Next session, my players will be going to the dwelling of a now-dead shaman, which has been re-purposed by BTL dealers. The shaman's ally spirit, with the desecration of the domain, will now be a toxic spirit of some stripe or another. The problem is, is that I'm not sure what exactly I want the spirit to look like, or what powers/stats it has. I figure that the shaman, when he was still alive, ran a clinic of sorts helping out people within the neighbourhood. Because he helped treat, among other things, addictions, the dealers decided to off him because he was fragging with business. The dealers then set up shop there, not knowing about the ally spirit, and inadvertently rendered the domain toxic.

So, what to do for the spirit, stat-wise? I was thinking about making it a toxic spirit of man, but I'm unsure of which powers to exchange, and for what? Ideas? Thoughts on the setup in general?

I wouldn't make it Toxic. I'd make it a regular Free Spirit, and pissed off, but bound by its oaths not to harm on the premesis of the clinic, even though said clinic is now a drug den.

Don't make the spirit a threat for your players. Make it the Johnson.

Part of the intent here is for the Chaos Mage and Shinto Priestess in the group (of 3!) to go on an astral quest into it's home domain, and in doing so find out they're not as different as they thought. I might normally do that, but here there's a greater purpose I'm pursuing. The Johnson is actually going to be a friend of the deceased shaman, wanting to do right by his old friend and putting the spirit at peace.

But...

A Chaos Mage and a Kanmiko are prettttty much about as unalike as they could possibly be without one of them being a possession tradition.

Chaos Mages are unabashed technophiles. They view magic as the underlying rules, operating orders, or one might say, operating system, on which the laws of reality are based - and it is an operating system that can be hacked. They resist drain with their Logic attribute, because of their go-it-alone, my-mind-and-knowledge-makes-me-powerful world-view of magic. They view the spirits they summon as manifestations of the basic universal elements drawn from the fabric of astral space by the willpower of the magician themselves; entities to summon, control, and bind. There is nothing religious about their magic; they have no need for superstitious nonsense. Some folks simply won the magical lottery, and those people can hack reality as they see fit.


Whereas a Shinto Kanmiko is a religious spellcasting tradition, hidebound and staid. They're all about the rituals and shrines and spiritual cleanliness. They resist drain with Charisma, representing the strength of their personality and faith, and believe that their power derives from the Eight Million Kami, the various and collective body of spirits that inhabit all things, and need to be variously appeased, bribed, conversed with, and occasionally cajoled or coerced into playing nice with all things and granting a kanmiko her powers and, most especially, her abilities to summon them directly to lend her aid in the realm of man.


Their traditions have nothing in common, whereas a kanmiko and a nahulli or a shaman might recognize one another as being similar, simply viewing the spirits with an odd light, and a chaos mage and hermetic obviously have greatly influenced one another. Hell, they only have three spirit types in common, out of an obligate choice of five out of ten, and none of them are summoned for the same things.


The only similarities between them is that they casts the spells that makes the peoples fall down and that they're both Materialization traditions.

We really need a +1 or 'Like' button.

/em shakes a fist towards the Forum Gods

/em begs forgiveness for past transgressions of the Forum Gods

Sometimes this community annoys the crap out of me. Instead of telling someone else how to run their campaign they way you would, how about respecting their choice to play things the way they want to and actually offering up the thing they requested in the first place?

I personally haven't toyed around with Toxic Spirits as a GM, but maybe after my local session tomorrow I can read up on their powers and give you some suggestions, ZeroSpace. In the meantime, maybe someone with more experience will have some good ideas for implementing your concept.

~Umi

What is the power-scale you are looking for? That would be a good place to start. A Force 4 spirit of any type is weak where a Force 12 is really tough. Can you provide a ball-park figure? We know your team consists of 3 characters, what karma levels and basic abilities?

I appologize for not trying to be more helpful in my previous post, Umidori is correct we should not try to tell you how to run your game, even if we disagree with the premis. I'm pretty familiar with toxics in SR4, it shouldn't be that hard to do in SR5, which did you need?

Giving this a bit more thought, you will probably want to start by more-or-less creating the Ally Spirit, then when it goes free picking the new "Free Spirit Powers" (one for each point of Edge). Then corrupting it.

Alternatly, you could just start with a Harrow (Toxic Spirit of Man) and modify it like an Ally Spirit and make it free with the powers from there.

Good Free Spirit Powers (from your description) IMO:
Mutable Form
Personal Domian

From the Toxic Spirit List:
Anaphylaxis

Plus any spells the Shaman might have given it.

One thing to keep in mind here, your Astral Adventurers may not actually directly encounter the spirit in question. The spirit doesn't have to be on its home plane for the Mages to quest for information. You just need to figure out which plane is the "home plane" and what rating the Astral Quest is and make the quest appropriately difficult.

Quick reply, as this is while getting ready for work in the morning.

Yes the traditions are about as different as you can get, but the characters backstories have a lot of parallels. That's more what I meant.

Should have stated earlier, but I'm using SR4A rules.

Power-wise, I was thinking about Force 6.

Group has roughly 45 karma, the chaos mage specced for blasting and astral combat, the miko for facing and dealing with spirits, and the third guy is, for practical purposes, playing a cyber-batman.

Here's some work I did on spirits on other threads here:
Fun with Free/Ally Spirits!
Blood and Toxic and Insect, Oh My!
Nuclear Elementals, the Most Lethal Critters

Some of those will help, some may not, but I included them all because I break down some fun and interesting ideas about various types of critters.

I'll agree with DMiller up a couple - you want to start out with building the Ally Spirit and then give it abilities when it went free. To show a change to Toxic, you may just add a difference in the form it takes or an energy type it uses; for example, in a game that I helped with, there were some air spirits that were in the Barrens for a while and the group was tasked to go neutralize them. The air spirits had Elemental Attack (Cold), but as a result of the radiation of the Barrens they became tainted with Toxic energies, turning them into E.A. (Fire), and the lead spirit was E.A. (Radiation). It was a small, simple change that reflected the fact that the radioactive environment was corrupting the spirits.

For example, you could select the Guard power as something the spirit had as an ally, and now the spirit's gone Toxic, it changed to the Accident power. Or by simply adding the Corrosive Spit power and making a change to the spirit's physical form you could convey the same concept. In fact, most of the Toxic critters are simply that - you take a spirit, change the form of it to look more dangerous, and alter a couple abilities - like Energy Storm (Fire) to Energy Storm (Static) that was listed in a book that I can't find the reference for at this time. By the way, it should have totally been Energy Storm (Radiation) anyways, and it would have killed a city.

I’ve given this more thought… I hope you are open to an expanded idea. If you aren’t this may still interest others.

Rather than having this be a simple in and out one-shot, it has the potential to become an entire small story arc. Let’s suppose that the spirit in question knows what is happening to it and regrets the fact that it is becoming toxic.

The Johnson hires the team to take care of the problem (or what ever the main push is). As the team begins to check out the situation they see what has happened and is happening. As they clean up some of the mess they encounter the spirit. With the Kanmiko’s skill set (s)he has the opportunity to take this form a hostile combat situation to a talking one. If the team decides on a more peaceful route, the spirit could ask them to assist it in cleaning up the area and maybe even setting up another clinic there. Once that is completed (perhaps a couple of missions here), the spirit then asks the team for another favor… When it became free the spirit acquired the Astral Gateway power, and now asks the team to undergo an Astral Quest to cleanse the taint from it. Using Astral Gateway the whole team could take part in the Astral Quest.

In the end the team was able to accomplish what they were originally hired to do as well as make a Free Spirit contact that is now running a medical clinic. It could be a lot of fun and be several related missions.

Just my thoughts on it.

That's a really good idea. Along the way, the Chaos mage could view it as a chance to learn a secret behind hacking a Toxic spirit to cleans the astral virus that's causing it to become magical malware.

Well, the original date planned for this session didn't fall through due to weather. I likely won't run this then until the new year.

DMiller, that actually sound really interesting. It contains a trip to the deep astral, which I need, and also extends the idea into an actual story arc. Thanks.

Anyways, with regards to ally spirits, are they an actual breed of spirit, like spirits of Man, or Air, or are they a sub-type, like Toxic spirits? I've mostly played 2/3 Ed, where I think Ally spirits were a unique breed.

They are basically a unique breed, as they cannot learn Great Form powers of other types.

Ally Spirits are a modified version of existing spirits. They are a spirit type that the summoner could normally summon modified into being so much more. See Street Magic (SR4) page 103+ for details on the process.

I may be late to the party, but I'd like to point out that Running Wild has a handful of new spirit powers.
Fey Glamour is one of my favorites, because there's SO much you can do to play with the scenery and setting to make things creepy and interesting.


To clarify this, if an ally spirit goes Free, there's nothing stopping them from branching out and acquiring those powers. In fact, free spirits can potentially grab ALL of them with enough growth.



I'd look at the Hidden Life power, read up on Ally Spirit Formula, as well as the Personal Domain power(and surge Glamour qualities for fluffyness) - the general idea that some sort of physical anchor to the sprit is being corrupted/turned toxic and bad, which is reflecting back onto the spirit(seeping back into it, turning it into something else) is worth considering - because it might not know the source of the encroachment even though it can feel it.