemented with military drones and military mages?

The team to take the job would have to be insane, or the best runners in the world, and they would demand appropriate compensation. No way you're wrangling up that kind of cash on a military salary.

Yeah, but if they're gonna have to extract you from a military base, they're already dealing with a lot of that. Option B is to get a hacker good enough to corrupt the records of which ritual sample belongs to whom.

Getting you off a base is probably going to be a lot easier than getting the sample in the vault, especially since the magician is almost certainly an officer and can arrange things favorably.

It's unclear if you can preserve a material link forever (I would assume that your astral connection fades over time even if its under a Preserve spell, but The Grimoire says that with careful collection it can last forever). But you get one chance to use it. Unless you have a whole battery of links on file, that's pretty risky.

That's certainly true, but the point is more that you'd find some way to deal with the ritual sample problem. Though, I wonder if it would be possible to design a ritual that used you as a link to a ritual sample.

Fixed that for you

So what? You just have one shot to kill? Well, I guess they would just store 3 samples and make the "killshot" the last one.
Anyhow. Meeting in aspected BC, having 3 mages everyone supported by one spirit use ritual spellcasting will get you a lot of hits, combine that with a high force area spell and you will probably kill the guy and the people who took him...

If the military keeps material links (especially multiple) that just further reduces the appeal of working for them (that's something only the hardcore magical groups do). In any case, I think the "forever links" is a bit much, which may be why they've obfuscated that in more recent editions.

That material sample is not just for spell tracking, as a mage you will be wanting the best type-matched material for regrowing damaged parts and the military can afford to splurge on this bit to keep you in fighting form.

Of course, there's also the thing where you don't want to kill your mage just because someone's taken him against his will...

It also helps if you can ritually dump a healbomb on your magician if he's operating alone behind enemy lines, or locate him if he's been captured.

The ritual link isn't just to scry and fry your mage if he decides he'd rather work for himself or for somebody else. It simply has that additional benefit.

It really depends on the rest of the contract. You know a ritual sample in some vault will probably never bite you.
(Unless you want to be a runner some day but that begs the question what you did by the military to begin with.
Yes, just going to the military to qualify/get the money for collage or something won't be that good.
You better aim for general.

But thats pritty much the feel of shadowrun. You more or less get born into stuff. Your father was working for Ares, you are working for Ares and guess what your son will be doing.

While the inside of corperations are run like communism/fascism (every thing like clockwork) the outside is nearly reduced to anarchy.
Like: Our education programm has a 100% success rate and if I need to cut open your fucking brain!

If you add the number provided by third edition sourcebooks for countries not covered by the Sixth World Almanac, it goes up to 5,159,843,502.

And this does not include China coastal provinces (Shanghai, Zhejiang, JIangsu and Shandong, 252 millions nowadays), Constantinople, Turkey and East Anatolia (76 millions now), Ukraine (49 millions with its Moldovian protectorate) and a number of other Eastern European, Chinese, African and South American countries. So I would expect the actual number to be much closer to 6 billions.

I swear I did the math early when 4ed came up and got a number around 8 billion by extrapolating current growth rates and subtracting the various calamities that occurred in the intervening timeframe. I can't find the record of this now, but yeah, I definitely remember being surprised by that result. It might be wrong, though, considering I can't find how I did it or care to redo the math again.

6 billion it is

Finished some math too.

My projection is 5,870,000,000, plus a few micro-nations I didn't bother to search for.

For the countries for which no data was available, I used current numbers. To account for VITAS and other cataclysms, I applied a multiplier for Chinese and African population. The Chinese multiplier is 0.75, calculated after the Chinese states we have figures for. The North African multiplier is 0.7, calculated after Egypt. The Subsaharan African multiplier is 0.25, calculated after the Nigerian worst case scenario (hum, expressions like "Chinese Multiplier" and "Nigerian Multiplier" would sound really scary in a WHO epidemics assessment...).

It's far from complete. It doesn't take into account anything like growth rate, only the canon numbers given in SR sourcebooks. Because of VITAS and metahuman fertility, I'm not sure it's actually possible to really study SR demographics.

http://nmath.free.fr/onyx/depot/sr.population.xls

Excuse me, what was the topic?

I've attached Nath's data to my dataset and created a quick population map. Blue is no data.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/jf475nelqrg06tz/WorldPop.pdf

That's seriously handy. Thanks, guys.

Now you need to overlay this map with a map of cultures and magical traditions. From that you can calculate, how many Hermetics, Shamans, Qabalists, Christian Theurgists, Voodoo practitioners, etc there are.

Many Shadowrun cultures are not spatially contiguous. And magical tradition isn't necessarily tied to culture anyways

But I believe there are various culture layers that could be overlayed. If you find anything in particular I can try and map it on the Shadowrun data.